Happy Birthday to Yugi, Happy Pride to Us!

The YGO Pride Button Parade continues with the addition of Johan and Kaiba this morning!

Buttons for the interest of my fellow Dennis enjoyers 🧡

Sometimes you just gotta do things for you

Ryou/Malik Buttons~

I probably won’t bother making many more than this, because I can’t imagine there are that many of us who would like a button. But still a button for my favorite pair of card game boys 💙💜

Look what I found for this boy

Forgot I had this :)

You know what @jaewul yeah I have thought a few thoughts about this boy

So, I’ve only read the manga. This is like the opposite of everyone else’s engagement with this franchise, which I think it has led to my frustration in some cases, but here are some things I think about regarding this dude.

It makes me kind of sad and more than slightly uncomfortable that the dominant fandom portrayal of him seems to be dumb, bratty, and slutty. :/ I wonder how much of this is anime and I particularly wonder how much of this is English dubbed anime. I love the crop top outfit but I think probably my asexuality prevents me from interpreting it as anything but a fashion choice.

It all just seems kind of unfair. The version of him I met was dedicated and focused and upon learning the truth was ready to take even more blame than he was due. His clarity about what he’d done and what it all meant I thought was really lovely. I think maybe other people like him in extreme villain mode, but I’m really interested in what we see when he realizes what he believes as right and correct wasn’t. I’m interested in who he is when he’s free of everything.

I think about how he should have vision problems as well as bone density problems given his upbringing.

I think about how some serious Arrangements in the background of everything post canon have had to have been made in order to keep him out of jail. That giant card game tournament was broadcast to thousands, maybe millions, of people. They always associate his face with a pretty real level of villainy (same with Ryou, for the same reasons). I wonder what parts of his future have been ruined by the fact that that whole thing was televised. I try to imagine what logical consequences can be extrapolated from the world setup we are given.

Logical consequences like wider world finding out that this trio of siblings was raised underground and taught to natively speak a dead language, very possibly with a passed down version of the accompaning culture. His family is an archaeological discovery. They have big implications for the Yu-Gi-Oh World version of Egyptology. (I might be writing a thing that includes this! You can’t prove it either way~!)

On that note, I find it somewhat frustrating that even the author appears to have assigned him traits and things based on the culture that inhabits modern Egypt (though that’s far more egregious feeling when it’s Yugi’s Pharaoh). He is not supposed to have been out in that culture, even if his family did so for the sake of finding other food or something. So it’s weird that they named him in Arabic and not Egyptian.

I like his sun imagery a lot. The gold, the blonde hair, the desire to come out of the dark, the birthday hovering near the solstice, the Ra card, a first name that means “king.” I’m weak against all of this, I think it’s Great.

I love thinking about the things he didn’t get to experience and thus the things that he will be absolutely enchanted with now that he is not underground or stuck living in a card game forgery Mafia. Get this boy on a roller coaster. Or even just a fucking escalator. Experience random parts of the world brand new right along with him.

He’s clever and smart and speaks multiple languages but there are presumably massive gaps in his basic knowledge. Imagine talking to this guy and then finding out that he was never exposed to the concept of the theory of gravity. Who would have taught him that? And when? Probably no one ever. And you could go about normal life without ever talking about it or using it, but just imagine somebody casually mentioning it for some reason the way you do when somebody falls down or you talk about being on another planet (something that would also be News). “Oh you know, the gravity is different there.” “… the what?” And he’s there racking his brains through like the four languages that he knows and that word is just not coming up, he is drawing a blank.

Repeat this for Concepts like the speed of light, evolution, germs??, vaccines?

Ironically, he may have never seen animation.

Maybe he goes through a very long period in his life where he doesn’t know who sincerely trusts him. Maybe he tries very very hard to be what he’s supposed to be or to be good because he doesn’t know what level of bad feelings might just birth a whole other mind he can’t control. (This may also be part of the thing I might be making…)

I suffer from being very interested in the ways that these people’s lives are affected before between and after the card game parts.

This is like. A dusting of my thoughts and feelings, haha, thank you for indulging me.

Sketches I’m too lazy to scan!

Angstshipping tree in my sketch book always there for me.

CoLoRs and scans from the sketchbook. The YuGiOh tree still bears fruit.

Pink!