every explanation yugioh has ever provided for Shadi’s Whole Deal: a compilation
Early manga: Shadi is a mortal human man. He’s alive. He rides airplanes. His family has guarded the tombs of pharaohs for generations. He’s motivated by things like petty revenge, intellectual curiosity, and a desire to protect Egyptian artifacts.
First half of Memory World: Shadi is a member of the Tombkeeper Clan. His side of the family got into a fight with the Ishtar side, and they each took some of the Millennium Items in the divorce. He’s motivated by the same duty the Ishtars were raised with: to help the Nameless Pharaoh regain his memories. Every fucked up thing he’s done (giving Pegasus the eye, lying to Malik, trying to kill Yugi’s friends, etc) was presumably part of a game of memory-restoring 4D chess.
Second half of Memory World: Shadi was never human. He’s a shapeshifting supernatural being that serves as Zorc’s equal-and-opposite counterpart. He’s also maybe the human incarnation of that tablet with the Millennium Item-shaped indents in it? Bobasa and Hasan were both him, shapeshifted. His motivation is to stop Zorc. Everything he’s done was presumably part of a game of anti-Zorc 4D chess.
DM anime: Shadi is a ghost. We mostly know this because of an anime-added scene where he saves Honda and Otogi from falling and then vanishes, and they’re like “was that a…g-g-ghost?” We don’t know when he died, or who he used to be. He isn’t Bobasa, the anti-Zorc, or Hasan (but he does briefly pilot Hasan’s Memory World RPG avatar, mostly as a convoluted way for the anime to adapt his death scene. Yes, he dies despite being a ghost). We never really get a motivation for why he did anything.
Capsule Monsters: Shadi has been a ghost for thousands of years. He’s been fucking with people the whole time (including Alexander the Great). Motivation: the lulz?
DSOD: Shadi used to be a mortal human man, up to about 5 or 6 years before the start of the series. He somehow got on his hands on the Secret Eighth Millennium Item. He trained a bunch of children to use it to make a utopia dimension. Then Zorkura killed him. After that, he was a ghost. His motivation was…4D chess for the utopia dimension? Which didn’t actually work?
