#yuugi mutou

[specialsummon]

"Please! Get a critical, Yuugi!" ["There is no time to think. Everyone's lives are at stake! Launch the dice!"]

[lysimachias]

Can I hear you ramble or character study Yugi and or dm(dark magician) not many people I see talk about 'them' specifically and I enjoy your rambles about the fandom.

Oh, this is such a fun ask, thank you!! So I do have to caveat with one thing: I know little to nothing about Dark Magician/Mahaad, and I struggle mightily with Yuugi lol. So I think the way I'm going to answer this is not "Here's my authoritative take on Yuugi" but "here's the things I've learned (or tried to) while writing him."

I'm referring here to my massive LOZ crossover fic, in which Yuugi is one of 9 main POV characters. I work very hard at rotating equally among the POVs and making sure each of the main characters gets their share of airtime. Functionally, this means I've had to confront characters I'm terrified of writing (Yuugi, Jounouchi, Link, Ganondorf), sit down, tough it out, and learn things the hard way over 4 years & 500k words.

So, without further ado, here are some of the struggles in which Yuugi and I have somehow managed to broker peace terms together:

Yuugi is a sweet, kind, loyal, gentle, caring, adorable cinnamon roll. This is inarguable and is a vital part of his character.

Yuugi is fearful, anxious, obsessive, and can sometimes be petty and jealous. These are also inarguable and vital parts of his character.

The cinnamon roll and the anxious fearful obsessive CANNOT CANCEL EACH OTHER OUT. They MUST coexist, and the coexistence is constant tension. It's absolutely fucking nervewracking to write, and writing Yuugi for four years has made me respect Takahashi-sensei even more than I already did; because he made it look effortless, and tricked me into thinking writing Yuugi would be easy.

I think the most interesting thing for me to navigate has been Yuugi's worldview. I read some meta ages ago pointing out that Yuugi seems to struggle with nuance and can be very black-and-white (I can't remember who - if you wrote this, my eternal gratitude for your wisdom, please lmk so I can link the post!!) Like, Good things are Good, Bad things are Bad. When he extends forgiveness to villain-type characters, he's absolutely exercising empathy - which all traces back to the core idea that "everyone deserves a chance, no matter what they've done." But you don't often see him engage directly with questions, especially structural, about why people have done those things. Why is Malik the way he is? Why does Bakura do strange and terrifying things that put himself and the group in danger? Why did the Thief King have so much anger towards Atem - did he maybe have a good reason?

So there's a bit of naiveté there, of course, but also a heaping dose of self-protective "I Do Not See It." A lot of Yuugi's personality does seem to come back to protecting himself. (Which makes so much sense given how much he was bullied growing up!) He gets codependent with people (and, uh, spirits) that he perceives as able to protect him. He struggles deeply with opening up and expressing his needs. He will do INSANELY self-sacrificing things rather than risk anyone leaving him.

The last Yuugi bit that took me AGES to figure out, but has been so rewarding and fascinating to wrestle with: Yuugi's anger.

Remember that for the early parts of YGO, Atem did not know he was not Yuugi. No one knew that, of course, but least of all Atem. He obviously was imposing his own sense of justice into how he doled out his punishments and penalty games; but you do also see him applying very modern, suspiciously Japanese-high-school-boy reasoning to the targets and process of his penalty games. And, notably, when Yuugi "wakes up" and sees that he's set someone on fire, he...does not always react with the horror you might expect.

So is Atem really applying his own knowledge, personality, and cultural context to how he handles situations early on? Or is he borrowing from Yuugi, and perhaps...sensing Yuugi's deeply-buried anger as something to act on? Or some confusing mixture of both?

And then of course, all that leads to the major question: does Yuugi acting in ways that are angry and self-protective mitigate the surface of those actions, which are often so gentle and kind and forgiving? How much anger and self-protectiveness are lurking, and how much is just his genuinely compassionate and justice-oriented nature?

I actually tend towards thinking that this all makes Yuugi even braver and even kinder; because he does scary things despite being scared, he does kind things even when he's insecure and anxious, he tries to be fair and just even when he's angry, he tries to understand even when he can't quite get there due to some combo of naiveté and struggling with nuance. It all coalesces into such a touching and deeply admirable portrait of a person that many of us can relate to on a very personal level, and maybe gives us a bit more grace and understanding towards ourselves.

Of course, I'm very open to different perspectives and disagreement with all of this - again, I don't claim to be any sort of Yuugi Expert, this is just where I've arrived with him after (A LOT OF) trial and error. I'm picking up on parts of the character that resonate with me, and very likely missing important things that resonate with other people. What do we think, OP, Yuugi nation? What have I missed?

[specialsummon]

"T-The ceiling!" "Master!"

[specialsummon]

"Come, adventurers! The entrance to the castle is open." "Good! Here we go!" "Players enter the Zorc Castle area. Open, area!"

[kaybluedy]

How

How is it possible

That Jonouchi’s hair… is harder to draw… then freakin YUUGI’S

Yuugis is so easy but Joey noooooooooo sir-e, thats not happening, forget it, he never looks like Joey when I try to draw him

[specialsummon]

"Be careful. Zorc has probably prepared traps." "Agreed. We'll be cautious, Poki." "Don't worry! No matter what traps we encounter, we have Yuugi with us, a friend we can trust!" "It's true, Poki." "A friend we can trust." ["Heh, but will you really avoid the traps? That's where your skills will fail, Yuugi."] "The drawbridge is lowering!"

[macibacsi-bb]

After processing and trying to understand the essence of Yuugi's grief, I realized that his nearly indescribable pain could be compared to... well, a fucking miscarriage.

Because how do you get over such an incredible phenomenon as sharing your body with something that isn't exactly a living creature, but is definitely something that exists? An incipient soul. Yuugi's body assembled the scattered soul fragments from the Millennium Puzzle pieces and created a complete soul. And then he let it live inside him. He let it grow inside him. He let it affect him and form a bond with him, until they became so deeply intertwined that it was hard to tell where Yuugi ended and where Atem began.

In some ways, pregnancy is similar. You almost literally grow together with your baby. You give them a name (Other Me), you talk to them, you care for them, and at some point, your brain becomes so radically rewired that you don't want to live without them anymore. You can't imagine a life without them. You're ready to do anything for them. Because you and the soul growing inside you have become one, and if you don't give them what they need, you begin to wither too.

Yuugi had no choice. Perhaps there could have been another way, but that would only have been self-deception. Despite his age, Yuugi was already wise enough at 17 to let go of what had to be let go, because the soul he believed was living inside him was already a dead soul.

So Atem was ripped out of Yuugi, leaving behind a hole, a wound, a void in his place that someone might try to fill with something else: hobbies, fanaticism, or the laughter of other loved ones, etc.

But you can never, ever forget the future you'd imagined with that soul, and in the end, a part of you dies with it.

[specialsummon]

"That is-" "-Zorc's castle!" "Zorc's castle... the hiding place of the Sovereign of Darkness, the Demon King Zorc!" "Good! We can finally enter! Are you all ready?!" "Yes!"