#halldor

Okay so I just finished season 4 last night, which is why I didn’t get to this ask earlier, but BOY OH BOY yeah these anime men are very fun and THANK YOU for requesting a full essay on them. Because I wouldn’t have normally made a full ramble for minor antagonists like them, but now that I have the excuse to go off, let me say:

This beloved team of Scandinavians, no matter how trope savvy they appear to be, clearly haven’t been watching the show. If they had, they would know the biggest mistake a 5Ds villain can make: profiling Yusei & co.

This ragnarock-and-roll boyband might just be my new favorite example of the “they’re just like us fr” opposing team trope (For my other favorite example, see Leverage: The Two Live Crew Job.) As I mentioned in previous posts, Team Ragnarok is a trio of dudes who are essentially the most qualified people to be main characters, and they know that. They’ve got the prophecy proclaiming them to be the Heroes, they’ve got magic eyeballs and god cards like the king of games himself, and interestingly enough, each of the members uses a parallel color scheme to one of the Satellite bois.

And like I said, they know  this. They are all deeply aware of the trope space they’re playing in, due to basing their own importance on stories and legends. They know how this is supposed to go. From their perspective, Team 5Ds is the scrappy, backwater team with good enough motivations who nonetheless aren’t qualified for the Sake-Of-The-World battle that’s about to ensue, and as such they must beat. (You know. Like Team 5Ds did to Team Taiyo just an episode ago.) Their narrative self-confidence is even supported by their theme: In the Eddas, Odin was told the prophecies of the end of days and knew going into it how everything would play out. So everything about narrative rules says this scrappy team of city slickers is their last hurdle to clear before facing The Final Boss. The penultimate fight basically every anime tournament pulls at least once: Fight Your Double. 

The trope wherein every member of the squad has to face off against their evil/thematically opposed counterpart. The Doppelganger Squad. If you’ve seen a kids show, you know this trope. Our heroes encounter a team of antagonists with the exact same powers and abilities, to a ridiculously parodying degree. And it’s also likely you know the stereotypical plot this episode often follows: The Opponent Switch. The team heavy is wearing himself ragged against an opponent of identical physical prowess. The team ranged fighter is unable to gain ground against their rival because they both keep shooting each others projectiles out of the air. The team tech geniuses are stuck in a standoff of hacking each others robots back and forth.

Usually, this episode plot is resolved by an Opponent Switch. The hero team realizes they can’t beat their doppelganger because they’re too evenly matched, so they swap. The tech whiz distracts the ranged fighter so one of their robots can sneak close and deliver an attack. The ranger can take out the fighter from a distance without getting within reach of their overpowered punches. The fighter has nothing to hack, they just charge forward and attack the (usually fairly wimpy) computer nerd. 

Team Ragnarok knows the narrative. They understand the power of tropes. So, they decide to cut right to the chase, and pull an Opponent Switch preemptively.

The funny thing is, they completely misjudge whose counterpart is who.

Jack is the silver colored, egotistical eldest, the king with glitz and glamor and years of experience under his belt. Dramatic and with a hint of villainous flair when it comes to mocking his opponents in battle. He must be the Odin, the de facto leader and calculating strategist. 

Crow is black and gold and bold as brass, with a tendency for letting his emotions get the better of him and charging into fights whenever he gets the opportunity. Obviously, he’s the Thor, the powerhouse.

And Yusei, he’s got Loki’s red hair and cunning. No natural powers to his name, he gets by through his enemies underestimating him and his quick wits. 

So, to avoid an even match, Team Ragnarok sends the fighter to overpower the strategist, the rogue to bamboozle the fighter, and the strategist to out-think the rogue. 

Perfect, they’ve avoided any possible fights against their opposites. Right?

Whoops.

So yeah, not only are Jack and Crow not actually foils of the Ragnarok bois who share their color schemes, they’ve managed to blunder into the exact match ups where everyone is forced to battle their doppelganger. And not only that, also defying the expected cliche, Jack and Crow do eek out a draw in each of their duels, but only by last minute burn damage dealt by Dragan and Broder. In a regular duel? They’d have just won, outright.

They’re better.

And they’re better without thinking they’re destined to be so.

When Halldor starts to describe his childhood to Yusei, he tells of his grand birthright and growing up to uphold the legacy of his family. Of traveling the world to grow into a Protagonist. To see, in his own words:

Yusei and the team never got that opportunity. But boy howdy do they know about the majesty as well as the desolation. They didn’t need to leave their birthplace to find it.

Halldor initially dismisses Yusei because of his lineage, because in his eyes, a bloodline is predetermination. And Yusei tells him “No. It’s not.” 

Yusei has nothing to do with his father. He never even met the guy. Yes, a great deal of his burden is dealing with the actions his parents took, the survivors guilt of living where his family’s actions killed so many others, but it’s never really been personal. It’s like he said in the dark signers arc: Reverse Zero was the direct result of his father’s work. And it was a tragedy. One that shouldn’t have happened. 

But it also gave Yusei Satellite.

And Satellite influences Yusei a lot.

And that’s why Team Ragnarok evaluated so comically incorrectly. Because yes, in a vacuum, the brothers were probably destined to grow up in those color-coded roles of their reflections. Jack, the eldest brother with an inflated ego and the most favor by the gods, was all set up to be their leader. But Satellite wore him down to anger. Thanks to his time on the mainland, he knows firsthand the difference between arcane power and authority, and is thoroughly unimpressed with both.

Crow is a hothead, a himbo with a heart of gold. That’s prime territory for the team powerhouse. But by sheer quirk of being a resident of Satellite, he could never afford to be a radical. To fight in the open. Crow learned to be stealthy and fight in the shadows, simply because endangering his own life would also mean endangering the kids left failed by the city. He learned to be a trickster, because Satellite denied him the privilege to be anything else.

And Yusei. My darling son. Gifted with all the potential to be the party rogue. The youngest, the third brother in the fairy tale, the one gifted with words and tricks and secondhand objects. The rogue fills in all the cracks in the party skillset, relying on the other members for things like magic and raw power.

But Yusei’s family left him. And he had to learn how to do everything else, too.

He’s a strategist and a knight and a scoundrel and a fighter. He doesn’t fit neatly into one archetype because up until recently he’s had to do it all alone, and while he’s mostly taken over as the brains of the operation, (by simple virtue of Jack and Crow having exactly one braincell between them) he can do pretty much anything in a pinch. 

Yes, if nothing had gone wrong, they would be the perfect tropey reflections of Team Ragnarok.

But something did go wrong. And now, all the roles are jumbled together. This tale isn’t going by the book because the author’s switched. And Yusei’s tired of letting other people write his story.

That is the difference between Team 5Ds and Team Ragnarok. They’re qualified to be the heroes because the gods put runes in their eyes. 

Yusei’s rune on his eye was put there by his oppressors. He stole the symbol on his arm from someone who didn’t deserve it. 

Team Ragnarok is good because they need to stop Zero Reverse. 

Team 5Ds is better because they’ve already had to live through it.

And then, acknowledging that personal power, the fact that this is their city, that they are made more qualified to save the world by the very fact that the world hurt them back, Team Ragnarok immediately backs off and becomes a friendly gang of Amicable Scandinavian Himbos.