☆ Rereading Yu Yu Hakusho - Three Kings Saga - Part 1 ☆
4/15/2025
Let's recap some things about Yu Yu Hakusho thus far.
- Yusuke is more powerful than ever, and at least partly demon.
- Both humanity and demonkind, basically everyone, have potential for good and evil.
- The barrier between Earth and the demon realm is really important.
It's not very unusual for shonen fighting protagonists to outgrow their earliest mentors in some way, but Yusuke is far outclassing anything on Earth. Yusuke going rogue would be a threat to the Underworld as well. He's strong.
This one is getting a little muddy with the introduction of Yusuke's demon heritage, but it's still a theme the story has been building. There are subtle-sih allusions to this even this late in the game. No one is sacred or universally good.
Not to de-emphasize the personal stories of Toguro and Sensui, but there have basically been two plots now about letting demons run loose in the human world by breaking the barrier between them. It is apparently not trivial to travel between them (except when it is?), and we were told at the end of the last arc that if Yusuke were to say in the human world, he would not be going back.
We already have a bit of a story problem. There's no one around who is on Yusuke's level, but it would be tough, or boring, to have yet another "invasion" threat of sorts. And apparently we're stuck here. So what do we do to keep the story moving? Here come these three guys with power suppressors that invite Yusuke to the demon realm.
It's a little funny, but it's probably a better solution than I could come up with. It makes the Underworld team look like idiots (why would demons of a low power be able to get through the barrier?), but it's good in that it sets up for Yusuke to disobey his employers and "go rogue" without him going total berzerk-o mode right away. The monk guys explain that the demon world is in a power struggle, and Yusuke's biological-demon-ish father, Raizen, has been fasting for a thousand years. Also, all of this happens as Yusuke visits Kuroko, the spirit detective prior to Sensui. Kuroko mentions to Yusuke that someday, he may have to fight her children. Nothing will come of this, I just wanted to note it.
Kurama and Hiei are approached by the other two Kings™ and are effectively recruited by them. Before confront his Demon Dad, Yusuke stops by to see Kuwabara, and the two talk about how they're walking down different paths, and that Yusuke will return in three years.
There are a ton of issues and missteps, but I'm going to single this out as one of the largest. Losing Kuwabara sucks. It would suck at any time, but I would argue with where this arc is going, you need him more than ever. If I could have one single change, it would be to include Kuwabara in the main proceedings. It would be tricky to do so, considering one of these three factions would get an extra member, but who cares?
Things are already happening too fast. Everything I said about the Sensui arc's pacing applies here. Yusuke meeting with a previous Spirit Detective, one who might fear him, has a ton of story potential, but it just doesn't matter. The monk guys who can pass through the barrier, and the existence of a device that allows S Class demons to just show up seem like something that would be an emergency to the Underworld, but it's not clear if they ever find out. The Underworld only goes along with Yusuke heading off to the demon realm because they think it will get him killed. The Underworld's relationship with Yusuke is totally flipped upside down, but we don't get to see them too much until the very end.
Kurama and Hiei also just...kind of go with it. It's not totally out of line for someone like Hiei, but they both seem fairly detached, whereas Yusuke at least wants to see (and beat up) his father. It's weird to see them calmly take sides against each other, considering we just saw them all flip out at Sensui killing Yusuke.
There is one thing I like about the earliest parts of this arc, and that's Keiko. For as much as she's gotten ignored, she's the only one that looks visibly aged and like she's moving on with her life. Considering how almost no one can mess with Yusuke physically, Keiko is one character who can still challenge Yusuke via his heart. This actually does feel like it has some stakes as she starts separating herself from Yusuke. It works well, and I like it.
The art quality starts jumping all over again(these pages are SIDE BY SIDE!), but mostly falling off. After Yusuke jumps to fighting his dad (basically off panel, in the same chapter we said bye to Kuwabara!), we are next introduced to "How They Spent Their Year." Whoa, years? We're jumping ahead and recapping a year?!
This is when it starts to go from iffy to almost unreadable.
I want to stress that it's the pacing that is primarily killing Yu Yu Hakusho here. There are too many things brought in for any reader to digest, and they just keep coming. In this one chapter...
- Backstory of the Ice Maidens and Hiei's birth
- A flashback to Dark Tournament with Hiei and Yukina
- Meeting, and fighting, the guy who put the Evil Eye in Hiei
But hey, it's at least broken up into two, this battle with Hiei is one of the last things resembling an actual fight. We've known about Mukuro for about three chapters, but we get a big reveal of who she is and what she wants for Hiei. And then Kurama talks to his mother from a demon phone in the demon city. This has always thrown me for a loop. It's not really impossible for there to be a demon city, but what, do they have jobs? Do they drive cars? Who's running the demon phone company while they're satiating their lust for human flesh? This just doesn't seem to totally gel with what we have seen before.
But on and on it goes like this. You meet far too many characters, get introduced to many concepts (many of which have only the bare minimum payoff, if they have one at all), and are just generally expected to absorb an awful lot. I don't think it's challenging in a fun kind of way, though. Reading this feels like a CliffNotes summary of itself, very little of it has any impact.
Yusuke's suggestion that the demon world should simply hold a tournament to decide who rules seems laughable. The Three Kings were in a stalemate for hundreds of years, and Yusuke comes up with an agreeable solution for everyone. A solution that everyone in the demon world should already be aware of. Yes, the Dark Tournament took place on Earth, but there were plenty of demons represented all over it. Kurama and Hiei knew about it. I guess everyone was just waiting it out for Raizen to die, but...ugh. Secondly, it's not like we didn't just see the Dark Tournament ourselves. If you want to paint it somewhat unfairly, that arc ended in March 1993. Yusuke suggests the demon plane tournament just barely a year later in April 1994.
It's not like it had been a long time since readers had seen this.
Yu Yu Hakusho's TV audience just saw the Dark Tournament end in February 1994. Even the story itself can barely act like any of this matters except for the final confrontations.
But how could you? I'm not sure when readers knew it, but there are nine chapters left.
I'll reiterate this in the conclusion as well, but the Three Kings Saga is filled with cool and interesting ideas. I'm sure the TV series did a lot of this more carefully. Doing another tournament is not one of those cool ideas, unfortunately, at least how it's presented at a breakneck pace in the manga.
Let me also say again that Togashi was badly overworked and just trying to give himself a break. Letting Yu Yu Hakusho fall apart at the end is totally worth it. Nothing is worth working yourself to death for. Let's look at Togashi telling it himself.
If I'm honest, I'm feeling a great relief and pleasure at the thought that I've finally been able to finish YYH. It's not that I've lost all emotional attachment to the work, but I feel that my stress levels had greatly surpassed my will to work. The six months leading up to the concluding chapter felt awfully long to me. To tell the truth, it had already been decided that YYH was going to end in December 1993 -- or rather, this was a decision that I had forced on the editorial staff.
There's much more than that in the link above, but it's all around sad to read. Still, as a fan, I must comment and make a little fun out of how south it does go as a story. It's crumbled under Togashi's exit, reused ideas, and unrealized concepts. It's also not helped by how powerful its main character has become, forcing it to play loosey-goosey with the already loose rules of the Yu Yu Hakusho world. There are more moments of madness and promise in the last few chapters, so we'll wrap it all up at that time! I've saved some over the juiciest observations for last...
- "Demon Plane" Jane