card game exegesis

welcome to my yugioh blog where we overanalyze card games. please be nice and enjoy your stay.

Sometimes it really does get me. The very last living villager of Kul Elna was murdered in the same place as his predecessors by the son of the king who reigned over the massacre. Children repeating and re-enacting, in small-scale, the violence of their parents and the state that raised them.

TKB and the Kul Elna temple is interesting because like. Obviously it's the location of the worst thing to ever happen to him and the event which permanently altered his life trajectory for the worse in ways he can never get back. But the manga also states he has his "home base" there, it's where the ghosts (un?)live, he just seems to kinda hang out in it to scheme. And then at the end of MW he bleeds to death in it to come full circle (as if to die in that spot was not a fate he evaded as a child but only temporarily delayed). Something something "home" as both representative of safety and the site of trauma / to be stuck somewhere or to keep returning to it repeatedly (mentally or literally) despite or perhaps because of what happened there / how the same place can be both cradle and grave

It sucks that canon never gives us anything about what sibling relationship existed between Rishid and Ishizu because compared to what Rishid has going on with Marik I feel like it would be like. shockingly normal. Not totally normal because she was also directed to think of him as a servant for most of her life. but there is way less baggage, especially on Rishid's end. She is just his little sister instead of like, a living commentary on his self-worth

that one post that's like "Atem yells at Kaiba like when your dog got into something and won't spit it out and now you gotta use the Serious Voice" and that other post that's like "Kaiba always talks to Atem like he's breaking up with him" are spiritual twins. to me

I think Zork's name really is Zork but I am not sure if it's funnier if in-universe 1) game is a coincidence, 2) one of the guys working on the adventure game was knowingly or unknowingly tapped into the darkest forces of the universe, 3) the game does not exist in the ygoverse owing to some butterfly effect stemming from having a different ancient Egypt, or 4) he wasn't named Zork until 1977 when he heard about the game and decided he liked it :)

There's a sort off...pinpoint violence, or some such, to Thief King's behavior that the anime gets wrong. He does hurt people, but not by default. He readily pays for food when he could get it just as easily by threat, and does so generously. He doesn't bother anyone until they bother him first. He's abrasive, but he's not kicking puppies or burning down buildings for no reason. He considers himself an eminently reasonable man. He even offers Atem and the priests the opportunity to quietly hand over the millennium items without a fight, even if it's somewhat facetious. He will always give you a chance to take the easy way out first.

And then as soon as you don't take it he goes "Well! Your loss." and promptly turns three men inside out so that their guts splatter the walls and they no longer have distinguishable faces because they are liquid. And then he leaves laughing.