For those of you who have wisely avoided the shreds of it I’ve left around the blog thus-far, I had some weird notion to go re-experience Yu-Gi-Oh uuuuuh a week ago? We’ll go with that. Time is meaningless.
I’d been able to read a good portion of the early manga at the end of highschool, and somewhere in my stacks and stacks of paper is fanart from this dark time, so you know I cared. I also still own a Dark Magician action figure somehow, so. I’d also watched a large portion of the anime with my brother because it had been laced with some kind of crack and we couldn’t look away? I remember when we both were just like shit, wait, don’t change the channel, I can’t stop looking at it. And the next thing we knew we were waiting for new episodes and I was doing research on the Japanese original because I was that kid.
Anyway, unnecessary backstory out of the way, here are some… let’s call them Observations and Consequences of having read somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 chapters (and growing) of a manga primarily hinged on card games from a spectrum of sources ranging from boringly lawful to sketchy as fuck.
I am so charmed by your takeaways from the manga, which is a thing I never managed to read more than a few random chapters of in Shonen Jump back in my peak YGO! days, aka back when I was young, dumb, and prone to computer-eating viruses. Your sketches are also adorable, in that I can definitely get a sense of ‘these are late 90s anime characters being rendered in a different style’ especially in the extra pointiness to their faces, haha. I don’t know if that was intentional style mixing or not but I’m digging it. You’re also making me question why I never fixated on Ryou frickin’ Bakura back then either for that matter, since everything you’ve said here and in other posts really drives home much I really should have? Teen me was even more aggressively about the angst than I am now but somehow missed All His Business. Pretty sure I can blame that on 4kids.
….I feel like I wrote a Yami Bakura fic at some point but I deleted everything off my FFN from before 2007 so who knows. If I did it was definitely a songfic though, haha.
Hahah, now we have like an inverted diagram of franchise consumption or something. Having finished everything last night, I now have Further Extensive WTF Thoughts, but I’ll keep those for another late night post only 10 people will appreciate. I’ve been looking up as many Japanese clips from the anime as I can to see more of Yami Bakura laughing and haunting the hell out of people, though. Especially because he gets to do a lot more of that in the anime, vs the manga doing stuff like 'okay, so he goes and kills several people playing a card game to get himself into this bullshit tournament, one panel of a baby goth getting absolutely Fucked Up by the spirits of the dead, moving on’ but I definitely don’t have the patience for all the filler dueling. My larger mental map of how the anime is structured and such is based on 15 year old memories of the dub and a consistent consumption of the Abridged Series over the years at this point, haha
There’s an image somewhere that motivated my decision to go manga for this weird detour through Past Interests Town in addition to being That Kid and it was a comparison of the shot of confused and injured Bakura after Yami Bakura stabs himself (again!) in order to do whatever the fuck Marik is up to and it was like, “4Kids - a bandage; Original - some faint pinkish stain on the bandage; Manga - bandage but also his arm is absolutely drenched in blood” and I was like, ah, yes, my preferred version has been clearly laid out for me.
So yes, 4Kids is definitely the reason you did not fixate on Ryou Bakura, haha. I was really into him back in the day, but it was so early on in the story of things, I didn’t even know the full spectrum of bullshit. I was very, oh, this pretty kid is kind of tortured and sad and he’s haunted, I will draw big eyed fanart, because I am 16. Somewhere, there is the start of pixel dress up dolls, even. I did not fully appreciate at that time how much I liked twisty creepy shit and my friends all actively discouraged it, so even if I’d known how messy he got I don’t know if I would have been able to get into to properly. Now that I’m 'allowed’ to like things scary and creepy and soaked in blood, I enjoy it even more because I’m not trying to mask the feeling. And now, getting to see what was removed or altered and that Bakura’s actually like, “I’m a huge nerd who gets obsessed with model making and detailed RPG storylines. I’m unsettling and weird! Do you want to touch my actively bleeding arm wound?? It doesn’t even hurt, so weird! Check out my collection of cards featuring undead ouija board playing broken dolls! :D I’m confused a lot because I’m blacked out 50% of the time. I don’t love that so much, and would like my friends to not die, but, look, tarot cards!” I like him even more than I did as a dumbass teenager. He’s a Delight. I do not need to convince you of this, you also like 90s/2000s era art covered in blood. But Still, my enjoyment now and my general feelings of indignant outrage that he was not treated better compel me to yell about him when the moment strikes.
(Am I currently obtaining the 2016 movie because Bakura gets to have Some Moments both in character and wardrobe and it’s based on the manga continuity? Yes. Yes, I am.)
I am glad you liked my horrifically photographed doodles! I will at some point make them not horrific photos and post further ones likely for your benefit only. I was definitely trying to do something like merging the vibes. Many of those characters are unrecognizable without the shape of their hair, or the distinctions of how evil they are at the time is based on what absolutely not possible thing their hair is doing, so I was looking into ways to maintain recognizability while also taming some of the sharp angles. There’s also stuff like, 'how much of a distinctive nose or face shape can I give this character before they stop clicking in my mind as that character but still don’t all look like clones with crazy wigs’. So there’s some facial feature drifting happening while I figure out where things should go, but they’ve been fun to do.
Yami Bakura songfic sounds like one of the most early 2000s things I can think of, well done.
Thank you for enjoying me talking about Yu-Gi-Oh, my childhood best friend can only withstand so much after she endured me liveblogging like four volumes of the most ridiculous part of the manga at her.
