#mirrorfalls

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.