"Any card—so long as it exists—has a power that is needed."

rhodanum:

sherlockhate:

Problems In My Faves series. Here goes. 

1. Yugioh is allergic to women. No, really. There’s always a girl there to be best female friend, and a few to be hot/evil, and that’s it. There’s no female Atem, no female Kaiba, no female main cast. And this is really discouraging. 

I never hated Tea/Anzu like some of the other fans, but I identified most with Atem. I wanted to be him - his ability to be brave and charismatic really inspired me, because I was bullied like Yugi but I didn’t have anyone to rescue me out of it. I had to do it myself. And Atem was there. 

Women are people too, and we too deal with our own personal balance of good and evil inside of us. We too feel loneliness and darkness inside of us, and it’d be nice to have a female Atem for once, instead of ANOTHER guy. Yugioh was what got me into writing and made me want to do this. It’s not a fun feeling when it tells me that I don’t really fit in. 

2. Depiction of foreign people. Now, this is Japan, and they’re not too good with foreign people. But their Chinese characters, their American characters - they’re all very stereotyped. It’d be nice if they could fix that too.

3. Queerbaiting. Seriously. Every series you can bring up legitimate proof that everyone is involved with everyone. You can’t go “everyone’s in love with Atem” and not run into problems. Same with GX, 5Ds and Zexal (especially Zexal and it’s like six-some.) Just because the protagonist treats everyone the same, does’t mean it isn’t queerbaiting. 

4. This is a personal want, not a problem. I would like to see them deal with more mature themes. Not dark stuff like 5Ds poverty themes. Dealing with life, death, existence, good and evil and all the gray areas, mercy - all the stuff they talked about more in DM. I loved Oricalcos even if it screwed over all the characters because it made Atem face his own hubris and flaws and darkness. I would like to see more of that, although not the way GX did it because suddenly emo Jaden really put me off the series entirely.

And this was going so well too… up until the very end. Seriously, you could probably hear the record-screech inside my head. I’m almost asleep, so this post might not make much sense. TL:DR version: Tumblr user rhodanum wants to chew through metal when people take one of the best goddamn main characters in shounen anime and call him emo.

Long story short, I am damn tired of people judging GX’s themes and in particular Yuki Judai’s character development based on the dub (which I’m guessing is what you watched, due to what names you use). There simply is no basis for comparison. Apologies to the people who liked the dub, but that’s just how it is. One can’t just go around stripping all mentions of love and change them to friendship, for example, and expect everything else to stay the same, along with the underlying messages. 

There was no suddenly emo Jaden in the original version of GX. The way he ended up in the latter part of the series was very much a natural progression of everything he had to go through — all of his mistakes, selfish inclinations, naive perceptions and foolish decisions smashed head-on against some very cruel realities. Luck and personal strength and merely believing in ~nakama~ won’t necessarily save the day. In fact, they could well make everything go straight to hell, because when you believe that righteousness is on your side, you might not stop to actually think anything through. 

Yuki Judai is as much a deconstruction of typical male shounen hero narrative tropes in the second half as he seems to be a straight-faced example of them in the first part. It’s repeatedly pointed out in-universe that heroics without the proper responsibility/understanding of the world and power without maturity/temperance will only lead to disaster. Which it does, in spades. Now, I wonder, which character is the more believable one — the one who carries the burden of failing those who trusted him, along with that of likely tens of thousands of innocent lives and bounces back with little signs of trauma…. or the one who has to deal with everything from guilt, to shame, to self-loathing, to doubt, to avoidant, closed-off behavior, to depression… and still keep functioning on a basic level, because the world isn’t gonna go saving itself! Season 4 Judai exhibits the textbook traits of post-traumatic stress-disorder and, frankly, it drives me round the bend to have that be called emo (in fact, I’ d have that word outright kicked-out from character analysis if I could. It hardly helps anyone and it’s solely used a zero-effort pejorative nowadays).    

Will believing in yourself be enough? What happens when you get used to always getting the outcome you want, to the point where you can’t even conceive of fucking up when everything rests on your shoulders? And then, when everything is all ashes and utter, miserable failure, what do you do with yourself? How do you keep on existing, without your mind imploding under the weight of it all? And even with this, what of justice and mercy? What do you deserve and, conversely, what do those who have wronged you deserve, especially when they came to suffer and sacrifice so much because of you? These are all questions that GX asks, across its run. Sure, the writing can be very scattershot and it has pacing problems out the wazoo, but when it actually gets down to ripping apart all certainties and cauterizing characters right down to the bone in order to make them grow, it’s very earnest about the messages it tries to get across.

(via hai-hai-sictir-deactivated20170)