#watching the last two eps of season 1 my brain is like a warehouse full of explosives catching fire

[folklouire]

those posts that are like finally getting into a very well known piece of media that's been there for years and you're like has anyone else heard of this yeah that's me with the sopranos right now because LITERALLY. HAS ANYONE ELSE HEARD OF THIS

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh S4 Ep 24: Someone Actually Called the Cops.

So recently I was like, “I should do something different than my usual” and I decided to open up a little thread for critiquing ppl’s short stories, and I kid you not, the very first story I got was someone’s Seto Kaiba erotica. Which, even in erotica form, did not have very much romance in it. So, now that Yugioh will apparently haunt my every waking move forever until I die, lets get back to S4. Lets desperately get back to canon. I miss canon.

Last we left off, Kaiba lost KaibaCorp...again. Really feels like he loses this company once every couple of years (weeks if we count season 1-3). Except, this time, Dartz didn’t read the fine print in the legal files that says the company must be run by a member of the Kaiba family. While that was a huge plot point with Pegasus, turns out that Seto and Mokuba’s memories have been blended so thoroughly, like a very fine Shadow Realm smoothie, that they just...forgot.

And like I’m positive that Roland remembers, but Roland’s not gonna say something and accidentally reveal he’s the 4th Kaiba brother and have to get abducted all the time and actually work for a living. Anyways, they forgot why Pegasus abducted them in the first place in Season 1, and honestly, so did the writers of this season 4 years later. Not like it mattered, because if Seto and Mokuba did take Dartz to court, the world would end before their case would even start.

Which is how, after one talk with Roland, Seto and Mokuba just sort of laid prone on the metaphorical ground and let it wash over them that yes, KaibaCorp is gone.

I really like this extra-long helicopter, PS.

Both members of Kaiba’s Sunglasses Army decided to align themselves with Kaiba, although honestly, I don’t think anyone else in this company has realized that they’ve been bought. It happened...1 hour ago. Like what do you even do if your company randomly gets bought in the middle of a workday? Like no lead up, no indication, just BAM you’ve been bought?

And if Duke works for Pegasus who got bought out by Dartz and then Dartz bought Kaiba Corp-------What does that make Duke? Is he gonna have to start wearing sunglasses inside?

Anyway, Roland knows better than to tell Seto Kaiba he doesn’t work for him anymore while still in the same helicopter as Seto Kaiba, who already crashed one plane today and will crash yet another plane before this episode is through.

(read more under the cut)

Seto decides to align with Yugi since he needs to confront Dartz eventually. Which is when we find out that Seto always planned to align with Yugi and was just giving him a really hard time.

Because over the last several episodes, Seto has had an entire team at this random museum in Florida in order to take some pictures (that really should have already been on the internet but wtv, it was 2003 so maybe it wasn’t?)

It’s like most of the way through s4 and the biker ninjas still send me. How did he make SO MANY biker ninjas? At what point was Dartz like...and now...all my mooks...will be ninja bikers. Or orcs. Mostly Ninja bikers.

Did Alister or the others ever tell him “hey, Master Dartz, I get that your 10000 years old but like...do you not understand what a biker is?” and was Dartz like

“clearly bikers are the most evil thing in the world, obviously.” completely unaware that most bikers are just 45 year old accountants.

In these scenes we also get a gander at their laptops and, if you ever want to see high level life crippling OCD anxiety in picture form, it’s illustrated very clearly right here:

Not only did they draw this keyboard in 1 pt perspective, they used like a ruler to draw all those letters so they were the same size. Some artist put so much time getting this nice and crisp and smooth...and then this happened.

And I’m pretty sure they died after that. I’m pretty sure this scene killed an artist.

It’s at this point that Yami kinda puts two and two together and was like “WE BOUGHT PLANE TICKET’S, YOU ASSHOLES.”

(It’s been such a long time since we’ve seen Mokuba smile like this, and it’s because he’s been hiding the fact for So Many Episodes that he and his brother prepped like hours ago to get this huge dunk on the rest of the party. He just wants to dunk on them so bad. Look at him. His company was bought today. BUT he gets to spend time with his bro dunking.)

Serious question, will Delta refund your flight if the Great Leviathan appears in the sky and tries to eat your soul to reboot the world from the ground up?

Of course not. They will never refund your flight. Trick question.

We switch back over to Rebecca and Duke, who have been absent from this show for so long, I actually forgot what Duke’s name was and had to think for like...5 entire minutes until I remembered that his nickname sounds like a poop and I was like “oh man, what name of poop would it be???” and then I recalled “Dookie. Yes. His name is literally Dookie. Wow that took way too long!”

Then we start a story arc I’d to call “My Kingdom For a Sharpen Filter” where, much like King Lear, the Yugi crew splays themselves on a battle field just strewn with different ways to sharpen an image, but can’t for the life of them use any other one, but the one deep in the heart of what is now DartzCorp.

And so yes, we are going to fly to San Fransisco, hop into ye Olde KaibaCorp, and log into proto-Noah in order to read a language that Arthur Hawkins can already read.

This is nonsense, but they put it there because it’s something to do. And honestly, it’s not a card game, so I’m down for this change-up. Lets go visit a version of Noah’s brain. At least they won’t drop an orichalcos for the 12th episode in a row.

On the way, Seto decides to try and egg on Yugi.

This backfires as you expect it will because Yami doesn’t freakin care. Like he’s not Yugi, he doesn’t care who the King of Games is, he harnesses freakin Dark Magic. The Wizard never cares if he’s King Arthur or not, and in fact, he probably prefers it....

..................Except in that spinoff where they had Yugi as a reincarnation of King Henry VII.

...................................................never mind.

And then Seto Kaiba says this actual line and I just...

WH.

WHHH

WHAT?

This entire show is just watching Yugi desperately cling to his scary ass hobbies. The tagline of Yugioh is “1001 reasons to go back to school and get a real job.”

What does Kaiba think Yugi does when he’s not around? Does he actually think Yugi attends school or sleeps at night or works an actual job? Like...he thinks Yugi has...NO HOBBIES.

Very interesting insight into what Seto considers a hobby and not hobby.

Especially since this Yami, who spends most of his spare time farting around his scary ass brain castle and getting lost. Occasionally he is forced on a date with Tea and wipes minds. That’s it. That’s all the things Yami does outside of hobbies.

Anyway, what is Dartz doing during all of this?

After this, Dartz pulls back the literal curtains on this room to reveal these candles that each hold the soul of someone he’s murdered.

There are not NEARLY enough candles for this segment.

A very brave man to have candles littered on the floor when his hair is down to his ass and all of his mooks have floorduster coats.

I really want to know what the local arts and crafts store thought when Dartz strode in there and bought every single tiny styrafoam skull during the Halloween sale and was like “can I put souls in these? You sell the kind I can put souls in, right?” and then immediately pulled out like a dozen 50% off coupons like a complete asshole.

Anyway, using this candle hocus pocus, Dartz uses the Orichalcos powers to take advantage of something Yugi did in the first episode. We distantly recall there was a giant eyeball in the sky--turns out if you bust up the eyeball with, lets say, a card that has a dragon on it, the eyeball will explode into many tiny Orichalcos pieces that will fall all over planet Earth.

So apparently Yugi didn’t save anyone at all when he busted that eyeball, because he instead set in motion Dartz’ evil plan to eventually use these many tiny Orichalcos pieces like the one seen here, to kill the hell out of people.

Good job, Yugi. Too bad you missed the Actual Bakura.

In fact, actual Bakura is probably the only one who survived this incident because I guarantee that Ryou Bakura is too busy eating all the contents of his fridge out of stress. He’s probably opened his window at this point, seen the crazy lights in the sky and in the street and was like  “Blooooooody nope nopenopenopenopenope” and just locked the windows and doors, turned up Hercule Poirot to max volume, and stuffed his face with cookies.

(Or biscuits, I guess.)

WELL.

I don’t know how to tally that.

Yugioh not only broke the tally I was using to measure the distance they spent commuting this season, it also broke the tally on the amount of people who have died on this children’s show.

That’s a really big number.

We’ve had real duel monsters for a couple weeks but youknow...this time they’re extra, extra, extra real. More so than the last times. Also they’re all Orichalcos versions of their cards so their extra edge now. They’re the hot topic versions of what were already pretty hot-topic ass cards.

MMM. We come full circle, back at a dock, a warehouse, and some huge ass boat.

Right where we belong. Where all friends meet, where we can all finally be one.

Yugioh found one of the only cities that has a very famous and tourist heavy pier/warehouse district in it just so the Yugi gang could finally feel comfortable in their natural habitat. HOWEVER, there’s just one tiny problem in this scene, and it’s that it’s not overlaid with the actual soundscape of a SF pier, which is that of 100000 screaming seals

I don’t have a seal problem, you have a seal problem.

Anyway, the only healthy adults here attempt to follow the children into danger but someone on the animation team was like “we just lost the keyboard drawing guy to that capslock! We cannot lose any more interns to a crowd scene with 9 people in it and 2 dead bodies!” and they uh...

And we immediately eject Roland and whoever that weird sunglasses guy is out of the script. Mokuba gave them a longing glance as they helicoptered away. Maybe because he missed his Dad stand-ins that he went through such efforts to call in the first place. Or more likely, because Mokuba would have preferred to be on that helicopter and far away from whatever the hell is going to go down on this dock.

Honestly the rest of Joey’s storyline this episode is him going rogue because of Mai rage, and it both comes out of nowhere and also seems very on point for him.

Meanwhile, Rebecca’s unbridled rage towards Yami Muto is still low key hilarious to me.

Witness the only character here who thinks Yami should suffer actual consequences and witness Yami just appear to not give a single damn about it.

Nearly spat out my own drink watching this.

The...

...police...

...exist in this universe?

Anyway, while Tristan and Tea try to locate a payphone to dial 911, Seto and Yugi decide to invade Seto’s own company by going through an elevator that you have to reach through the sewers.

Straight up I don’t think SF even has sewers. At least, not in the sense that you can walk in em like New York or Paris or other cities that have sewers. Our sewer systems are very small cuz we got something called “liquefaction” which means our ground is so soft (and artificial--a lot of the land is fake), that when there is an earthquake, certain parts of the city will...liquefy. It’s Terrifying. We kind of...avoid going and building underground except in certain stable places. (like even BART gives me the heebies.)

I just have a very strong distrust of basements, caves and other underground places in general and it’s not because of spiders, or ghosts or whatever, I’m just afraid of faultlines. It’s like having an active volcano, but you just don’t see it, and we haven’t had a Big One since 1989 so...any day now (I mean, 2020 has been such redic content, that I think we’re finally ready)

Again, Japan has way more intense Earthquakes than we do, and yet they have a billion underground subways and very, very tall buildings, so like, this is mostly a big cultural difference between the two of us. And the bedrock. They probably have better bedrock than we do (honestly, I just have no idea).

MASTER HACKER SKILLS.

Almost as good as that time he hacked into Pegasus’ company by dropping a satellite on it. I’m starting to think Seto actually doesn’t know how to use a computer.

Anyway, Seto is faced with...real cards, real monsters, indisputable evidence, and he decides, it’s time. It’s time to finally face facts.

So, while these two are just flinging cards around willy nilly, Tea and Tristan are ...actually talking to police.

4 seasons. They’re actually doing it.

Although, TBH, they probably should have gone to the Japanese Embassy first? Just throwing that out there.

Ah Yugioh, the only kids show around that tells you point blank not to trust cops. Timeless.

U.S

In some weird underground earthquake hazard, Rebecca proves that she is smarter than Seto Kaiba. She’s maybe even the smartest person on this show. Nice that we gave her nothing to do this season but pine over Yugi who is already taken by Tea who he is also not even dating.

Not that I love Rebecca or anything, I actually have a hard time with her voice, but like...they really dropped the ball on Rebecca.

If she does end up joining Kaiba corp as their back up Felicity Smoak while Seto just runs around aimlessly punching stuff that really is just offbrand Arrow but with cards. And with slightly less resurrections.

So, lets get a gander at that computer.

We didn’t get to see Kaiba pull out 12 other discs to complete the installation process for these all these Hard Discs. Maybe the lure of throwing a very aerodynamic CD across the room like a paper card was so strong that his dev team forced him to switch to these defunct squares?

PS, I am a true millennial, OK? But, I don’t remember Hard Discs.

Hard Discs were SO long go. I stopped using these damn things in Elementary school. The last Hard Disc I ever touched was in college, when I had to put my art portfolio on a disc to submit it to my degree. I don't know even why. Everyone had a mac, so I knew no one’s computer in the department even...HAD a disc drive so it was like...whomst among you has this damn computer from 1997? Whomst among you is still using Windows 95? WHY would I put IMAGES on a floppy when I can just email them to you?

Anyway, I had to get a USB hard disc reader, and to get that reader, I had to call my Dad who had legacy software because he’s a computer engineer, and he had to mail it to me.

In that same portfolio review, PS, I also had to submit my portfolio as slides.

I didn’t even know where to produce slides so I had to ask all these old people and go to the last photo processing store on earth to get digital pictures turned into negatives and then turned into freakin slides.

SLIDES.

I honestly think they just did that to weed people out of the art degree.

Anyway, I tell you this story just to say that there is no way in hell that Kaiba was using a hard disc during the height of the CD era. We were CD or go home since 2000. We had pretty decent jump drives at this point. We had wifi. It was realllly bad wifi, but we had it. Your phone could connect to the internet. It would charge you 50 bucks, but it COULD connect.

Who on the Yugioh team DID this?

Anyway lets see these pictures that for which, we spent thousands of dollars in unused plane tickets, destroyed a Caltrain, killed 2 ancient Atlanteans (and their dog), killed 3 random mid-villains, walked across the entire Peninsula, crashed an international plane, and left both the plane and the train to rot gas fuel into the nearest lake which is right next to a ghost graveyard?

Yeaaaaaaaaaah!

Like he reads it and is all “They’re gonna resurrect Atlantis” and it’s like WE KNOW. Dartz and his hooligans have talked about starting their Utopia to reboot the world since Gurimo. Since Day 1.

Man.

Anyways, there was one plus to the pictures, and it was that Seto Kaiba recognized the Oricalchos logo.

just...

The Oricalchos logo is...

...This logo, Seto?

You...didn’t recognize...seriously? Not until just now? You have been inside of this logo, rearing to lose your soul to Alister 2 times, and he only recognized it...just now.

I mean Seto takes a while y’all. He’s a genius, but his memory is so, so bad, that he will Eventually get smart, but you have to wait until like episode 24. But he’ll get there. Just gotta be patient.

And, when he saw it, he wigged out in a way I wasn’t prepared for.

Y’all I feel like I’ve seen to many weird zooms on Kaiba’s crotch in this show. Or just in life in general, especially after that surprise fic. That’s all.

I don’t know why everything exploded, but maybe the logo is cursed in the same way as God Cards? I dunno.

Anyway, this is when Dartz shows up with his brand new dog.

So they run outside onto the roof.

Now listen, does every Kaiba Corp building need the same weird ass roof? Is it like a McDonalds?

Because I’m just picturing this type of roof in SF and I’m having a time.

Forgive me if I made this lemming joke already. He’s just stood on a cliff’s edge so many times I can’t keep up.

RIP Dragon Jet, who took us from S3-S4, you’ll always live on in our memory, you glorious, wasteful, beautiful death trap.

Seto and Yugi are fine by the way, they just kinda jumped out, as you do when you’re an immortal god possessing a small boy and a...whatever the hell Seto is.

It’s at this point we reintroduce Valon because Joey went rogue and has decided to take on Dartz by himself. This is what happens when Tristan leaves the party. You always need Tristan to hold back Joey by his armpits to keep him from fighting random people.

So I guess Valon’s gonna die next episode. That’ll be nice.

What’s great about this show is each arc is just watching each villain die. You know they’ll die. But...how much?

Anyway, that’s all for today. I’m still drawing a hell ton of stuff so I don’t know when the next update will be...but just now I haven’t dropped off or something. I’ll...eventually get to it.

And if you just got here, this is a link to read all of these in chrono order.

Anyway, I mentioned Hercule Poirot, (because watching a hell ton of BBC was how I spent time with my family when I was a kid, and my very Southern Grandma freakin LOVED Hercule Poirot) So here is the best subplot of that show, which is David Suchet eating stuff.

And which doesn’t want to embed for some reason. Probs can’t embed more than one video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17antzzJrzQ

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh S3 Ep 12: Seto Discovers Hostile Takeover Tactics

For April Fools, I’m actually going to update this blog. I know, right? It’s been a little while.

I’ll have you know that, if I had more time, you were *this close* to getting a recap of this hot mess movie.

Buuuut it turns out that movie is a lot longer than I thought. Soooo many bad wigs. Maybe another April Fools.

Anyway, back to Yugioh, are you ready for MORE BUSINESS?

Cuz if you wanted to watch a kid’s show with stocks in it well, I had no idea it would be the one about the playing cards. Really didn’t see that one coming. Stocks are going to be traded in a little bit, but currently, all we have to worry about is that Tristan is a monkey and Kaiba’s about to die.

He seems cool with it, both with being “dead” (still unsure if Tristan can be human ever again) and watching Kaiba become dead.

This is some high level freaky sci fi thing just stuffed into a side plot? Like...what purpose is the weird monkey robot?

(read more under the cut)

Joey has completely run out of his thimble full of patience, and he’s taken over the part of Den Mother in lieu of Tristan being too horny/monkey to manage it himself. Watching Joey slowly become more and more too frustrated to Even Deal With This Right Now has been his character growth this entire arc.

And the team’s somewhat amusement and concern that one of their best friends--who they saw...pretty much die--and is now a very horny monkey is like how you would notice that your engine light is on. Like they just have so many other problems right now. They’ve decided they will get around to deciding what to do about this...later.

They’re definitely going to deal with the monkey later. Eventually. So they just tied him to the truck and continue driving.

Like that’s what they actually did, they actually just tied him to the truck and kept driving.

Eventually, they do make it to the scene of the Kaiba card crime in their 3 wheel pickup truck, but unfortunately, so does the weird satellite laser, so once again our team does not make it in time to really make any difference. The Yugi team is consistently like...3 minutes too late. Should be their team motto.

So Noah’s big plan is to make Mokuba watch Leichter--the hard to spell Big 5 with the very Dixie accent--explain in great detail all the ways Seto screwed Mokuba. And it was...something that I don’t think most kids would get. Last week it was a .com analogy, this week we’re straight up jumping into hostile takeovers. Seto decided to use the Big 5 to buy up a majority of the stock and fire his Father, but realized that Gozaburo would absolutely not let that happen.

So, Seto set up a whole plan to make it appear like he was losing the stock race, by leaking the whole plan that they were secretly buying allll the stock straight to Gozaburo but while pretending to be Mokuba (I assume by pinching his nose while shouting through a telephone) and then driving Mokuba to Gozaburo by attacking him point blank.

Did any children watching this show understand this? Did any of you?

Anyway, for some reason Mokuba is shocked that this happened.

And then we get a flashback to remind us that yes, Mokuba was here when this happened. Maybe didn’t understand it at the time, but overall, should know by now that like...this happened. Noah revealing this to him really shouldn’t have been such a shocker, right?

Mokuba describes it as “the worst day in his life” which is kind of a lot since two seasons ago Mokuba was chained in a castle cell for several days (possibly weeks), turned into a playing card while his body was a zombie that did dishes for Pegasus, died in a VR game because his brother couldn’t play nice, then last season, got abducted and then was suspended from the bottom of a flying helicopter by one single rope tied around his waist, was imprisoned in a box warehouse where he barely escaped, found out one of his good friends is pretty sure he’s an Egyptian Pharaoh dont-think-about-it, only to find all of his other friends were now attached to torture devices and about to be drowned in the bottom of the sea or squashed by a couple tons of cargo container. And then the next day, 3 people got sent to the hospital during the tourney he’s the manager of and only one of those people isn’t still in a coma, and now there’s at least one serial murderer on board his blimp and there’s nothing he can do about it.

But sure Moki, this is your worst day.

Convinced that Gozaburo (I will never spell his name right, PS, my apologies) thinks Moki is on his side, Kaiba decides to do the deed. In his school clothes. Not entirely positive that baby Kaiba has any other outfit than his school clothes and that purple coat.

Like did Seto get off school early to go and do this, or did he honestly clock in at 8 AM, harass Joey and Yugi for a bit, maybe take a test, turn in his diorama of mitochondria that he made out of twizzlers or whatever, eat lunch while making fun of the skater kids who botch it on the stairs, scribble some art in art class until 3 PM, and then take the bus back home to do THIS?

And so although the Big 5 were still majority shareholders, they couldn’t really control Seto Kaiba--which leads me to think that at some point he managed to get their stocks away from them...somehlow...probably more insider trading, he seems really into that.

Anyways, long story short the Big 5 really screwed it on this one. I mean the company has to be run by a Kaiba per the Kaiba rule that we learned in S1 (kind of a weird rule this family enforces, when all of the Kaibas are SO BAD at romantic relationships that they can only date trading cards, or can’t stop getting abducted long enough to even go on a date with a real human ((Reminder that Mokuba and Serenity are the same age, but he’s 1/millionth as horny as any of these High School Juniors that are into Serenity)))

Leichter (who is the light purple font here, I uh...forgot to cap Leichter’s face so it’s somewhat confusing) decided to just continue explaining, mostly for Mokuba, I assume, because...everyone here already knows what’s happening.

And at this point he reveals that he does have a Blue Eyes.

Again, very surprised Noah gave him that card but youknow...the power of...whatever the hell is going on there between Kaiba and that paper card.

Anyways, the Blue Eyes gives him a win, so I guess he’s figured out somewhat how to use this card? Like it’s significantly less bad than it was in the previous seasons. Maybe that separation between him and the paper card in S2 was good for him. Got his relationship back on track.

So like, something that is kind of vogue right now in more adult TV is this tendency to try and make all your characters relatable by making them realize and obsess over how they messed up to the point that they can no longer make any moral choices.

And that was the thing I was worried about in this arc, I was worried that the one guy on the writing staff who SUPER stans Seto Kaiba would make Seto into some sort of Bojack Horseman, who becomes so obsessed with his guilt that he kind of becomes a victim of what society did to him rather than a guy who ever made a choice. And Bojack’s not a bad show or anything, I did watch all of it, and it’s supposed to be more about society than the characters. But, as his problems from his youth compounded, he loses all of his agency as a character. If you are forced to be an ass then...well you can’t be one, by nature of what it means to be an ass.

Does that make sense? I see that more and more in shows these days, just a constantly apology fest whenever writers do a villain background episode.

But yes, Seto was trained to be a shark, but he was already a shark from day 1. He was always like this from the moment he was put in that orphanage. No apologies on behalf of the writing staff are needed and I’m glad they didn’t make any. It was somewhat refreshing that Seto never once apologized during this entire episode. He is awful, and he is completely fine with that.

And like, Bro hates it when you do this type of parallel comparisons between characters, but I freakin love it because he might be an English major but he majored in technical writing, and I was minoring in film for a hot minute so I love analyzing stuff and he can just deal. So lets dive in. We just came off of a whole arc talking about Marik’s tragic backstory and it’s really interesting that Seto’s tragic backstory mirrors Marik’s a great deal (especially since Kaiba was the one who was supposed to inherit the magic rod) but the two of them have a very different response to it.

Marik’s background gave him absolutely no agency. Even when he did lash out against his father--that was the rod rather than Marik himself. He lost his nut because he got tortured by his Father and lived a very shelted life underground, there was no choice there. He even has a brother that he threw into the coals (well, stroke of lightning) for his own ambitions.

Seto, on the other hand, was also tortured by his Father, but lived a shelted life so far above everyone else, that he never really left that lifestyle. But, unlike Marik, when he got the chance to make a choice, instead of getting out of the Kaiba house to save his Brother, he decided to freakin destroy it, even if it involved torturing Mokuba (momentarily) in the process.

Both are destroying their Father’s legacy while also trying to rule the world at the same time, two different villains, two different ways, one isn’t necessarily better written than the other, but it does feel like Seto has a lot more control of his own life than Marik, who is currently bumming around in Tea’s brain.

But I dunno, maybe Seto will have a big moment where he will feel an ounce of guilt and we’ll find out that everything he did was secretly a good thing or The Only Way something. I might eat my words later and be somewhat disappointed. We’ll see.

If you just got here, this is a link to read these recaps from S1 Ep1, in case you felt like reading a novel’s worth of Yugioh, since we are on S3.