YUGA YUGA YUGA i'm so normal i'm the NORMALEST abotu yuga ohdo. He makes me insane. He makes me explode. Thank GOD he exists and I can talk about him.

Why I like them/why I don’t

Honestly, when I first starting watching Sevens, way back when the first few episodes of the sub were airing before I dropped off for years… I didn't care much for Sevens, and I didn't care much for Yuga! I couldn't get much into the premise! I liked this dystopian setting I was introduced to where everything about duels was being controlled, but it just felt like not enough was being…done with it, to hold my attention. Also, I didn't have any exposure to Rush era fans back then, anyone I was seeing talking about it was talking about not liking it so far… I dipped fast.

Then, I was exposed to people who liked the Rush era, and people who were actively watching Yugiohs for the first time, and I missed watching a Yugioh for the first time, because it had been years. So, I gave Sevens another shot. By this time, the dub was long done, so I watched the dub since I had easier access to it. And my opinions switched fast. My favorite character at first became my least favorite, and Yuga soared to the top. I'm not sure exactly when it happened for me… I just remember, by the time the tournament arc arrived, I was rooting for a Yuga-Nail-Roa teamup, and cheered when I got it.

So, what do I like about Yuga?

What don't I? He's a guy who cares so much about his invention and just wants everyone to have fun with it. Yet, he's continuously a bystander in his own story, other people advancing things where he doesn't have that vision to the point where he gets called out on it multiple times. He constantly forgets that he has supporters and friends at his back, and tries to take on everything himself. He punishes himself for things that aren't his fault. He always knows what's going on…to the point where everyone expects he has the solution to have problem. He was willing to blow up a corporate office because there was a ladybug in it. I am obsessed with this guy. I could probably list things I like about him all day. He's my emotional support blorbo. I need to stare at him like I need air. Speaking of staring at him--

What I like about their appearance

He looks just like Roxel Kingdom Hearts for real and that's what immediately drew me to his appearance. Whoever on the Yugioh team decided to bring the Akuroku fankid to life as a Yugioh protag is my hero. I have a tendency to love characters wearing red jackets (hi jaden) too… And, I really like his shirt in Sevens. The little design on it. Cute. The red button up shirt in Go Rush? Very queer of him. Perfect little bean.

Do I prefer their dub names or original names?

I prefer Ohdo over Oudo for a last name! I just like the h, idk.

OTP

As a Rush era multishipper, this is a hard question for me… if I only had to pick one guy to ship Yuga with? Probably Roa.

My rarepair heart really loves Yuga/Yuuga (Ohdo/Goha) though… Yugasquaredshipping my beloved…

NOTP

Yuga/Yuna makes me sick to my stomach. Literally. Can't stand this.

OT3

Yuga/Roa/Nail!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am obssessed with this trio. YNR!!!!!!!!!!

Favourite card they use

Oh, man, this is a tough one… I'm really obssessed with Sevens Road Charm Witch, but technically, Yuga doesn't play that. I really like Sevens Fear Magician, he's really cool. The fusion between Dragias and Sevens Road Magician is also really good, but Sevens Fear Magician is a REALLY cool name. I prefer Sevens Road Witch's design over Magician, though.

Favourite moment they were in

Okay I have two. One for Sevens, one for Go Rush. And these are gonna be extremely predictable.

Sevens is the Yuga Goha arc. Specifically, Yuga VS Yuga. I like both the sub and dub interpretations of how the duel started; I recently sat down and watched them both and compared/contrasted them. In the sub, they just both know each other well enough to know what the other is up to, and Ohdo's threatening to destroy dueling for good if Goha doesn't duel him. In the dub, Ohdo calls Goha to him, and Ohdo threatens to destroy Goha's duel account if Goha doesn't duel him. There's a lot going on in both these interpretations of these two that I love. I'm absolutely feral about this scene. Ohdo dueling to the point of literal collapse.

Go Rush is the second Yuga VS Yuhi duel. Everything leading up to it, bringing Yuga to be the villain trying to stop Yudias and Yuhi… it's INSANE. You can really see that the Yuga VS Yuga duel, the whole Yuga Goha situation in general, really traumatized him. His friends forgot completely about him, and Yuga Ohdo already sees himself as someone who isn't important, who is expendable, willing to give up his own identity for the chance to change this history/future. And that's just the damage we saw in the show, it's really heavily implied if not outright stated that Yuga Goha was wreaking havoc with Monster Reborn before Yuo sealed his memories and turned him into Swirls. Yuga takes complete responsibility for the Yuga Goha situation (in the sub, after the Yuo VS Yuga Goha duel, asking himself "What have I done…?"), is clearly holding himself accountable even years after the fact in his POV, and is willing to do anything to atone. I was waiting since season two of Sevens for a Yuga Ohdo Villain Arc, and I loved this. Yuga putting fixing his own mistakes over the possibility of bringing back an entire extinct alien race. Like, I side with Yudias on this one, even though it came out that Monster Reborn can't help him after all, but I empathize with Yuga heavily. Also, I'm a real sucker for the hero/protag turned villain scenario.

Least favourite moment

Any moment where Yuna's trying to force a crush onto Yuga, especially the baby episode. I hate the baby episode with a passion.

Would I fuck, marry or kill them

Marry. I would never kill my boy. My emotional support blorbo. The light of my life.

WAH THANK YOU apologies this took ten thousand years to get to..late june/july is always busy for my art fightin' ass

ANYWAY IVE BEEN HMMING AND PONDERING OVER THIS FOR A WHILE and like. i think the tricky thing with yuya is that, well, i don't think the WRITERS even fully had a grasp on what they wanted to go for with him in the later seasons (and/or what they wanted to do with arc-v's themes. and the plot. and the all of it lmao) so it really is a bit of a 'there's multiple reads you can have on this character and while not all of 'em are right, not all of 'em are probably wrong either'; the narrative frankly doesn't have a strong enough backbone for like the entire second half to put full conviction into one definite read. Great news for guys who like to think way too much about yugioh characters!! Less great news for "trying to actually grasp wtf the actual honest to god true intent of the writing was" 🥴

All that on the table and now aside, let's talk about the little unwell tomato of the hour. First I do think it's a bit misleading to say Yuya's especially repressed, per say--there's an element of unconscious ignoring/avoidance to repression, and let's be real this kid is certainly not ignoring his negative emotions. The negative emotions are beating his ass. He is spending half the series having catastrophic emotional meltdowns and veering directly into sobs and explosive rage outbursts and feeling Bad almost constantly. I think with him it's more an instance of him having just an absolute pisspoor handling on his emotional regulation... because yeah his parents have been giving him terrible self-help advice for years </3

I don't think theyve necessarily told him he's not allowed to be sad/get angry/express negative emotions--instead it's more of a case where (with Yusho especially) Yuya's being told if he DOES feel sad or upset, then that needs to be met with a smile in order to truly push past it and to feel better, i.e. if you fake the laughter then it will become genuine laughter and youll be a-ok and HAPPY!! YAY HAPPY ^_^ (yusho you cant fucking say that to your coughing baby who's also a hydrogen bomb!!!! oh god!!!!)

arc-v is Very into this idea of illustration emotions as through the metaphor of a pendulum (huh wonder why) especially like.... 'when you're crying, laugh instead, and that will swing your emotions back around again into positive ones' and 'if you're courageous and confident and push through feeling upset, that courage will swing back and turn into happiness.' which is like... IT'S ALMOST SOMETHING. THEYRE ALMOST SAYING SOMETHING MEANINGFUL. BUT YUYA IS SUCH A BAD MAIN CHARACTER TO EMBODY THIS THEMATIC CONCEPT. he's neurotic and kind of not particularly brave and wretchedly insecure and again his emotional regulation is complete dogwater and he's not a very good, confident duelist (or showman even) and so on and so forth. And the problem I think is as you get into season 2 and 3 the stakes keep getting higher and urgent but Yuya doesn't really like.... Grow very much in those aforementioned areas. They just start piling more and more insane shit on him and then it's not just his dad telling him to smile more but also like half the rest of the cast and the narrative itself BUT THERE NEVER GETS TO BE A MOMENT WHERE LIKE. THAT MANTRA FEELS EARNED, FOR YUYA. The writers reeeeally really want him to be this embodiment of laughter and always swinging back around to smile in the face of adversity but most of the moments we see them trying to make Yuya out to be this in the show, where his dueling brings smiles to everyone and ends classism and makes the bad guys nice immediately, they just feel kind of....fake. ive mentioned before how the end of arc-v feels like a fake tumblr post but alongside that a lot of season 2/3's writing for yuya feels like the exaggerated parody of steven universe that su critical blogs in 2015 were convincing themselves existed. and don't get me wrong it's fucking hysterical, I think it's hilarious yuya fixed arc-v aster in like two duels and now he's not an authoritarian child soldier anymore, but we do have to also Be So Serious.

sorry i just needed to post CHILL OUT ON THE GLOOM AND DOOM :/ again. this aster definitely has killed people but it's fine yuya fixed him. he's fine.

IMO It's hard to get a grasp on/understand Yuya's character in the later half of the series cuz yuya's character is so weighed down with these big idealistic themes the show didn't actually put any work towards getting him on a narratively satisfying track to fulfill them. He spends like 2/3s of season two literally locked in rooms astral projecting every so often like COME ON. and season 3 much like a lot of arc-v ALMOST GETS THERE. ALMOST SAYS SOMETHING, WITH YURI AND WITH ZARC. What happens when someone's happiness comes about from pain and violence? What happens when a smile is full of malice? That could be such a cool opportunity to explore the pitfalls of the pendulum emotion metaphor the show sets up, how that can be twisted into something harmful, but. well. that's not what we got huh :,)

anyway all that to say i think yuya's a sweet kid who has such a genuinely big heart and is a really interesting character, but it's almost this sort of key feature of his that he's really not a terribly happy person despite the smiley emoji-shaped hole the show's plot tries to jam him into (and cuz of that there's just so much dissonance in that that makes his whole deal kind of murky when all is said and done.) he's really a character that just has nonstop shit Happening to him whether he wants it to or not and it's kind of insane how little agency he has for like... So Much of the Show. He's made into a mouthpiece for Smile Away Da Pain and like.... for what? [arc-v spoilers if it matters] at the end of the series the other three yuboys are effectively dead and soul-absorbed and don't come back and it's like. you cant Smile World that loss away, arc-v. yknow?

Well, first, I think the scanlation is very wrong about how they chose to phrase what Shoji is saying. What Shoji says is this:

ヒーローはまずっ入院患者や関係者の安全確保に動いたそうだがっ

Heroes moved to first ensure the safety of the patients and other people involved.

Makes him sound less inane that he thinks the rioters have resources/authority/ability to evacuate the hospital.

So I think more like, he’s asking if the rioters have even considered the safety of the people in the hospital they’re trying to raid; considered the safety of these innocent bystanders that have nothing to do with the heteromorph’s grudges and making sure they’re not caught up in the crossfire.

In which case, fair enough, he has a point. Nothing looks worse than uninvolved innocents being harmed, and the implication is that if the heteromorphs care so much about a better society and the well-being of everyone, they should’ve considered the safety of the most innocent of innocents there is: sick people in a hospital, which are places long thought to be sanctuaries from outside chaos and grudges.

It’s the classic gotcha.

I hope so dearly that this argument of Shoji’s is quickly shut down. Because, as other people have pointed out, why keep a known high-value target at a hospital in the middle of a war? It’s a terrible strategic choice if the Heroes’ intent is to minimize the amount of damage and civilian causalities. It’s not as if they weren’t expecting the attack - they posted 200 Heroes and police there despite their supposed low numbers already being stretched thin between like five other places. Knowing Kurogiri would be targeted by Villains sent by AFO and so prepared to counter this, they still left him in the middle of a hospital full of civilians? That’s at best criminally incompetent and at worse intentionally malicious.

But also: the question immediately takes attention away from the very legitimate grievances of the heteromorph rioters. Hate crimes and a long history of discrimination and harm upon a minority population? Never mind that, you guys are just as bad for endangering the littlest cancer patients that the Heroes knowingly placed in the middle of a potential battlefield, if not worse. Like I said, a classic gotcha.

I really hope PLF Speech Guy can refute and retort well.

I came upon this post last year. It's such a great read with some mindblowing arguments. I loved it even back then, still I was adamant about it not being the case. Now after so long and with all the latest developments surrounding Mikasa, but specially chapter 131, I couldn't help but go back to this post. This writeup is why I ever considered the possibility of mikasa being the one to kill eren even if I didn't like it and I had to acknowledge this finally.

No matter I like it or not, whether it happens or not, there is no denying that it is written so well.

Most importantly they also explained so early on and so accurately why eren asked mikasa that question in chapter 123.

"It’s entirely possible that Eren had made up his own mind at this point, that he was already going to commit to the plan, but the reason Mikasa believes this to be the critical juncture where the path split off is because what Eren is asking here. He’s asking her specifically, do you love me as a person? or do you love me out of obligation? The one person who loves him as a person, Eren is having doubts and is trying to reconfirm his humanity in the face of everything he is about to throw away to become a devil."