#yamiyugi

He thought he had the upper hand!

Atem: "So… someone still has to show me her amazing lioness skills." Martina: "Ah, right. True. Though I’m not sure you still deserve it…" Atem: "What do you mean I don’t deserve it?!" Martina: "Ahah, dork! I’m just messing with you!" Atem: "We’ll see who gets the last laugh, dork."

*I chose not to remake it in English, as I wanted to keep the original mood. **I know the scene reads quite fast — I had to find a balance between the pacing of the frames and the readability of the dialogue, so this was the best compromise for now.

I used “dork” on purpose for the translation of scemo. In Italian it sounds affectionate, playful, and lightly diminishing in exactly the way Martina treats Atem.

She does not put him on a pedestal. She doesn’t approach him with reverence, fear, or idealized distance — and that matters a lot. One of the things that makes Martina so important to him is precisely that she treats him like a person before anything else, at her same level. Not like a king. Not like a myth. Not like someone untouchable. Everyone else, in different ways, still carries some version of that distance with him — Yugi included, even if in a very different and loving form. Martina doesn’t. Her attachment to Atem doesn’t come from reverence, but from direct emotional recognition, from parity, from an almost instinctive sense of communion. And Atem is deeply drawn to that.

-------

It’s been a while since I posted anything here, but this project is not abandoned at all. Over the past few months I started several illustrations, but I left many of them unfinished or suspended for a while. Sometimes I sketch something quickly, and I keep it in that raw state instead of fully rendering it. That also happened with this GIF: it’s not meant to be a polished final piece, as it is my first attempt at making one.

I also know that, for anyone following this blog, the overall shape of the story may still be a bit unclear. At the beginning, my idea was to post more visual material first before giving it a proper structure. In the following posts, I’d like to put together a small conceptual guide / map with the key points of the story, just to make the project easier to follow.

In the meantime, I had to slow down a lot because I’ve started a hieroglyphs course. This is actually part of the project: I want to become more grounded when it comes to Atem, his language, and the historical side of his character. I want to be able to write at least the basics properly, and to build his Egyptian speech in a way that feels as believable as possible. Through Coptic-based reconstructions and other material, I’m also trying to note reconstructed readings whenever I can. The goal is to make the story richer, more coherent, and historically alive. In my version of the story, this eventually leads him toward Egyptology: the most meaningful contribution he can give to the world is helping clarify what is still obscure, distorted, or incomplete in the study of ancient Egypt.