#remixboot

[kintatsujo]

Twas gonna do more art first but I feel like talking about this remixboot nonsense now

Okay so for those of you who weren’t here the last time I talked about the remixboot, which was last AU August, firstly here’s the tag

#Yugioh Remixboot

And now I’m gonna talk about this self-indulgent school play storyline, with the understanding that EVERYTHING about the Remixboot is self-indulgent and also that it’s got a lot more focus on High School Shenanigans because these are a bunch of dumb teenagers and engaging them in dumbass School Rumble comedy makes me laugh

The setup here is that basically, post Duelist Kingdom we’re settling into a couple of breather arcs; Rebecca and Arthur show up but it’s mostly because Arthur was visiting because he’d understood Grandpa Motou’s coma during Duelist Kingdom as a health emergency at first, Duke is introduced and however that goes down gets sorted (I haven’t fully decided, see).  Joey is shown getting into contact with his mother about Serenity’s surgery, which I think deserves its own moment to breathe.

and most important big difference, the Big 5 haven’t challenged Seto to any kind of game because instead they skedaddled the moment Pegasus lost to Yugi rather than find out if Seto was going to call on Gozaburo’s yakuza or mafia contacts

(Incidentally and perhaps also important to this time period: Yugi became a majority shareholder of I2′s stocks when he became King of Games, which he’s very flustered about at first until Grandpa points out he can hire someone to worry about that for him and also that now he can pay to renovate Kame Games.  Yugi starts treating Joey to lunch a lot more often.)

Anyway, the school play thing has to do with something about Tea that I feel could have come up if only canon had cared about this kind of stuff: She strikes me as the kind of person who is in WAY too many school clubs, and she especially strikes me as someone who’d be interested in drama club.  

So Tea’s drama club is getting ready to put on the play for the season, and it’s got basically the same plot as the in-universe game from the first VR arc; two kingdoms have to send sacrifices to appease an evil dragon and some plucky local heroes have decided to put an end to it.

And Tea goes “Hey I have an idea” (and her club members go “Oh no”)

cut to Tea sliding into the seat in front of Seto Kaiba, doing a Kilroy face over his mahou shojou manga very serious book, and asking if he’d consider helping with the special effects in this play the drama club’s putting on. 

Now remixboot!Seto is ALSO in way too many clubs so when he says no she basically enlists the chess club and half the soccer team into convincing him, but what gets Seto to finally agree to it is when she points out that the hoity-toity school always one-ups Domino’s plays because their drama club naturally has better funding and she’s tired of it; Seto used to GO to the hoity-toity school and he hates all of them and runs on spite so he can’t resist the idea after that.

I forgot originally it was going to specifically that Kaoruko was going to be ranting about the other school showing them up so I guess she’s in drama club too lol

And then obviously like half the core cast gets roped into either acting or stage crew and it’s all very silly, and at some point they find out Seto can not only act but sing and somehow he gets a major role even though Tea had promised he just had to manage the Solid Vision because he got swept up in the challenge of it all, and a fistfight breaks out over Adina’s role at one point

But after the first performance Seto goes missing somewhere between the last bow and cleanup.

The thing is, whoever it was the Big 5 hired to drug him and spirit him off in the dark and noise of the post play haze had assumed nobody would notice he was missing until it was too late; they had intel on how he interacted with peers like Sigfried or his old classmates at Kagemaru High school and so had an inkling that he’s inclined to fade into the background when he’s not outright contentious with people his own age.

They hadn’t counted on Yugi and Ryou and the others giving a damn about him anyway.  They definitely hadn’t counted on how seriously the drama club would take their special effects hero and one of their lead actors going missing.  And maybe for the same reasons Gozaburo underestimated him, they hadn’t expected Mokuba to be on their trail as damn fast as he is.

And that’s how the VR World storyline starts in the remixboot.

[kintatsujo]

Seto’s soccer team in the remixboot is just like........ one OC with seven to ten bodies and they are utterly enamored with him but also they think of him as “The Quiet One Except When He Somehow(?!!) Got Our Old Coach Fired For Being An Asshole And Also He’s More Prepared For Injuries Than The School Nurse”

They have like no idea he’s famous until later and they also think Roland is his Actual Father until eventually being corrected, although they’re also not actually wrong for like multiple reasons, including that Roland is actually Seto’s legal guardian after Gozaburo’s (legal) death in the remixboot because he finagled the role away from Leichter in the confusion 

[kintatsujo]

So the plot of the play itself in the remixboot is cribbed heavily from the plot of the in universe game of the original VR three parter with some of the twists that the cast introduced, particularly one of the characters switching places with Princess Adina in order to save both her and the other sacrifice, who in the context of the play is both that character's older brother and also the prince of the neighboring kingdom (mostly so I can put Seto in fancy clothes since he's playing the character that takes the role he had in the three parter, confusing I know)

#Yugioh Remixboot

previous post

Post where for better or for worse I talked about some of the female students because it’s relevant here

This also marks the moment in the remixboot where I finally said "fuck it, OCs for filling out the cast" because I needed a Senpai to be head of the drama club and didn't feel anyone filled out that role to my satisfaction, so here he is, your new husband and probably something like the fifth new "dad" Seto picks up in the remixboot, Kenji Shindou:

I say that he's Seto's fifth new "dad" because as I noted in the previous post Seto goes from managing the special effects to actually having a major acting role and he ends up changing the ending of the play because he figured out Seto was upset by the "little brother takes a hit for big brother" plot point much, much worse than he was letting on and Kenji is a fucking softie

So that's why there's a tacked on full party Phoenix Down scene at the end of the play

(he's very dramatic about it but not where Seto can see him; he's got this whole monologue to himself about how the play's ending is supposed to be beautifully bittersweet but he can't be going around making his kids upset like that, he's not an ASSHOLE he's in drama club because it's supposed to be FUN)

(and that btw is why I said he's husband material)(also he probably wrote this play himself so he’s also a romantic let’s be real)

Also keep in mind this play is being put on less than a month after Duelist Kingdom and Seto is still Tender From Feelings of Every Sort (The remixboot IS the AU where he ends up crying in Ryou’s arms during Duelist Kingdom after all, it’s self indulgent as fuck, let my baby feel soft emotions) so THAT’S a big influence on things

Anyway the drama club has a lot of gals with Type A personalities and then Kenji up there, so he’s very much a cool-tempered emotionally mature sort of guy who’s Very Used To Dealing With Shit

So when the fist fight breaks out over who plays as Adina he’s just like “stop stop stop stop stop this is MY decision” and starts firmly handing out roles like “okay Kaoruko YOU’RE the Lovely Gladiator (originally Mai’s role), Maria YOU’RE Princess Adina, Tea you’ll be playing”

And then it turns out Tea is playing Seto’s sibling because Maria and Tea could ALMOST believably be mistaken for each other 

Keeping in mind Tea still hasn’t apologized to Seto for yelling at him that he was heartless and inhuman when oops he’d been trying to save Mokuba the entire time during Duelist Kingdom and they’d sort of always been frenemies at best before then

And so there’s THAT.  And again it’s very silly but also emotionally wrought and she kind of has to figure out how to apologize to Seto in a way that he doesn’t just go “hnf, whatever” (which is absolutely how he responds) but also she thinks it’s Very Silly that she’s spending the whole play calling him “Elder Brother” when actually she’s older than him 

Also meanwhile Joey builds pretty much the entire half of the set that isn’t getting glossed over with Solid Vision and since Serenity and their mom are preparing for her surgery Serenity ends up coming to watch the play because “Well yeah Joey I get that you’re not acting but you Helped” 

(I haven’t fully decided who plays the other hero roles but my favorites are Ryou and Duke, just because)

Which is how Serenity ends up coming along with the main crew and also most of the drama club and probably the soccer team when Seto goes missing (and the drama club partly comes along because Kenji, when he realizes one of his leads is missing, is like “Listen I want to make SURE he’s okay and also look I didn’t get to tell him he did a good job out there” because Kenji is a SWEETIE don’t look at me)

(....Look the soccer team comes along because Seto plays soccer in this AU and they’re crazy about him because he keeps dadding them even though he’s the youngest person on the team, I swear I’m not going to actually bloat the actual set of characters that go into the VR World by this much, but also I have this entertaining mental image of Seto’s soccer buddies storming some hidden KaibaCorp bunker that the Big 5 had set this all up in)

This post is more than long enough at this point so I’ll go into VR World next time, which might be as early as later tonight but I don’t know yet.

[kintatsujo]

So buckle in for a mo bc I had a thought involving my Unified Seto Kaiba Reincarnation Theory, which is sufficiently connected to my “How Souls Work In Yugioh Theory” that I need to explain it a bit in order to share:

Basically the relevant part of the “How Souls Work In Yugioh Theory” goes like this:

Your Ka and Ba are both organs in one spiritual body

Ba is sort of like hitpoints while your Ka is effectively like a Dark Materials Daemon

There’s more to it than that (because I dug up the other parts of the soul listed in ancient Egyptian mythology once and have this really complete chart that includes one’s shadow and one’s name) but this is what you need to understand the Unified Seto Kaiba Reincarnation Theory.

The Unified Seto Kaiba Reincarnation Theory is this:

Kisara is explained as someone whose Ba and Ka are one thing; IE she’s effectively casting from hitpoints whenever she uses the Blue-Eyes’ power.

Kisara replaces Seth’s Ka.  He now has his own original Ba, his hitpoints, and Kisara has become his Ka, his Dark Materials Daemon.

Seto Kaiba is a reincarnation of that fusion.  Seto Kaiba is both Kisara and Seth’s reincarnation, hence why his mystical past memories are kind of confused and also part of why he so instinctively rejects the idea that he’s the reincarnation of Seth until he sees him after the fusion has taken place in Memory World.

This theory is muddied by the anime deciding to make Seth look even more like Seto somewhat but let’s be real Yugioh is a confused mess and I can run with my headcanons if I want.

Here’s the thought I had that made me decide I had to explain all this nonsense;

Seto tears the fourth Blue Eyes in half, right?  And on the surface that’s sort of difficult to reconcile in a Watsonian sense (in a Doylist sense it’s just that KT wasn’t thinking that far ahead and just wanted to write him as a jerk)

Except... BEWD is explicitly an unusually powerful Ka, in universe.  And according to the Unified Seto Kaiba Reincarnation Theory, Seto Kaiba is her current incarnation.  

What do the God Cards do about the extra cards made of them?  They don’t even like the originals being made; it’s implied from this that making a card of a Ka is something like sealing some part of it.  You’re not necessarily hurting the monster the card is attached to if you hurt the card, you may actually be releasing it.

So like, maybe the real reason Seto tears the fourth BEWD in half is because that card existing when he can’t use it is like binding one of his own limbs? 

Like he can’t explain why it drives him so nuts but it does so he tears it in half effectively to relieve some kind of soul itch.

And maybe people whose Ka are represented by more common cards don’t feel it to the same degree because the effect is dulled somewhat, and their mystical connection to their Dark Materials Daemon living in the other world is less strong because they’re not attached to the whole Shadow Games and Millennium Items stuff as strongly as Seto is.

But for someone with an unusually strong Ka, who’s directly attached to all the mystic shit, it’s like fire on the brain.

I would have an image of me standing in front of a bulletin board full of pictures connected by string here but I have other stuff to draw today

[kintatsujo]

Which on that note do ppl wanna hear more about the drama club and the play or more about what happens next first

[kintatsujo]

Also if I do the beauty contest storyline in the remixboot (I probably will) the girls get so wound up with dealing with the girls they see as serious rivals that everyone is completely blindsided when Joey wins

One of the girls is like "but he's a GUY" and whoever is in charge is just like "it doesn't say he can't enter in the rules"

Yugi and Téa actually coached him through it because he needed the prize money to get a new bike for his delivery job

[kintatsujo]

phoenixsoul13 said: omg, yes yes yes! (especially yes more Serenity please, I love it. :D)

SHe’s muh GURL

phoenixsoul13 said: “Roland is actually Seto’s legal guardian” YES

Like I have a whole lot I could say about this but it mostly boils down to “Roland’s his real dad anyway so why not”

queen-of-carven-stone said: I am so here for Seto’s soccer team being enamoured with him!!! Everyone should be enamoured with Seto!!!!!!!

>=D YOSH

[kintatsujo]

This was supposed to be a fucking warm-up lmao

So for the remixboot I’m adding a vest based on the blazer and three sweater variants to the Domino High girl’s uniform so everybody’s got more gdamn options

because the boys are apparently allowed to wear whatever they want under their uniform jacket as long as it’s a solid black or white (or it’s UNDER a solid black or white; looking at you, Yugi) and the fact that the girls don’t even wear different socks always bothered the hell out of me.

LOOK AT HOW MUCH MORE PERSONALITY YOU GET OUT OF THIS >=/

Maria and Joy are based on Kokurano’s “attendants” from the early manga fortune telling storyline; Maria’s actually in the chess club with Seto and Joy is her best friend so they both show up about as regularly as the cheerleaders would be doing.  

Moko is my “fat fangirl” redesign if you’re new here; Midori and Tomoyo were suggested names for the other two cheerleaders way back when I was doing the Ladies and Gents Role Swap for I think the first AU August.  Moko has resting bitch face and I aggressively love her.

Kaoroku was the antagonist of the week in the rather infamous episode of Season 0 that most people remember because Joey wore a dress in it.  She would also be semi-regular the same way as the cheerleaders, largely because I think she’s cute and as previously noted I love alpha bitches XD

And then Mayumi showed up in the Season 0 version of the storyline Miho is originally from; she had a crush on Joey and was the one giving HIM the puzzle letter!  I gave her a slight redesign because she looked a little generic and her hair was like, dark mutagen green.  SHE’D be a semi-regular more in the way MIHO would be in the remixboot because I’ve decided Miho and Mayumi are both friends with Tea.

Anyway long post over, I gotta go eat some poptarts and do the art this was supposed to be a warmup for

#Yugioh Remixboot

#AU August