Duel, Standby!

Mai x Ishizu

this one’s just for you <3

I think the question of intent is really interesting in the discussion of canon. With any media, of course, but most especially with yugioh; not only is there the question of five zillion often-contradicting canons, but also there's a well-known narrative around YGO's publication. Takahashi was railroaded into making the manga about Duel Monsters, even though his original intention was to use plenty of different games. Takahashi was pressured into giving Kaiba a larger role because of his breakout popularity. Takahashi was very ill while writing the Memory World arc and didn't get to include everything, or tell the story as coherently as he wanted to.

This is a worthwhile conversation to have and there are many fascinating ideas to be mined from it, and I also think there's an inherent danger in assuming what Takahashi did want and basing our understanding of canon from that. A couple of examples:

Takahashi himself stated, in one of the manga forewords, "Until then, I had intended for the manga to continue in a one-shot format, however, I was running out of ideas, and I gave thought to trying out a larger story arc. That is why I tried to construct a story with the card game being the focus." That doesn't sound, to me, like "I desperately wanted to keep doing one-shot games and was cruelly forced to pivot to Duel Monsters." So do we take Takahashi at his word for what he actually said in his own words - that he was running out of ideas and glad to pivot? Or do we cling to the narrative that he was "forced" because it gives legitimacy to a different sandbox many of us clearly want to play in?        

Takahashi has also stated that he deeply regrets not being able to give Set and Kisara's story the space it deserved: "The story arc that was cut from my manga was the part about Kisara and Priest Seto and even now, I still have a lingering regret about that. As the readers would suspect, not only was it the story of the connection between modern-day Seto Kaiba and his Blue-Eyes White Dragon, it was also a very important part of the story." I think it's worth asking ourselves why so much speculative energy is spent on "what could have been" when it comes to exploring the horror themes of the early manga, or even characters like Bakura; but it's considered a rare and niche form of fandom to speculate on Kisara and think about her importance to Seto and overall role in the story. Even when we have the creator right there saying 'there's more to this, this was very important to me and to the story, I regret this, I wanted to tell you more about it.'     

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.

The original line: