The Children's Card Game

There's something that my dear sister (GDG-this is Invid) refers to as the "children's card game fallacy."

Simply put, it's the fact that fans of the series view the characters as treating a simple "children's card game" as a huge piece of srs bsnss. (Thanks a lot for that observation, LittleKuriboh. You have officially warped the fandom.)

Well, it's certainly true that they put an awful lot of stock into a game, but it goes beyond being a children's card game.

You see, when Takahashi was writing the early chapters, there was only one card game that was well-known enough for him to be talking about.

He called the game in his manga Magic & Wizards, but he was really talking about Magic: The Gathering.

(Note Grandpa's emphasis that it was the card game that "is such a hit in America." If you ever get pestered by people talking about the purity of the card game in Japanese due to its origins, there's a stick to hit them with. Yeah, the game is different-but Takahashi thought of it as an American game.)

You might dismiss this as an unfounded theory, but aside from the obvious fact that Magic was and is the first, biggest, and most-played card game in the entire world, the cards that Takahashi designed are essentially a simplified version of the M:TG cards.

Not necessarily the individual cards (though I'll get to that). If you look at the card back of a manga or anime Yu-Gi-Oh! card, you'll see that it has a dark brown oval in the center, with a brown "background" and a tan border.

Check out this article on the M:TG site, which showcases the game's card back (with a hypothetical variant back that never was). The proportions are rather different, but it's essentially what Takahashi was building from.

The fronts have some similarities, too; when Takahashi designed his cards, he put stars on them, possibly because he didn't know quite enough about M:TG to know just what the mana cost on a Magic card meant. (By the way, if you ever wondered about the "spell card" change in Yu-Gi-Oh! because you weren't following the game, it's all Hasbro's [M:TG's proprietary company] fault. They thought the use of "magic" was a misleading use of their trademark, as Magic players refer to their cards in a similar fashion. Never mind that Hasbro can't actually trademark the word "magic...")

It does, in fact, go further.

Check out this old picture of the Blue Eyes White Dragon, and then compare it with this picture of Shivan Dragon, one of M:TG's old famous cards.

Note the general similarity of the poses.

There's another one that has similarities to an old school Magic card, Summoned Skull. Compare this manga image to Lord of the Pit:

This is further highlighted by Takahashi's anniversary art version of Summoned Skull, which in homage to its origins has the same color scheme as Lord of the Pit, though its appearance has diverged along different directions from the "traditional" Summoned Skull design most of us know from the anime.

(Note that, in the two games, their positions of power relative to each other are essentially reversed. Lord of the Pit is [mostly] stronger than Shivan Dragon but less practical, while the same is true of Blue Eyes White Dragon compared to Summoned Skull. Not that any of the cards are competitive in the modern games...)

Of course, any discussion of the early manga version of Duel Monsters/Magic & Wizards would be highly incomplete without looking at Seto Kaiba, everyone's favorite psycho player.

Takahashi has apparently stated that Kaiba was based on somebody who was a huge jerk to one of his friends originally, but the character has obviously moved away from his humble, cruel-guy origins.

I have a theory as to why the character evolved the way he did, and I'm going to share it here. It's pretty crazy, and it hinges on a completely insane coincidence, but I'm sticking with it.

Flash back to 1999. This was during the early days of the anime, more or less. Guess who was rocking the Magic: The Gathering world at that time?

His name was Kai Budde.

Now, Kai Budde is not Japanese (although Japanese players have traditionally had a pretty big impact on the game). He's German. But if you parse his name, well... It's not much of a stretch at all to notice the similarities between Kai-ba and Kai-Budde.

They even look a bit similar, as far as such things go.

(Pictures ganked from the Yu-Gi-Oh! wiki's Kaiba page and Kai Budde's previously linked Hall of Fame bio page. Sorry if it bothers anybody, but I'm doing a historical essay here, and I think it's fair use.)

It's impossible that Takahashi derived Kaiba's name from Kai Budde's-Budde's first victories that propelled him to worldwide Magic fame occurred in 1998, and even presuming an extremely leisurely publishing schedule, "The Cards with Teeth" would have come out well before that, sometime in late 1996 or early 1997. (The Yu-Gi-Oh! wiki, being heavily focused on the card game, doesn't have a date for the chapter itself, and I'm hesitant to guess too closely.)

Anyway, why is it important that Yu-Gi-Oh!'s card game is based on Magic?

Well, according to market research, the biggest demographic of Magic players is in the 15-16 year old age bracket. In effect? The same age as the characters from the series.

Further, it might seem silly, but Magic really is serious business. Aside from the fact that certain old cards from the game are extremely pricy (some go for somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars apiece, which makes participating in a format where those cards are legal very difficult for newcomers), you can actually make big money playing Magic. People do.

There are hundred upon hundreds of players worldwide who compete in sanctioned tournaments, and many of these sanctioned tournaments have large monetary prizes. Kai Budde actually made something of a living off of the game at the height of his career, as I understand it.

Basically, the game we see in the various Yu-Gi-Oh! series is what Magic would be like if it reached the scale of a big-name pro sport.

Which isn't entirely impossible, you know. Just not likely.

Yet.

Why Background Characters In Yugioh Are Awesome

If you look, the other characters in this are also doing entertaining things. X3 (Two of them are staring at Kaiba with either trepidation or awe, while the couple to his right are having an argument and ignoring him completely. XD)

Building a Soul Room

(Note: I may eventually add pictures to this. Scans are a wonderful thing, but not if you can't find the large versions of the pages you actually want to scan. I reallly need to organize my Shonen Jump issues.)

I talked about Bakura's soul room in the most recent comic commentary. Obviously, I didn't know how Takahashi would have built it; but thanks to the soul rooms seen in the manga and anime, I did have an idea of how he might have started.

The three soul rooms we see in any detail are those of Atem (obviously) Téa, and Professor Yoshimori, a one-story character who suffered quite a bit of abuse (but didn't die, which is what would have happened to him otherwise.) We see a very little bit of Yugi's: it was bright, and there were toys scattered across the floor. Shadi judges him to have a pure soul with a mere glance, indicating, perhaps, that brightness can mean this.

Each soul room's starting point was something that was important to the character, usually involving interests. Téa's was a dance studio. Yoshimori's was full of books, like a library. Atem was wrapped up in his own mystery and in his death, and therefore his room resembled a cross between a royal tomb and an Escher maze. As noted, we can't see exactly what kind of room Yugi's room begins as-- but the walls have a very modern material look to them, and I'm inclined to believe that it's based off the game shop, a video arcade, or something similar.

If I were to build a soul room for myself, I would start off with an art studio, with off-color furniture and books piled haphazardly around the room in little towers. I have an image in my head of something like Merlin's Tower in Disney's "Arthur."

The decorations and furnishings in the room indicate several things: stuff like trees, shelving, books, chairs, anything that doesn't represent something specific but rather something general, represents aspects to a personality. In Téa's room, the walls were covered with mirrors, which Shadi declared showed her to be either confident or prideful, and that in any case, she has strong beliefs. I interpreted the open ceiling to mean an open personality, and likely the fruit trees indicate generosity of spirit or an outgoing will. Different kinds of trees probably mean different things; in Ryou's soul room, I chose to use willow trees in part of the room to indicate his occasionally meloncholy nature. The books in Yoshimori's room showed that he is a man of learning. He also had a lot of ancient artifacts sitting around in his room, showing his love of the past.

Photographs, portraits, statues of people and other specific things should be taken to represent specific things that are important to a person. Téa had a faceless portrait of a man with a superhero shield on his chest, to represent Atem (who she didn't know at the time was Yugi), and it was sitting on a loveseat. She also had a picture of the Statue of Liberty holding a ballet slipper, which pretty obviously represented her New York dreams. Professor Yoshimori had a little portrait of his family sitting in the corner, covered with cobwebs to show how he had neglected them and now regrets it.

For whatever reason, I like the idea of dead people having curtains and shrouds around their portraits in other people's soul rooms, the way Cecilia's portrait was hidden by a curtain in Pegasus's private sanctuary. This wouldn't always be the case, and sometimes a shroud could instead indicate estrangement or a long separation. In Yukai's soul room (which you WILL eventually see!) there will be a double portrait of his father and Atem, overlapping one another to show how they've sort of blurred in his mind-- but Atem will be turned mostly away, a figure important in Yukai's life, yet a person that Yukai has never met.

How different things are represented can be shown in different ways, especially depending on the person a soul room belongs to. I tend to think that things like trees, water, mirrors and clouds would tend to be very general and usually mean the same sorts of thing from person to person. A dance studio, the style a loveseat is done in, the types and titles of books, would be more specific to a certain person. Whether the portraits are framed images or statues probably won't make much difference, but a gold statue versus a clay one might mean something, and so would the fanciness of the frame. (A statue versus a framed portrait might show how "real" some dream or person is to the soul room's occupant, but your mileage will vary.) The kinds of flowers that appear in a room might mean something specific depending on their prominence and location, but if they're scattered randomly about, they might just be there to add a sense of lushness to the room, or to indicate a full, romantic, or whimsical spirit. The toys on Yugi's floor were probably intended to indicate his playful nature, or his general innocence and sweetness.

Téa's soul room also featured a big smiley sun that reminded me very strongly of the Sun and Moon clocks and art that one of my aunts absolutely filled her home with. I am going to be upfront and say that I really have no idea what the hell that's supposed to represent, because I always found them a touch folky and creepy, and I don't think of Téa as folky or creepy. Maybe Takahashi just wanted to show how cheerful she is. :P (Suns should not have faces, dammit!!) Also, that Statue of Liberty portrait was kind of pushy, because it bounced around all over the room and managed to appear in every single panel. I doubt that means anything, and yet I find it hilarious.

Sources that would be helpful for devising symbology in a soul room would include dream dictionaries, books on religious symbology (Not for imitating slavishly, but for ideas- especially if a character's religion is important to them), and imaginary therapy scenarios. I went on a mindwalk as part of a group therapy session in high school once.* Among other things, there was a path, a forest, a cup along the path, a pool of water, and a wall that stood in the way of the path and went as far as the eye can see in either direction. The way you imagined each of these things and what you did with them was supposed to indicate aspects of your personality and how you approached life. Keep that idea in mind when building soul rooms, and you may begin to find the excercise is actually very fun, and even better, can put you into very deep touch with a character, even an original one.

*(For the curious, my mindwalk indicated that I was quiet and contemplative, but materialistic, that I considered my sexuality mildly forbidding and mysterious but liked to, ah, tease the fish, and that death made me more curious than anything. At the time, this actually described me pretty well. Unfortunately I suspect going on the same mindwalk today would be colored by knowing what each thing represented. You can bet we laughed pretty hard when I said I teased the fish and then found out the pool represented sexuality.)