#time again for When I Do This

[cyberdragoninfinity]

ok it’s time for dana to hoot and holler about zexal

finished ygo zexal for the first time last week and i absolutely adored it and am STILL thinking so much about it (as i will be probably for. a While now if my relationships with the other ygo spinoffs ive seen are any indication).....time again for me to do my little personal rambly yugioh series retrospective post as the brainworms truly start to set in. kattobingu feel the flow high five the sky build the overlay network let’s goooo!!!

more under the cut. a lot more lol. spoilers for a decade old anime, naturally

GOD. YEAH. THIS ONE MIGHT BE MY FAVORITE YUGIOH SERIES IVE SEEN YET. HOLY SHIT. 2021 Dana was really out here thinking Zexal looked kind of annoying (based on mild DL characters/plot osmosis) and not terribly interesting and I want to go back in time and shake her shoulders and say NO. NO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. ZEXAL FUCKING ROCKS. every yugioh has some degree of Danabait to it (probably because. watching Duel Monsters as a child was the catalyst to what Danabait even is lol) but JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH Zexal is like being hit by one nuclear bomb of shit genetically engineered in a lab to make me insane after another.

THE ART STYLE. OF ZEXAL, FOR ONE. makes me absolutely rabid animal bonkers--I LOVE seeing the way the ygo art style has been honed and developed and evolved over time. YGO influenced my art style more than I can articulate, and then zexal comes in swinging with the ygo art style at its Most Zany. The EXPRESSIONS in this show!!!!!!!!! Fucking rule!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A MASSIVE CHUNK OF THE CAST DOESNT HAVE MOUTHS HALF THE TIME AND YET STILL ARE SOME OF THE MOST EXPRESSIVE YGO GUYS EVER!!!! Constantly making expressions I LOVE to draw!!!! and oh my god the COLOR DIRECTION OF YUGIOH ZEXAL?!?!? genuinely absolutely phenomenal and one of my all time favorites i’ve seen in any cartoon, western or anime. you mean to tell me we got a lighting and color budget now??? we get yugioh scenes looking like this??!??

THE BEST. THE BEST. THE BEST. OBSESSED WITH IT. ABSORBING ZEXAL’S COLOR AND EXPRESSION PROWESS. STEALING ITS POWER.

ANYWAY as usual with my ygo watching i was primarily watching the dub (absolutely thrilled to have a Completed Yugioh Dub to watch for the first time since DM, MAN.) but I did end up watching...over half of Zexal II’s sub; stuff just gets so absolutely insane with the Barian Emperors that I desperately wanted every possible inch of their lore so I ended up watching both (sometimes back and forth at the same type like an unhinged wild animal) for the full picture. I like Zexal’s dub a lot!! its comedic timing is ON POINT, EXTREMELY FUNNY DUB. and really like..all of the main dub VAs are so, SO good (as they usually are.) There are a lot of bizarre things they cut though, a lot of childhood flashbacks and little character moments and the like. It’s a shame! I can only imagine a lot of them were cut to leave more room for ad time which. Sucks a bit 🥴A lot of duels do whip a lot harder in the sub too, especially in the back half..... still though, enjoyed my time with the dub. there’s a remarkable amount of stuff i am SHOCKED they actually did keep in?!??! The car crash that killed Shark’s parents is just straight up presented as is with like one or two small cuts. A LITTLE GIRL’S DEAD BODY IS SHOWN?? ON SCREEN??? ZEXAL DUB!! KIDS LOVE IT SO!!! MY GOD!!!

ok enough on that. some breakdowns/specific points like I usually do with these roundups:

Stuff I Didn’t Like: always get this one outta the way first. There really wasnt a whole lot I straight up disliked with this one!! It’s extremely solid all around. It does, of course, have some...Choices, being made, like. Girag’s lips. and. Girag’s backstory. Love the guy but oh my god why did they do that to him 😭Yugioh Racially Questionable moments ride again!!! At this point it’s just par for the course, definitely not the first time a ygo has. Done stuff like that. Ah well. Worth mentioning though.

What’s really a shame is that Zexal has some of the COOLEST, MOST FUN GIRL CHARACTERS, and time and time again they just dont do anything with them!!!!!!!!!!!! IT’S SO FRUSTRATING. i LOVE rio but the poor girl is fridged for literally 2/3s of the series!! She’s in the hospital like five times!!!! Rio and Anna and Tori and Dextra and Kari are all like, some of my favorite ygo gals YET but they have maybe 5 duels between them. Konami let your girls DUEL CHALLENGE. PLEASE.

hm what else. I guess also the final showdown with the series “Big Bad” was. uh. kind of let down lmao. But to be fair I was positively spoiled last series with the Z-one duel lol. Can’t win ‘em all. As cool as the concept of “the protag and rival team up to duel the Big Bad” is, and as cool as Don Thousands Entire toxic manipulative dynamic with the Barian Emperors is for like the Entire Rest of Zexal II is, they just....don’t. Do much with him for that last Donny T duel?? Would have loved more backstory elaboration or just like. Anything. It was over so soon and I was like “...that was it??” HDFHGSDFG thankfully the last two duels of zexal whip like hell so we bounce back!!

i also kind of wish don thousand kept his sick as hell demon armor form but c’est la vie i suppose. sad! well there’s other guys.

Favorite Season: I actually have no idea how Zexal is split up into seasons, so I guess Fav Arc would be a better term? Anyway I loved the World Duel Carnival Arc, I’m one of like 5 people who actually enjoy tournament arcs but i think theyre FUN and this one is a blast. There’s Arclight Family Agonies coming from every direction and there’s the INSANE DUEL ROLLER COASTER and Vetrix is bouncing around being a little freak, it’s GREAT

anyway and then Zexal II came in and grabbed me by the head and threw me into the drywall

LIKE. MY GOD. ZEXAL HAS THE FUCKING EMOTIONAL PACING OF MORAL OREL. YOU HIT Z2 AND SHIT STARTS GETTING REAL AND GOING HARD AS HELL AND IM OUT HERE GETTING MY BRAIN SCRAMBLED. I love like. All of the arcs of zexal II it’s hard to pick a favorite but I DO really like just that first third or so where the Barians are just starting to show up and the horrors haven’t quite begun and everything’s so silly and Ray Shadows is Very There. gives me gx season 1 vibes a little bit. it’s a delight.

Favorite Characters: oh right I should. talk about that. pained smile.

i joke about this a lot but usually every ygo series has like. A Character That’s My Actual Favorite, and A Character That Makes Me Absolutely Insane (syrus vs. zane, leo vs. aporia, etc.) but, uh. this time I GUESS THAT’S JUST. THE SAME CHARACTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SORRY. TO BE BASIC. BUT WHY DID THEY DO THAT TO ME. WHY DID THEY PUT A CHARACTER IN ZEXAL WHO ALREADY LOOKS LIKE MY ART STYLE. ALREADY LOOKS LIKE I DREW HIM. AND THEN MAKE HIM FUCKED UP AND SILLY AND A SAD LITTLE JACKASS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ABSOLUTELY NEFARIOUS!!!!!!!!! 2021 dana had no CLUE they were hiding this fucker in the back of one of the ygo spinoffs. never could have predicted it. vector’s genuinely one of the best ygo characters of all time to me. what if a yugioh character had the most absolutely bonkers expressions youve ever seen and he was constantly doing little bits and acting like a little funnyman and then the devil fucking Kills Him. he’s perfect. the madness has only just begun to infect me i fear.

ANYWAY other than The Carrot in Question, I fucking love like...all of Zexal’s cast; I think this is the first time for any ygo where a series just didnt really have any characters I straight up Did Not Like. it’s such a solid, colorful cast that just checks so many boxes for my fav kinds of characters. I didn’t think I was gonna like Yuma but I ended up LOVING HIM!!!! I LOVE SEEING A YGO PROTAG THATS LIKE..ACTUALLY BAD AT THE GAME, THAT GROWS BETTER AND STRONGER OVER TIME BUT STAYS SO SILLY. I love what Zexal does to “traditional” yugioh character archetypes--Shark and Kite are both such cool rival characters and the shit they do with Shark especially?!?! NEVER COULD HAVE IMAGINED THEM DOING THAT. WITH A YUGIOH RIVAL. KAIBA COULD NEVER.

Narrowing down a top five fav Zexal guys is so hard, they really came in swinging with Catostrophic Families AND insane alien guys, but after pondering I think I’d have to say rn it’s Vector, Shark, Nistro (my fuckin  MAN!!!!!!!), Trey, and Alito. Immediate runnerup also being Tori. I fucking love Tori, new favorite main ygo girl. She bore witness to All That Shit and never folded. SHe’s Yuma’s FRIEND his CONFIDANT his EMOTIONAL SUPPORT!!!!! Absolute boss. Yuma would be dead in a ditch somewhere by episode 20 without her around.

Favorite Duel: BEEN GOING BACK AND FORTH ON THIS A LOT but I think my favorite duel was and still is the Trey vs. Yuma duel in zexal I, it’s just fantastic. The COLORS AND LIGHTING!!!!! The stakes!!! The SICK DUEL ARMOR!! Trey literally threatens a world-ending murder-suicide because he wants his family to be proud of him and well i’ll just explode into bits all up and down the road about it. Goes hard as hell. Trey and Yuma’s dynamic is one of my favs in Zexal but that’s it’s own post.

I also love all of Alito’s duels (especially the tag duel with Nistro, which is one of the most atrociously danabait duels ever (slash pos) and his last duel against yuma, which ALSO has some of the fucking coolest shots and lighting of any yugioh duel to me) and the last duel between Shark and Yuma. Shit rocks.

Zexal is also pretty unique to me in that it’s the first time i can really concretely say ive had favorite EPISODES as opposed to just favorite duels. There are so many episodes left and right that just make my fucking head explode. The BASEBALL DUEL FRIENDSHIP GAMES EPISODE. The EPISODE WHERE YUMA AND SHARK ARE IN THE HOSPITAL. The “VECTOR GETS STRAPPED INTO THE ALIEN GOD THRONE AND MR. HEARTLAND IS BEING INSANE AND THE ARCLIGHTS ARE IN A SUBMARINE AND ERAZOR IS GOING TO FUCKING KILL YUMA’S FRIENDS” episode. THE. UM. THE EPISODE WHERE THIS HAPPENS

^BROKE MY WHOLE DAMN BRAIN IN HALF. I AM STILL RECOVERING FROM THE DAMAGE zexal II comes in swinging with episodes that just knock your tits clean off and you LOVE to see it!!!!

Miscellaneous Other Zexal Gushing: IT’S JUST FUCKING GOOD!!!! THERE’S SO MUCH TO LOVE!!!!! I love the cast, I love Yuma and Astral’s dynamic and just how much love is there. I LOVE yuma’s friend group, they are SUCH perfect dweeby little middle schooler weird kids. I love the ways Zexal parallels Duel Monsters (and imo takes a lot of elements from DM and does them even better), I love Yuma’s grandma and Kari, ABSOLUTE REAL ONES!!! I fucking love Orbital 7. I love the Number cards and how theyre just completely thematically not related to each other at ALL (sometimes it’s a bug! sometimes it’s a guy! sometimes it’s an entire floating civilization!!!) I love the ABSOLUTELY BONKERS RELIGIOUS MOTIFS AND SYMBOLISM FLYING AROUND IN ANY AND ALL DIRECTIONS. THEY DID THAT FOR ME!!!!!!!!!!!!! ASTRAL CHRIST ALLEGORY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And I just...adore how fundamentally Zexal is about kindness and hope and love, and also about how it’s so important to not lose yourself or your sense of fun as you grow up!! That theme absolutely EVISCERATED ME when gx came out swinging with it in its last season, and it’s GETTIN ME AGAIN HERE!!! IT’S ABOUT HAVING FUN!! IT’S ABOUT THE BONDS WE MAKE WITH OTHERS!!! IT’S ABOUT HOW CEASELESS KINDNESS CAN BE AN UNSTOPPABLE FORCE THAT MAKES EVEN THE IMMOVEABLE MOVEABLE. yuma has SO much joy and love and forgiveness in his body and it makes me WAIL.

Duel Monsters really ends on this note of “goodbye” with Atem leaving, and it works well for that story’s themes of grief. Meanwhile I think it’s very special that while Zexal also ends on a goodbye with Astral leaving, it feels so much more like a “see you later.”  That hanging note of “we’ll meet again.” It’s so sweet. The themes of past and future at play really just make you root for these kids and hope they grow up into the best versions of themselves.

Also it’s so fucking funny that like All of the Cast That Died and Went to Hell Came Back Except Mr. Heartland Who Definitely Died For Real. gay WRONGS.

God. what else. I’m sure I’ll think of 8352389 more things I love about Zexal immediately after I post this. It’s just that good. So thrilled I gave it a go. I love you Xyz Monsters I love you Dyson Sphere I love you Vector’s dub and sub voices I love you Duel Monster Based Off of the Titantic I love you Dr. Faker’s absolutely insane character design I love you Barian World I love you Arclight family I love you Zexal II Dub Opening Song That’s Sung By Bruno 5D’s VA I love you YUMA AND FRIENDS!!!!!!!!!!! ZEXAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

cant wait to port all these kids to the college AU. it’s already happening. I love them so much

[chloesimaginationthings]

Gregory has it best out of the new FNAF protagonists..

[bigfatbreak]

Birds of a Feather previous / next

[torsamors]

On Seatbelts and Sunsets - Hanif Abdurraqib

[bluegiragi]

holding back (part 2)

early access + nsfw on patreon

[starry-bi-sky]

on a completely separate note; shizun luo binghe with a disciple shen yuan who fell into the abyss??? *thinks about LBH canonically stealing SQQ's corpse for 5 years* he'd hallucinate i think. like, like visual and audial hallucinations.

Keeps thinking he's seeing SQQ in the corner of his eyes, or wandering between the trees, amongst a group of disciples. Thinks he hears him calling for him, but its just the wind or another disciple.

Gets Xiu Ya reforged but patently fucking refuses to make a sword mound. Because his disciple Is Not Dead :))) There was No Body. He's Not Dead. And If You keep Insisting That He Is, He's Gonna Skewer You :). He's holding onto Xiu Ya so he can return his most favored disciple's sword when he returns. It's on his hip right next to Zheng Yang where it's supposed to be.

Also this motherfucker?? does not sleep btw. He has the image of SQQ, wide eyed and hysterical and standing at the mouth of the abyss burned into his fucking eyelids. Can't use the dreamscape to escape it either because he keeps trying to save him and either he does and it's an incredibly cruel trick to wake up to, or he doesn't and he gets his heart broken in several different pieces again.

There is no convincing this man that Shen Qingqiu is dead. Absolutely nothing at all. He is buried so deep in denial that moles would be jealous of how deep he is. He keeps making tea for two in the bamboo house only to remember that it's just him. SQQ's fans are hiding everywhere, little reminders of his presence. He goes to wake up SQQ on the mornings he sleeps in-- only to find the room empty.

[starcurtain]

Teyvat's "Most Down Bad" Award Goes to Alhaitham for a Second Year Running

Seeing everyone making fun of Alhaitham for his "stalkerish" tendencies in this event is funny, because I feel like a lot of people missed that "Be literally everywhere Kaveh is" has been Alhaitham's MO from the day Kaveh appeared in the game.

From only grabbing his house keys after Kaveh returned from the desert (he couldn't have had both sets of keys at the end of the Archon Quest unless he went home and got Kaveh's copy) to ditching conversations to get back to his house only after Kaveh came home, to showing up without any warning or explanation in Kaveh's hangout with some ridiculous excuse about hearing his voice through noise-cancelling headphones... Refusing to offer any help in the Temple of Silence story quest other than staying in the library with Kaveh...

Since when does Alhaitham willingly cover anyone else's duties?

But this trend of "Be everywhere Kaveh is" didn't start when they were adults. It was already in place when they were still Akademiya students--and it's a trend that didn't end even when they had their fight.

Even when they weren't speaking, Alhaitham dogged Kaveh's every step through published responses to Kaveh's research articles in academic journals. He insisted on keeping a line of communication between himself and Kaveh open, even if the only way to do that was through very public ideological clashes. Pulling Kaveh's pigtails to get his attention lolol. It's implied that, for at least the few years between their fight and Kaveh moving in, this was the only communication between them--Alhaitham's refusal to allow their connection to entirely fade away. (And the fact that this is revealed in Kaveh's character stories--through his precious journal that records the moments of his life that had the most impact on him--shows just how deeply he values the fact that Alhaitham didn't give up.)

Another relevant side note: Alhaitham never asked Kaveh to give up his half of their house. Knowing half of it belonged to Kaveh, knowing that Kaveh may one day want to reclaim his part of it, knowing that it was listed as theirs, Alhaitham moved into the house and made zero effort to change its ownership. He was completely fine with living in "his and Kaveh's house." The stories suggest it was only months later (or even longer) that Kaveh even noticed he had the house, and he transferred away ownership of his portion without Alhaitham ever asking him (or even seemingly wanting him) to do so.

Please, let that sink in. Alhaitham actively left his grandmother's (presumably comfortable) house to move into "his and Kaveh's house," with no apparent explanation for why, and after doing so, he made no attempt to change that "his and Kaveh's" label. He moved into the house with no promise that Kaveh wouldn't show up on the doorstep the very next day and move in too. It almost feels like another deliberate provocation--I've moved into our house, are you going to come stop me? LBR, if Alhaitham had had his way, Kaveh would have been living there with him from Day 1...

There's also the fact that Kaveh literally can't write on a single message board anywhere in the entire nation of Sumeru without Alhaitham hunting his messages down and responding to them (which absolutely no one else does, by the way).

"NUH-UH!" "UH-HUH." "NUH-UH!"

Alhaitham's own character stories tell us explicitly that one of Alhaitham's defining character traits is "He is never where you need him to be," yet somehow...

Shot, and chaser:

Any time Kaveh is in the slightest bit of need or danger or just wants Alhaitham near, Alhaitham is "coincidentally" exactly where Kaveh needs him to be, whenever Kaveh needs him to be there.

Alhaitham didn't just "happen" to run into Kaveh in Port Ormos, an entirely different city from where he was supposed to be working. He didn't just "happen" to read the same terrible book as Kaveh when we know he otherwise would not waste a moment of his time on poorly-written literature...

He didn't just "happen" to appear when Kaveh was upset and needed a distraction in the House of Daena during Kaveh's hangout. He didn't just "happen" to be sitting around waiting when Kaveh needed answers after the Archon Quest. He didn't just "happen" to find Kaveh's academic publications and every single message board posting and respond to them at length and in public.

The only person for whom Alhaitham just "happens" to be available is Kaveh, over and over and over again--because he is very deliberately making himself a constant presence in Kaveh's life.

Which is exactly what Kaveh's mother told Kaveh he needed.

(Like, out of all things, I think people really underestimate the devs deliberately paralleling the romantic relationship between Kaveh's mother and father with Kaveh and Alhaitham's relationship. If you want to point to one thing that says "These two characters are intentionally queer-coded," it doesn't get any more obvious than this.)

Alhaitham, are you not embarrassed to be this transparent??? 🫣

[deathricedrawn]

i'm ready to try

[kumzorg]

she's showing you around the hinamizawa :3

plus bonus rena that i was too bored to add

[araneapeixes]

fuck it. sketch poast

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Why are you running?

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[nancywheeeler]

hopeless time loop. the way out isn’t to save everyone. the way out isn’t to save even one person. the way out isn’t to change anything. the way out is accepting how it happened the first time is how it always will be. that’s how you acted, that’s how they acted, that’s how you would have acted every time if you weren’t given the curse of hindsight. the way out is accepting you can’t fix the past; you can only forgive yourself for it.

[turtletoria]

one downside to digital mediums of art is that you cant see the tear stains (they just slide down the screen)

[basalting]

after jasons death bruce "accidentally" slips harvey a crowbar while hes in arkham and kisses his cheek and says, voice soft and colder than ice, "make him hurt for me honey"

it takes 6 guards to sedate and drag two face off the joker the next time two face sees him and for the rest of their lives as soon as harvey sees the joker he goes after him like a rabid dog.

[ciderjacks]

despite Laios low self esteem making him think that if he’d been eaten, Chilchuck and Marcille wouldn’t have helped Falin,

theres a small part of me that thinks the reason Chilchuck stayed with the party and went back in the dungeon in the first place was because he didn’t want to leave Laios alone. That Laios was moreso the reason he stayed.

[inkskinned]

they want to talk about mental illness and acceptance and how everyone is a little ocd it's cute and quirky and their "intrusive thoughts" are about cutting their hair off and you say yours are about taking a razorblade to your eye and they say ew can you not and everyone is a little adhd sometimes! except if you're late it's a personality flaw and it's because you are careless and cruel (and someone else with adhd mentions they can be on time, so why can't you?) and it's not an eating disorder if it's girl dinner! it's not mania if it's girl math! what do you mean you blew all of your savings on nonrefundable plane tickets for a plane you didn't even end up taking. what do you mean that you are afraid of eating. get over it. they roll their little lips up into a sneer. can you not, like, trauma dump?

they love it on them they like to wear pieces of your suffering like jewels so that it hangs off their tongue in rapiers. they are allowed to arm-chair diagnose and cherrypick their poisons but you can't ever miss too many showers because that's, like, "fuckken gross?" so anyone mean is a narcissist. so anyone with visual tics is clearly faking it and is so cringe. but they get to scream and hit customer service employees because well, i got overwhelmed.

you keep seeing these posts about how people pleasers are "inherently manipulative" and how it's totally unfair behavior. but you are a people pleaser, you have an ingrained fawn response. in the comments, you have typed and deleted the words just because it is technically true does not make it an empathetic or kind reading of the reaction about one million times. it is technically accurate, after all. you think of catholic guilt, how sometimes you feel bad when doing a good deed because the sense of pride you get from acting kind - that pride is a sin. the word "manipulation" is not without bias or stigma attached to it. many people with the fawn response are direct victims of someone who was malignantly manipulative. calling the victims manipulative too is an unfair and unkind reading of the situation. it would be better and more empathetic to say it is safety-seeking or connection-seeking behavior. yes, it can be toxic. no, in general it is not intended to be toxic. there is no reason to make mentally ill people feel worse for what we undergo.

you type why is everyone so quick to turn on someone showing clear signs of trauma but you already know the fucking answer, so what's the point of bothering. you kind of hate those this is what anxiety looks like! infographics because at this point you're so good at white-knuckling through a severe panic attack that people just think you're stoic. even people who know the situation sometimes comment you just don't seem depressed. and you're not a 9 year old white kid so there's no way you're on the spectrum, you're not obsessed with trains and you were never a good mathematician. okay then.

mental illness is trending. in 2012 tumblr said don't romanticize our symptoms but to be fair tiktok didn't exist yet. there's these series of videos where someone pretends to be "the most boring person on earth" and is just being a normal fucking person, which makes your skin crawl, because that probably means you are boring. your friend reads aloud a profile from tinder - no depressed bitches i fucking hate that mental illness crap. your father says that medication never actually works.

you still haven't told your grandmother that you're in therapy. despite everything (and the fact it's helping): you just don't want her to see you differently.