#yugioh rambling

[anthurak]

Okay you know how basically EVERY fantasy series gets at least a bit weird with Light and Darkness representing some ‘good and evil’ dynamic?

It’s either the typical Light-is-Good-and-Dark-is-Bad, or it’s the ‘subversive’ take where you just swap the dynamic so Dark is Good and Light is Bad.

Even when it’s some Order-vs-Chaos thing, it’s almost always the watered-down, generic version where Order=Good and Chaos=Evil, or you’re just doing the ‘subversive’ flip again.

The point being, it feels like fantasy stories just CAN’T HELP attaching morality to light and darkness.

The reason why I bring this up is that I’ve recently noticed that early Yugioh actually does a really subtle and fun twist on this idea with Yugi and Kaiba that is not only a bit subversive but also manages to detach any real morality from this representation of Darkness vs Light.

Obviously we have the subversive element of Yugi, the hero, being associated with darkness via his Dark Magician, while Kaiba, the rival, is associated with light via his Blue Eyes White Dragons.

But more than that, Yugi’s association with darkness via his Dark Magician more represents the cunning, trickery and guile the Yugi so often uses to defeat his opponents.

Whereas Kaiba’s association with light via his Blue Eyes represents how he relies on overwhelming power to destroy his opponents.

Basically, we have the twist of the hero being associated with darkness and the rival associated with light AND managing to make this ‘darkness vs light’ conflict NOT represent any kind of ‘good vs evil’, but rather represent the ideologies and strategies of these two characters.

Oh and yes, this does in fact make the story later pivoting into a super-generic 'light-good, dark-bad' dynamic EXTREMELY jarring in hindsight.

[shitpostingkats]

I wanna live in the yugioh world solely so I can watch the defucntland episode about Maximillion Pegasus.

[polyphonetic]

You're in his DMs. I died 5,000 years ago in ancient Egypt, and my soul is in the puzzle around his neck. We are not the same.

[marblesmind]

YuGiOh protagonists tend to fall into two categories:

1)Silly little positive guy who wants the best for people and will be put through the absolute wringer

2)Mechanics trying to overthrow a corrupt company/government system

[halfamask]

Joey and Kaiba are the best literary parallels in yugioh and you can’t tell me they’re not because:

Older sibling entirely in charge of taking care of their (similarly aged) younger sibling because their parents didn’t do it

Desperate to be good at Duel Monsters to the point where they define their worth at least partially on it

Both can be seen as dueteragonists to Yugi’s protagonist

Trash talk a lot and are also saner about a lot of the weird fantasy stuff than Yugi, who has to live it in his head

Both definitely coping with inferiority complexes that Kaiba solves with an endless need for power and control and Joey solves with friendship and making a joke of everything including himself

And the way they go about life really shows this. Kaiba sees his life as a result of his controlled scenarios, manipulation, power gain through fear, and depending only on himself of course he’d be terrified to become joey who has none of those things of course he looks down on who joey has become. Joey feels like he got dealt a lousy hand but grew because of yugi and Tristan and tea of course he resents kaiba for acting as if your connections with people don’t matter of course he regards kaiba as a spoiled brat who doesn’t know his own privilege. They are two sides of the same damn coin and their stories could be reversed so easily it’s scary

[millenniumscreampuff]

[pkpumpkinn]

>:D Kaiba appreciation post

He's so crazy I love it when he goes >:D

[xerith-42]

The reason I love torturing my blorbos is because the writers of Yu-Gi-Oh looked at Jounouchi and said "How much can we put him through in one season?" And then decided to start the arc by beating him up in a back alley, stealing his favorite card, making him feel like a failure to the most important person in his life, fight for his life against two people who are not playing fair in a tournament he shouldn't even be in, AND THAT'S NOT EVEN GETTING INTO THE MIND CONTROLLED FRIENDSHIP DEATH TRAP OF SADNESS we do not have time to get into that, because after Jou is out of that traumatic experience he goes on to the finals where his first duel ends with him getting struck by lightning, then he has to watch one of his best friends lose her memories of him and then lose her soul to the madman that's been tormenting them, oh and Jou also gets paralyzed by that madman but that's not important because after that this madman duels him in a Shadow game so hard Jou ends up in a coma.

And he ends the season perfectly fine.

[dreamydelite]

"it's like they're stuck in their own world" -joey probably

[chaoscheebs]

Seto Kaiba absolutely does that thing parents do when making a sudden stop while driving, i.e. whipping out an arm protectively in front of their passenger to stop them from theoretically flying out of the front window.

Mokuba doesn't really notice it anymore because he's used to it, Yugi thinks it's charming, and the one time Seto did it to Jounouchi (look, Yugi wasn't feeling well and was laying down in the back seats, Seto promised him he'd get Jou home first, the things he does for friendship/love/to repay some kind of debt, etc.), he grumbles "force of habit, don't think this means anything," but unfortunately, Jou now knows, and honestly you are now one (1) point higher in his estimation of you.

(... only 100 more points to go until Seto's in the positives with Jou.)

[anthurak]

Hey, so for anyone who grew up with or just watched the 4kids Yugioh dub, do you remember that time in Duelist Kingdom when Yugi dueled the supposed ghost of the supposedly dead Kaiba? You know, that episode with all the talk of the practically phantasmal probability of Yugi’s victory?

And then when ‘Kaiba’ unmasked himself as this creepy clown looking guy, you know he revealed that he was essentially the personification/manifestation of the darkness of Kaiba’s soul that Yugi banished to the Shadow Realm with a mind crush at the end of their duel in the first episode. Only to have been freed from the Shadow Realm by Pegasus and sent to defeat Yugi?

Thus actually making this guy a genuine shadow/evil-counterpart to Kaiba that Yugi has to defeat in a twisted repeat of their first duel, and Yugi effectively cleaning up unfinished business when he defeats this shadow doppelganger of Kaiba and banishes him permanently this time.

As well as presenting a pretty good example and exploration of the strange, occult mysticism at work in this setting and the kind of power that both Pegasus and Yugi possess through their Millennium Items. It turns out that Yugi really did banish this dark piece of Kaiba’s very soul to this mysterious ‘Shadow Realm’, and that Pegasus was able to actually retrieve this piece of Kaiba’s soul, give it a body and make it his minion. And that Yugi is powerful enough to then PERMANANTLY banish this specter back to the shadows, never to be free again. Or, depending on your interpretation of the wording, Yugi’s mind crush may have just outright DESTROYED this piece of Kaiba’s soul for good.

An act which is certainly reinforced by the following ultimatum Yugi delivers to Pegasus, a statement delivered magically/telepathically over the video-screen that Pegasus is watching, something that even echoes what PEGASUS did to Yugi in their first duel, with Yugi wreathed in an aura of mystical power that ends with Yugi shattering the glass in Pegasus’s hand.

So that’s the dub version…

…And then you find out that in the original Japanese dub, the Kaiba doppelganger was… just a random evil, creepy clown working for Pegasus who was really good at disguising and impersonating people and decided to pretend to be a dead Kaiba to mess with Yugi.

For some reason.

As sacrilegious as it may sound, I feel pretty comfortable in saying that the English dub did actually make a few GOOD changes.

And yes, I know that in the manga, it was a ventriloquist with a Kaiba dummy who claimed that Kaiba's soul was in the dummy but was really just bullshitting. Which frankly I consider only MARGINALLY better than 'random evil clown disguised as Kaiba', simply because we get to see Yami go all Season-Zero on him with a sick penalty game.

[madkuroi]

"Will you fight with me again...? Light and Darkness Dragon..."

Got my new tattoo at the con I attended this weekend! It was a prize from the karaoke contest, and I got first place, tee-hee!

I confess that I had other plans, but after Matsuno-san passed, I felt like I should immortalize one of the characters he voiced, and one who helped me to grow as an artist, to this day. Also, Light and Darkness Dragon was legit the first YGO card I ever got, so this art has a deep meaning for me.

(Fun fact, it's on the same arm where I have a chibi Manjoume tattooed as well. So now I have both anime and manga versions. And I was cosplaying him today~)

[chronophobica]

panel redraw (bug eyed freak)

[oddeyes588]

gOD I'm eating so well today... we're finally getting some good characterization for Ruri and Rin... hell, it's incredible that we're getting some characterization for them AT ALL. I'm gonna ramble about it.

Ruri. Oh Ruri... it's genuinely so funny seeing her complete contrast with Yuto and Shun, who have all the dark and broodiness that comes with being characters who've been sharpened by the harsh edges of war. Yuto is in a bit of a middle-ground compared to Shun, but Ruri sits on the complete opposite end of the spectrum to her brother.

She's very chill and sweet, in stark contrast to Shun's tendency for rage and violence. Hell, she's the only one of the Xyz Trio who ISN'T glaring constant daggers at Dennis. She's sympathetic, and this goes in line with what we already knew about her. Having received the same teachings from Yusho as Yuya, she's pacifistic and hates the violent dueling that destroyed her home, as it's not what dueling is meant to be.

While Yuto and Shun get understandably hardened in order to do what is necessary to survive, Ruri doesn't want to lose what she loved about her home, and as such tries to maintain it. It's not like she let everything that happened slide off her back, she still has fear for Academia, but she's readily sympathetic, and it's honestly very sweet to see. While Yuto and Shun are still trying to adjust into the process of healing, Ruri is ready to dive in headfirst, because that's exactly what she was waiting for the whole time.

Basically, for having seen the Horrors of War, Ruri is handling herself remarkably well.

And at last... Rin. Rin is hilarious in a few ways, but to start with a more serious note...

It truly does speak to how good of a place Heartland was versus how shit of a place the City was from the get-go, because out of the two, Rin is somehow the more traumatized one? Not that anyone can blame her, since she grew up in a Capitalist Dystopia where you can be arrested and sent to a "correctional facility" indefinitely for the crime of, uh, trespassing on the property of the rich. Oh, and at the age of 14, too! Rin is often scared and fully ready to choose violence over it. Honestly, the idea that Rin's automatic reaction to somebody lunging out at her is to drive her knee into their stomach makes way too much sense... and it really speaks as to how little brain cells Yugo has that he doesn't learn his lesson, and keeps trying to hug her out of nowhere.

But with that said... god I love Rin, actually. Despite Yugo's inability to learn why you don't suddenly glomp somebody, she's got exactly the amount of "he's an idiot, but he's MY idiot" energy that we expected... by which I mean she has an ABSURD amount of that energy. She cares about Yugo just as much as he cares about her, though she shows it via the very hilarious method of affectionately dragging him at every opportunity.

And it's actually so great. I love her. Anyways! It's also neat to see how her overall focus is actually on a much smaller scale compared to everyone else. Yuzu has—or rather, had—obviously she asks about her home, asks how the Synchro Dimension is doing... and she's happy to hear that it's finally on the right track. But while the other three girls are somewhat vested in the fate of the universe(s), the state of their home, etc... Rin seems to focus a lot harder on the fact that she missed the Friendship Cup on account of being kidnapped at the time.

And while yes, there's a hint of tragedy to that considering that the losers of that particular tournament are all sent to an underground work facility to be worked until they die...

...her being lowkey SUPER competitive is a delight.

[shitpostingkats]

The big differences between the pokemon anime and the yugioh animes' approach to the format is that pokemon goes to great lengths to make portray competitive battling as pleasantly as possibly: handshakes, compliments, every contestant is respectful and polite.

Meanwhile, in yugioh, you get extra points if you manage to make your opponent have a psychological breakdown mid duel.

[marblesmind]

Astral being fascinated by a construction site is so important to me and it should be important to you too

Look at his face