Duel Puzzle

I've been perusing a lot of stuff lately, looking for blog ideas, and naturally, I have run into people who complain about the YGO:DM dub. A lot. Including, most particularly, lots of people who yell "this dub sucks!!" (One of the things that gets me is people who complain they should have dubbed the first series. They didn't and DON'T have the RIGHTS to the first series, you twits, they couldn't have dubbed it if they wanted to!)

Now, I am not going to say that 4Kids did a perfect job dubbing Yugioh. The only "perfect" dub I have ever seen is the dub of GaoGaiGar, which takes you half a minute to realize "Hey, I'm not supposed to understand Japanese!! Hey, they're talking in ENGLISH!" We don't live in a perfect world. The GaoGaiGar dub only lasted about twenty out of fifty episodes (And by the end of this essay, you'll know why.)

But it really cheeses me off when people call the dub by 4Kids of Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters "bad."

I grew up on Power Rangers and reruns of Voltron. No one has any right to call the Yu-Gi-Oh! dub "bad." At worst, it's an "average" dub. Invid and I would call it a "much better than average dub." Regardless of who did it, 4Kids or otherwise.

You know why the dub of GX sucks so much? It's because of the idiot thankless masses who made the dubbers hate their job by focusing only on the negative and not ONCE appreciating what they do RIGHT.

So today, I plan on showing my appreciation for the 4Kids dub by pointing out all the things they DIDN'T do, that they COULD have, that older dubbers WOULD have.

1. They bothered to keep a significant portion of the original names, and didn't name anyone anything like "Kaz Kazington." The GX dub did this, possibly out of sheer spite. In a BAD dub, the SERIES wouldn't have kept its own name: They would have called it "Duel Cards" or "Shadow Puzzle" at BEST. Yugi would have been named something like "Danny," Kaiba would have been "Kenny" (to explain the K), and Joey would have been named "Mack." And the Winged Dragon of Ra would have been named "Phoenixtron."

"HA! YOU can't use Phoenixtron, because YOU don't have its ACTIVATION CODES!"

2. Nobody's sex got switched. I have been, time and again, SHOCKED and ecstatic at 4Kids' track record over this. Even One Piece's drag queens stayed their own sexes. Yubel even stayed a transsexual!! In a BAD dub, Bakura would have been named "Anita" and Alister would have been "Regina." They might even have bothered to draw boobs on them. I have a LOT of love for 4Kids when it comes to this. (WHY would a bad dub have made Bakura female? "We need more female characters!" No other reason, unless you like "Well he was VOICED by a woman so why not?")



3. There was pretty minimal fiddling with the plot. Now, I'm sure some fans reading this are going to launch into a long list of all the little things they considered fiddling with the plot, like "Welcome to AMERICA" and the apparent lack of Yugi getting shares of Industrial Illusions (it's not like the Japanese version or even the MANGA ever care about it afterwords, but whatever.) I'm not talking about changes like that. In a BAD dub, Kaiba would be chasing after the other characters because he was in love with Téa (who would be named "Alice.") Bakura-- I mean Anita, would be actively crushing on Yugi, Alister-- I mean Regina, would be mad at Kaiba because he was in love with Téa, and not "her." Pegasus, who, by the way, would have spoken with a very oversexed French accent and laughed like Pepe Le Pew, would have engaged in Duelist Kingdom just to be a jerk. Oh yeah, and Yugi would give up the Face Off duel because Kaiba asks nicely.

"Alice is going to Danny's grandfather's shop!!" [VEEN!]



4. They let Cecelia be dead. In Duelist Kingdom they even let Kaiba's parents be dead. I agree 4Kids did poorly on this later. But I'm more inclined to blame soccer moms writing angry letters than the company, even if it was stupid. At best, in a BAD dub, Cecelia would be in a coma and Pegasus would be trying to revive her by putting other people in comas. She would wake up really late in the series, but we'd never see her. (Also her name would be Patricia.)

"I just got a phone call from the hospital! Patricia finally woke up!"

5. In a BAD dub, Mai would be wearing a turtleneck. In a bad dub, Atem wouldn't have been wearing a horribly drawn shirt, he would have been glowing.


"Aren't you hot in that, Mary Jane?"

6. They kept the lip synch pretty close. Now yeah, part of the reason is because they have better tech for that now, often abused to dub out women's breasts, but it's still something I have to appreciate.

"YUGI I CHALLENGE YOU TO A DUEL HA HA!"

7. In a bad dub, they wouldn't even have let Obelisk (who would be named Titanos the Mighty) punch Marik, much less Joey punch Atem (the latter was a pretty graphic punch, so it's understandable. It was also a friend punching another friend, which the 4Kids people seem to have trouble with. [/sarcasm])

"The AIR PRESSURE of Titanos's fist sent him FLYING!"

8. They bothered getting nice music for it. I DIE every time I hear a rap intro for a kids' show these days. Maybe you don't like all-instrumentals, but at least they didn't take the opportunity to go on about "JO-ey, he's Yugi's friend/ Stands by him to da very END."

"And we're/ and we're/ and we're/ GETTING DOWN WITH THE HEART OF THE CARDS!!!"

9. Nobody had voices like Erica Scheimer's "little boy" voice. I'm sorry, but you wanna complain about Serenity sounding "too old?" Watch He-Man for a few hours straight, you'll just be happy she has a voice that sounds like a normal human being. (Not to knock the talent of the Filmation staff. They worked with what they had.) And what are you on about "they don't sound like teenagers like they did in the Japanese?" Where are you people getting thirteen year olds that sound like four year olds and teenage boys that sound like middle aged women with lung cancer? I WANT TO KNOW.

(I happen to be in love with Serenity's voice, by the way. Not Lisa Ortiz, though she strikes me as pretty cool. Just her voice.)



10. Yes, they dubbed a show aimed at teenagers as though for little kids. But guess what? Shows aimed at teenagers don't MAKE it over here unless they're live action. This is exactly why the Uncut!Dub didn't last very long-- it was a financial sinkhole. I'm not sure why. You'd think teenagers would have enough money to have more power in the market than eight and ten year olds. But those few shows that ARE aimed at teens still have to be SAFE for their younger siblings, because there ARE NO TIME SLOTS in the States for teenage viewers, only for little kids and adults. The Yugioh dub actually was aimed at teens-- it was just being tamed down because little kids were going to watch it anyway. If they hadn't dubbed it the way they did, there would have been no Dan Green screaming "YUGI! IT'S NOT FAIR!!" because the show wouldn't have lasted that long.

And that would be a crying shame.

Little Voices: Cover to Page 14

Just to head off any more of those questions about this and Magic Light, YES, these are directly connected stories. Yeesh.

I am insanely pleased with the cover for this puppy, all except for one thing: The cards in Bakura's hands are "Unity" and "Soul Resurrection," which you can barely see. (I complained about this elsewhere.) Unlike the cover for Magic Light, this thing goes way heavier on the inks (which my art has come to do in the past year or so) and I think it really works. That shadow scar really entertains me for some reason.

Yes, the cards point to bits of plot. Yes, the plot involves Yami Bakura. No, you don't get to get spoilers. That would be silly.

Page one, of course, involves Bakura Ryou chest. XD Now, as ya'll know, I've talked and talked about using the dub names. "Ryou" never gets mentioned as his name in the dub, he's only called Bakura. But for heaven's sake, he needs two names. I spell it "Ryou" instead of "Ryo" (like the manga) for two reasons: the "U" changes the sound, and "Ryou" sounds like what they say in the Japanese. "Ryo" makes me think of Shaman King, and after all these years of reading fanfictions calling him "Ryou," it looks kind of emasculated without that last letter.

There's a lot more CG airbrushed shading on this page. I have to admit, I like my CG shading-- and it does make it look more... uh, night-timey here. But I think what really clinched it was the black page. I totally did that on the compy, not with a marker, although the "Not there" panel did originally have black sharpie all over the background, which is why it now looks like there is no panel border for that panel. Go figure.

When Bakura says "It's been six months," by the by, he means since the end of the Memory Arc. In case anyone WASN'T clear on that. O_o

As I mention in the DeviantArt comments for page two, everybody in the first panel is somebody.

I really enjoy Joey in Little Voices. He cracks me up all over (He was pretty funny in Magic Light, but not like he is here.) His expression in the last panel here wasn't quite as manic as the original sketch, but it still makes me laugh. (And so does Yugi's sympathetic pout in panel five. XD)

Little Voices makes a lot of off-hand references to the final episode's Japanese ending song sequence, which showed a bunch of "what are they doing now" type moments. That first panel of page three is the first, and the later pages with the Schroeders and Pegasus is a longer one.

I chuckle that Joey "always" worries about Kaiba. Kaiba's costume here is intended to enfold him in a somewhat protective way, like armor. Because he's been feeling somewhat vulnerable since he accidentally ran Joey over, you know. As for page four-- Mokuba is chasing around after Serenity for much the same reason he was in Magic Light. Also, HIS costume is intended to emulate Kaiba's Battle City costume, although you can't see much of it.

Rebecca, on page five, is essentially the same bubbly nightmare she was when last we saw her. Her life has been going well since the end of the series. I think she's growing up just a wee bit, though, if only in that now, she's actually trying to KISS Yugi. XD

Page six: Once again, a guest in the first panel. Thistle, incedentally, was the first character that got sent in (not counting the characters that belong to friends of mine who all said "go ahead and use them if you want.") She'll probably appear in several different incarnations, because I did a lot of sketches of her that didn't all look like what was originally sent me. XD

I've always had it in my head that Mai gave Valon Joey's email. I'm not sure WHY Mai would do that, except possibly that she found the idea very amusing.

As for Valon, his emails typically consist of video mails ("Gueass who, Wheelah!!") and porely speld threts to treet mai rite. XD (Considering Valon's background, wouldn't he be somewhat illiterate?)

One of the things I've long tried to do with my craft is tell as much as possible with the pictures, and especially the facial and body expressions, as much if not more than with the dialogue. If your characters stand there and tell the whole story with talking, there's no point to making it a comic; you may as well be writing an online chat. The fourth panel of page six illustrates what I'm talking about-- there may be talking there, but the real story is in Yugi's face and Joey's hand on his shoulder. And I'm pretty happy about that.

Ironically, I had a lot of trouble with Téa and Bakura's scenes, and technically this chapter is about them. (You'd never guess it, considering one of the upcoming scene sets, but that'd be spoiling.) Originally Téa was way more emo on page seven, page eight wasn't even there (and it's pretty silly that it wasn't, because it clarifies a lot) and page nine was... um... gooier. Bakura and Téa are essentially "together" here, but I wanted very much to not let it feel like Bakura was taking advantage of her grief, and at the same time I didn't want it to seem like Téa was taking too much advantage of his kindness or shoving Yugi aside too callously. Some of the original pages made me make "ew gross" faces, if only because I made the mistake of trying to make several of them funny, and I'm actually still in the process of reworking parts of this chapter just because this sort of awkward relationship can be hard to work with.

(And I was in a relationship something like this once, sort of on Bakura's side of it, which only makes it harder.)

All Bakura really wants here is a happy ending for the people who helped him, and it's putting him in an uncomfortable position.

I think of page ten as the coup de grace of this project thus far. You see a lot of Kaiba angst scenes, and a lot of them go too far in one direction or another. His best "angst" moment in the series was probably the Face Off duel, and there he was caught and stripped of his armor right in front of an enemy. (I tend to think the real reason he was such a jerk to Yugi about it later is because he was trying to calm his own self down-- and also because Kaiba really doesn't realize how jerky he sounds sometimes. XD) Here he has chosen the time and place for himself, so I got to let him angst calmly in the rain. XD I actually really enjoy drawing rain, when it turns out right, and sadly touching scenes are my true art, so this page was essentially "GDG spoiling herself."

I think Kaiba's relationship with his biological father is really important to his character, especially since his father was the first formative figure in his life. It's usually overshadowed in fanfic because his screwed up relationship with Gozaburo is so out there and obvious, and most fanfictionists only care about his mother. I prefer a focus on Mokuba's relationship with his mother, since their lives only overlapped in a whisper, and a focus on Seto's relationship with his biological father. (Yes, I'm the author of "Happy Mother's Day," but that's not the point. "Happy Mother's Day" covered all I ever need to write about Seto's relationship with his mom.)

Even in the orphanage, Seto was telling Mokuba to "man up," to "buck up and be strong." He didn't get that attitude from the orphanage staff. I think he saw his father as a very strong and stoic person, and so when he chose to take over as Mokuba's father, he tried to emulate that. Part of what happens in Game of Dreams is that Seto comes to realize that presenting a strong face to someone who needs it isn't the same as never letting that facade slip.

Also, first panel: That is lightning dancing across the clouds. Lightning does that. Roar.

I'm really happy with the effect of non-standard gutter filler (it's not all white, it comes in different shades of gray) on this page, too. Overall, the whole scene was intended to indicate the turmoil of Kaiba's heart, while letting him still stand there looking stoic as possible (he refuses to answer whether those are tears or rain. Make up your own minds. (wink)) And I think I achieved that goal pretty well.

Page 11, of course, starts the other scene of Little Voices that references that ending sequence at the end of the final episode. I had some issues with the silly dialogue here, but it turned out okay even though I felt like I was parodying the series when I wrote parts of it.

Several people have complimented me on how well I write Pegasus. I'll tell ya'll a secret: I've been possessed by his dead wife since I was fourteen. XD I could even tell you some of that really private stuff, like the way he mutters in his sleep, but I won't. (wink) (Actually it's because I really enjoy writing campy, maliciously gleeful people. He's just sort of my Type when it comes to dialogue.)

"Scheiße" (the "ß" is pronounced or can be alternately written as a double "S," for "scheisse," or "shy-sa") is German for "Shit!" Yes, I learned this in German class, in high school. Part of the reason I even bothered including the Schroeders (besides the fact that I love them) is that they give me an excuse to put random German in my fancomics. (Hey, it's why the Japanese made him German too, and you know it.) German class was one of the real joys of my high school experience-- aside from art and choir class it was the only academic thing that I got really excited about, partly because the teacher was like an uncle to me, but also because I really just adore the language. Leon's accent will eventually get much thicker, for exactly this reason.

I like that little Curse of Dragon on page 12. He represents what's really going through Yugi's mind. XD He also wasn't there in the original sketch comic, funnily enough; there were just a bunch of ellipses and Yugi's horrified expression. XD

Yugi's kind of snarky in my comics, have you noticed?

I mentioned in the comments for that page that the idea of Yugioh characters as crime lords really cracks me up. If someone brings a fanfic to me that plays with this, and does it well, I swear I will make you art. You can call me out on this.

I like page 13's first panel. Yugi looks so grown up. XD It was with these pages that I decided to (finally) consider YnY comics to be on a schedule, because apparently treating my hobbies like hobbies means they collect dust in the corner.

The idea of Zigfried being at least a little intimidated by Pegasus has been kicking around the back of my mind for a while now. I think that regardless of what HE says happened regarding the contracts with I2, (he's an unreliable source, you know) that probably what really kept him from getting a contract was a combination of practices Pegasus didn't approve of (like crashing Kaiba's appointed demonstrations) and Pegasus being kind of scary to Ziggy. Pegasus likes Leon, on the other hand, but will only let him push so far. XD

Because a friend asked about it, here's a brief explanation of a standards war, as given to her:

A standards war is essentially this: say Kaiba uses one operating system for the Duel Disks. Now say that Ziggy comes up with a different one that isn't compatible with Kaiba's, for the sole purpose of forcing people to choose one over the other. Now say Ziggy throws a bunch of tournaments that use his operating system only, with lavish prizes (and other marketing ploys, like a lower price, easier maintenance, lighter weight, etc.) Obviously, Kaiba would have to respond to that.

What Yugi did here was essentially force Zigfried to not do that, by insisting that both systems be compatible. Now, Kaiba still has a competitor, but it's not the metaphorical bloodbath Ziggy was suggesting to Pegasus.

And you can see why Yugi would find that more acceptable.

As I mentioned in the original comments, page 14 was going to go up on Valentine's Day originally, but I couldn't get it done in time. I'm happy with it, though, and that's what matters.

Page 14 really shows what I mean by "telling a story with images," and also demonstrates powerfully why Game of Dreams and YnY as a whole are being done as comics instead of prose. This single page would have taken your average fanfictionist (who is admittedly less skilled than I am individually, since the average has to include people wh0 r1te lyk th15) the length of this entire blog post to tell. It packages two relationships and a dozen things about both of them into six images.

When I was a kid, I used to think that giving people happy endings meant you had to give them all exactly what they wanted, and therefore Pegasus couldn't have a happy ending without all sorts of problems. I know better now, of course-- sometimes happy endings have to do with learning and growing to accept what must be accepted. I think Yugioh as a series is a lot about that.

Pegasus will always grieve for Cecelia, but he's no longer cutting himself off from life because of it. And best of all, he's found someone who can understand that.

Happy Valentine's Day?

Since I want to get into the habit of posting once a week, no matter what, and since all my ideas for this week felt uninspired at best, here's a screencap comic.


















Yaaaay.

Fanfiction Peeves

I was looking through some notes for some pairing essays that I did, and MAN, I am rather opinionated, aren't I?

For those of you who follow this blog without following us at DeviantArt, you might have missed that I plan on updating at least once a week here, and probably at least once a week at the DA, from now on. Trust me, I have every determined intention of actually doing this. I'm making my Angry Yugi Face right now. (The little cute guy. I couldn't pull off Atem by any stretch of the imagination.)

So for today, I give you my list of things which, if I see it in the first few paragraphs of a fanfic, I'm liable to close the window and look elsewhere. I don't actually run into them on a regular basis (thank RA), because I now only skim recommended and favorite fanfic lists, but I still find 'em from time to time. There's no accounting for taste. XD

1. Kaiba using the word "mutt" when referring to anything other than an actual dog.
-Kaiba only very rarely uses animals as insults, even in the dub, and he really only ever insults Joey to his face. (Probably because he's going for a reaction, because I don't see him as actually disliking Joey.) I think he's called Joey a "monkey" more than he's called him a dog, so really, we should be calling it "Monkeyshipping" instead. Or "Bonkotsushipping." Maybe "Moneybags-shipping."

2. References in the narration to Téa as a "bitch," "mean girl," or anything else blatantly negative.
-Okay, I get that you don't like her, but good narration is unbiased. This also goes for when a character who is friends with Téa in the show reacts with some form of horror or distaste when they see her coming. I GET that you don't like her, but Yugi DOES. A good fanfic writer accepts that sometimes a character they like gets along with a character they dislike.

3. Taking a character out of a scene from the show due to dislike.
-Yeah.

5. Slavish imitation, in dialogue, of a character's accent.
-So you want the characters to "sound" like themselves. I understand. But Joey's "voice" has little to do with his accent, it has to do with the words he chooses to use. Having him say "da" instead of "the" is one thing. Having him say "Da quick braown fohx jumped ovah da lazy dohg" is quite another. Writing like that hasn't been in fashion since Mark Twain. Stop doing it. (On the other hand, using British spelling, like "colour" instead of "color," is a perfectly acceptable way to imitate a British accent. Why? It's less distracting.)

6. Runtogethersentencesandparagraphswithoutformatting.
-Don't upload with notepad; save it into Word or something first. And if FF.net eats your formatting anyway, keep at it until it's at least sort of readable. Just trust me on this. Don't have any of the acceptable filetypes except for txt? Get them. You're going to need them eventually anyway.

7. Mixing dub names and Japanese names, such as calling Serenity "Shizuka Wheeler."
-Following a mixed continuity? Almost impossible not to do, since the different continuities fill in each others' gaps. Using mixed names? Confusing and weird. I used to put up with this, but my tolerance has gone down the more I've seen it.

8. A character like, say, Tristan, calling Téa "darling," and then you realize a few sentences later it's because he's gay.
-Tristan would be the butchest gay guy ever. Not all gay guys talk like that.

9. Realizing a few sentences in that the character you thought was a canon character is actually an original character who happens to have the same name.
-Curse you all for the confusingness! Make it clear from the outset! Good grief.

10. Author's notes that say anything along the lines of "Marik is the yami, Malik is the hikari, okay?"
-It's not so much that I begrudge you the right to do that, but if you do, you're going to confuse me. It's a difference of one letter that doesn't actually happen to be much difference; the dubbers call him "Marik" because that's what the Japanese VAs sound like they're saying. And I, personally, am very mildly dyslexic: I am going to forget which you said is which, and I am going to get frustrated. Besides that, it's not even accurate to either versions of the show OR to the manga. Call Yami Marik something else in narrative-- if you don't like "Yami Marik" (and there are so many reasons not to) you can call him "Ishtar," or "the Ishtar demon," or whatever else that appeals to you and makes sense. (Yami M himself considers his name to be that of the original Marik Ishtar, because he considers himself to BE his "hikari.")

11. A sex scene between two members of a non canon pairing in the first chapter.
-I love silentshipping, as anyone who knows me should know. I love it to death. But I accept that any fic featuring it needs to nurse it along, to nurture it and let it grow. A good silentshipping story accepts that the "blimp scene" doesn't point to eternal love; Kaiba's reaction to meeting Serenity again would probably run more along the lines of "Oh, it's you. Uh. Hi." Not the first meeting, but it might as well be. Personally, this fanfictionist can't see Kaiba as a "kiss on the first date" kind of guy, much less a "sex after the first walk in the rain when we're not even sort of dating" kind of guy. I mean, yuck.

12. The lyrics of a song, cut and paste verbatim.
-I have no problem with songfics, even though ff.net's management does (obviously, you get around THAT by not posting it on ff.net) but I didn't click into your fic to read a huge block of text that didn't come from you. If you're planning to incorporate the lyrics into the story itself, be a little more creative than that. And if your story is only INSPIRED by a song, all you need to do is point out the song's official video on Yuutube and inform the reader of the relationship. It'll keep you out of trouble AND be less annoying. I didn't used to click out of these right away, but now I don't tend to waste time on them-- because I've spent too much time already reading through the songs in the past, only to find out that the story itself is only two paragraphs long.

13. Overly cute stuff.
-I'm not really talking about fluff here. When I come across a sentence like "Yugi skipped across to Kaiba and stared up at him with enormous puppy eyes," there's something wrong.

14. A character being the wrong gender without explanation.
-If it's an AU (alternate universe), please, please tell us before we start reading. If it's NOT and Kaiba is secretly a woman, please explain in the story WHY she's a crossdresser (and shame on you if Mokuba doesn't know already.) And for heaven's sake, DON'T gender switch someone just because you like a pairing but can't get past the ghey. Pairings don't have to involve sex or romance. Write something where they become brotherly friends and get it out of your system.

15. Male pregnancy with no explanation.
-One time I read this story in which Bakura was "getting really chubby" and the doctor was all "Oops, Marik, you got him preggers!" It was supposed to be funny, but the fact that nobody even batted an eye at the idea of a pregnant man and the only explaination was "gay sex" really killed the humor for me. Even humor has to make SOME sense. When you treat male pregnancy like it's a normal thing, it is not funny absurd, it's just absurd absurd.

16. When the summary of the story is essentially the first paragraph.
-It's a narrative. Not an essay. Take a writing class.

17. Dialogue, in a supposedly serious story, which sounds like chat-room speak. And also narrative that sounds like chat-room speak.
-USE PUNCTUATION. USE IT. USE SPELL CHECK. IT DOES NOT COST MONEY. For that matter, reread your story before putting up for the rest of us to read. The computer, she misses things.

18. Being dumped into a non-canon status quo without any warning, explanation, or reaction on the part of the characters.
-If it's a few years in the future, say so in the narrative. If it's AU, say so in the author's notes (unless it's a case of "AU clashes with Canon Universe," then you can just do it in the narrative.) If the story opens with Pegasus essentially saying "I love you kay?" to somebody we've never met before, there needs to be some explanation of how the characters got to that point, like "ever since they had met several months before" or "Since Joe was the first person Pegasus had laid eyes on after drinking the magic potion...." I mean, seriously.

19. Mokuba needing a babysitter.
-Did we seriously watch the same series, guys? This kid is an awesome little ninja who referees tournaments and is the vice president of Kaiba Corp. And when he's not in school or being Kaiba's ninja messenger and head general, he's hanging out in Kaiba's office, apparently making sure he stops working long enough to eat and sleep. If anybody needs a babysitter, it's Kaiba-- and he's got one: Mokuba. Being able to take care of himself and more mature than he might have been otherwise is one of Mokuba's character traits-- and anyway, at the age of ten, he's already old enough to be left home alone by most countries' laws. The same goes for Mokuba feeling ignored by Kaiba or for Kaiba abusing Mokuba in any way after Duelist Kingdom. This isn't going to happen.

20. Kaiba having a girlfriend that Mokuba doesn't like.
-Unless she has eldritch powers and is controlling Kaiba's mind, this isn't going to happen either. Kaiba places his brother's needs above his own when it comes to this kind of thing. Mokuba doesn't need any help getting Kaiba's brain out of the gutter and the girl out of the house-- all he really needs to do is say "Well, Seto, I hate to say it but she's kind of a bitch" and Kaiba'll respond with "Oh well, sex isn't everything." (My cat has a similar hold on my love life, so I know what I'm talking about.) (On the other hand, if your story actually features this conversation in just the first few paragraphs, I would totally read it.)

21. Yugi being significantly younger than the rest of the cast, or Mai being in high school with the rest of the cast.
-Yugi is shown as being in high school. Mai is explicitly stated as being out of high school even in the dub-- as being IN HER TWENTIES even in the dub. Yugi is not a little kid and Mai is not a teenager; jokes are made right in the series about Yugi looking younger than he is, and a large part of Mai's character is that she's been around the block once or twice. I'd totally read a story about Mai before Duelist Kingdom, but you can't just shove her in a Domino High uniform, plop her in Yugi's class, and expect me to go along for the ride.

I'm stopping here, because these are the main things that kill a fic for me in the first chapter. Ciao for now!