Why I love these two manga frames:

Let’s review Kaiba’s life up until this point.  His parents have died, leaving him (in  his own mind) responsible for his baby brother.  Both boys are taken in by their relatives, who promptly steal whatever money has been left for them and then dump them in an orphanage where they are adopted by Gozaburo.  By the time Kaiba meets Yugi, ever parental figure in his short life has abandoned (children will often experience death as abandonment), betrayed or abused him.  Kaiba doesn’t trust people to look out for his or Mokuba’s welfare - and you know what?  This is not just a perfectly reasonable viewpoint for him to hold, it’s one that’s been ground into him by just about every interaction he’s ever had.  Where would he have learned about trust, anyway?  From his relatives?  From Gozaburo? From Pegasus? From the Big 5?  From the bodyguards that kidnapped Mokuba and then tried to kill him?

At Death-T, Yami no Yugi gave Kaiba a chance to rebuild his life - and it’s clear that nothing less than shattering his heart would have worked.  But this is early-manga Yami no Yugi, lets not pretend there wasn’t a punishment element there as well, because let’s face it, that’s how early-manga Yami rolled.  So basically, the person (besides Mokuba) who has Kaiba’s well-being most at heart shows this by shoving him into a coma for six months.

Fast forward to Duelists Kingdom. Kaiba wakes up from a coma to learn that he has (once again) been betrayed.  He shows up at Duelists Kingdom where Yugi, for possibly the first time in Kaiba’s life since being orphaned, is kind and decent to him (by giving him back his deck) and offers to be his friend.

If ever there was a moment for a sappy turnaround, for the light-bulb to go off, or a choir of angels to start singing, this was it.  Instead, Kaiba doesn’t just turn Yugi down, he’s absolutely furious that Yugi would expect him to fall for his pitch so easily in the first place.  Instead of a two-frame change of heart, we get to something gloriously better: a front row seat as Kaiba struggles with concepts like friendship and unity and trust for the entire rest of his part of the story.  And this is where it starts - with Kaiba’s furious rejection of all the ideals that, up until now, have had no place in his life.