#ygh.post

I had an eureka moment from staring at color wheels a while back, and it turns out Toei Seto and Yugi's color palettes are opposite, also known as complementary colors of each other. There's awareness of Seto's white-with-gold-trim uniform vs Domino High's standard blue uniform-with-black shading. But this contrast also applies to the hair and eyes.

Seto's neon green hair is meant to compare and contrast Yugi's purple magenta streaks.

In the anime, Yugi's eyes swap around the silver or purple zone, while Yami's eyes are more red or magenta to match his more brightly colored hair streaks.

That's why Seto's eyes swap between gold and orange.

These array of colors the animators swap around, can suggest that due to lack of commitment and consistency on eye colors. Staff members may have used their judgement viewing the color palettes as analogous, meaning 2 or more colors next to each other are used.

It also happens that the Toei anime and 2016 edition are biased to certain colors which reflect on differences in Seto's hair color.

The anime shows favor to the color green:

While in the 2016 official colored release of the manga, there seems to add a lot of brown tones to Takahashi's designs:

What's even more intriguing is, starting from chapter 41, the chapter focused on the affection compatibility device. The Yugis' are given classic purple-magenta gradient eyes, in the previous chapter Yami mind crushed Seto. This made it a reverse of the Toei anime, where Yugi and Yami changed eye colors in the manga, after Yami inflicted mind crush.

Grandpa Mutou still gets to keep his brown eyes, a reminder of those days.

To wrap this post up with a conclusion, it's apparent that staff behind the 2016 edition, and Toei staff have their own artistic visions that diverge from what fans of the series are familiar with. It's not necessarily about right or wrong but more about human behavior. These differences in interpretation are natural with so many variants of Takahashi's work.

I wanna pinch his face, he looks sooooo pikachu in this movie.

a perfect shocked pikachu face match

and this applies to the manga version of the movie too, since its mostly copied and pasted frames from the movie formatted and colored differently.

After taking a closer look at the screenshots and official toei designs released on their website

Been thinking about this scene for days now. The writing here has such a seamless transition to Yami Yugi facing Noah, for Seto and Mokuba and turned the focus to how they're both ghosts. This is Yami with his own thoughts and opinions about Noah's situation that he clearly resonates with!

going from the manga > toei anime > toei movie > d.sod

>gx bc I watched ep1 of dm w my pal and that was kind of rough so we decided to watch gx

> then for me, a bit of dm for Noah bc Toei references ✨️

to ocassionally circling back to dm to understand more references.

Its a good thing I watched Virtual World 2 before reading ygo r, so I can see more of what it took inspiration from.

One of the biggest expansions of the series is the introduction of the four game masters along with Seto Kaiba, to create build up and give the series a clear direction with the endpoint being at Monster World. This was a tradeoff in place of his backstory in the manga. It's an easier way to adapt the 51 chapter manga material into 20+ episodes.

I think it's completely fair for the series to not adapt Seto with the same complexity he has given how much more planning it would take. Personally I enjoy the references, and the unhinged addition of him having a grandpa who he keeps in a medical capsule and exploits, to parallel him with Yugi.

I Do think if the series wasn't meant to be so contained that the writers can do a really good job at writing Yami and Seto in more complex ways. But this is very tricky with one of the big themes in the series being Yami appearing to save the day and protect his friends. The series with it's monster of the week format treats the penalties Yami doles out as solutions. It would break the format really hard and require the main cast to confront Yami rather than have his actions be seen as more justified because he's doing it for his friends. As much as I think the series shines by showing the bonds and interactions between Yugi and his friends, it does flatten the moral complexity with its treatment of shadow games.

That Makes So Much Sense.