Got Any Fives?

note: I (the owner of this blog and maker of wheels) am not into warrior cats! I just thought this would be fun to make

is STILL creating wolf art TO THIS DAY. TEN YEARS LATER. proof that the world is beautiful. her username is wolfroad! you can find her art right here, and here are a few of her more recent pieces that I absolutely adore:

This means that if you're in transformative fandom, "canon vs fanon" isn't a binary, but a spectrum.

YGO is an interesting case because there's a zillion canons to pull from, all of which both reinforce and contradict each other constantly. Also, much of the fandom has been kicking around for 20+ years, mixing and matching at will; the horse is out of the gate, and trying to enforce strict delineation between anime/manga/spinoff films/filler/dub/sub/etc on the entire fandom is a lost cause. I think that's actually even more of a reason to add in some nuance and work off a spectrum, because in a canon this (I say lovingly) convoluted, there's some real value in being able to broaden your evaluation tools past "canon vs. non-canon" and figure out which bits of 'fanon' might actually trace back somewhere.

Here's the rubric I tend to work off:

"Honda Hiroto attends Domino High School" - this is stated canon. It is a declared fact in-story, and there are no conflicts across any Yu-Gi-Oh! medias.

"Honda is loyal and conscientious" - this is directly conveyed canon. Honda is demonstrably loyal to Jounouchi and later to Yuugi. Honda carries and looks after people when they're incapacitated. Honda makes sure people aren't left behind: he advocates for the Kaiba brothers in Duelist Kingdom despite his personal distaste, and he checks up on Bakura more than anyone else. This is a major character trait and you're clearly meant to get this out of the source.

"Honda is interested in machinery" - this can be reasonably inferred from canon. Honda rides a motorcycle, is frequently associated with mechanical imagery in the context of Duel Monsters, and is seen in DSOD repairing Jounouchi's duel disk. It's not the major focus of his character, but it's still a straight line you can draw from canon.

"Honda really fucking likes cantaloupes" - this is esoteric canon. It is mentioned Once in capsule monsters, and literally never again. This could easily be confused for fanon, but...it is indisputably canon. to something.

"Honda would become a mechanic post-canon" - this is grounded fanon. Despite his interests, Honda never actually mentions wanting to be a mechanic. While he does mention that he's expected to work at his father's factory post-graduation, he's clearly not thrilled about it. Because the series ends before we see what he actually chooses, there's nothing directly supporting or contradicting this fanon; but it also doesn't come out of absolutely nowhere.

"Honda has asthma" - this is ungrounded fanon. I give Honda asthma in my personal headcanons because I have asthma, and I love Honda and relate to him and want to project my shitty lungs onto him. There is absolutely nothing in canon to suggest this. If you wanted, you could argue with me and tell me that this is a ridiculous headcanon. It would be unnecessarily confrontational, but you'd be correct. And if I were to go around telling people they were stupid for not making Honda asthmatic, I'd be both unnecessarily confrontational and wrong.

For anyone who's not familiar with this particular bit of esoterica, it appears ONLY in one panel of the English manga translation, and absolutely nowhere else (that I know of):

It is, unquestionably, canon to something - the English-language manga. It is very, very likely a mistranslation or at least something that wasn't given a lot of thought. But it's there, it was published, it's never been refuted in any other piece of canon.

So the question isn't really "is it canon," but "how seriously do we take 'esoteric canon."

Someone absolutely is not wrong, or making things up, if they write Honda as a melon lover or Yuugi as a diabetic. They're working off published canon. HOWEVER, both Honda's melon obsession and Yuugi's supposed diabetes are one-offs that have absolutely no impact on the story before or after they're mentioned. We never see Yuugi have to make any concessions to being diabetic. Even if it wasn't a mistranslation and was 100% Takahashi's intention, it's still kind of a random one-off. So if someone chooses to ignore Yuugi's diabetes, they're also not wrong.

Hathaway’s Odysseus

Reject modernity

Tell me how to destroy the depths of these mechanisms.

All humanity can't live on Earth together.

If I don't do something, there'll be no consolation for Char's rebellion, or those who died with it.

As long as there are exceptions to the rules, people will try to commit injustice."

In terms of what to do about this:

Begging folks to: 1: Start taking memes seriously, look at where the New Lingo you're getting is coming from online because the answer is almost always either:

Appropriated AAVE, which also serves the far-right agenda in multiple ways. Participating in Digital Blackface and the active destruction of different facets of Black cultural tradition (queer spaces do this SO MUCH. SO MUCH of "gay people talk" is bastardized AAVE and that causes serious harm and erasure of history which is inexplicably linked with histories of resilience and joy and culture making in the face of oppression and enslavement. We owe much of our ability to track what gamergaters are doing At All to the work of Black feminists who paid attention to how the far right started to mimic and impersonate Black women online to seed controversies designed to discredit feminist movements, but I digress (barely))

or

Far right memes designed to push the overton window on acceptable behaviour and things to say more firmly into their wheelhouse. This is something far right governments are both aware of and actively engaging with.

All those Virgin v Chad comics; the incredibly ableist lobotomy reaction images; the resurgence of the R slur; the push of tradwife content and Girl Math and such all either originates back in those cesspits or has been firmly weaponized.

2: Continue to educate yourselves on game development and call for systemic change at shareholder levels. Get loud and write in proper complaints about racist and sexist and ableist design choices. Call for crediting and fair pay for everyone who worked on games, including contracted staff on the other side of the world who provided art assets or quality assurance.

Video games are increasingly recognized world over as one of the most profitable and effective modern shapers of culture. A truly obscene amount of money is constantly changing hands, and where development studios are allowed to form at all impacts what stories are told.

A lot of gamedevs want better than this, but we need audience support and participation. There's huge efforts to unionize the industry - but the same underlying problems are at play in organizing too. Devs, not just white devs in the global north, all over the world need support. Unionization won't fix underlying culture issues, and there's also a lot of people who have no interest in even starting to address those. Please support the Game Devs of Colour expo, look at indie titles, check out independent games journalism efforts who are able to call out the links between the mainstream industry and the numerous active war machines.

Sorry for the huge add-on but as a developer myself I have followed along with this from the start and kept abreast of how the situation has continued to metastasize and develop. It's genuinely so important to talk to kids and young people about this history that's still in motion and provide education on what to look out for, especially if you know any who come from conservative homes. Many of the kids are NOT alright, and they're getting swept up across the world into states of profound alienation and taught to view anyone different than them as less than human.