Yeah, Thief King Bakura was always being used I suppose, but there's the way its presented in the manga vs. the anime, where in the manga TKBakura doesn't realize he's being used until he starts dissolving into sand, while the anime has him only being aware of what's happening around him right at the very end, which just doesn't have the same dramatic impact for me.

Well, one thing that would have definitely helped is if the anime writers were to have toned it down, like ten or twenty notches; they kept making everything too big, too expansive, the world always being on the verge of destruction...bleh, how about a more personal scale, like in the manga, the source material? Yugioh R, for example has the right level of scale, tone, and...plausible extrapolations from the original manga, that if something like that were to be the sort of filler that the anime went with...who knows, I might have ended up preferring the anime to the manga!

(And oh god, I hated that garbage about the parallel world of the Duel Monsters, and GX and 5Ds both, have pretty much run with that. What was wrong with the monsters being summoned from a piece of the human soul, may I ask?)

As for your story, that does sound very interesting, so when you've got that all put together, I'd definitely be interested in taking a look at it.