Seto Kaiba is Nietzsche’s Übermensch incarnate—a self-created man who refuses to bow to gods, pharaohs, or fate. He is not content to believe in destiny; he seeks to overcome it. Kaiba rejects the ancient magic and mythos that Yugi embraces. He doesn’t pray to the past—he builds the future, with science, with technology, with relentless ambition. He is the embodiment of the will to power, defining his own values in a world obsessed with inherited ones. His dueling is not just skill—it is self-assertion. He plays to win, not to protect some mystical legacy.
Contrast this with Yugi Muto, the Untermensch—a character who never fights alone, never wins alone, and whose greatest triumphs are borrowed from a spirit of the past. Yugi is the passive vessel for the Pharaoh, a literal host to the authority of tradition, hierarchy, and ancient morality. His victories are not acts of personal will, but divine intervention. He is guided by friendship, loyalty, and inherited ideals—values Nietzsche associates with slave morality.
Kaiba rejects all of this. And in that rejection, he transcends the game he plays. He is the future fighting the past, reason confronting myth, the self-made man against the sacred child.
