For the most part, I don't question the crazy shit in GX, and specifically the crazy shit in Duel Academy, but if you stop and think about it for a few seconds you realize that not only did Seto Kaiba found and fund Queer Card Game Hogwarts (entirely in character) with a merit system based entirely on his own petty grudges (entirely in character)...

This nigga hired someone to teach alchemy at his card game school

They’re in the mainframe!! In the grid!!! My god

Now that I'm older I understand why Kaiba was so pissed off by Yugi. When I was 10yo it seemed so EASY to just "believe in the heart of the cards" like come ON Kaiba

As an adult, if someone who was kicking my ass at my favourite game (on live TV no less) told me that the reason I'm losing is that I don't BELIEVE hard enough, I would launch myself across the arena and start throwing hands

Found you 🦋

You know how sometimes I go on "hey guys Seto Kaiba is canonically a child" campaigns

It's because this fandom constantly puts his behavior in the lens of him being an adult

And it's like no of course it would be ridiculous if a 25 year old was doing some of this

... But he's fifteen and it makes perfect sense that he acts like this

Also you can't put an adult lens on his relationship with Mokuba oh my fucking god stop it they are fifteen and ten, ten and five, a literal pair of children trying not to get separated by adults, that is a different fucking relationship from abusive codependency

i know its probably more rich american culture than rich japanese culture, but i think seto should give transfem mokuba a fucking insane and huge sweet 16 party

like maybe its not long after she comes out and he wants to make her feel special and give her some gender euphoria (with a side of a big old fuck you to the media) so he just goes all out, spending thousands on whatever dresses she wants, a whole crown to top her look off, makes it a private concert with her favorite bands/singers, holograms and light shows everywhere because seto kaiba would not be caught dead planning a party without them, and he runs himself ragged trying to make it as perfect as possible because he loves her and would do anything for her

(honestly she'd be fine with just a day out at the fair or something, but she wont complain about getting a sick ass party and private concert)

seething fuming about duel links further making a mess of an already oversaturated franchise

i tried to scribble kaibas mom from memory

something something yugi's choker something something the girl with the green ribbon

Some yugi practice :0

im so sorry but i have to ask are Rill and Thresher supposed to make me think season 0 kaiba and yugi I think it's the green hair that does it

the primary inspiration for Rill is absolutely S0 Kaiba and I'm not exactly being subtle about it! However, Thresher is not Yugi in any way whatsoever.

Thresher is based on a character concept I wanted to follow through on since 2019 before I ever watched Yugioh and doesn't really have an existing character in other media I can really point to as a comparison point or specific point of inspiration. I actually almost scrapped their concept entirely because when Splat 3 came by and had Shiver be a shark themed Octoling I was like FUCK they got to it first!!! People are gonna think I'm immediately ripping off a canon character!! But I got over it because who gives a shit, I was here first, and it's not actually very similar to what I was wanting to do anyways

Then about a year after I actually made Thresher into a proper character I caved to my dark desires of "I want to play with that cabbage freak in this other setting and see what he mutates into" and the only character I had lying around to throw him at happened to be Thresher.

The biggest inspiration for how Thresher deals with Rill has been a hawk I saw once sitting on a house roof ignoring a tiny ass songbird that was repeatedly dive-bombing it and bouncing off of it without doing any visible damage. I'm being completely serious this was the funniest thing I've ever seen

Anyways point is I think the biggest trap people fall into with these 2 is that they see a Kaiba and assume that there's going to be a Yugi somewhere to match when in reality I made these two completely independently of each other whoops

Do you see the vision

Okay so after several episodes of alternating between unconsciousness and just standing vaguely in the background doing nothing so Alexis can angst about it, they have finally given Atticus a personality. And it turns out he's insane. I love him

God... the digital world arc is like if yugioh was perfect and good and a real show and good and was written by someone not having a mental breakdown and good and perfect and awsome an-

MORE "SPIDEYKAIBA", "more kaibabros garabage" and "puffship"

HEHEHE. OK I'm gonna put the spideykaiba stuff in a separate post, but HUZZAH I'm so stoked for some

puffship

The story behind this one is actually my favourite classical composer story of all time: Rachmaninoff desperately wanted to become friends with his fellow composer Stravinsky, but wasn't quite sure how to break the ice. He heard Stravinsky liked a certain type of expensive honey, and just randomly showed up at Stravinsky's house in the middle of the night with a big ol' jar of honey. It worked. They became friends.

BUT ALSO THIS IS LIKE, PEAK BAKURA BEHAVIOUR, ISN'T IT?! (as I am rapidly adding more red yarn and thumbtacks to my 'tenuous connections between YGO and classical music' corkboard, a large hook comes to drag me off stage)

Hence this excerpt but with a more Jounouchi-esque food substituted:

When the buzzer in Jounouchi’s flat goes off at midnight, he’s not sure what to expect. The only people who ever drop by unannounced are Honda and Anzu. Anzu has a key and has never once in her life bothered with the buzzer, and Honda only comes at ungodly hours of the morning to clean his apartment and lecture him the entire time while Jounouchi watches TV in a half-awake stupor. “Hello?” Jounouchi says into the receiver. “Hello,” a soft voice returns. A pause. “Bakura? The hell are you doing here at midnight?” Bakura is silent for a moment, and then: “Do you like shrimp?”

I'll put the next one under a cut 'cause this is getting long, but it's a YGODM rewrite where Seto's mind crush goes. Very differently lol

Anyone who knows me probably remembers this one 'cause I've been poking away at this for actual years 💀 but very roughly (??!) it's a YGODM rewrite where Mokuba is Seto's half-brother and they don't grow up together. So when Seto gets mind-crushed he doesn't have any reason to 'put the pieces back together.' He's in his mind crush coma for two full years, and then Isono manages to find Mokuba in foster care. Yuugi & Atem's relationship is really different in this one too! It's a much slower burn to Friendship™️and there's more 'oh god an arson obsessed ghost is in my body' fear and paranoia. Basically just me enjoying dark freaky Season 0 vibes for way longer and easing into the whole plot later on when the kids are college-aged.

more kaibros garbage

Anzu had completely forgotten herself, and was examining Kaiba with open fascination - and revulsion. She moved closer to him hesitantly. “Can he...can he hear us?” she asked, her voice small. The maid Okazaki was already nodding enthusiastically, but Isono slowly shook his head. “There’s really no way to know, Mazaki-san.” Yuugi knew that the answer was more complicated than the question had been. Kaiba could hear and respond to noise, certainly; the whole reason he wasn’t hooked up to a mess of tubes in a hospital bed was because he could eat with assistance, and raise and lower his arms obediently when asked to in order to facilitate clothes-changes and cleaning. The question was whether he understood any of those noises in a meaningful way, and whether he ever would again. It had already been two years. The outlook didn’t seem so good, these days. Anzu gingerly sat down in the chair closest to Kaiba. She took another long, hard look at his vacant face. Her expression slowly began to shift. Pity. An emotion that Yuugi couldn’t allow himself to feel towards Kaiba. To pity the frail, twisted boy before him was to condescend to him, to disrespect their relationship. Yuugi had done this to him, and so he owed it to Kaiba to remember him as he had been - tall and powerful with a loud, strident voice - vicious, calculating, eyes shining like the cruelly sharp edge of a diamond - alive. Anzu reached out and gently, gently laid her hand on top of Kaiba’s. “Hi, Kaiba-kun,” she said softly. “We brought your diploma.”

I’M WATCHING YU GI OH DARK SIDE OF DIMENSIONS AND KAIBA YOU ARE GAY FOR THE PHARAOH. ‘YOU HAVE YOUR BOND WITH HIM... AND I HAVE MINE’ LITERALLY THERE ARE TEARS IN MY EYES YOU ARE O B S E S S E D