Mai Kujaku
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| Mai Kujaku | |
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| Yu-Gi-Oh! character | |
 Mai in the second series anime |
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| First appearance | Yu-Gi-Oh! Duelist Volume 1, episode 3 Original Japanese manga Volume 8, Duel 64 |
| Voiced by | Haruhi Terada (Japanese) Megan Hollingshead (Season 1-3) Bella Hudson (Season 4) Alyson Johnson (Uncut DVDs) (English) |
| Profile | |
| Age | 240 |
| Date of birth | November 20 |
| Known relatives | Parents (deceased) |
Mai Kujaku (孔雀 舞 Kujaku Mai?), known as Mai Valentine in the English anime and English video games, is a fictional character in the manga Yu-Gi-Oh! and the anime Yu-Gi-Oh! (known as Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters in Asia). Her English name seems to be a pun on "My Valentine", while her Japanese name means literally "Dancing Peacock".
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[edit] Character Profile & Relationships
"Kujaku" means "peahen". "Maikujaku" also refers to a type of kurume azalea. In the English anime, Mai calls Joey by his given name, while almost everyone in the manga and the original Japanese anime calls Jonouchi by his family name. Her name in the English anime is a pun of "My Valentine".
Her best friend is Katsuya Jonouchi (Joey Wheeler). Kazuki Takahashi, the author of Yu-Gi-Oh!, deemed their situation as purely platonic, although even in the original manga, he dropped some rather strong hints that Mai actually does harbor deeper feelings for him.
In the Waking the Dragons series (Doma) Varon, one of Dartz's men, finds Mai, and develops romantic feelings for her which she only slightly reciprocates. Mai is also a role model to Shizuka Kawai (Serenity Wheeler in the English anime, Shizuka Jonouchi in the first series anime), Jounouchi's sister, who admires her beauty and strength and takes care of Mai after losing to Marik and having her mind trapped in the Shadow Realm.
[edit] Clothing
In Duelist Kingdom, Mai wore a short sleeve purple coat over her white corset. From Battle City on, she changed to a sleeveless lavender vest and the same corset. She wears a dark purple mini-skirt in the Duelist Kingdom and Battle City arcs, and a garter on her leg to hold her deck. In Waking the Dragons, she wears dark purple shorts as well as a pair of thigh-high boots, a dark purple vest, a black corset and long, fingerless black gloves along with an arm band and a pink belt.
[edit] History
In the beginning, Mai is a self-absorbed woman who seeks prize money. She believed that life was all about money, because it gave her everything she wanted. Her childhood was lonely and she was raised in a wealthy household, but her relatives barely seemed to acknowledge her very existence.
Mai once worked as a black jack dealer on a ship-board casino, which she discovered Duel Monsters and therefore challenged rich men into dueling her. Mai felt she was lost in life because of her loneliness, until she joined Duelist Kingdom hosted by Pegasus, to seek the three million dollar prize money. In her trip, she met Yugi Mutou (Yugi Muto in the English anime) and his friends. After she meets them, she seems to start caring more for her friends and the deeper meanings of the game, as her wins become empty to her later in the series.
[edit] Story Summary
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The plot summary in this article or section is too long or detailed compared to the rest of the article. Please edit the article to focus on discussing the work rather than merely reiterating the plot. |
Mai first appears in the Duelist Kingdom arc of the manga. She lost the first duel she is seen participating in to Katsuya Jonouchi (Joey Wheeler in the English anime). On the boat to Duelist Kingdom she is seen outraged at the fact that she doesn't have a cruise ship hotel-style room like the other championship duelists. She then tricks Dinosaur Ryuzaki (Rex Raptor in the English anime) into a duel where the winner would keep the room. Of course Mai wins and kicks him out.
Seeking revenge, she is challenged by Ryuzaki again, but Mai won't accept unless he beats Jonouchi in a duel. Rex loses and Mai storms off. Later, Mai sets up camp with Yugi Mutou (Yugi Muto), Jonouchi, and company. She is surprised to find she likes spending time with them. Later that night, when Mai goes off by herself, she is kidnapped by Panik, the player eliminator, and is forced into a losing duel where she loses all of her star chips. Yugi then battles Panik and returns the star chips to Mai.
Mai isn't seen again until Yugi loses his star chips to Seto Kaiba. Mai offers Yugi enough star chips to get him into Pegasus's castle, but (in the anime) he is too shocked by his loss with Kaiba to accept them. Anzu Mazaki (Tea Gardner) steps in to duel Mai for the star chips. In the duel, Mai easily could have defeated Anzu, but chose to lose on purpose in order to give the star chips to Yugi and not reveal any strategy that might grant Yugi and Jonouchi an upperhand in the finals. In the manga, Yugi accepts Mai's star chips, and there is no duel between Mai and Anzu.
In the semi-finals, she is close to defeating Yami Yugi, who is at the time too distracted by the prospect of dueling Pegasus and winning back the souls of the Kaiba brothers and his grandpa. After the spirit of Yugi from within his mind as well as Mai herself convince him to focus on the duel more seriously out of principle, Yami mounts a slow but steady comeback which leads Mai to surrendering rather than watching her Harpie Ladies get destroyed. (In the English anime, it was altered such that Yugi was distracted by a fear of Yami Yugi that he still had due to what happened during the climax of his most recent duel against Kaiba, which was resolved after Yami Yugi convinced him he would never do anything that would compromise the health of another person.)
In Battle City, she discovers Shizuka Kawai (Serenity Wheeler), Hiroto Honda (Tristan Taylor), and Ryuuji Otogi (Duke Devlin) running from Rare Hunters. She offers to drive them to the site of Yugi and Jonouchi's duel. Just before Yugi, Jonouchi, and Mai board the Battle City Finals blimp, Mai's suitor, action star Jean Claude Magnum appears and duels her for her hand in marriage, in addition to a place in the Battle City finals due to him already having 5 out of the needed 6 locator cards.
Mai manages to beat him, but not before he attempts to have her kidnapped. Jonouchi rescues Mai, and Magnum is never heard from again in the series.
As she enters her semifinal match against the newly emerged Yami Marik, she is in a state of frustration and disillusionment towards Jonouchi and his friends, due to Jonouchi's having told her moments earlier that she wasn't in the dream he had when he was knocked out from the visage of Ra during Jonouchi's duel against Rishid (Odion in the English anime), leading her to believe that the idea of friendship was a lie. (In the manga, she actually wasn't in said dream, while she was in the anime.) In the anime version of the duel, Yami Marik takes advantage of this by activating a dark duel (Shadow Game in the English dub), where every time a duelist's monster is destroyed, a memory of someone else they know disappears. (The manga version is a torture duel identical to the duel Jonouchi was subjected to later on against Yami Marik.)
As her monsters are destroyed, resulting in her friends becoming erased from her mind to the point where she cannot even see them, Mai despairs amidst thoughts of loneliness, and flashbacks to her earlier years where she had no one else to call a friend or family. With seemingly no friends once again, she feels as if she is walking in darkness due to the game Yami Marik had created. Yami Yugi uses his powers of the Millennium Puzzle to pierce through the shadow barrier and encourages her to press on and defeat Yami Marik in order to dispel everything. Encouraged, she manages to take the Egyptian god, the Winged Dragon of Ra, from Yami Marik's hand and summon it to her field. However, she ends up in yet another bind as she finds herself unable to unlock its powers because she cannot read the ancient Hieratic text that suddenly appears. Yami Marik takes control of the Winged Dragon of Ra by reciting the chant, and with the use of two monsters on the field, known as Holding Arms and Holding Legs in the English dub, binds Mai to a tablet that magically materializes and prepares to attack her and finishing her off.
With the realization that the blast from Ra will kill her, Jonouchi rushes to her defense and convinces her that she is his friend no matter what (in the anime, he confesses that she was in his dream, but was too embarrassed to admit it at first), and attempts to free her from her shackles. Nonetheless, even after Yami Yugi comes forward to shield them both from Ra's attack, Mai is the loser of the duel, and as part of the penalty, Yami Marik traps her inside her own mind, where she will die if not freed within 24 hours. (In the English anime, this is referred to as the Shadow Realm.) She is saved after Yami Yugi helps defeat Yami Marik (Marik regains control of his own body near the end of the duel, and forfeits, thereby banishing Yami Marik into oblivion.), which also undoes all other damage by him. After returning from Battle City, Mai and her friends say their goodbyes.
Early on in the Waking the Dragons (Doma) arc of the second series anime, Yugi, Jonouchi, Honda and Anzu encounter an unexpectedly hostile Mai, who immediately challenges Jonouchi to a duel, which she activates the deadly Seal of Orichalcos, an indicator, along with the presence of Varon and Raphael watching from a balcony, that she has joined Dartz's group (Doma in the Japanese version). Reeling from her defeat from Marik in Battle City and subsequent near-fatal penalty game banishment (Shadow Realm in the anime), Mai is once again in fear of defeat, and now fears that she cannot rely on herself. Even though she enters and wins many tournaments, without her friends to show her the way again, her fear of defeat still persists.
The worst of it, however, has to do with her recurring nightmares of Marik subjecting her to a penalty game (Shadow Realm banishment in the anime), with no hope of anyone saving her, that persist throughout most of the arc. At the end of her rope and with no one to help her, Varon finds her and convinces her that what she needs is not Jonouuchi or any of her other friends, and that what she needs can be found with Dartz and the power of the Seal of Orichalcos.
Dartz fools Mai into believing that it was Yugi, Jonouchi, as well as her other friends that abandoned her, and, after being infused with the Seal of Orichalcos and all of its atrocity inducing power, she not only believes it, but she intends to defeat them, starting with Jonouchi. It isn't until she sees Jonouchi ready to pass out from their second duel during the story arc that she finally breaks out of her Orichalcos-induced trance of rage directed at him and remembers everything that they went through that she overcomes the power of the Orichalcos. In an attempt to pay back Jonouchi and Varon, both of whom lost their souls to the Orichalcos trying to help her in their own ways, she attempts to take on Dartz but is ambushed and defeated by Raphael and lost her own soul.
Following Doma, she spends the rest of the series alone and out of the picture reevaluating her life and trying to rediscover her passion for dueling. She promises to return one day to both Jonouchi and Varon, however, in the US version, Mai and Valon's relationship seems to end, and she doesn't say whether she will go back to Joey. She is on the invitation list to participate in the KC Grand Prix but disappears. She is seen in passing a few times, including the ending credits in the final episode of the Japanese version, where she is dueling alongside Vivian Wong against the Meikyū Brothers (Paradox Brothers) on top of the Great Wall of China.
[edit] Translation changes
Due to the rather risqué nature of Mai's deck and dress, her appearances and cards are edited in the English anime. This includes:
- Digitally reducing her cleavage by removing cleavage marks
- Lengthening her skirt
- Filling the Harpie Ladies' clothes in so that they reveal no skin as opposed to covering little skin.
- Renaming sexually named cards (i.e. Cyber Bondage to Cyber Shield) and removing its sexually-suggestive spikes
[edit] Deck
Mai runs a Harpie Lady deck, based around Harpie Lady and her variants. Her signature move is to split the single monster in three via Elegant Egotist, although she also uses Nightmare Tri-Mirror to the same effect under the influence of the Orichalcos. While Harpie Lady is generally a weaker card in terms of power, Mai uses Cyber Shield and Rose Whip to increase its strength. She also includes Amazoness cards during the Battle City tournament, with various female Warriors based on the legendary Amazon warriors.
[edit] References
Kazuki Takahashi (2002). Yu-Gi-Oh! Characters Guide Book - The Gospel of Truth (遊戯王キャラクターズガイドブック―真理の福音―). Shueisha. ISBN 4-08-873363-0
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