Lady Sparklefists Watches Yu-Gi-Oh! • Episode 104, part 2: instead of card games, more...

Episode 104, part 2: instead of card games, more trauma!

(part 1 is here, assist ~~a queer disabled student~~ your friendly neighbourhood Yu-Gi-Oh! recapper here or here!)

While Jounouchi and Mr Lawyer are getting ready to duel, where are our other intrepid duelists?

This screencap literally looks like a talented but inexperienced teenager’s fanart, there’s just something really posed about the whole thing, and Yugi’s really obvious expression and the “ugh what even are hands” vibe and Yugi’s hair being really flat but their faces being hyper-highlighted and of course the fluffy shippitude of it all, I’d be delighted if someone still in the copy-the-anime-style phase of their drawing career drew this.

Like when I say the animation style is inconsistent, I don’t just mean, sometimes it’s good and sometimes its bad, I mean, damn did they even have character models? Did they refer to them? Did they get given WILDLY different deadlines for different episodes? We swerve wildly from highly detailed and quite “grown-up”, to hilariously off-model, to almost chibified, to very shiny and simplified, to lumpy and misshapen. I know, different lead animators, but damn, did they ever even talk to each other?

Ahem, anyway, after giving Anzu his jacket in some Smooth Chivalric Moves (he is wearing a lot more clothes than she is), a visibly ass-freezing-off Yugi expresses his concerns: while he’s sure that Jounouchi and Kaiba will be able to take care of themselves…

Anzu: What about Otogi?

Yugi: What ABOUT Otogi?

Anzu: Aren’t you worried about him too?

Anzu: … well what about Mokuba, then?

Yugi: Who?

Dancing freezily through the icy expanse in fantastically inappropriate clothes, they discuss the chances that one of their friends will be evicted from their mortal form to make way for a top-tier coporate executive, and come to the conclusion…

#lolburn

Elsewhere, at this very moment, Honda violently sneezes. The someone-talking-about-you sneeze apparently in proportion with how severely they’re roasting your total incompetence cause it nearly blows his head off. Shizuka is concerned but Otogi isn’t impressed

hOW DArE

Honda correctly divines that he is simply being talked about, which, I dunno people, like its a cartoon and also other character have powers that literally allow them to read minds and see the future and shit, but it still kind of freaks me out that he Knows? Maybe BECAUSE other characters have those powers, so magic is definitely real in-universe, so maybe gossip really DOES cause sneezes and Honda really CAN tell…

Anyway then Yugi and Anzu comment that Shizuka may not even know the rules of dueling (Duel Rules™) and then Shizuka sneezes and…

#lols4days

Then shit gets weird and Honda says if he’s so contagious he’s going to give all his lurgy to Otogi and like, fuckin, violently rubs himself all over him

…

MOVING TO A DIFFERENT AREA OF THE FOREST as swiftly as possible, Kaiba is being aggressively Kaibaish

I fucking love how quick he is to dismiss the Virtual World as ~ridiculous~. It’s his. He did it! As we’re about to find out.

You see, Noah admits that the whole Big Five dueling everyone for their vengeance/bodysnatching is just ~~a thin and hackneyed plot hastily assembled by the writers to facilitate the required number of merchanise-friendly card games per episode~~ a front for what he really cares about…

heh. “””man”””

Noah decides it’s time for some more Fun Family Trauma Time, so he gives the Kaiba brothers another door, this one leading to Gozaburo’s office…

These are the faces of the Kaiba brothers on seeing Gozaburo behind his desk. Remember, this can’t be a surprise; this is like the third memory they’ve been in so far with Gozaburo. They get this horrified EVERY TIME they see him.

This memory involves a young Seto – two whole years before he stages his coup and takes the company – furious with Gozaburo for misusing the Virtual Reality system tiny!Seto designed

nice outfit nerd

It’s to Seto enormous credit (a) that he keeps standing up to Gozaburo, in his characteristically dramatic and demanding way, despite Gozaburo’s cruel and authoritarian “parenting” style and (b) that the reason he’s kicking up such a fuss is because he can’t conscience his inventions being used to kill people

tall!Seto becomes very angry and uncomfortable watching this particular scene, I would go so far as to say upset

he doesn’t turn away from it, but as Gozaburo lays out his violent intentions, and tiny!Seto vehemently objects, tall!Seto - who obviously remembers this exchange and knows what’s coming - actually winces and bites his lip

It’s a strangely intimate signal of distress, nothing like his snarls and growls when things aren’t going his way in a duel. He watches tiny!Seto get dragged out of the office by Gozaburo’s goons and I imagine, by tall!Seto’s reaction, that tiny!Seto is punished severely for his rebellion and I want to be outraged but instead I am COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY DISTRACTED BY…

… these guys’s haircuts like WOW holy SHIT you’ve got your absolutely classic triangle-quiff of course but also the CAT-EARED MULLET?? bold move, sir

I figure this had to be a reasonably common argument between idealistic baby genius Seto and the war profiteer who adopted him, but apparently this specific exchange was a significant one…

I had noticed that he was calling Gozaburo “otōsan” throughout the exchange (rather clumsily translated in the subtitles as “dad”, which seems a bit informal for “otōsan”, which I think seems more like “father”, but whatever, he stopped doing it from then on, apparently, so it probably won’t come up again!)

Ditched back into the forest after yet another traumatic memory, Seto self-soothes by indulging in one of his most favourite activities