Jean-Michel Roger

Jean-Michel Roger

Jean-Michel Roger alternatively romanized as Jean Michel Roget is an antagonist in the Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V anime and the main antagonist of the Synchro Dimension saga (season 2). He is a resident of the Fusion Dimension who crossed over to the Synchro Dimension, infiltrating the dimension by rising to the position of Director of Security, enforcing the City's law. However instead of helping Duel Academy as an infiltrator for the invasion, he betrayed them and intended to control the Synchro Dimension and turn it into his kingdom instead. However his plan was thwarted by the Lancers persuading the Tops and Commons to unite, ending the unfair government and dismantling his status quo forcing him to flee back to the Academia in a last ditch attempt to save face with Leo Akaba, but his machine malfunctioned sending him into the unknown and his fate ambiguous.

Personality

Jean-Michel Roger was the very definition of the Synchro Dimension City's Status quo, he was callous, power-hungry and obsessed with his own victory leading him constantly underestimate others and overestimate himself, perhaps to compliment yet another of his obsession: himself. He was a narcissistic and egotistical individual with a clear and pathological case of self-worship. Indeed Jean-Michel Roger was an evil person who characterized the worst aspects of political and governmental power and oppression to the point of totalitarianism and devoid of a moral or ethnic centee. Ruthless, Brutal, Cruel and Corrupt as well as Machiavellian and tyrannical, he complimented the City's long and tragic history almost poetically.

In his first appearances Roger is a seemingly cold, serious, manipulative and calculating individual. He is cunning and methodical, being able to calmly take decisions in order to ensure criminals are apprehended. His calmness was emphasized when he observed the Lancers' use of the other dimensions' Extra Deck Summoning methods and an Action Duel being initiated. He would usually portray an act of clear nobility in his presence and usually had a casual but relaxed and serious grin on his face, and was not above rare moments of levity to further proclaim his superiority towards others. For example when he heard that their was a duel going on in the Detention Facility and instead found the would-be escapees in the midst of their escape by crossing a river he instead asked if the prisoners were having a swim meet.

Roger seems to have a love for chess as he always has a chessboard with him and uses it as a tool to describe the duels going on in front of him and even as device to activate his own schemes when necessary, shown when he moved his pawns into a specific formation to activate the King's Gambit. When watching a duel with one of his pawns in play he likes to follow it and feel that he is the one personally dueling and is able to represent a Duel's progress through a chessboard by moving the pieces accordingly to the situation in the Duel as if he was playing it, even going as far as speaking in monologues of how he is "ahead" of "his" opponent. In his speech he can sometimes incorporate chess terminology to how his plans are going such as "check" and "checkmate". However he can also make moves ahead of the duel which results in it being completely different from what he had intended or expected. This is especially proven in the Duel between Duel Chaser 227 and Yugo, as Roger was ready to call a "Checkmate" against the Common but quickly remembered Yugo's set trap and ordered Duel Chaser 227 to cancel his attack; an order that was ignored and resulted in his defeat. This also happened during Sergey and Jack's duel where he was ready to call the check mate of Sergey's win when Jack did what he had not expected, and when Serena's pride stopped her from taking out the action card he had manipulated her to receive, both instances show that Roger does not take one's personality and feelings into account when trying to manipulate someone which has had dire backlashes to his plans.

He strongly dislikes being on the lower end of the ladder of authority, having turned against Leo Akaba after realizing defecting from his cause would benefit his own ambition more, and the Executive Council due to them being the only ones able to defy him blocking his way to absolute power. He seems to be under the delusion that he is the key to the city, demanding the utmost submission from it and looses any and all composure when someone else makes important decisions without his knowledge or permission; made especially apparent when the Lancers managed to unite the people when he has failed. When Yuya and Jack were going to have their Duel to determinate the City's future, Roger burst out in several fits of hysterical and maniacal laughter, declaring himself the only one worthy of determining the City's future, showing that he was becoming borderline insane.

His deviousness was further emphasized by his machinations to subtly overturn the City's structure of power to himself alone and thus create his own kingdom, done primarily by somehow implanting mind control chips in all of Security's staff to enable the King's Gambit, and place the Executive Council under guard, and to keep his motives and new rule over the city secret he declared Martial Law to quietly stamp out the last of loose ends in his ploy. However for all his plotting and ambition Roger himself was a reactive Police Chief as opposed to a proactive one; waiting for a solution to appear and only took the initiative when pushed shows that his entire plan was based around waiting for his opponent to make the first move and wait as opposed to create a solution to the problem or situation himself. Even with almost his entire underlings under mind control he fruitlessly vent his frustration on them and told them to fix it despite their lack of most thought at the time, and the soldiers only being able to do what he instructed them instead of trying to find a solution himself.

For all of his calmness and methodical stratagem his poker-face vanishes when a source of great frustration emerges to the point that he can literally burst out in spouts of anger without warning. He can also show fear towards those whom he knows he cannot beat, showing a particular concern for Yuri, one of Academia's top agents. Nonetheless he is skilled enough to make quick decisions in the heat of his anger. However the more his plans are derailed or the more prominent his own miscalculations are shown the more frequent these outbursts become and the more desperate he becomes.

To get his own desires he is not above manipulation, whether it be verbally or general cheating. Seeing Yuya's potential after his victory over Shinji Weber, Roger praised him as an ally to the Tops. Jean's manipulations lacked any form of sentiment other than for his own greed, and when pushed becomes highly immoral inn his methods: he placed security under mind control, desired to do the same to Yuya, and when pressed for time opted instead to torture him with electric shocks in order keep the to make sure that the audience were focused on Yuya and Crow's Duel and not his takeover of the City and defeat of the Council and hopeful incarceration of Akaba Reiji quiet and quick; less extremely he manipulated the course between Yugo and Serena in order to make it so that Yugo could not obtain Action Cards.

To take advantage of the skewed mentality of the citizens Jean often made to keep the tops entertained or under his control through bribes or deals leading to the other party to believe that they were the winner when it was really only to help him and gain something in return for giving aid to his pawn, and heavily manipulated the City's dark underbelly to be advantageous to his plans. In Gallager's case he approached him with the deal to alert him to the coming crackdowns of Security at the Underground Duel Arenas in exchange for the promoter's aid in finding strong duelists that he could enlist to fight his rivals for dominating the Synchro Dimension. He also gave warning to the tops whenever a police raid was about to be conducted and made sure that members of Security were their to escort the tops whenever needed.

Though he claimed to be "charmed" by the Synchro dimension it was in all likeliness rhetoric to get Yuya on his side but alternatively could refer to how the skewed system of favouring the 1% elites resonated with his own narcissistic delusions. Indeed he generally favoured the tops over the commons and showed prejudice against the Duel King himself, refusing to let the very symbol that the Council had used to satisfy the Commons have his way in most cases and wanted little more than to take the coveted pedestal for himself or for a more useful figurehead pawn. He also refers to most of the Synchro Dimension City's people as "Peasants" which further implies that he sees himself as higher than them.

He shows signs of being a sociopath, deeming others as nothing more than pawns, no matter how valuable they are to his plans, which is demonstrated by him not caring about Yuya's imminent death due to his mind control chip as long as he serves his purpose of entertaining the crowd, and trapping his subordinates, whom he had no more use for, in a building he set to self-destruct as he ran away. During this time it was seen that he is cold and strict with his subordinates, as after Duel Chaser 227's Duel concluded, he fired 227, going as far as throwing a chess piece that represented him into the trash can. Giving 227 a second chance was nothing more than a ploy to evaluate Yuya as a threat, and even than he expected little to nothing from the defeated officer. He is shown to be possibly more cruel and evil than even The Professor. He invoked Yuya's Berserk Mode, he watched in delight as Crow and Yuya's life were in danger. He implanted mind control chips in the Security and surgically altered Sergey to be his ultimate machine basically robbing the man of his humanity. When the scientist warned him of the broken chip, his immediate concern was the cessation of electric shocks that did not happen and when told that the shocks would continue at their highest setting he even delighted in it; he did not care at all when Yuya's life was in danger with possible brain damage because of the unstoppable electrocution and instead merely mused it a shame to loose him as a pawn but a necessary for current events. From his perspective he is the one who is solely right and should make demands and when someone else tries to do so he becomes quite ruthless to shut up the opposition, throwing Yuya into a cell and planning in insert a mind control chip into his brain when Yuya did not share his vision of power and when Yuya and Jack began to have a duel after Sergey failed he was fully willing to have Security kill Jack and Yuya by ambushing them with his troops, however when Jack took them out with a single move and when Melissa Claire reported the news he reached an extreme breaking point and told her the shut up despite her only being on a monitor.

Roger was likely intelligent and capable as he had been able to secure a high ranking Tops position in the City which demonstrates his manipulation and value as well as being trusted with a mission as an infiltrator which shows that his skills were either highly prized or his deceptiveness was an asset that the Academia found would be useful for their invasion of the Synchro Dimension. The entire second Season is proof of his degree of skill in long-term planning as he plotted for various eventuality years in advance and scored whatever benefits and resources that he could achieve from the city to prepare for it, even creating an entire "Earthbound" deck that had the potential of both Fusion and Synchro for Sergey's use and a new fusion monster for the "Goyo" series for his officers to use. None-the-less the reality is that Akaba Reiji has long foreseen all of his plans before hand making him quite behind his opponent. Also while he appeared to be adept at planning for long-term goals whenever something would happen immediately that he did not prepare for his own incompetence showed and he often used desperate and questionable methods to shut up the opposition as quickly as possible.

Furthermore, he also appears to be a rather lack-luster agent, his dismal sense of loyalty aside he did not posses any outwardly good qualities that would've made him the best choice for an infiltration. His dueling was below that of other, younger Academia agents and had it not been for his cheating he would've been sorely defeated, lacked the clear agility that the other agents were known to implore when on the offensive, and his inter-dimensional machine also malfunctioned as well showing a lack of scientific ability when compared to other academia agents (though to be fair in this case it was likely untested and he had not worked on it with the aid of others who would've been familiar with the Fusion Dimension's advanced technology) as well as making unreasonable demands to his own scientists when more time and precision was needed than what he would allow to be scheduled The former basically assuring his total loss by its malfunction and sending him to a random location through its wormhole.

Roger is also a sore loser and a coward: when his plans to conquer the City were ruined he attempted to flee back to Duel Academy with Yuzu to avoid being seen as a traitor by Akaba Reo, while delusionally calling himself a "winner" even though he was bested in every way shape and form. He even proclaimed that running with his tail between his legs to hide behind a man he had previously betrayed and hindered was "strategy". Roger's cowardice and refusal to accept defeat can also be seen in his Dueling style, which relies on holograms which can be replaced each time one of them is defeated, rather than facing the opponent himself. When Akaba Reiji trapped this cheat in an infinite loop he completely descended into bouts of irrational spasms and made one last attempt to discredit the Leader of the Lancer's by revealing Akaba's lineage and attempted to turn them against their leader by claiming that the Akaba Father and Son were in fact cohorts. When Reiji pointed out the flaw in his logic and inconsistency Jean became possessive and threatening to Yuzu as she was the last lifeline he had to survive. When she was rescued he finally lost all hope at wining and decided to take the Lancer, the City and everything else that was proof of his failure with him into the void between dimensions, eliminating them all. This would've essentially created a Pyrrhic Victory in his mind, a win that had a great cost, but it could also just be out of sheer shame and cowardliness at his failed attempts or his delusion at being a winner, in either case it proved to be his downfall in the long run.

History

Roger is a Fusion Dimension resident that was sent to the Synchro Dimension as an undercover agent to ensure Duel Academy's conquest. He introduced the Real Solid Vision technology to the City, which became a crucial tool for the Executive Council to strengthen Security's power and maintain the Tops' dominance in the riots created after Chojiro Tokumatsu's arrest. Roger then quickly climbed to the position of the Director of Security. He eventually decided to betray Duel Academy, and without informing Leo Akaba he began to make plans to turn the City into his own kingdom.

Around this time he made an alliance with Gallager, Gallager would be informed of any and all upcoming raids on the Underground Illegal Dueling bets so as to escape ahead of time and in exchange Gallager would help Roger find and scout out powerful duelists that he had either found in the streets or who had been sent to the Underground Labor Facility. One such indavidual was Sergey Volkov who had been sent underground after he had defeated Thirty other prisoners after his arrest. Once underground Gallager explained this to Sergey and once Sergey had defeated fifty duelists single-handedly and momentarily shocked Gallager contacted Roger, who was not surprised that Sergey had been recycled, and sent for Sergey to be ground to him. After this Roger robbed Sergey of his life and humanity by outfitting him with powerful cybernetics and mentally supressed Sergey's personality to be used for Roger's benefits. After this rumours circled that Sergey had died, which was figuratively true.

Deck

Roger uses an "Ancient Gear" Deck. Like the Obelisk Force, it centers around inflicting effect damage, but utilizes "Ancient Gear Devil" rather than "Ancient Gear Hunting Hound" and its Fusion forms. He reinforces his monster with "Ancient Gear Magic Shield", granting it massive DEF, immunity to other card effects and indestructibility by battle, rendering it virtually invincible while slowly eating at his opponent's LP.

During his Duel with Akaba Reiji, it is revealed that Roger never Duels his opponents personally, instead opting to use holographic clones of himself. If one of the clones is defeated, another will take its place - although this costs Roger half of his LP due to the intrusion penalty, he can repeat the process infinitely, allowing him to keep using the effect of "Gear Devil" until his opponent is defeated. However this cheat is prone to defeat if he is ever caught in a loop which will allow for an infinite loosing streak if such a thing ever happens, which is exactly how Reiji outwitted and doomed Roger.

Gallery

Roger really mad.

Roger activates the dimension gateway.

Trivia

The chess formation that was used to activate the King Gambit is two white pawns against an Isolate black pawn. Judging from the moves, it would need to be a third turn situation where both the white and black pieces had taken two steps on their first move. The white pawns have pawn support while the black pawn is set to be captured next turn which represents his moves against the city.  This is Darren Dunstan's darkest role he played.