#ravenofshadowcastle

Hey there, thank you for the lovely compliment! I’m glad what I write is cool food-for-thought.

Unfortunately, I don’t have too many things to say about the Duel Masters at this point in time. Mostly because I’m not that far into the first season yet so only Chavez and Kimora have gotten a decent amount of focus.

As a general statement, I like the way Kaijudo approaches the Duel Masters as both individual characters and as a representation of worldviews. Like the Ray and co., they’re all varied in terms of design, cultural background, mannerism, and talents, but also form a collective that allows for some kinda transgressive themes to be discussed. While they’re the over-arching power structure our heroes are learning from and report to, they’re not framed as infallible or necessarily morally righteous.

A point is brought up early in the season directed at the protagonists that the Council of Masters really isn’t that different from the Choten (the series’ antagonists) in terms of Kaiju interaction. The Masters maintain peace between Kaiju and humanity essentially via segregation; keeping the worlds separate, erasing the memories of people who interact with Kaiju, and rarely venturing within The Veil. They also have intense, and disturbingly dehumanizing, restrictions on how they interact with Kaiju such as no touching, no befriending, and no communication save for direct commands by way of their gauntlets. They utilize Kaiju for battling purposes in the big-picture name of keeping the two worlds safe, but offer little back to the individuals they essentially exploit.

Often repeated by the Masters in the first handful of the episodes are the phrases: "Kaiju aren’t pets, and Kaiju aren’t friends". Unsettling as these words may be, on a meta level they help set the tone for the series: this is not a show wherein the ‘Mons will be automatically complicate with human instruction.

Kaiju are sentient creatures with their own agency, world, and independent actions. Furthermore, we as the audience are shown that Kaiju will attack, dismember, kill, and even eat humans if you’re not careful. We venture into The Veil early in the first season as well, and we witness that Kaiju maintain a lot of the same problems humanity does: racism, classism, slavery, etc. So to an extent, the Masters’ concerns are valid. But by the same token, the fact that Kaiju are independent, sentient creatures with all the same potential and imperfections as human beings makes the Council’s cold control over them all the more distressing both to the protagonists and the audience. Kaiju may not be pets, but certainly at least some of them could be friends, provided humans approach them as such.

This is probably why I like Master Chavez and Kimora so much thus far, because they’ve been the first two Masters to become more aligned to Ray’s perspective and seeing their Kaiju on a more even level. For example, in episode nine “The Taken”, Kimora realizes that the simple summoning of a Kaiju from out their world to duel can have disastrous effects on said Kaiju’s personal life and connections to other Kaiju. It was good to see and I hope the trend continues.