Ok harsh contrast to my previous, excited post, but I did say I had more to yell about episode 75 and I need to get this off my chest anyway. Plus, I remember mentioning in a post that I need to talk about season 3 onward Aki anyhow, so might as well do that now! I am thinking Big Thoughts and I need to Scream.
Long, incoherent, unhinged rant incoming because I have 100 things to say and 100000 screenshots to post, but I am also tired and my brain is mush.
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Who allowed you to be this pretty, huh?
(Feel free to use these as icons!)
I figured out a gripe I have with the pre-WRGP/WRGP arc while watching episode 69 today. Full disclosure, if the WRGP is your favourite arc, feel free to ignore this post, keep truckin', god bless you. This is just a personal thing that's been brewing in my mind for a while, because compared to the DS arc, I could literally feel that I wasn't anywhere near as excited to rewatch the pre-WRGP and WRGP arcs again (even though I need them for reference because my fics are mainly set during the WRGP arc). And now I need to rant a bit. Putting this under a readmore because I'm not here to hate on anyone for liking the WRGP.
Inspired by this wonderful post.
- Crow was supposed to be the main villain of the Dark Signer arc, with the smoking-gun evidence being a piece of very early concept art by Takahashi that describes him as a guy who’s tried to steal Yusei’s D-Wheel before and is now his friend, with Rex Godwin’s massive Nazca condor shirt emblem being a cleverly-placed red herring.
- Crow was made into a good guy because his cards sold well, in that set that came out a month after he debuted and was shown as a good guy and Yusei’s never-mentioned BFF. Rather than the standard anime production cycle of a few months per episode, they created the episode in negative three weeks, paying very close attention to the card game the same way they did when they swapped out Kaiser’s Cyber Dragons for the incredibly meta-relevant Cyberdarks.
- Aki Izayoi’s role was reduced because her voice actress, Ayumi Kinoshita, was pregnant at the time of the show’s run in 2008-2011. She would go on to get married in 2012 and give birth to her first child in 2014, setting the world record for Longest Pregnancy.
- The Roma-Sophie cult scandal, which went public in September 2010, affected the production timeline of the entire second half of 5Ds, which began in mid-2009. Having seen the future, they decided to distance themselves from the cult, and cleverly destroyed the Arcadia Movement building and largely ended its plotline in December 2008. They also excised almost all elements of the occult and shifted the series in the direction of pure sci-fi. Except for that part of the series and the whole-ass DS game, because they figured they could have a little cult stuff.
- The aforementioned cult also caused them to completely revert Carly Nagisa’s long-running character arc, as her voice actress, Li-Mei Chiang, was a high-ranking member of Roma-Sophie. To accomplish this, they significantly downplayed her role in the series and turned her into a cheerleader for Jack Atlas. However, she was so nice around the office that they decided to raise her character from the dead, give her a prevalent, irritating running gag, and have her keep showing up and even get a filler recap episode that aired in October 2010, despite her having essentially no role in the ongoing plot and many other characters losing prominence or being written out in the transition to the WRGP Arc. They only recasted her part in that episode, which was near the end of the series, because she was literally under arrest at that point. It came as a complete shock to everyone, despite the fact that they had been planning for the eventuality for over a year.
These facts may have no apparent sources or citations except hoary decade-old internet rumors and fandom gossip one step above a friend’s dad who works at Nintendo, but they are definitely true. Because, as we all know, the idea of Yu-Gi-Oh shows downplaying or sidelining prominent female characters, reverting character development that might alter the status quo (especially when it comes to romance), rejecting cool occult elements that appeal to an older audience in favor of toyetic sci-fi that appeals to kids, and sticking the spotlight on completely unprecedented characters for no reason to the point of sidelining existing characters and plotlines, is utterly inconceivable. There has to be an outside explanation.
In seriousness, friends: sometimes a show just does things you don’t want it to do. There’s no reason for it. Nobody forced the writers to do it. There was no nasty executive sharpening a knife over their shoulder. The same writers who wrote the things you liked, can write the things you didn’t like. This is especially true when you are a nostalgic twentysomething Western adult and the show is aimed at ten-year-old Japanese boys and therefore does things not meant to appeal to you in any way.
And I believed most of these myself at some point. I eagerly jumped on the idea. It let me construct a “true” version of 5Ds that existed in a mental covenant between me and the show’s writers, who understood what was really good about the show. I could claim that, really, the last half wasn’t bad, because it was just them doing the best with what they could under heavy limitations.
But there were no limitations. They wanted the show to be that way. They did it on purpose. It sucks, but it happens. Some people actually preferred the show that way, you know.
If it’s any consolation, it’s not new. Just ask a Dragon Ball fan about Gohan sometime.
In light of what happens the next time Yusei and Antinomy duel: Ouch.
2. They upgraded it for her all together!!!!!!!!!!
Look at how happy they are!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Look at how happy she is!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They are ALL friends and I love them so much!!!
I’m glad they were never any more than friends. Asuka may have had a crush on him, I will begrudgingly accept that that was true at some point in the series, but he didn’t ever return those feelings. He saw her as a good friend and great duelist and she was satisfied with that. It’s nice. More male female friendships please!
Found some energy again and now I feel a burning need to go back and talk about the Jack/Carly dark signer duel because, in all honesty, I think this may be the best of the dark signer duels, full stop. At the very least, it easily makes the top three in terms of stakes, character dynamics, and sheer drama. But what I really feel the need to talk about is what this duel does for Jack's character because I feel like there's a lot to unpack here. Long post ahead.
What I mean is, it seems a general consensus that Akiza Izinski/Aki Izayoi and Carly Carmine/Carly Nagisa were better characters in the first couple of seasons of 5Ds. You know, up to the end of the Dark Signers Arc. Do you agree with this? Do you not? Or do you not really care, aka you're going with the neutral option?
I do think this could apply to Mina Simington/Mikage Sagiri, but she's always been a minor character compared to Akiza and Carly, imo.
I'd argue there wasn't a single female character in 5Ds that wasn't at the very least severely underutilised in the second half of the show (that includes Sherry), but Carly and Aki definitely got the worst of it because they had all the necessary setup in the first half to become at least semi-important characters, but they just didn't. You could argue they tried to do something with Aki when they let her get her tubro duelling license, but even that flopped, because she literally only participated in a single turbo duel and lost after four turns, then her ability to turbo duel isn't relevant ever again, not even in the finale against Sherry. Don't even get me started on Carly. They axed her completely post dark signers, to the point where I've seen some people--not without reason--argue that she should have just stayed dead after her defeat as a dark signer. Which is I think, a damning indicator of how poorly she was handled, seeing as she was basically the driving factor for Jack's character development the season before. Both of them got little to nothing to do once the WRGP rolled around which seems absolutely absurd when you look at how prominent they were before. Aside from the turbo duelling bit, neither of them got so much as the hint of an independent plotline, and aside from the Team Unicorn duel and the finale, neither of them got a chance to duel or otherwise contribute to the main story either. Carly especially goes from being a driving force for Jack's development and a fully-fledged character to essentially an accessory, which feels like an insult to her.
No joke, this guy is probably my favourite non-plot related character in the show.
I wanted to make this a nice, coherent post, screenshots and everything, because I feel like it deserves the effort, but in the end, my thoughts completely ran away from me and I guess now I’ll just have to inflict whatever stream-of-consciousness mess I can come up with onto people now.
So remember how I talked about the first duel between Aki and Yusei and how it does so much and drives me absolutely insane? Well, that turned into many more thoughts and now I’m basically obsessed with the way Aki and her relationship to pain and destruction are defined at the start through the first third of the show. So I wanna talk about that. Also, warning: LONG post incoming.
God, the utter anguish in Yusei's voice when first Martha, then Rally vanish in his first duel against Rudger/Roman. That duel is rough for him in terms of trauma. (Also, since I'm watching sub r/n, I can only speak for that, but Yuya Miyashita does an absolutely stellar job voicing Yusei in general and in particular in highly emotional scenes like that. Like, mad props.)
5Ds-related things I need to yell about, in no particular order:
This might be the weirdest plotline the show has ever dropped. Like, what was the idea here? Where was this supposed to lead? Was Sly (the kid) supposed to successfully steal Stardust Dragon, only for Rua and Ruka to get it back? Was the attempt to steal it supposed to be futile to teach the kid a lesson? Was the absence of Stardust, even if briefly, supposed to teach Yusei another lesson or something? Were there supposed to be parallels to Jack, who's stolen Stardust before?
I just have so many questions.
