Some Random Thoughts

Gee, sorry I keep vanishing like that. :P Work's been a bear.

So: Some random things that have occurred to me whilst trolling-- I mean, trawling ff.net's Yugioh forums for blog ideas, things that are pretty much just little statements that I think you'll like, but that I can't imagine doing full essays over.

-Yugioh is essentially a ghost story. Very little fanfiction remembers this at all.

-If you gave Atem his own body and let him kill people, the original manga would be two steps away from a vampire story. XD

-Yugi is totally a Christ figure. O_o Which would make that vampire story kind of awesome, now that my brain is slippering down that slope.

-Spellcheck agrees with me that "slippering" is a word. Invid is disturbed by this.

-Oops, Spellcheck just changed its mind. XD

-Members of the fandom's nerd levels can be quite accurately described using the characters from the show. That guy over there, muttering about how fancards are always stupid and the duels are never written well? He's a Kaiba-level nerd. That chick you know who's dead serious about characterization and couldn't give a bee's behind about those trap cards? More of a Téa level nerd. (Téa's a nerd, just in a different way.)

-So can the roles we actually play in the forums (not role-playing, the way we comport ourselves.) There aren't enough Yugis.

-Honestly, there just aren't enough Yugis anywhere.

-All fanfiction ideas can be done well, but finding them is like topdecking: You can't rely on it. O_o

-Invid hates ff.net.

-I can totally understand. It needs some kind of "number of favorites" or something, or at LEAST some way that's better than communities for people to find skilled writers. (I mean, come on, the third forum from the top in the YGO section is summarized: "I like to hear more about Yami/Tea and any other couples if I like them. I don't want to hear any Yoai or Yuri. I can't stand that." I mean, wat. This is an entire forum?! Streamline your system, ff.net.)

-And here's one from Invid: If Yugi is sort of a Christ figure, then one of the basic premises of YnY (the story, not the blog) makes it sort of like a metaphor about Christianity: People can get really nasty when spreading the message of love and peace, missing the point entirely.

-I'm not at all sure how I feel about this revelation. No more deep literary analysis for YOU, Mister Invid!

(The really odd part about this is that Invid is the one who insists that Duel Tanks would be awesome in the same conversations with deep literary analysis that makes me uncomfortable.)

Not the Chicken Dance!

We watched "Steppin' Out" just last night, actually. It is just as weird an episode as it was the first time I saw it.

A theory on Johnny Steps: Johnny equates being good at games with manliness. He also equates being TALL with manliness. So the reason he freaks out and runs away when he finds out who Yugi really is? All the foundations of his worldview have been utterly shattered.

XD That is the closest to a character study on Johnny ya'll are ever getting out of me. :3

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.

Guess what I'm wearing

So I've been thinking about clothing.

No, despite my femaleness, that actually is sort of unusual-- I may have a wild assortment of clothing, but it's only because I also have a small assortment of other women who love to buy me clothes. Mostly my mother. Whenever she's at a yard sale and sees a nice dress shirt, a t-shirt she thinks I'll like, or pants that might fit me, she buys 'em (because they're ALWAYS cheap). I have collected more clothes than I'll ever need through the habits of my mother.

But I digress.

What I mean is that I've been thinking about the clothing the Yu-Gi-Oh characters wear (of course I have) throughout the DM anime (and also in some parts of the manga.)

And I have several observations to make (of course I do).

First of all, you can tell a LOT about Kaiba's insecurities through looking at his clothing. In his first manga appearance, his school uniform practically sags around him, only really fitting at the shoulders. I've long suspected that right before he entered high school, the hormones suddenly set in and he shot up from anywhere to a foot taller to two feet taller than he previously was. (I think this is partly because he always looks so SHORT next to Gozaburo in flashbacks.) So Seto hasn't filled out enough to fit in his uniform.

You can tell this is a source of insecurity for him because of his Battle City onwards costumes. All of them have over-wide shoulders, and the white trenchvest is clearly intended to make him look larger. It's like a lion's mane.

As for what he wears in Duelist Kingdom? I'd been looking at how subdued it is compared to his later costume (and even his earlier costume, that white suit with the huge red cape? That thing was so overblown.) And suddenly it struck me.

Those are Kaiba's pajamas and his house coat. Lots of people, Japanese or otherwise, wear shoes inside their homes that technically could be worn outside, but aren't so as to keep the house cleaner. He was essentially vegging out in his house, not bothering to wear dayclothes, while he obsessed over his Duel Disk prototypes and losing to Yugi and being soul-broken. (XD) He left by the window. That blue duster is the shortest of all non-uniform coats he wears in public (Neither of the white suits count, because suits are a kind of uniform). His pants are loose and comfortable looking, much unlike his regular clothes, which are usually sleek and form-fitting. His shirt doesn't cover his neck (Kaiba always covers his neck!) instead lazily drifting away from it and exposing his collarbone for all the world to see. Not only that, but the housecoat doesn't have a collar-- the shirt collar is what produces the effect most of his coats do by themselves. His pants and shirt are the same color, and it's a color that pants don't tend to be. Finally-- he's not wearing any socks.

Which kind of gives a new flavor to Kaiba's part in Duelist Kingdom, if you ask me. Makes it feel even more desperate than before. I like that.

And now you all know what Kaiba wears to bed. :D

Here's another random doozy: Serenity's outfit ethstetic tends to be a feminized, extremely toned-down version of Kaiba's. I do not say this lightly. Certainly, we only really see her spend a lot of time in the Battle City outfit, but that's what both their Battle City outfits ARE-- a high-collared vest over a shirt. It's probably because I'm a silentshipper, but I find this hilarious. Follow that theme for Serenity (feminized and toned-down Seto Kaiba) and you won't go far wrong when it comes to costumes that feel "right" for her to wear.

Of course, she also looks pretty good in a plaid skirt, but then she IS much, much liklier than Kaiba to be running around in a skirt at ALL. (snickers)

Joey, of course, wears whatever didn't smell bad enough that day. He probably bought it off the cheap rack, but since he's scruffy it works for him. Tristan dresses in a similar fashion but it's likelier his mother buys his clothes, because they look to be in better shape and of higher price tag.

Yugi of course is a punk with an Egyptian bent. It's not entirely clear if he only became a punk AFTER he was possessed, but I think he just didn't have the guts to wear his collar to school before (Atem had to have found the thing SOMEWHERE.) He also likes hoodies, although you wouldn't know it if you'd never read the manga. I like Yugi in hoodies, but I also like real-life punks in hoodies, so go figure. The hoodie doesn't detract from a goth/punk ethsetic at all. Atem seems to have at least SOME influence on what he wears, of course-- sure, there's the jewelry choices, but I'm actually thinking more about that uniform. Egyptians were kind of weird about fashion, by our standards, and it may well be that Atem likes that damn uniform because in ancient Egypt everybody dressed pretty similarly. (And yes, I know he's the one putting on the muscle shirt under it. Pharaohs dressed up their uniforms, but they still dressed pretty similarly to everyone else. The muscle shirt may be what he sees as an acceptable way to mark himself as different from Yugi's peers, and since it's like armor, that makes a lot of sense.)

Téa is always up on Japanese "respectable girl" fashion, although I do admit the yellow dress shirt flaring out from under the pink vest in Duelist Kingdom probably wasn't the best choice (I love her boots there, though.) She never vamps it up too high, she never goes too far into any counterculture. In short, she's a bit preppy. That's fine for her; it works with her sensible personality. She also wears shirts with Engrish on them, but that keeps getting dubbed out. Other than the Engrish she looks much like any American high school girl you might see in the mall or walking down the street. (I love the Wavebody shirt.)

Mai's sort of a cross between trashy and classy, and it's a very weird cross that works very well. She doesn't get enough different outfits. Also, she's the only major character to have a color theme that she sticks to faithfully-- that is, purple. Most of the other ones waver between two colors or don't stick to a color at all (Joey and Tristan don't stick to a color, Kaiba vacillates around the cooler colors and black and white, Téa likes pinks and yellows for some unfathomable reason that probably has to do with Takahashi's own weird preferences. Yugi... well, Yugi's usually wearing his uniform, and that doesn't count, especially since it's probably because Atem's all like "Woot! Uniform!" That wacky Egyptian. XD)

Out of the characters, the two who have the most different outfits are Téa and Kaiba (I'm sure you've never heard THAT pulled out as reasoning for azureshipping!). The outfit which potentially says the most about the person wearing it is Mokuba's Battle City outfit, which includes a very ornate cross necklace. (What does it say? That's up to the fanfic author. Takahashi probably just thought it looked cool.) Sexual-orientation-confirmation prize goes to the French maid outfits Zigfried had all his female servants wear. Most iconic is probably either Kaiba's Battle City outfit or Yugi's Battle City outfit (although Yugi's hair carry most of his outfits. You can't get too complex with clothes when someone has hair like that.) My personal favorite outfit is the white vest and black turtleneck Yugi wore during the Dungeon Dice Monsters episodes. It's Just So.

Colors that should be worn more often:
Blue, for Serenity and Mokuba, green, for Téa, and red, for everyone else.

Maybe, after I've finished the next character study, I'll do an essay about how Yugi and company can be adapted or interpreted as a Power Rangers/Super Sentai team. 83 IT'LL BE FUN.

Fandom Rant: Kaiba, Kisara, and silentshipping

(glances at title) That seems a little off, does it? Well, it's not.

Recently while searching for more stuff to put into YnY's collection of other people's Yu-gi-oh next generation stuff (this doesn't count GX, it's fanmade nexgen of the original cast I look for) I became more aware of the attitude that many Kisara/Kaiba fans have toward other Kaiba pairings.

As one shipper put it: "Seeing Kaiba with anyone but Kisara sickens me." (Emphasis mine.)

Sickens you? Really? That seems a little harsh, for one thing.

I guess I can understand the roots of this rather arrogant, evangelistic attitude about the whole thing. Kaiba/Kisara is considered "canon" by most people. (For the record, I actually like the person who said that, just not what she said. Which is why I'm not pointing out her name, because I don't want any jerks getting the idea that I want her flamed or something.) Some anti-silentshippers, whom I have much experience with (being the stalwart captain of the ship), go so far as to call Kisara "evidence" that Kaiba and Serenity shall "never be." My fellow silentshippers have gone to such extremes in order to "get around the obstacle" of Kisara as claiming that Serenity is Kisara's reincarnation. This is preposterous, and it's kind of disheartening that they feel the need to stretch so far.

Here's what really bothers me about the whole thing, though-- Seto Kaiba and Kisara are not actually a canon couple.

You read right. And I'm not insane. Kisara's in love with Priest Seto, not Seto Kaiba. Kaiba is Priest Seto's reincarnate, sure-- but he's not Priest Seto himself. Are Yugi and Atem the same person? All evidence points to NO. In Yu-Gi-Oh, reincarnation is not resurrection. If Seto Kaiba is fulfilling some destiny, it's because Priest Seto is using him, by proxy, to get the job done. Kisara herself says, "you're like him, but you're NOT him." And even more than that? By the time Priest Seto would have died, he and Kisara were actually a merged soul. THAT soul is the one that would have been reincarnated, which is how Kaiba still had a Blue Eyes as a Ka. (The Shipper's List agrees with me: "blueshipping" is Kaiba/Kisara, "Mizushipping" is Priest Seto/Kisara.)

Which, in a way, makes Kisara Seto Kaiba's mother.

Give me a few moments, I need to get over the squick factor before I can continue.

Kisara has no direct reincarnate counterpart, but Kaiba decorates all his stuff with twisting, twining Blue-Eyes White Dragons. He feels a direct affinity for it. Priest Seto had no relation to the beast until he fell in love with Kisara. You can call that a sign that Kaiba remembers the romance somehow, or you can see it as something deeper-- Kisara living on within Kaiba himself. He's like her child. I, personally, find that a lot sadder and more touching, especially since we have no real hint of what his biological mother might have been like. (There are going to be photographs shown of her in Game of Dreams. I intend to make her look rather like Kisara, for the reasons given.)

Now then-- because Kisara has no direct counterpart, making one for her is essentially creating a fancharacter. I've mentioned elsewhere, I don't care for OC pairings, if I can help it.

So I'm going to stick to silentshipping, thank you.

5Ds Batman ninja boyscouts in FUZZY VESTS OF DEWM

Several things I want you to note here:

Yusei, Crow, Kiryu and Jack apparently used to be members of the Batman Boy Scouts.

Their uniforms were terrible.

Turning into a dark signer obviously has made Kiryu prone to laughter-related seizures.

Yusei, Crow, Kiryu and Jack don't actually age, or else they're all a lot older than we were previously led to believe. How many things did they do while looking that exact age?

I suppose I can forgive them if they were, say, fifteen when they did the Batman Boy Scout thing, and they're like, eighteen or nineteen now. But for Yugi's sake. Characters in Yugioh used to look differenter than that at differenter ages!!!

Anyway, believe it or not I'm horribly amused, especially at the whole ninja scatter thing toward the beginning of the clip.

Fandom Rant: afive dees summoar

XD Yes, I know, twice in a row. When the comic updates more regularly there'll be more variety, promise.

Just really a few comments anyway: There was this very-likely-dubbed-in talk about Yusei being an insectophobe, and it was really funny because they'd all go "OMG YUSEI HE IS SO SCARED!" and Yusei was all "-_- what are you people talking about?!" (Not vocally, his facial expression said it.)

And Yusei quoted (paraphrased?) Yugi from the Panik episode of Duelist Kingdom, which was one of my favorite episodes from the Duel Monsters series. XDD He is Yugi's mindslave.

Also, whatta heck was up with the bully dude (Lenny)'s posse? Why the giggling man's hand no move?

Jack's voice is still absolutely hilarious.

Pairing Crack: Whar's teh slash?

Darnit, this is the wrong computer to upload an "appropriate" image from to head the blog off with. Oh well, we can edit it later. XD

There's no way to keep everybody happy when it comes to pairings. Some people only like a fic when all the pairings are "totally and undeniably canon," whatever that means, while others can't stand anything resembling canon pairings and will only read a fic if Weevil is paired up with Princess Adina from the VR episodes right after Duelist Kingdom (or something equally WTF.)

And then, of course, there's the people who can't stand slash ("gay" pairings) and the people who can't live without it.

This is a nexgen. GDG and Invid (the authors) are both very creeped out by MPreg. Therefore, there will be little actual slash to speak of between canon characters.

That doesn't mean either of us really has anything against slash. Invid doesn't like sex in his fic fare at ALL, and GDG is bisexual. All sexual relationships in YnY and Game of Dreams will not so much be shown as hinted at (sometimes very, very strongly.) We believe that, for the purpose of this story, less is more.

There will be hints of pairings that don't actually end up happening in the long run. The driving force of Game of Dreams is mainly to get everybody together that are parents of main characters of YnY. After that, pairings won't be quite as central, despite the fact that Yukai's sexual orientation seems to be Kaiba's daughter. (If you've read the preboot, you know this already. It's not a spoiler.) But slash will rear its crack-dazed head more than once in both YnY and GD, occasionally humorously, sometimes as nothing more than a whisper, and possibly for real at least once.

But I refuse to limit any two characters by keeping them solely to each other. Yes, Kira Kaiba is Serenity's daughter and GD needs to explain how a heck that happened. But Kaiba's relationship with Joey plays a major role in that, as does Serenity's relationship with Joey. Even Mai's relationship with Joey. And the same goes for other relationships that exist in this fancomic, up to and including relationships with dead characters.

Game of Dreams is not a romance about any one pairing. It's about a web of relationships both romantic and otherwise. And YnY isn't really a romance at all. It's about a father-son relationship (and about one of the most entertaining characters I've ever devised, including my original works.)

One of the reasons I arrived at some of the pairings I use, in fact, is the fact that they create very interesting relationships between the main Yukai no Yugi cast. If, for example, Joey and Kaiba ended up together instead of Serenity and Kaiba, then not only would Yukai not be all weird about Kaiba's daughter (as opposed to Kaiba's niece, which mightn't be so charged), but Kira and Ken (Joey's oldest son) wouldn't be cousins and wouldn't act like siblings. I find the fact that Kaiba and Joey's kids act like brothers and sisters to be much more interesting than an uneasy friendship or fullblown rivalry would be.

If something having to do with pairings disappoints or upsets you, I apologize. Go over the Golden-Dragon-Girl account at DeviantArt (or email at yukaimotou@gmail.com) and send me notes demanding your slashcrack there. Or your hetcrack. Or your Weevil/Adina crack. It might not work, but then again it might. But don't knock YnY for something you dislike about the canon character pairings. You'll deprive yourself of all the crazy slashy jokes we start making about three (four? five? something like that) chapters in.