Intro to the Seven Stars, and I recognize Fubuki, Camula, Tanya, Titan, and Daitokuji, but who's this other clown? It's clearly not Abidos or Don Zaloog.
I'm curious what plans the writer's had that changed along the way.
I would say it's funny that they apparently thought that building an isolated chamber to imprison a child in was a simpler solution than just taking away his trading card, but I suppose trying to take the trading card away is what ends up causing everything with Yubel later, so...
Really funny subplot thrown into these episodes. We have a guy who's framed as being a sort of sleazy journalist who is investigating the missing students at Duel Academia. The episode portrays him as being a shady bad guy for doing this, because the story would damage the school's reputation.
Except! This is all true! An entire dorm of children did go missing, and the school is covering it up and lying to the public and their families about it! And this guy is portrayed as being a dirty troublemaker and shady journalist for... printing the truth.
Don't worry, he watches Judai play such a sick card game that he decides not to tell the truth, because it's more important that the kids can keep playing Yu-Gi-Oh! than getting any sort of investigation going on the fact that many children have died at the school and the faculty is covering this up.
The situation with Rei in her first appearance is a bit confusing to me. Why the need to disguise herself as a boy? Is Osiris a boys only dorm? I suppose we never see any girls in Osiris and Ra early on. Every girl in the 1st season is in Obelisk Blue. Does this mean that girls automatically get put into Obelisk regardless of their grades because it has the only dedicated girl's dorm? And because all transfer students have to begin in Osiris, this therefore means that the school can't have female transfer students??? Except we do see Rei come back to the school properly next season, and she is in the Red dorm, so it can't be that women simply can't exist in the Red dorms. Maybe she just assumed that Ryou is incredibly gay and that her only shot with him was by passing as a boy.
I think the premise of this episode is quite clever. Obviously with GX being the first of the spin-off series many people would still be directly comparing it in their heads to the original series, including the idea of who would win between Judai and Yugi/Atem. This is a cool way of giving the fans that without actually needing to put one protagonist over the other.
If you have Judai beating Yugi so early on you would risk alienating and angering the fans who are fond of the original and the showrunners may end up looking too desperate to put their new hip protagonist over by having him beat the previous one.
Conversely, you also don't want to portray the protagonist of your new series as being totally inferior to the protagonist of the original series and make your new characters seem lesser in the eyes of the fans.
Using the copycat duelist who stole Yugi's deck allows them to have this duel that everyone wanted to see and let Judai win without actually letting Judai defeat Yugi.
Of course, Judai does eventually duel Yugi/Atem for real, but that's at the very end of the series as opposed to this duel taking place in season 1. Judai has fully gone on his journey as a protagonist at that point and earned his place next to the legend as someone who could potentially defeat him. We don't get to see the outcome of that duel, but it doesn't really matter who wins at that point because we've already come to recognize Judai as a great character on his own without needing to compare him to anyone else, which may not have been the case if they had pushed the match up too early on in GX when a lot of people still would have been on the fence about the new show.
I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.
I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:
the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and
the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.
Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.
Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.
In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with “Saki” is different.
It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.
So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.
The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???
Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????
Back when I was just an awakening baby gay, I spent everyday trying to consume every bit of yuri I could get my hands on.
You didn't have nearly as many options back in those days, mostly just people recommending the same handful of animanga over and over again. This meant that I ended up spending a lot of time getting into some rather questionable series that I wouldn't necessarily recommend nowadays. One of those anime series that would pop up frequently and I inevitably ended up watching was Saki.
I can tell you, OP is 100% correct about everything said here. If you were to only watch the original 1st season you probably wouldn't think much of it. It's a fairly standard sports tournament manga with some ecchi and yuri elements thrown in. There are some girls with big boobs, there are some men around that react to them, some of the girls clearly have sapphic feelings for each other. Nothing too noteworthy for an ecchi. But if you read the manga to the point where after the anime ended things start to get odd... Men start to appear less frequently, only the male characters that are closest to the central narrative are sometimes begrudgingly shown. The ecchi elements start to ramp up, but so does the casualness of them as described by OP. Ladies just walking around with no pants on whatsoever, and everybody treating it like it's normal. Meanwhile, you're being introduced to the fact that in this universe they've developed technology where lesbian couples can have children together, and some of the main characters actually come from lesbian unions. It begins to sink in that males are on a decline in the world of Saki as more women are starting to marry and have children with each other. A world that is gradually becoming more casual with women's bodies and their queerness. The manga didn't start out like this, but by the time you've noticed its already become normalized. The frog is boiled.
15 years later, and this franchise still holds some bizarre fascination for me. It's not unusual for me to just suddenly remember this series and think about what that absolute madwoman Kobayashi Ritz is up to these days and how much crazier everything has gotten if I were to go and look.
Going into the dorm where Asuka's brother went missing, Judai spots a framed photo he had of himself that he also signed his name on.
At first it may seem weird and come off as clunky writing for Fubuki to just have a glamour picture of himself with his own autograph, but then you meet the guy later and are like, "Okay, yeah. It makes total sense that this guy carries around signed photos of himself. Totally in character."
The entire school is taking written and practical exams, and Judai completely sleeps through the written exam and flunks it, but when we get to the practical duel exams that are supposed to be between all the students we just see everyone in the school sitting and watching Judai and when he wins the headmaster gives a big speech and confetti rains from the ceiling for him. Kind of funny to have such a fanfare for someone who completely failed half the exam.
I do love GX and Judai, but it can be pretty ridiculous how up his ass the show was in the early episodes.
So we Shou directly referencing stuff from the original series, but it's kind of crazy because it's in reference to some of the supernatural elements of the original that never became widespread public knowledge in that show.
We also see them reference Millennium Items and dark games, although we also see that most people don't actually believe in these things.
So the question is, which character from the original show do you think went blabbing about dark games and ancient pharaohs until they became widely known in public consciousness? Did Yugi himself reveal this? Did Pegasus write a biography or something?
Also, if everyone knows that the Duel Monsters world champion claims to have been a vessel for a 3'000 year old pharaoh and battled to save the world in soul stealing games but most people don't believe it, does that mean from the perspective of the average person that Yugi is just crazy? If other high profile duelists like Kaiba, Rebecca, or Pegasus corroborate this story, does that mean people think they're all crazy or that it's all some kind of inside joke?
I guess a lot of people would just attribute it to celebrities being eccentric, but do you think there are entire groups of people out there studying his psyche and history, trying to diagnose him various conditions for his strange beliefs?
So in this scene Judai runs into Yugi, but Yugi's voice, look, and demeanor are all those of Atem rather than Yugi. Which is weird because Atem is gone at this point.
Was this a mistake on the part of production, or are we supposed to believe that Yugi grew up to look and sound exactly like Atem, because I don't think I really believe that. Yugi was a very distinct character from Atem.
To unveil his new duel disk technology Kaiba makes it look like a plane malfunctions and is about to crash into a stadium full of people, causing a mass panic and stampede of people running for their lives before saying "Psych!"
In the Dark Side of Dimension movie we learn that Kaiba apparently got a law passed that in order to be a legal citizen in Domino City you have to have a registered Duel Monsters deck which KaibaCorp uses to keep a 24/7 surveillance on all the populace.
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