#mirrorfalls

[dipndops]

Que Sera, Sera. Another gift to Masumi-lovers everywhere (especially that one. You know who you are 🙌) c/o @bumbleboa (For 200: can anyone guess the manga that inspired this composition?)

[brawltogethernow]

I don’t think you’ve ever done a masterpost on this so: after all these years, what keeps us coming back to the original Yu-Gi-Oh? What does it do better than any other series?

Huh. Well, I'm not qualified to do a masterpost, because I've only watched the first two spinoffs. (So like, idk, 600 episodes of anime or something, lol.) Early Zexal was just unwatchable (TO ME) beyond the grace afforded by being part of a franchise I like, and none of the newer stuff I've sampled one or two episodes of has grabbed me. Like, they look fine, I'm mildly interested in the Christmas-haired kid, but.

Broadly, though... Like the biggest thing working against the spinoffs' ability to get a foothold in the zeitgeist is they're anime originals. The Duel Monsters anime can be kind of messy, but the mess is resting on the bedrock of a story that has a relatively coherent artistic vision because it was created by a single person. If you dig into the flaws of the anime series that are their own source material there IS nothing solid underneath, and the whole thing comes apart in your hands like wet sand.

They get manga adaptations, but all the ones I've sampled have been slop - uncanny xerox of a xerox of a xerox situations that don't even have the same casts/characterization/storylines/worldbuilding as the shows they're based on, which are already playing fast and loose with being based on a show that was playing fast and loose with being based on a manga. Like I don't know who that material is for. It seems to have just been released for the sake of being released.

Second problem is the card game.

Now, I don't think being a toy advertisement prevents a show from being a good story. Transformers exists. And I disagree with the idea that there's, like, a forbidden better version of the Yu-Gi-Oh manga that Takahashi would have written if the card game hadn't become an international phenomenon. I think he leveraged the structure provided by focusing in on a single game instead of inventing a new one every week extremely well. Because the early manga's monster of the week structure was based on associating each game with a unique antagonist, both of which then never return, fleshing out Magic and Wizards (lol) dovetailed nicely with the series shifting to focusing on having an arc plot with a structure. M&W's associated antagonist of the week was Kaiba, and keeping it focal let Takahashi flesh him out into the engaging, iconic recurring antihero we know and love (who maintains a shockingly solid foothold in pop culture for a 30-year-old side character). The card game focus has cons but on average uplifted the Yu-Gi-Oh manga.

But Takahashi never forgot that the story was not ABOUT the card game. It was a horror series with a quirky alternate take on the battle manga structure that juxtaposed gratuitous violence with uncringeing schlock about the power of devoted friendships, heavily flavored by Takahashi's interests in 90's alt fashion, Egyptian archaeology, and clowns. The spinoffs have already almost completely dropped all of these things by GX, which makes them by comparison pretty aesthetically sauceless, and also just - confused.

(The horror elements injected a huge amount of flavor into the DM anime even while being toned down, but the spinoffs comparatively avoid visiting that well even though they get instantly more interesting whenever they do.)

Like. Okay. There's a huge post going around where someone asks what Yugi's hair is supposed to be and someone else immediately answers "IT'S VISUAL KEI," but the Yu-Gi-Oh spinoffs are clear evidence that this confusion isn't limited to the Anglosphere. Mutou Yuugi's hair looks like that because he did a cheap bleach job on the bangs that makes them fall into kind of shitty, greasy fried curls that he keeps pushing behind his ear on his left side, and he spikes up the rest, which is undyed black with highlights represented by "light black is purple" artistic license, also demonstrated elsewhere in Takahashi's art style like on the Black Magician card - and also being possessed makes his hair stand up and wave around, but that's only represented in the bangs because the rest is already as up as it can go. Suspension of disbelief is demanded as early as chapter 1 when his grandfather's hair also looks like that, but that's still what the style is.

What is Yuma's hair? What's up with Yusei's orange zigzag? What is YUSAKU'S doing?? Like the entire concept for all of those was clearly "design Yu-Gi-Oh protagonist hair✌" without any concept of what that means or why the series' look was like that in the first place. And I'm digging into this because it's a microcosm of how the premises and plotlines and designs and setting logic are developed.

Again, it's a xerox of a xerox of a xerox. Takahashi's manga built out his premise on the card game, but the spinoff shows have this idea that the premise IS the card game, which obstructs their using the card game to tell actual stories.

I LIKE the game, but it does not MATTER. It is interchangeable to the structure of Yu-Gi-Oh with any other less marketable game. And the deader Kaiba gets in the spinoff timeline(s?) the less coherent and meaningful it becomes to have it be this rote assumption that all of society hinges on it.

Meanwhile none of the spinoffs except like half an episode of GX have ever used Yu-Gi-Oh DM's UNIQUE, DYNAMIC, FLESHED OUT MAGIC SYSTEM THAT ACTUALLY DROVE ITS PLOT. Like this is good for me because if the eighth (8th) (EIGHTH) Yu-Gi-Oh spinoff was dropping retcons about the Millennium Items that would be a very special kind of hell, but it definitely doesn't do the shows any favors.

I don't really understand why they all develop new magic systems. I'm not even sure if every single show has one, but the ones I've sampled are just really...muddled? And they don't build on each other - are the newer shows actually supposed to all be set in different universes that are just incidentally all obsessed with slightly different reskins of the same trading card game?

The sci-fi worldbuilding also seems to be getting more and more elaborate to degrees that don't seem to cohere or contribute to anything. Like we're back to the "Kaiba's enormous influence on the franchise" topic - in the original manga, there's futuristic technology straightforwardly because Seto Kaiba is insane. They have holograms because Kaiba got his brain exploded by dark magic, A to B progression. Why are the worlds in the spinoff shows like that?

They're all SO weird and have So Much Premise. 5Ds was an entire cyberpunk dystopia and just didn't have a plan to unpack all that. GX had two evil cults and an apocalypse and past lives and space aliens and alternate dimensions and an overlaid spirit world and brainwashing and darkness magic and alternate personalities and possession and ghosts and vampires and time travel AND the original series' lore was still evidently canon and most of these things had nothing to do with each other and that's all WITHOUT getting into the base premise of Card Game School, like please just pick something and focus on executing it thoroughly. SINCERE question, are any of them actually good at their own premise?

Their character designs, I have to designate a separate paragraph to note, are to the last absolutely catastrophic. Even the original show's filler had problems working within Takahashi's design language, honestly, like, it's fascinating. Is the entire problem genuinely that he was drawing actual clothes and hair but so heavily stylized that people only try to copy the stylization. Like what makes it weird is you don't really look at any of Takahashi's designs and go "ah yes, this is appealing, this is skillful design work, people will like this," so you wouldn't think that some drift away from his aesthetic sense would be the end of the world, yet there's absolutely some super palpable element of sincerity missing from attempts to draw Takahashi's style without Takahashi. It's empty - it's all exaggeration that's not exaggerating anything.

Like again I haven't watched everything so it's entirely possible that Go Rush parries every single one of these issues and I just haven't heard about it. And I would love to hear about it! If that is the case! But yeah my impression is

no elements of the premise of Yu-Gi-Oh remain in the spinoffs

they are not very good at executing whatever they are actually about

There's plenty of fun stuff to salvage out of all of it but. Generally. It all seems pretty incoherent. Og Yu-Gi-Oh was never actually hard to conceptualize it was just extremely weird.

This completely talked around the question "what keeps us coming back to the original Yu-Gi-Oh" jdfksj it's SINCERE it's UNIQUE and if you start with a filtered down adaptation and catch a glimmer of something in it that speaks to you it UNFOLDS LIKE AN INTRICATE PUZZLE BOX when you pursue that glimmer backwards to the source material, which is inevitably stranger and rawer and cooler and grosser than you imagined. RIP Takahashi I owe a large chunk of my personal sensibilities to you.

[kiyomitakada]

So. Any interesting Implications in how Ryuk just assumes English is Earth’s most popular language?

AAAAAAAAAAAAA (clutches head) AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA (this is a very good question thank you)

i actually never thought to question that it might not be the most popular language in 2003 until now and now that i'm looking it up i get a bunch of conflicting sources?? it's either english or mandarin chinese. i kind of assumed ryuk was just correct in-universe because he's been observing the human world for so long but the idea that he might be biased is actually really fascinating. he doesn't ever mention dropping the death note before but he does say that death notes have made it to the human world a few times. is he censoring his previous experiences from light or has he just heard other shinigami talk about it before. hmmmm.

anyway i Am insane about the fact that the instructions are written in english as a symbolic thing in general. light specifically says 'geez, it's all in english. what a pain…' about this. our introduction to a-kira is him getting a bad grade on an english exam and telling ryuk to translate the rules for him. the rules are generally themed around 4s (unlucky in japan) but light's fake rule is 13 days (unlucky in the western sphere). light's name is literally an english word. the death note is labeled DEATH NOTE in english but the word note is taken from japanese because it'd be 'notebook' otherwise?? though maybe that's just for snappiness. i don't have many coherent thoughts about it but i would love to read analysis from someone who does, i feel like death note evokes culture clash in so many small fascinating ways

[chuthulhu]

You wanna accept Case Closed as a valid translation. You wanna accept Case Closed as a valid translation sooo bad

(❤️🧡💛 Happy Pride! Commissioned @bumbleboa 💚💙💜)

Oh my god I LOVE Sera and her queer little socks, thank you <3! I’ve been staring at this for like a month and I still love it but i’m still not accepting Case Closed

[artistfingers]

#yourbed

#mybed

[scintillyyy]

Been meaning to ask for a while, your ranking for all the 90s Bat-events? (You can put the wider DCU ones like Underworld Unleashed in a different category if you want)

i am so sorry for the extremely delayed response BUT i kept getting sidetracked by real life. i'll go big bat-focused events only and only go up through M/F for my own sanity in answering.

#1 is NML hands down even with the more conservative copaganda present therein. it is the absolute peak of everything 90s events have been working towards and it's big and exciting and amazing and i love it.

#2 is prodigal because deep down i am a prodigal girly above all else

#3 is probably cataclysm for me. there's a lot of haunting stuff in there and gotham getting wrecked by an earthquake is the kind of comic book world shattering event i love to read about for drama

#4 is M/F because of the absolute drama of did bruce kill someone and the absolute drama and fallout and conflict it causes

#5 is legacy because i love it and i love a little bit of fun blorbo woobification and tim imagining himself dying dramatically during his wedding to his high school girlfriend hits that campy and fun woobification i adore. and all the motherhen-ing.

#6 is contagion because how can i Not enjoy tim initially getting the plague and the only reason its not higher is because it's too short for me. tim should have been dying for at least 10 issues, draw it out.

#6 is knightsend because i'm a sucker for bruce coming back and teaming with dick and tim

#7 is knightfall because bruce going on a gauntlet and spiraling may be iconic but it was also the first event and story-wise i think it could have been a lot tighter. it's the first and it shows narratively

#8 is knightquest because while i enjoy azbat going crazy and choking tim out in the cave and bruce searching the world for jack there's a lot of other things going on re shondra that i just can't rate it particularly high

#9 is officer down. it's short. and boring. and ultimately i don't care that much about bullock or gordon

i think those are the main ones through M/F. i don't have it in me to rate all the littler crossover event things they did

[the-fallen-blue]

DC 👀 Whichever you feel like ranting about

#2 a compelling argument for why your fave would never top or bottom:

None of my DC faves have dicks in canon, so they will never top, because that phrasing refers strictly to whose dick is going where. Yes I will die on this hill but I'm taking you all down with me

But no seriously let's go with #9 worst part of canon, because I've been thinking about it since that retcon poll. And it struck me that, as much as a lot of those retcons aimed at fixing wildly sexist or racist shit were good, I didn't find them, idk, gripping? Like, sure, you can show us a New Version of the founding of the Justice League and make a point of the fact that Diana is a full member and not a secretary. But you can also just... ignore those comics. No one reading modern Justice League comics is assuming Diana was ever a secretary, and if you show them a Golden Age JLA comic they'll go "lol wow sexism was wild huh" not "oh gosh I need to update my understanding of canon." And newer stuff, like erasing the inane infanticidal rapist Amazons thing, may be necessary, but are also, thankfully, kind of inevitable. Nostalgia and popularity are the two driving forces of comics, and both the old and the popular Amazons are good guys.

So I think I'm going to go with Babs is Batgirl. Because it's up there with stuff like rapist amazons as the worst shit modern DC has done, but also even worse than that because we can't fucking solve it. You can't just casually write Babs as Oracle in a Batgirl book until everyone forgets that she was Batgirl; a code name change is a major event, a behavior change on that level is a major event, a physical injury on that scale is a major event, it completely changes the plot and vibe. It requires a retcon. And we're not going to get a retcon because nostalgia and popularity are overwhelmingly stacked against us. We're just fucked. We lost one of the best characters in comics because a bunch of old white men are sexist, ableist, and exceedingly stupid, and unlike most of their sexist abelist and stupid mistakes, we have little hope of ever seeing it fixed. Devastating and enraging and I will hold a grudge about it on my deathbed.

[birdmenmarxist]

Gosho Boys OT4 🙈 Also ShinCelty x anyone else

hiii mirror thanks for the askkk low key I misread when I first saw the ask and I was like detective boys ot4?? never thought of them that way but yeah before haibara they were definitely 4... anyways gosho boys ot4!!

sorryyyy I don't really have that many thoughts re:hakuba or kaito so I don't have much in the way of opinions here... I wouldn't say color me intrigued because I've definitely seen gosho boys content before. I also don't actively dislike it either!!! I think they have really great comedy potential together hence I can make it so stupid, largely BECAUSE they're compatible brands of freaks. 3 detectives 1 thief is an inherently funny combo you have to admit. why doesn't the detective majority just eat the thief? are they stupid?

but at the same time I don't really enjoy the fated enemies trope that much either!! idk I don't think it's that serious to them LOL... but on second thought perhaps they do enable the worst in each other? actually yes for sure let me go back and mark that LMAOOO... They're all convincing each other that their autistic detectivisms are literally normal and ordinary and I do it too and let's impersonate this suspect and see what happens or trespass as a group activity or or or

shincelty x anyone else... you intrigue me mirror. I will take this chance to talk about shincelty x shizuo. Shizushincelty:

this was not an organic thought I had on my own (and hence color me intrigued! by both the idea of shizushincelty but also at mirror for asking) but one introduced to me by one of my drrrmutuals who shared their beautiful thoughts about the chemistry that the three of them might have. a different drrrmutual had also spoken at length about the possibility of Shinra having a crush on Shizuo instead of Celty if he hadn't met her! but crucially both of these treatises were missing crucial point of "Okay but under what circumstance could this actually happen" but fear not. I have the one (1) circumstance

I like it in very specific scenarios that exist inside my head only: the One Scenario is shizuo getting evicted from his apartment and, with nowhere to go, and not wanting to face either his parents or his brother as a disappointment yet again, he goes to his two non-judgemental, relatively well-off friends Celty and Shinra and asks to crash at their place until he can get his shit together again.

From here you just have to boil the frog for all 3 of them until the thought of shizuo moving out becomes unthinkable. it could happen naturally with time but we can always expedite this process by letting shinra get kidnapped or something. whatever! I'm not too finicky about the details but I just don't know that I could accept shizushincelty under any other circumstance. it just feels like something huge about the status quo needs to change for it to work and if shizuo doesn't somehow move in I just don't know how this thang could work

In a relationship. not sure what kind but they're in one: this is the CRUCIAL secret sauce that makes this scenario tick. because I think whatever shizuo has going on with celty and shinra can never be labeled as romantic or else it would be vetoed by Shinra (sorry, I only have space for one lover in my life and that's Celty <- knows about polyamory but chooses not to participate) and Celty (what?! you can't do that!! <- concept of polyamory alien and unsettling to her) they literally HAVE to secret third thing about it it's the only way out could possibly work. and I think that works especially well especially considering Shizuo's own personal arc about feeling like he can't love people without things ending badly and so on, as well as with the complexities of being loved so much by Saika...

They ARE compatible brands of freaks and they ARE sweet. and outside of #myScenario I do think I really enjoy just thinking about them hanging out sillystyle and like idk. doing each others nails and everything

thank you for the ask mirror!!