Thanks and curses to @indigobluerose, who planted this particularly overly fancy seed in my head several days ago. I don’t know what is going on or why, I just wanted to make Ryou and Marik with the layers of dark and light stuff I like and Fancy Fancy Bullshit.

I would still enjoy doing something related to this another time with a bunch of paper textures.

Miscellaneous thoughts about background and whatever beyond this point.

I think about Marik having been raised with his whole world being ancient. That they were there to preserve something that had been gone for several millennia. The gods are real and the pharaoh’s memories are so precious you ruin your children over them. So even though he’s the one who isn’t possessed literally by ancient Egyptian something or other, he feels closest to it to me.

I like that after his first several years of growing up in plain robes he (and his sister, to be fair) just went out and was covered in gold. So I’ve dressed him wildly impractically and more like a pharaoh, I suppose, but he deserves it. I may have stolen some famous shit from the 18th Dynasty for this just saying

His heavy hand sun symbolism appeals to me because I’m a simple creature. Behold kid born just after the winter solstice with blonde hair who busts out of the dark to get revenge/liberate his family with the use of a Ra card while wearing thick gold jewelry in like every place he can get it. Okay, buddy, we all see what you’re doing, we get it. And we love you, it’s fine.

I didn’t use a single ankh or lotus on him how did that occur

I’m so used to shoujo series in which you always get an obligatory piece of art with the protagonists dressed in New Year’s kimono, so when Indigo was like, ‘Ryou Bakura in kimono’ I was blown away on several levels. Like oh god, not only did I not come up with this, but it also is not available in 17 flavors from the original author like it is with every other comic I read growing up, haha. I tried a few with his hair down just for character recognizability reasons, but the bun looked so much better and is what you’re supposed to wear, and why not do something else to him.

I always hope he looks like himself to other people too, haha. I don’t adhere to anime/manga features, but I try to hit up some kind of balance when I make these.

I tend to color him with the anime’s brown eyes even though the only canon I’ve fully consumed is the manga, where they’re blue. The brown just feels good on him. Probably because despite only having seen a fraction of it 15 years ago or whatever, the anime was my first introduction to him. Plus, given Marik’s coloring, it feels nice to give at least one character one trait that they would be actually likely to have.

As is so often the case lately, I envisioned something else, but this is also nice, so Okay, we’ll go with this.