#sparklefists watches ygo

[pharaohsparklefists]

Episode 118, part 1: we are SO CLOSE to being finished with this duel. SO CLOSE YOU GUYS.

(Have you ever wanted to help a pregnant woman, but for some reason, wanted your assistance to be related to popular shonen anime series Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters for some reason? Then today is your LUCKY DAY!!)

Although it initially does not appear that this duel will ever be over...

Do the writers really think giant unreasonable LP gap is so fucking fascinating, I mean come on?? How outrageous, giant, unreasonable are we talking, I hear you ask?

I appreciate the title card providing furigana over the romaji in case someone had gotten to episode 118 and didn’t know what LP stood for. Raifupointo, obviously. Japanese and English’s blatant mutual incompatibility continues to amuse me.

Anyway!

Noah made a ~prophecy~ that Yami would lose this turn but Yami did not lose this turn - yay! - although nor did he fucking win and put us all out of our misery - boo! - and Noah is almost as exasperated that this Duel continues as I am!

Pictured: nerd trash talk. God bless.

In retaliation, Noah lithifies the robot monkey body Honda’s, idk, consciousness? soul?? is currently residing in, having already DIED once this arc. 

RIP in what could be a fine-grained andesite maybe? It’s almost like they didn’t actually pick a specific type of rock to be the rock that people’s bodies get magically turned into, FOR SOME REASON, which is bullshit. (If you agree it’s bullshit, read the Broken Earth trilogy by NK Jemisin. SHE knows how to pick specific types of rock for her magical horror.)

Jounouchi, understandably, lodges a complaint with the manager about the treatment he and his associates are undergoing in this digital hellscape and Noah is a tiny pointy obnoxious dick about it.

low blow, asshole

Then he’s like, there’s a simple solution to this problem, just bEaT mE In A cARd gaMe yUUGi and makes this face

(wow)

then screams “JUST TRY IT, YUGI” again, so he’s doing super great and definitely enjoying whatever the fuck it is that’s going on here.

Then this happens:

This is a hyper-realistic Monster. Not because it looks like the kind of thing that could exist in real life - it’s a freakish alien-eyed rabbit-creature with some kind of stomping missile - but because I can 100% imagine Pegasus picking at his Camembert and doodling it as a design.

Things look up when my best friend Dark Magician Girl shows up!

YESSSSS I LOVE YOU!!!

Also Yami makes The Most Relatable Face 

SAAAAAAME I LOVE YOU

It’s such a it’s-4am-and-I-regret-my-choices expression. I love it!

Noah targets Shizuka next, and Jounouchi tries to protect her, but she SHOVES HIM AWAY

BECAUSE SHE IS A FUCKING BADASS AND SHE NEVER GETS ENOUGH CREDIT FOR IT HONESTLY SHE IS WAY MORE USEFUL THAN OTOGI 

Jounouchi is distraught, understandably

T___T

although Anzu seems to be deliberately and poorly performing “oh no” by curling her fingers against her cheeks and opening her mouth, without actually expressing any emotion?

Desperate, Yami falls back on what he (presumably) enjoys most;

ENACTING DARK RITUALS

(Weird Christian Moms Who Try To Get Yu-Gi-Oh! Banned For Occult Content Honestly Might Have A Point, more at 11)

Dark Magician is BACK baybeeee and the Dream Team(tm) is back together!

AND SHE GIVES HIM A LIL SALUTE WITH HER STAFF AHHHH I LOVE THEM SO MUCH!!!!

#Yu-Gi-Oh! #sparklefists watches ygo #episode 118 #looks like this is gonna be a three-parter #yami yugi #yami #oh no I forget how I tag him #Noah #nerd herd #Hiroto Honda #robot honda #shizuka #Jounouchi Katsuya #Anzu Mazaki #dark magician girl #dark magician

[very-merry-sioux]

A Very Merry (Scandal|Pride)shipping Fanworks Rec

Part two of my response on a post yesterday (part one was Sealshipping: [X]). I think I’ll have better luck with these two ships because they’ve been popular ships for a long time, even before Mahad was introduced.

So, here’s me cracking my knuckles and starting.

Btw, there is a lot of works about Prideshipping in general, and with DSOD it multiplied. So as a challenge, I’m focusing on the ones that do not have smut of any kind. If there is, it’s just a teensy weensy amount.

I haven’t found much fics of Scandalshipping, usually the ones I find have some Prideshipping mixed in, which is why I combined it into one list.

In terms of art, there’s a lot of ‘em (for both ships), so I won’t focus on that much. You can easily search for them. Pixiv will be your friend.

Fanfiction

Stepping Stones by evexe-n (manatsuko) and rowanthestrange_yugihell - It’s a fic series that features both Scandalshipping and Prideshipping. It’s the kind of series you want to read when you want fluff and humor with just a few pinches of feels.

Not The End by Prismatic Bell (Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor) - A post-DSOD Prideshipping fic that is a must read after you watch the movie. Because yes. Yes. You will not only love Atem and Kaiba, but also Mokuba, Mahad, Mana, and all the characters except that one KC employee who insists on adding boobies on every game. Kaiba’s dry wit is one of my favorites here. Also, this story will punch you emotionally.

Smoke and Mirrors by FloaromaMeadow - So how about we take DSOD and make it even sadder. Bonus points for Kaiba making dead jokes and Atem not being amused.

Our Fairly Modest Just A Few Close Friends Ancient Egyptian Wedding by rowanthestrange_yugihell - A feel good post-DSOD Prideshipping fic. They get married and there is no explanation on how a bunch of Ancient Egyptians were able to stop being dead to attend a wedding, probably Kaiba’s sheer force of will in screwing the rules.

In the Shadow of the Pillars by zuzeca - I like the fact that Atem punches Kaiba in the gut. I also like how the writer tackled reincarnation here. It features more pairings besides Scandalshipping and Prideshipping but they all blend so well.

Stocks by TunaFax - Kaiba is canonically an asshole but we will never get tired of it because seeing written word of his assholery is a gift from the heavens. Here’s one more fic that showcases this. Plus points for making Yuugi a bit of an asshole too.

Getting Rivalzoned (And Learning To Live With It) by oogenesis (vriskacircuit) - The premise is unrequited Prideshipping and is 80% hilarious and 20% feels.

Sunday Get-Together by Deck Divination (astralpath) - AU in that Gozaburo is still alive and Kaiba is dating to spite him.

A Spirited Challenge by Sparklefists - A supernatural AU featuring Kaiba’s intense skepticism over the supernatural despite playing chess with a supernatural being several times.

Ma'at's Executioner by Iced Blood - Very Season Zero, probably more Season Zero than Season Zero itself, something rare in most YGO fics. A little OOC since this is post-Duelist Kingdom and this is the time Yami vowed not to be season zero. I still approve. It’s more platonic than romantic.

The Gambler's Debts by Iced Blood - Has a Season Zero feel to it. I love the conversation between Yami and Kaiba, it felt like reading a conversation between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice. Except this Hannibal is less violent (usually) and less cannibalistic, and the Clarice is more vicious. This is one of the fics where I approve of the “Call me Yami” trope because it gives an explanation that is wonderfully tied in canon. This is also platonic.

Comics

Sirius by S-FLAME, translation by @drummerdancerficsandpics - Post-DSOD doujinshi. Very lovely art.

Stay Gold by S-FLAME, translation by @drummerdancerficsandpics - Post-DSOD doujinshi again, continues to the last scene of the movie.

(drummerdancer has plenty of YGO doujinshi translations so check out their blog!)

Code to Kaiba’s Heart by voyagehour - All of their expressions are gold, Yuugi is a sweetheart and Atem is a petulant spiritchild.

There’s a short one that I liked but I can’t find it. :( Nevermind, I did, thanks @hiramiyugioh for making me remember!

You’re An M (lol in general there’re no titles in their comics so I’m just making ‘em up for this list) by purpuara - It’s hilarious.

The Gem That Is Hong Kong Subs, alternatively You’re An M part 2 by purpuara - A happy DOMA comic. Kind of.

Duel Again? by purpuara - Hello, DSOD feels.

Red String of Fate by purpuara - A short Scandal and Prideshipping comic about the red string myth.

Surprise~ by purpuara - In which Yuugi can be a little shit.

Don’t by purpuara - Scandalshipping sads.

A Great Read After “Don’t” ^^^ by  寒実  - More Scandalshipping sads.

My Prince by purpuara - Oh, wow look at all the Scandalshipping I’m finding.

Take It Off by purpuara - Scandal and Prideshipping feels.

Blogs!

There are a lot for Prideshipping, don’t know with Scandalshipping though. But usually a Prideshipper has a 50/50 chance of being a Scandalshipper too. So I’ll just put on the ones I frequently stalk like a creep check out during my spare time.

@aminotvxq - Has amazing art? In general? I am very envy of the anatomy, and the muscles.

@evexe-n - Has good fics that I discovered because of my DSOD craving. I stalk the blog for fics and fic discussions and hilarious ygo posts tbh

@yugihell - ^^^^^^^^^ see above. Also, your tags crack me up.

@prismatic-bell - I love your fic it still clenches my heart.

@emmyfais - Probably knows more places to Prideship to your heart’s galore.

@purpuara - Has the cutest Prideshipping comics, and occasionally makes one that breaks your heart. Likes Scandalshipping too! Has a lot of posts tagged as Prideshipping.

Have some posts

1

2

3

4

5

6

#ygo #prideshipping #scandalshipping #fic rec #this was tiring #i pulled most of this from memory #bookmarking is not a thing for me ok #i just started recently #for the sake of making these lists #that i keep on making #why do i do this

[ladysparklefists]

I'm finally watching the Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters sub, and I'm blogging about it here, cause I don't want to fill up my main blog with dorks with ridiculous hair. 

#sparklefists watches ygo #yu-gi-oh #yu-go-oh! #we'll see how this goes

[pharaohsparklefists]

Episode 117 part 1: I had forgotten I was in the middle of this interminable Noah duel oh my fucking god

To facilitate the retention of my sanity, I will be straight-up ignoring the actual card game. If you want to know what happens with the lifepoints and the Monsters and the drawing of the cards, please feel free to subject yourself to watching Episode 117 yourself. This is a suggestion, and by no means a recommendation.

SO! Yami is facing off against Noah, on behalf of the actual Kaiba brothers

Seems like one of those things would be more useful in a duel than the other, but who am I to judge? (I would have chosen to inherit Kaiba’s pride as a duelist and Mokuba’s Death-T willingness to straight-up murder but that’s just me and my desire to murder Noah.)

Yami adopts Kaiba’s orphaned cards into his own deck, while Noah just straight-up builds himself a new fucking deck explicitly designed to counter Yami’s, which is b u l l s h i t of the highest order thanks. I mean, SERIOUSLY at this point, it should just be a new duel!!!! He’s also scathing of Yami’s friendship-oriented deck-building technique.

Don’t worry, Noah, no power on the face of this Earth could make this fucking duel any slower.

But Yami isn’t worried!

gross.

(also do they share one heartbeat or? ... nvm) 

Oh, so Noah is kinda floating and semi-transparent such that he clips through his Deck Master (see above screencap) and his Deck Master on top of having so far FOUR Deck Master abilities, ALSO has a fucking ~Special Ability~

WELL SAID, MONKEY BOY

Noah decides to try some of the Casual Human Conversation he’s (presumably) heard so much about, and enquires politely after Yami’s reasons for throwing himself into this rubbish bin of a duel.

“Given that you literally kidnapped us because we’re allegedly Seto’s friends, why am I even fucking here if you think we’re enemies?”

But instead he says, confusingly;

“You’re right! We’re not what you said but a different thing!”

someone please go help these writers

I like the way Yami also doesn’t seem to be actually that sure about all this Ancient Egyptian Hocus Pocus that Isis is shilling. But he doesn’t care about it anyway, the more important thing is that he and Seto are both Duelists (tm) with a capital D and associated Duelist Pride, and therefore whatever mystical ancient sorcery binds their souls together across millennia takes a back seat to ... both of them play card games very intensely.

he said, wonkily. Where’s the bond between animators and character models at?

Worried that Noah might not be getting what he’s going for here, he keeps going for it.

Is this why we call it prideshipping? Also, is this healthy? I thought you were supposed to cardgame real hard for friendship and shit, not pride. That’s one of the 7 deadly sins, you know. Whatever. I love it.

Noah, presumably sincerely regretting attempting to have a Human Conversation, tries to get things back on track.

“It’s a bunch of janky overpowered bullshit is what it is, we all saw already.”

Card game turns ensue. I care not for them. Neither does Noah from the sounds of things.

why don’t you do us ALLLLL a favour then and just ... leave. Lemme tell you, this anime protagonist is not going to get less lucky.

Oh also, Noah has a bunch of OTHER janky bullshit cards and GUESS WHOSE FAULT THEY ARE?

Pegasus Card-Game-Bullshit J. When-Does-He-Ever-Have-Time-To-Run-A-Company-With-All-This-Jetsetting Crawford.

A couple of turns in, Yami pulls a card and his eyes widen and the “camera” “shakes” and the music cue is like DUN-DUN-DUNNNNNN because...

you PUT his cards in your deck how could this POSSIBLY be a shock good GRIEF boy

(support your local disabled queer pregnant YGO recapper or leave a tip!)

#Yu-Gi-Oh! #sparklefists watches ygo #episode 117 #yami yugi #Noah #nerd herd #seto kaiba #Mokuba

[pharaohsparklefists]

How about some Trauma Time~~? It’s part 2 of Episode 116, wherein so far, Noah has really pissed me off and Kaiba has...

Fallen down.

So Noah has a brainwashed Mokuba on his side and Yugi had reminded Kaiba that he, Yugi, got through to brainwashed!Jounouchi by reminding him VERBALLY of their bond, and suggests Kaiba does this. Kaiba mentally corrects this to “remind him of our bond ... with a card in this card game” and silently pulls cards for two full turns hoping to get a card that might remind Mokuba of their bond, but does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE to facilitate this process and is about to fucking lose and die. Yugi is a patient person who believes in letting people come to their own emotional growth, but apparently there’s a limit to the amount of card-game-related stubborn self-sabotage even he will put up with because he finally just yells at Mokuba himself...

“DOES THIS SEEM OKAY TO YOU???”

amazingly, this works way better than Kaiba’s strategy of Try Absolutely Nothing At All!!

“god can you imagine if his actual brother had even slightly tried to get through to him? this bullshit wouldn’t be working at all!”

But lo! Kaiba is back on familiar ground! Yugi is succeeding at something and that means Kaiba wants to oUTDO HIM! He finally, fucking FINALLY, starts using his mouth-words to make his feelings be on the outside instead of the inside so Mokuba might actually fucking become cognisant of them

WAS THAT SO HARD you poor traumatised disaster?

He remembers back to the day Mokuba sent him the trading cards - which he immediately dismisses as “trash” by the way in case you’d forgotten that lil tidbit! - and drew him a picture of the Blue Eyes White Dragon that he would someday own. possessively. and almost kill an old man for. but whatever.

</3 For all his brave talk and bitter stubbornness, Kaiba admits aloud here that he came very close to giving up, in the “hell” that was the Kaiba mansion under Gozaburo’s reign, and that it was Mokuba’s love and loyalty and questionable card design skills that kept him going.

Now that he’s started with the emotional unloading, it’s like ten years’ worth all come out at once.

This is such a touching and sweet and vulnerable expression and I really REALLY thought he was going to say “that someday we’d get through it together...” or “that I would always look out for you like you looked out for me...” or even “that as long as I had you I’d never give up...” or something but NOPE he says “that someday I would own the REAL Blue Eyes White Dragon AHAHAHA” like o.kay. buddy you are the emotional equivalent of a fire in a nuclear containment facility honestly sort your entire shit out.

THEN he says

oh honey. If there was ever a line that summed up “Seto Kaiba is a traumatised teenage boy play-acting his idea of an adult corporate executive” it would be this. “Which of these trading cards is the one that the most powerful adult would own?” is such a FUNDAMENTALLY flawed question! It’s like asking “which Spiderman lunchbox would mark me as the most grown-up person?” or “which teddybear really tells people I’m a serious, ruthless person?”. Nothing you buy or own makes you a “real man” or a grownup, and this particular thing is a genre of item that isn’t even associated with being an adult or a man or powerful! At least if you want to go down this ill-conceived route, go for fast cars or expensive watches.

And he doesn’t just say it, he really runs with it as a theme!

“Can anyone really deserve a trading card?”

He draws again, real last-chance high-stakes emotionally-vulnerable shit, you know how it is, and...

... he’s so nervous his eyes are closed and he cracks one open to squint at it!! So fucking cute!!

Did he draw the One Card he needed on the It All Comes Down To This Last Draw last draw? I’ll let you DRAW your own conclusions.

Okay so Noah has activated THREE Deck Master abilities and Kaiba FINALLY activates his and I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS. He literally says this, then says “Dimension Dragon counts as two sacrifices” then summons the Blue Eyes and idk if that IS Kaiser Sea Horse’s Deck Master Ability or if that’s just an ability of Dimension Dragon and anyway, colour me Very Underwhelmed compared to Noah’s fucking monstrosity-boat.

Kaiba does his very bestest Magical Girl / Marilyn Monroe Standing Over A Grate impression, and summons the -- you know what, you can figure it out.

Over the course of this rather weird emotionally open monologue from Kaiba, which culminates in this Duel Monsters move, Mokuba has been remembering his sealed memories, including...

Being really really fucking tiny apparently if that’s supposed to be the same exact Duel Monsters card sized drawing of Blue Eyes that he sends Seto, which it is otherwise identical to. Like what the fuck? 

If the width of that page is the width of a standard YGO card, 59 mm (no I didn’t know that off the top of my head) then Mokuba’s head and chest are about that wide at the widest and if we look at his whole body...

and those lines are ~6 cm, I’d estimate he’s less than 30 cm tall (11.8 inches, Americans), which is the length of a standard school ruler. A newborn baby is considered within the “normal” range if they’re 46 - 56 cm long/tall so Mokuba is depicted here as being slightly smaller than a premature newborn infant. So there’s your unsettling YGO calculations for the day.

Anyway pixie!Mokuba is also hallucinating WILDLY and imagines the dragon coming out of his drawing and flying off with Mokuba on her back...

which is just about as classic an escapist fantasy as they come. Seto - smiling, affectionate, big-brother Seto - materialises behind Mokuba on the dragon

and they fly off into the imaginary sunrise...

And real life (well, okay, not imaginary, present day, virtual reality) Mokuba comes fully back to himself with no or vague idea of what exactly the fuck.

Kaiba just has Emotions(tm) in a not very coherent manner, Jounouchi just screams at him to get away from Noah, and only our intrepid robotic monkey hero, Honda Hiroto, actually answers the fucking question!

However, the manner of delivery of this news CERTAINLY raises more questions than it answers for poor Mokuba.

#Yu-Gi-Oh! #sparklefists watches ygo #episode 116 #seto kaiba #Mokuba #Noah #nerd herd #yugi #Jounouchi Katsuya #Hiroto Honda

[pharaohsparklefists]

Episode 117, part 2: can you believe when I started this episode I thought it might be the end of this duel? 

(If you want to know what happened, approximately, in part 1, check out the recap. If you want to know what happened specifically, with the cards and the plays and the points and the duel, you will tragically have to watch the episode yourself because I am abstaining from Duel Details on this one.)

It is not the end of this duel...

But it IS the end of...

Noah’s fucking Deck Master’s fucking Deck Master Abilities, of which there are FIVE. There are FIVE Deck Master Abilities this fucking thing can do, and also when it’s in play on the field it has a separate Special Ability. Kaiba’s stupid Deck Master has ONE ability and it’s CRAP. The filler arc writers are embarrassingly bad at writing card games which is horrific because it’s like a solid 70% of their job. And they’re not that good at writing characters either. All the good shit in this arc is directly from the manga. All the additions and expansions are questionable at best. who’s looking forward to season 4 wheeee

As though to encourage me to keep watching, one of my best friends shows up!

Yesssssss this guy!!

But tragically not for long. womp womp. He does get a good attack off before he goes though, which Noah wants to speak to the manager about.

humiliation = getting hit for one attack in a duel against the literal King of Games who is literally the best person in the world at games generally and this game specifically. okay.

AU where this all takes place in real life bc Noah is not, nor ever has been, dead, but he has still gone mad from isolation, but it’s just because he’s awful and no one wants to spend any time with him because he’s somehow an even more insufferable and obnoxious child genius than Seto

Yami is also outraged by that particular objection.

you tell him honey!

Noah, uh, doubles down, in the weirdest possible way.

... You know you didn’t MAKE these people, right? You kidnapped them. Like it was a whole Thing.

Then Yami gets all existential on him.

He delivers this as a fairly throwaway line, on par with the kind of shit he says in duels, and basically just makes the point that the weird tech keeping him alive is unnatural and clearly not doing him much good. But Anzu files it away for later. Yami is also a soul still on Earth past his time, and looking for a home...

Anyway I know I’m not recapping the card game itself but I just wanted to share with you...

the RUG OF HELL. aka SATAN’S CARPET aka THE SOFT FURNISHINGS OF THE DEVIL HIMSELF. you’re welcome. on we go.

Yami is frustrated by the duel (aren’t we all) but luckily he has friends cheering him on! (I, meanwhile, have amazing followers and patrons <3) 

I’m afraid so, grumpyface.

You know what Yami ALSO has? Motherfucking Kuriboh!

yessssss this was the best moment in the whole episode tbqh

Noah decides to make a ~Prophecy~ (*rolls eyes*) saying that Yami will be immediately defeated when the Swords of Revealing Light blah blah blah whatever. Then he says...

BLAH BLAH BLAH WHATEVER that’s way less impressive when you basically been fuckin cheating.

Yami’s friends are all like, yay Yami! and Noah’s like...

proving that he doesn’t really know what “belief” is but okay. 

anyway they have plenty of reasoning, having personally witnessed many occasions where Yami was able to win against similar odds, so they can easily argue--

oh okay that’s cool too.

Noah’s like, I’ll show you, blah blah blah, I hate friendship even more than Seto does, and decides to start picking off Yami’s friends one by one, starting with the most annoying, the one who’s been shouting at him, the one who’s been most loudly supporting Yami, the--

oh. or Otogi. sure. the one who didn’t even say anything.

>:o

“Don’t worry, I’ll cover his eyes so he can’t see what happened to him!”

Noah says he’ll pick off the others one by one, and let Yami see them all turned to stone before him,

and THAT raises a lot of interesting psychological and neurological questions about the nature of consciousness that I’m sure I have already, just writing this sentence, thought through more thoroughly than the writers ever did collectively. So let’s just move on.

Yami, possibly panicking?, says,

“And THIS is a nose that has faith in friendship! And let me show you the EARS of passionate trust in mutual support!”

Bonus screencap:

I don’t have a joke or anything I just really fucking like this bizarre flaming Egypt clock. 10/10 would hang in my home.

#Yu-Gi-Oh! #episode 117 #sparklefists watches ygo #yami yugi #Noah #nerd herd #Jounouchi Katsuya #Hiroto Honda #robot honda #Ryugi Otogi #kind of #lol

[pharaohsparklefists]

Are you ready for Episode 116 part 1 of 3??? 

Kaiba is not ready. He’s done! He’s totally done! He’s done with...

... the ... pity farces...? Uh, yeah, buddy, aren’t we all?

Kaiba has an opportunity to end the duel (PLEASE) but he does not take it because Noah uses Mokuba as a “shield”. I’m putting shield in sarcasm-quotes because IT’S A CARD GAME INSIDE A VIRTUAL REALITY SIMULATOR, Mokuba is not in any actual danger whatsoever.

The peanut gallery thinks this was the wrong move, and so do I, but we rather differ on the details

That’s blatantly untrue! He’s shown arrogance, smugness, a lack of humanity, callousness, cruelty, spite, genocidal tendencies-- oh you meant a strategic flaw, not a personality flaw? Well he came within one human-shield-deployment of losing outright and he’s already used BOTH his Deck Master abilities even though it should only have one, so I don’t see what the big deal--

A FUCKING THIRD FUCKING DECK MASTER ABILITY go die in a hole you smear of shit 

Seriously! How is Kaiba not like “wait a minute this seems kinda like bullshit, are you just making these up?” THIS ability lets him add 500 LP for every Monster in the Ark by removing them from play entirely.

Yugi points out if he’d just done that one turn sooner...

Because he’s the wooooorst!

At this point, Kaiba goes into a flashback, triggered by guilt and fear seeing Mokuba on Noah’s side. He justifies his harshness towards Mokuba the day of the takeover:

BUT NEVER CLARIFIED THAT OUT LOUD TO MOKUBA APPARENTLY.

He remembers how proud he was of Mokuba and how completely he trusted and trusts in their mutual love and loyalty to one another...

BUT NEVER OUT LOUD TO MOKUBA APPARENTLY

Yugi sees that this is all going rather pear-shaped and decides to impart some hard-won knowledge to Kaiba by screaming it at the back of his unreceptive head

“Who is that tiny shrieking gnome? Is that...? No I can’t tell, he’s too far away.”

Yugi reminds Kaiba of the recent traumatic near-death experience Yugi and Jou went through and Kaiba witnessed, when Malik forced Yugi and brainwashed!Jounouchi to duel TO THE DEATH

“that pinch” = they both really almost drowned to death for real

Jounouchi: Yuug I think I might be suffering from PTSD

Yugi: haha yeah, we have been in a few jolly bothersome scrapes!

Anyway Yugi manages to get it into Kaiba’s skull - thick though it is with contrariness and rugged individualism - that he should attempt to evoke the bond Kaiba and Mokuba share. Kaiba’s like, huh...

“Should I tell Mokuba I love him? ... No, better! I’ll play a CARD in this CARD GAME that Mokuba doesn’t even play. Nice. Nailed it. Best big brother ever. All I have to do is DRAW THE CARD!”

“Fuck.”

Bored, Noah [deep pained sigh] moves on to the fifth staging post on his violently inaccurate timeline of Earth’s history.

nnnnoooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Rapid???? CYCLES????????? 

THIS IS LITERALLY A WORSE UNDERSTANDING OF EVOLUTION THAN FUCKING POKÉMON

And then he immediately says, like the NEXT fucking SENTENCE is...

Shhhh. Listen. Yes, you, reading this recap. Close your eyes. Do you hear that? A high, ragged note, right at the very edge of your hearing? That’s the faint echo of the shriek of rage I emitted at this point in episode one hundred and sixteen of Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters. It will ring in the air for the rest of time, powered by the rage of a hundred thousand baffled geologists.

Ignoring literally everything Noah says (a strategy I could recommend to one Seto Kaiba), check out the city materialising in the background. The half-building just hoving into sight is KaibaCorp tower, and Noah now summons a KaibaCorp fighter plane, which flies out of the tower...

(I like the helipad and there’s a crane on the opposite jutting-out-bit, like they build things up there, which is cool!)

... and then just vanishes to come “out” of the holographic card anyway so why even fucking bother?

Noah equips the plane with two Magic Cards which allow it to deal damage even if it’s a Monster in Defense Mode it hits, which Kaiba’s dimension-hopping dragon is. The dragon arrives back from an alternate dimension every time it’s destroyed, so the plane can hit it again, which in Noah’s opinion is super great... 

He’s the worst. The anxiously watching Nerd Herd agree...

Um. Well. Much as I hate to defend this geology-abusing shithead. In fairness. “keep attacking until your opponent loses” is not, shall we say, actually bad, wrong, evil, or freakish? Like that’s .... the game?

Another turn, another chance for Kaiba to USE HIS MOUTH-WORDS to maybe TELL MOKUBA THAT HE LOVES HIM

... or he could continue trying to draw a card. that’s fine too. it’ll probably work.

Noah starts laying out his like, endgame plan here, which involves stealing Kaiba’s body specifically, dying its hair turquoise I assume, and taking over KaibaCorp

You will absolutely not, you fig-headed lick of dish scum, because your ~knowledge~ is vastly inferior to My First Earth Science Book for fucking playschool kids. 

Frustrated, scared, and angry, something in Kaiba finally snaps and he actually comes out with a genuinely devastating trash-talk takedown

OUCH

DEMOLISH HIM KAIBA

YES YOU MAGNIFICENT JERK!

#he's actually calling him a jerk because Kaiba snarked back at the Nerd Herd's encouragement #but anything for a cheap joke #Yu-Gi-Oh! #episode 116 #sparklefists watches ygo #seto kaiba #Mokuba #Noah #yugi #Jounouchi Katsuya #nerd herd #Hiroto Honda #robot honda

[pharaohsparklefists]

IT’S EPISODE 114 (part 1) AND IT’S TIME FOR .... monkey shenanigans I guess!

Jounouchi has an amazing beside manner.

I mean can you imagine your friend breaking tragic news to you while holding you upside down?? 

But don’t worry, they figure out how to fix him! If by “fix” you mean...

UNINTENDED HELICOPTERING

Further shenanigans follow, it was a touch exhausting, zany antics were had, faces were pulled, shrieks were emitted, buttons were pushed, one of the buttons was an angry red colour and Yugi IMMEDIATELY pushed that one and it put Honda in Emergency Mode (Iimaagensii modo! Iimaagensii modo!) and Emergency Robot Monkey Honda leads them to KaibaLand and into a corridor before turning around abruptly and...

And I was all like, oh come on, like one small robot can stop them this is ridiculous if they expect me to believe they can’t just run past--

oh.

Well then.

They DO just run past.

While looking DIRECTLY AT THE CAMERA like they’re challenging me to call their bullshit. AND I WILL.

Anyway, further along in the corridor, Kaiba has presumably gotten a trademark Weird Boner(tm) at the sight of the KAIBACORP EXCLUSIVE BLUE EYES WHITE DRAGON TRAIN

you know. sometimes. things that are shaped like a dragon. are worse.

#fightmeKaiba

Elsewhere, Noah is really amping up that creepy borderline incest vibe and it’s weeeeeird and Mokuba doesn’t remember who Seto is so when he sees him on the screen he asks Noah who he is and says...

And this is meant to be a sad and creepy moment but I got distracted because NO HE DOESN’T ffs they look kinda similar at the same age (but still very distinguisable) but now they just, like, have a similar haircut?? No 16-going-on-28 year old looks like a 14-going-on-8 year old ghost okay thanks.

Noah leaves Mokuba and arrives at the chosen stage to face Kaiba. What chosen stage?

LAVA STAGE and this is your unfriendly non-neighbourhood geologist here to tell you that this setup is UNSAFE and HIGHLY IMPLAUSIBLE but we’ll let it slide on the basis of “Virtual World  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ “ and move on.

OKAY NOPE. NO. NOT MOVING ON. YOU ARE NOT STANDING ON THE EARTH BEFORE IT WAS FUCKING BORN YOU LITTLE DIPSHIT BECAUSE IT WAS A ROTATING CLOUD OF SPACE DUST BEFORE IT WAS BORN AND YOU COULD DO THAT IN YOUR VIRTUAL FUCKING WORLD BUT YOU HAVEN’T SOOOOO..........................

Anyway then Noah monologues for a while. He basically leads with this...

And I would have more sympathy for this position if I couldn’t see the inevitable fucking card game bearing down the track right towards us, like a huge and ugly and misshapen and ill-conceived dragon-themed train...

But before we get to that, Noah regales us with thrilling tales of his very very weird childhood.

“We’ve decided on maid-themed harem anime lifestyle for our son.”

I say “our” son and there is that woman holding his photo in the footage of his funeral, and Noah says “adopted by the Kaibas” talking about Seto and Mokuba, but WHERE IS NOAH’S MOTHER?? Everything’s just “father” this and “father” that. For example....

“He also invested in a full-size university lecture theatre to be installed in our house, which was weird. In order to make him feel like he hadn’t wasted his money, I sat as far away from the front of the classroom as possible. Shot my eyesight but it was worth it.”

He also learned a full range of other skills, although when pressed to name them, he came up with music (violin apparently) and “sports” (horseriding) and that was it. This well-rounded education was supposed to raise him to a suitable level to inherit control of a company...

Yeah sure, whole fucking country, one company, really similar vibe.

I do think there could be an interesting exploration here between Atem’s destiny to be raised to literal kingship and Gozaburo’s attempts to engineer the perfect education to create a powerful heir, but instead of that we gotta make room for cardgames so moving swiftly along...

like the car that hit and fatally wounded Noah...

“No! He was on his way to the optometrist! This never would’ve happened if his eyes hadn’t been so tired and strained!”

He’s rushed to KAIBA HOSPITAL like what IS this company  

“Uh do you mean ... not dead?”

“YOU HEARD ME”

Instead of not-dead, they go full weird-anime-stasis-tank scene. Gozaburo drags up a military AI he happened to have lying around...

Yep perfectly normal thing to do.

In case you’re not getting the SCARY SCI FI vibe, the pathetic fallacy chooses this moment to lob a lightning bolt at the building

“he LIVESSSS hahahaha”

spoiler: he does not.

#the triumphant return of #sparklefists watches ygo #Yu-Gi-Oh! #seto kaiba #Noah #Mokuba #gozaburo kaiba #Jounouchi Katsuya #Hiroto Honda #robot honda #nerd herd #yugi

[pharaohsparklefists]

Episode 116, part 3 babyyy, following the wild roaring success of Kaiba failing to draw a card and then Kaiba eventually drawing a card

But no matter how many Blue Eyes White Dragon cards Kaiba draws (up to three, I guess, but so far only one), Noah isn’t worried...

You are not and I will savour your eventual destruction.

Kaiba has a few hundred LP left whereas Noah has like 7000 or something stupid, so Kaiba decides to trigger a Sudden Death card to take LP out of the equation, he’ll pick one Monster (no prizes for guessing which) and...

so it’s BLUE EYES vs A BIG ANNOYING BOAT in the battle of the century

boom, motherfucker

But then! But! Then! Noah has the unmitigated fucking GALL to be like, oh didn’t I mention the FOURTH ability of my Deck Master and honestly why do we even HAVE rules to this card game it’s literally like one of those annoying playground games where that one kid always be like, “nuh uh you shot me but um I didn’t die because umm I ALSO have Superman’s bulletproof powers and I ALSO have ummm a MACHINE GUN except it fires ummmm LASER BULLETS so actually I even shot you with lasers before you even shot me anyway so YOU die”

his boat turns into this gender-ambiguous seraph I fucking guess

because that’s EXACTLY what this duel needed: more overpowered Deck Master bullshit and more weird Christian iconography. I guess.

Kaiba falls down

again.

sadness.

not as sad as Noah, though, who hovers upward and uhh....

melds.

THIS is your true form? smirking out of a torso? okayyyy.

but at least he’s happy!!!

“Cheating at card games, being insufferable, floating naked in a blood-soaked void, EVERYTHING!!!”

From inside his Deck Master (sure why not) Noah takes the role of “God” in this family drama.

Mokuba takes a long-ass time to decide to start running to Seto...

THEIR FACES

but I don’t think it mattered because I think Noah was always going to lithify them right before they reached one another...

And then give the resulting pair of statues a really really stupid name I guess.

THE MOKUBA STATUE IS CRYING HELP ME I’VE FALLEN INTO A DEEP WELL OF KAIBA BROTHERS FEELINGS AND IT’S DARK DOWN HERE

Yugi rushes over, upset, and is so upset he just pops right out of existence and/or Yami is so irate he just pops right into existence

I would probably have put these the other way around, since very few people manage to toy with Kaiba’s feelings but every second villain kidnaps Mokuba to use him for some ridiculous card-game-related scheme, but GOOD POINT YAMI

Then Yami meanders away from solid ground in his argument...

Okay like, firstly, I dunno about like “Dimension Dragon would’ve been destroyed but come back and that totally doesn’t count as being destroyed” like that doesn’t sound right, and secondly, I get the argument, like, saying Kaiba only summoned the Blue Eyes because of Noah using Mokuba, but like (a) Kaiba literally summons Blue Eyes every chance he gets soooo and (b) even if it was for a personal reason, I don’t think you can argue the path not taken in a duel? 

But I don’t want to be too critical here, because anyone telling Noah he’s a cheating scummy fuck is correct in my book!

OR THE BASICS OF THE GEOLOGICAL TIMELINE

Yami lovingly picks up Kaiba’s fallen deck (good thing it didn’t get lithified too!) and says the DUEL IS NOT OVER and I am so on his side here but oh my god the duel being over was like the ONE good thing about this..... but okay, okay, it’s fine.

Jounouchi: oh my god what is he doing

Would it not make more sense though, and again, I’m totally on Yami’s side here, but would it not make a LITTLE more sense to ... challenge him to a follow-up duel?? 

ALSO while we’re here, I would just like the record to reflect that Noah interrupted Jounouchi’s duel against [snigger] Judge Man because Judge Man was cheating and cheating would mean AND I QUOTE SCREENCAP

SO WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT, EH, NOAH, YOU SLIMY GIT??

Yami is bringing exactly the kind of rage energy that I need to this so even though the duel apparently must go on, I’m here for it!

YOU TELL HIM HONEY

#Yu-Gi-Oh! #sparklefists watches ygo #episode 116 #seto kaiba #Mokuba #Noah #yami yugi #Jounouchi Katsuya #nerd herd

[pharaohsparklefists]

It’s Episode 115 part one of THREE because wow do these boys talk shite.

Kaiba gets us off to a flying start, in the “previously on”, with his overblown bombastic aggressive [checks notes] card game trash talk.

like yes, great, babe, but does it always have to be a card game first? Like Kaiba will GENUINELY crush people. Let! Kaiba! Crush! People!

ANNNYway, Noah’s Deck Monster activates its effect, which I am calling Slurpy Slurp

Kaiba is attractively stoic at the sight. 

Turns out the Ark steals all Monsters that should be in the Graveyard and keeps them all cozy instead, which prevents them from using abilities that are activated by being in the Graveyard so Mr Gay Vampire can’t resurrect again, sadly. Going in the Ark when you’re dead is like the opposite of original Noah’s original Ark but whatever.

FURTHERMORE

AND THIS IS BULLSHIT, the Ark spits out a Monster at random if Noah is attacked without a Wall Monster, so he’s never undefended and I, personally, do not think that Deck Masters should get multiple effects but I guess Slurpy Slurp is a pretty underwhelming effect so w.h.a.t.e.v.e.r.

Either way, Kaiba is unphased and maintains his usual level of Drama(tm) (and hotness)

I quite like the way he goes on about the Goddess of Victory on and off. It makes me feel like dub!Kaiba’s somewhere getting hives.

At this point, we move on from the Great Flood of the Old Testament...

IT ISN’T IT’S DEFINITELY DRAINING AWAY COME ON IT CAN’T EVAPORATE THAT QUICKLY WITHOUT THERE BEING AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF VISIBLE WATER VAPOUR`but whaaaaateverrrrr.

oh come on.

So so far we’ve had “before the Earth was born” ie actually I’ll MAYBE give them late Hadean Earth, ie circa 4.0 Ga. 

Then the fucking BIBLICAL FLOOD, complete with on-the-nose Ark, which is a Christian apocryphal myth. 

And NOW we’ve got the MOTHERFUCKING DINOSAURS which, by actual fucking geological time, we’ve skipped almost three full fucking EONS right the fuck up to the fucking Cretaceous period by the looks of the Spinosaurus-looking motherfucker that Noah summons.

which okay yes this is pretty fucking cool except I’m not sure how it’s doing that since its entire head is visibly on the “camera” side of the dragon’s neck. D’you see? Its upper jaw isn’t behind the dragon like it should be if it was actually biting it. But whatever~~~

BUT, to return to the fucking chaos of time periods, at least if we’re talking geological time, we’re going in the right fucking order, because if we’re going by the Biblical timeline, the dinosaurs were DEFINITELY not AFTER the fucking Biblical Flood. SORT YOUR FUCKING SHIT OUT NOAH. Here’s how.

How To Sort Your Fucking Shit Out Noah

1) Decide on a timeline and STICK TO IT. I get you want the #aesthetic of a Biblical timeline. THEN YOU DON’T GET DINOSAURS.

2) Once you’ve decided your timeline, ACTUALLY RESEARCH IT you smarmy piece of shit

3) Do it in the right order.

4) maybe shut the fuck up forever.

Anyway at this point he’s talking about being dead and shit and Anzu is (again) like “oh my god he’s dead??” (keep up Anzu) and Noah, from a very very long way away, is like...

He’s so far away he’s not depicted in colour. He’s that black blob on the further rock.

Anyway then he launches in again on his favourite song “I’m Way Smarter Than All You Loser Humans Especially You Seto - That Is You - Seto - Are Smarter Than Most Humans But I’m Even Smarterer Than That”

From the Human World, eh? So like ... Wikipedia? Or ... worse? Cause he CERTAINLY DOESN’T APPEAR TO HAVE ACCESS TO A DECENT GEOLOGICAL TIMELINE. 

Instead he has this:

Ah yes, the sum of human knowledge, including Plolien Silough. Ioho vu ylibe seah. led chuse vcl Snibn [something obscured by glowing arm]. And the lesser “leafy” parts of philosophical knowledge: Plophren io she smhm Chossed on Blemneal, Tupherous [obscured],  [obscured], [obscured], [obscured], [obscured], [obscured], Tarberiron on Amnnm, and Broah in Thomnas.

After a few more blatherings about how Kaiba was never going to measure up to Noah’s birthright and/or intellect, Jounouchi catches up to what was baffling the rest of us several episodes ago...

WHAT. DO. THEY. THINK. THIS. MEANS.

Still my best guess:

W~H~A~T~E~V~E~R

#Yu-Gi-Oh! #sparklefists watches ygo #episode 115 #seto kaiba #Noah #nerd herd #yugi #Jounouchi Katsuya #Anzu Mazaki

[pharaohsparklefists]

It’s part 2 of Episode 115, and you can catch up with the zany antics of part 1 right here if you missed it!

(If you enjoy these recaps and want to see them continue, please think about helping me navigate my currently highly unstable life by becoming a patron. I am having a bit of a Time right now in my real life and it would mean the world to me!)

So iiiiiit’s Kaiba vs Noah in the Irritating Boy Prodigy World Championship and Kaiba is tired of Noah’s posturing and “pretentious” statements. He claims that such talk...

Which is really quite lovely and poetic, although also perhaps a touch unclear as an example of card game trash talk, no? And of course, I wouldn’t go so far myself as to suggest it is also bordering on, ahem, pretentious. I will leave that to the judgement of my honoured reader.

I do think it’s cool that Seto sees a version of himself on steroids if he’d stayed as a good Kaiba son, and recognises all his disdain for humanity as an excuse to avoid emotions. I mean, it’s nice he can recognise it, although it would be EVEN NICER if Seto didn’t also reasonably frequently disguise his normal human emotions with disdain but HEY baby steps.

Anyway he confronts Noah’s story of Gozaburo’s intentions and fatherly love with a direct challenge; if Gozaburo really intended for AI!Noah to take over KaibaCorp instead of Seto, then...

This triggers a loooong flashback from Noah, during which, I have to imagine, Seto et al just stood around in awkward and slightly huffy silence, presuming Noah was just buffering.

Lil Noah (same size, probably, but younger) wakes up after a “bad dream” in which he was killed in a traffic accident. He discovers he’s locked in his bedroom with NO MAIDS which is very unusual for him. One wall turns semi-transparent which is also pretty unusual, I assume, and Gozaburo appears.

It’s translated as “Father” which is usually 父 (chichi) or more formally お父さん (otosan) in Japanese, but I thiiiink he’s calling him 父上 (chichiue) and sort of mushing the sounds together cause it sounds like he’s saying something like “chiiue”. I dunno if that’s more or less formal but it literally means “father-up” or “father-above” soooo... check out the notes and see if someone who understands Japanese better than I do added any information!

From Gozaburo’s perspective, he now has less of a son and more of a big chibi tamagotchi on a screen in his creepy sci-fi basement

“Can you, uh ... step back. You’re freaking me out. Creepy-ass ghost boy.”

Gozaburo is actually really really Nice and Kind about the whole thing which I personally think is bullshit because Gozaburo is an abusive monster and yeah you get real life abusive monsters who are nice to their own (dead?) kids but “poor Gozabuwo he’s so saaad he bought his dead kid a puppy” is not the hard-hitting addition to the Kaiba brothers’ backstory that I asked for.

Here’s the fuckin puppy:

It is not, Mr Gozaburo, it is creepy. It looks like a sad puppy-kitten hybrid. You pushed the KAWAII slider too far.

Anyway for a while everything is totally fine and great in Dead Kid Digital Paradise. Noah gets a trip to space AND a cake for his birthday whereas usually children only get ONE of those two things and they don’t even get to choose which (get in the fucking rocket, Timmy). Noah sometimes forgets he’s not real.

“Ha yes, when I uploaded render=>seas[d=HD,colour=#2B94FC] I definitely saw exactly what you saw...”

But Noah has become disillusioned with the NPCs in his digital world, even “Sunny” the miserable hybrid. Gozaburo asks after Sunny and Noah assures him Sunny is TOTALLY FINE

“That’s what I most wanted to add to my living arrangements. A rabid animal auditioning for Mad Max 5: Also The Pets Went Feral.

So then, making light birthday conversation, Noah’s like “hey dad you know what’s cool, if we tried hard and believed in ourselves...”

Gozaburo is like “huh. how many people would survive?” and Noah’s like, “eh probably 3%” and I was a lil worried they were going to have Gozaburo go all ~genocide is wrong, what have I done to raise this monster~ but instead he was like, “hmm seems a little low? anyway interesting idea but now I’m bored byeeeee”

Apparently that brush-off was Noah’s first indication that Gozaburo was not quite as into his digital son as he was into his physical-reality son

Shortly thereafter, Seto and Mokuba showed up, but apparently Noah was never mentioned to them and they never noticed Gozaburo’s time in his creepy child-tamagotchi-dungeon and I DON’T KNOW guys I just don’t like the implications of this post-hoc rejiggery of a very strong backstory. You know what Seto’s backstory did not need? The removal of all little!Seto’s agency, in order to reframe Gozaburo’s abuse as arising from grief. 

Anyway, Kaiba’s like,

And I’m like, you’re tragically lost to some undergraduate philosophy discussion group, my sweet darling pretentious teenager. Can you IMAGINE how insufferable 16-year-old private-jet-owning history-refusing god-killing Seto motherfucking Kaiba would be in your undergrad philosophy class? Some incisive but retiring young woman is, in another universe, as we speak type read, raising both eyebrows at something he just declaimed in response to the long-suffering TA and adding it to her wildly successful That Crazy Rich Kid In My Phil Class twitter.

Despite his ridiculousness, Kaiba does make an excellent point:

Noah has shunned his humanity, cocooning himself in contextless (and GEOLOGICALLY INACCURATE) knowledge and smug disdain. On the other hand, people could definitely turn out WORSE after like 10? years in near-total isolation with godlike powers over a virtual reality but no ability to affect the outside world.

Noah doesn’t like Kaiba pointing out his flaws so he tries to get the conversation back on track by making a VERY UNDERWHELMING “prediction”

He’s holding up his fingers like that because he ~~predicts~~ that this ~~mysterious event~~ will take place on the third turn. It’s currently the second turn. AND HE IS IN CONTROL OF LIKE THEIR ENTIRE SENSORY EXPERIENCE. It’s not a ~~~~prediction~~~~ it’s just a fucking THREAT and you just know, you just KNOW, when he follows through on his THREAT, next fuCKING TURN, he’s gonna be all like ohoho I’m sooooo SMART I ~~~~~~predicted~~~~~~ this very outcome ohohohoho. 

Fuck you Noah.

In any case, no one is particularly phased by his prediction THREAT because after all, 

“Shock is not one of his core emotions. They are contemptuous disdain, glee, attention-seeking, Mokuba!, DUEL, and I must kill god and I will. 

#that's a joke #Seto has LOADS of emotions #he's just got a very Seto Kaiba way of expressing them #Yu-Gi-Oh! #sparklefists watches ygo #episode 115 #seto kaiba #Noah #yugi #gozaburo kaiba

[pharaohsparklefists]

Time for part 3 of 3 of 115!! Part 2 is here (I’m angry about Noah’s ~prediction~) and part 1 is here (I’m angry about Noah’s cavalier attitude towards geological time) 

AND THAT’S NOT GOING TO CHANGE

because the next thing that happens is Noah plays a card called Pew Pew Get Rekt Dinosaurs or something and firstly, may I just say, it strikes me (like a meteorite) as highly fucking suspicious that he draws his cards in (approximately!!) the right order to do his bullshit timeline (or maybe he doesn’t, and he just wings it based on the cards he does draw, and that’s why his timeline is so bad?)

secondly, this is pretty cool looking so that’s fine, but it’s also inaccurate as the meteorite* that triggered the K-T** Extinction Event (i.e. the death of most of the dinosaurs) was a single large meteorite up to 15 KILOMETRES wide so you might think these explosive impacts are big but THEY ARE NOTHING COMPARED TO THE DRAMA OF ACTUAL GEOLOGY

* It’s called a meteorite if it hits the ground; a meteor doesn’t! The study of meteors is called meteoritics, because the study of fucking boring-ass weather is called meteorology, because English is a disgrace of a language

** Cretaceous-Tertiary, also sometimes known as the K-Pg (Cretaceous-Palaeogene). You may notice that Kretaceous isn’t spelled like that. That’s cause we already used a C for the Cretaceous’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, the Cambrian, a.k.a ALL our many-times-removed-grandmother, the period during which life on Earth appeared, over 500 million years ago. The Cretaceous, you might remember from information you read about dinosaurs as a child, is a mere 66 million years ago!

THIRDLY,

MOTHERFUCKER YOU CAREENED CARELESSLY THROUGH FUCKING 66 MILLION YEARS OF GEOLOGY/PRE-HISTORY THERE, INCLUDING OH I DON’T KNOW, THE REALLY MINOR DETAIL OF THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANS FOR THE LOVE OF ACCURATE ISOTOPE DATING IF YOU BRAG SO MUCH ABOUT KNOWING SO MUCH SHIT, WHY ARE YOU SO FUCKING IGNORANT?? IS THIS DUEL CALLED THE ~CREATION OF HEAVEN AND EARTH~ DUEL BECAUSE IT’S FUCKING CREATIONIST PROPAGANDA???

WHAT’S WITH THIS DUDE???

Moving along for the sake of my mental health, if you were worried that the Insufferable Boy Geniuses Championship Final: SETO vs NOAH was not insufferable enough, they boy-genius, do I have some reassuring screenshots for you!

mmhmmmmmm

sure.

It’s just. All like this. The Whole Duel. Is just them BOTH being the smug gotcha character like.... please...... [lies down on floor]

Kaiba makes a good play (I honestly forget what it was, I couldn’t fit it in my memory on top of all the Geology Facts but it definitely involved attacking Noah’s monsters in order to lower his life points) and he’s all like,

and okay that didn’t even come up?? But sure. Meanwhile, Kaiba hasn’t even used his own Deck Master. The whole Deck Master thing is a bit of a damp squib, honestly. But the important thing is that Kaiba gains the upper hand here!

Anyway, Kaiba’s Not-Friends are delighted, or rather, Yugi, Anzu, and Shizuka are delighted...

Jounouchi is TOO DELIGHTED and Otogi is the only one who has noticed the danger.

But it doesn’t stop him from being tragically obscured by Moderate Chinface The Suffocator. (Yugi’s lil FACE)

Everyone’s like YAY and Kaiba goes to call his LAST ATTACK and even splurges on his largest and most disdainful hand for the occasion:

what a cutting one-liner my goodness.

But Noah is making THIS face:

and yes, OBVIOUSLY, because life is cruel, duels are long, and Noah’s a dick, IT’S NOT OVER YET because Seto can legally win but he can’t do it (emotionally) because...

Annoying brainwashed Mokuba. Like okay. I get this is emotionally very traumatic, to see your younger brother brainwashed (AGAIN) but (a) would it ever kill them to announce their plays just a lil bit faster cause I feel like we could’ve defeated Noah if we’d moved through the fairly long-drawn-out explanations-and-trash-talk phase of Kaiba’s turn just a touch quicker and (b) it won’t actually HURT Mokuba to land the attack, and he’s CLEARLY BRAINWASHED EITHER WAY, so why not just defeat Noah and THEN solve the brainwashing problem??

But no, it’s too traumatic and I suppose that’s fair

pictured: Kaiba core emotion #4 “Mokuba!” 

Also it’s a heartbreaking expression, he looks - well I was going to say “younger”, but I think he actually looks his real age, 16 ish, instead of a very carefully maintained performance of adulthood

Call me old-fashioned but I do not think this kidnapping-and-brainwashing plan needed the addition of pseudo-incestuous vibes because it was ALREADY CREEPY ENOUGH

But that’s what we get. Explicitly claiming him as a “brother”, while stroking soft fingers lovingly over his cheek and neck exactly the way siblings don’t. 

But at least he rubs it in without falling back on that really stupid and irritating ~~~prediction~~~ he m--

OH FUCK OFF YOU SMARMY FUCKFACED FOOL YOUR SO-FUCKING-CALLED INTELLECT IS NOT WORTH THE PRICE OF A PACKET OF CRISPS

YUGI DON’T ENCOURAGE HIM.

#Yu-Gi-Oh! #episode 115 #sparklefists watches ygo #seto kaiba #Noah #Mokuba #yugi #Jounouchi Katsuya #Ryugi Otogi #Anzu Mazaki #shizuka #nerd herd

[pharaohsparklefists]

It’s time for Episode 114, part 2, the [checks notes] Duel of the Creation of Heaven and Earth. I’m gonna call a soft “lol no it isn’t” on that one, folks, but let’s see how it plays out.

(I am going through A Lot right now, and facing two pretty scary financial burdens over the coming months. It would be absolutely amazing to get a few more patrons. If you ever thought about sending a dollar or three my way for recaps, please do!)

Seto and Noah are duelling on rocky outcrops over a field of lava (hard “lol no” on that one) and Seto is laying down some Personal Philosophy!

“Here comes the spoon! Open your mouth for mommy, Seto!”

“I refuse to live for anyone but myself, mother. I will open my mouth on my own terms or not at all. AHAHAHAAA”

“There’s a good boy! [shoves spoon in mouth]”

Also, if this is true, it means he’s not just living for Mokuba’s sake at any point. He lives for himself, he survives out of spite, and he succeeds to prove a point.

He continues with his monologue for a while, and specifically says his future is a “road of glory”, which I think is interesting because the road metaphor is one he uses with Yami, so I like this reassertion that that road is the road to his future.

dirty my road, will ya? 

... This sounds cool, but he means hands of cards.

Meanwhile, the Nerd Herd have discovered the Kaiba family home movies which are very depressing and also weird. They discover that, according to this VIRTUAL FILM, which is in NO WAY GUARANTEED TO BE TRUE OR ACCURATE, that Noah is allegedly dead. Spoops!

Girl it’s a VIRTUAL WORLD like you met a TALKING PENGUIN no one needs to be who they say they are.

Anyway, a short time later, they find themselves on a hand cart following what they do not realise is a dragon-train-monstrosity towards what they do not realise is a lava pit. They’re going too fast and I blame Jounouchi.

I ask you to please take a moment for yourself to look at each of their faces. Honda in particular is excited for his useless so-called friends to finally die in a horrific crash, and join him in his hellish robot existence.

Oh speaking of funny faces:

YOU ARE WELCOME.

They arrive in time to see Kaiba lay a face down card in, obviously, the cunningest possible ploy. Cunning enough to be worthy of THIS smirk:

“hehehe I’m so smart”

This is the point at which the duellists realise they have an audience.

“how very fucking dare you, you piece of shit, I haVE NO FRIENDS.”

Anyway in a wow amaze shock twist, Noah manages to connive his way past one (1) face down card and breaks out the standard issue Yu-Gi-Oh! Overstatement Gloat

“entire” “plan” = one (ONE) face down card!!!

In response, Kaiba summons some kind of fabulous fang-adorned 80s vampire fashion idol...

With a “Vampiral Effect” no less! I was like “ooh, it’s gonna be like, if he deals damage directly to the opponent’s LP, you gain LP or something cool like that!” no. no of course fucking not. It’s like “I name a type of card and you must discard one card of that type from your-- blah blah blah COME ON I miss Duelist Kingdom and its fluffy effect-focused ridiculousness.

Speaking of ridiculousness though, lookit this vampire’s SHOOOOOESS

The ankle frills are A++ and he’s basically wearing lil booties I love him. Anyway then he immediately dies. But he resurrects! But then he dies again. Fuckin’ rollercoaster, you know how it is.

At this point, Noah starts grandstanding about the cleansing wrath of a judgmental God, as you do #JustDuelThings

I dunno if this means Noah is actually Christian or has just adopted this story from the Christian canon to either suit his worldview or just for the sake of the #aesthetic and you know what? I don’t really care!

Either way, he’s like “my deCK MASTER!!!” and everyone’s like “oh fuck yeah, he had a Deck Master presumably?” cause he never declared one but in a game where there are over 4000 rules and only approximately 32% of plays are legal in any given duel, no one fucking noticed.

Anyway he summons his Deck Master, a big floating boat. Like floating in the air, not floating on the water. That wouldn’t exactly be worth mentioning, being fundamental to the whole boat vibe. He also summons a fucking tsunami to flood the lava lake which, in a move that shocked THIS geologist, did NOT result in explosive bursts of steam-fuelled obsidian shards filling the air and killing everyone but WHATEVER... 

Instead we just get this:

lol no it doesn’t.

#Yu-Gi-Oh! #sparklefists watches ygo #seto kaiba #Noah #nerd herd #Jounouchi Katsuya #Hiroto Honda #robot honda #Ryugi Otogi #Anzu Mazaki #shizuka #yugi

[pharaohsparklefists]

112/224 Retrospective: Top Ten Jokes!

These are literally the single jokes within recaps that make me laugh when I read back over a previous recap to remember or find something! They are presented in chronological order. Link to the recap in question is below each joke if you want to remind yourself of the context.

WHAT NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS I FOR ONE AM TOTALLY SHOCKED 

(Episode 23)

Q: Is Pegasus still behaving inappropriately towards the teenagers he lured onto his private island through coercion?

A: Oooooh! 

(Episode 30)

*splutters in outrage* oh my gOD MIND YOUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS seriously?! YOU LITERALLY CHASED YAMI HERE AND INSISTED ON A TAG TEAM DUEL this isn’t your– YOU INSISTED ON BEING INVOLVED?! THIS IS YAMI’S DUEL!! 

(Episode 68) (actually a lot of this recap makes me laugh)

Mokuba yells something but his mouth is moving and all you can hear is helicopter, which at least is realistic. (That is, the helicopter is drowning Mokuba’s voice out, not that Mokuba opens his mouth and helicopter sounds come out instead of human speech, that would not be realistic at all.) 

(Episode 70)

THEN GET THE FUCK OUT THERE, YOU MURDEROUS FUCKBUCKET (Episode 76)

“Because we all only started playing this game LAST YEAR. Funny how it controls all our lives now and has almost led to multiple fatalities in our friend group alone. And it’s not just us, apparently it’s a big enough deal that there’s a thriving black market for rare cards. Hey, when’s the last time any of us went to school?” 

(Episode 86)

“My orders are to treat all, quote, magical bullshit as though everyone involved is just play-acting to annoy Mr Kaiba.” 

(Episode 92)

Damn, boy. Check your patriarchal expectations before you wreck yoursatriarchalexpectations. 

(Episode 93) (this is the stupidest joke and I love it so much)

“I give this unoriginal kidnapping a meagre 2/10″ 

(Episode 99)

OH MY GOD HOW COULD HE HAVE– listen you little shit a standard deck is forty fucking cards a starting hand is five fucking cards and we are ten fucking turns in to this shitshow meaning this is the 15th card Kaiba has fucking drawn from a deck that you fucking know and I fucking know and the most dim-witted of toddlers watching because they don’t know how to work the fucking remote to change fucking channel back to Paw-fucking-Patrol fucking knows that Seto motherfucking Kaiba has three fucking Blue Eyes White fucking Dragons in his shitfuck deck bc three is the maximum fucking amount permitted and Seto shitting Kaiba is always fucking always fucking always at the maximum permitted number of Blue fucking Eyes fucking White fucking Dragons at all fucking times so that fucking means assuming for one shit-forsaken second that he has yet to fucking draw a single goddamn Blue Eyes that this draw has a fucking 3 in 26 chance of drawing the fucking Dragon at fucking base chance i.fucking.e. no ~willpower fucking nonsense so that’s a fucking better than one-in-fucking-ten chance that’s a fucking 11.54fucking% chance right there that’s not a fucking ~he couldn’t have~ bullshit fucking fuck for shit’s sake this is the least fucking surprising fucking– 

(Episode 109) (record for density of swear)

Do you agree? What were your laugh-out-loud moments?

#sparklefists watches ygo #Yu-Gi-Oh! #Top Ten PSFs!

[pharaohsparklefists]

112/224 Retrospective: Top Ten Fake Subtitles/Screencaps

About halfway through my recapping journey so far (at Episode 52) I realised I could mimic the subtitle font to make the characters “say” whatever I wanted, or what I thought they SHOULD say. (Usually this means making them swear.) Here’s my favourites!

In 10th place,

There was cute music and I wanted to share! 

(Episode 81) 

Coming in at number 9...

This makes more sense than the actual lines tbqh... 

(Episode 105) 

At number 8, it’s...

Yami being a hypocrite! 

(Episode 99)

Insistent friendship in 7th place...

This is pretty much canon.

(Episode 111)

The one that started it all is at number 6...

Spoiler: he does.

(Episode 52) (you can tell I refined the subtitle font after this, this isn’t very accurate)

Breaking the top 5...

Spoiler: he had not.

(Episode 82)

Not quite a subtitle but I really love it and it didn’t fit into any of the other Top Ten retrospective posts so it’s ended up here at number 4...

Noooooooooooooooooo~

(Episode 106)

Bringing in the top 3...

Yugi being a dick will never not be amusing to me honestly

(Episode 104)

In 2nd place, the only possible response to “Don’t lose!”...

Spoiler: he did not lose.

(Episode 82)

And topping the poll (of an electorate of 1)...

One of my absolute favourite jokes of the whole thing. Someone please PLEASE get Dan Green drunk and get him to say this!

(Episode 75)

(That last one is the one I keep as an Illustrator file; when I want to make a new one, I paste in the new screencap at the right size, pop it behind the text box, change the subtitle, export and save the new one as an image, then revert it back to this one to save the Illustrator file. Because it’s my favourite.)

What do you think of the fake screencaps? Did any of them ever get you to do a double-take? 

#Yu-Gi-Oh! #sparklefists watches ygo #laughing at my own jokes #Top Ten PSFs!

[pharaohsparklefists]

IT’S EPISODE 112 MOTHERFUCKERS WE’RE HALFWAY THERE!!!

WOAH-OH LIVIN ON A PRAYER!!

(if you want to be part of this magical years-long journey through Yu-Gi-Oh! with affectionate snark, please join my patreon!)

THIS IS SO EXCITING!! I’M GONNA DO SOME KIND OF RETROSPECTIVE POST BUT FOR NOW, LET’S GET ON WITH THE CARDGAME SHENANIGANS!!!

RIGHT SO, WHERE WERE WE, HONDA?

AH YES, THIS ASSHOLE:

IS ACTUALLY FIVE ASSHOLES ALL OPERATING HONDA’S BODY ONE AT A TIME (mostly) AND ALSO LAYING DOWN SOME JANKY AS FUCK BULLSHIT TBQH

FUCKIN UP JOUNOUCHI

BOOM

LOSING LIFEPOINTS! FALLING OVER! ETC! CLASSIC JOUNOUCHI!!

AND YAMI??

OH MY SWEET MOTHER OF DIVINE CARDGAMES WHAT A FUCKIN TWIST??? 

(do you think the voice actors got tired of saying this and making it sound believable?) 

OKAY SO

SO

YAMI SUMMONS A(N OSTENSIBLY) KINDA SHITTY MONSTER AND SETS A FACE-DOWN CARD...

AND SMIRKS LIKE WOW HOLY SHIT THAT SMIRK. WOW.

AND JOU IS LIKE, INTERNALLY,

AND PERFORMS THIS AMAZING HAND-WAGGLING DANCE WHICH YAMI CALMLY IGNORES BUT WHICH EMBARRASSES SHIZUKA JUST BY WATCHING IT

SAME TBQH #preach

BUT OTOGI IS ALL LIKE, EVEN I, A CARDGAME MORON, CAN SEE THAT YAMI HAS MADE A CARDGAME MISTAKE BY BEING SO OBVIOUS HERE

AND NOT-HONDA IS LIKE, HAHA YOU’VE MADE A CARDGAME MISTAKE AND DESTROYS THE SET CARD

AND JOUNOUCHI IS LIKE, OHMYFUCKINGGOD WAS I CORRECT ABOUT THE CARDGAME MISTAKE????!

AND YAMI IS LIKE, SOZ FOR MY CARDGAME MISTAKE

AND THEN NOT-HONDA ATTACKS!! BUT!!!!

AND NOT-HONDA IS LIKE WHAAAAAAT D:

AND JOUNOUCHI IS LIKE WHAAAAAAT :D

CAUSE YAMI WAS ACTUALLY TRYING TO GET NOT-HONDA TO ATTACK HIM AND NOW NOT-HONDA FEELS SO ATTACKED RIGHT NOW

LOLS

AND YAMI’S LIKE

AND MANAGES TO MAKE IT SOUND ONLY A LITTLE BIT SARCASTIC

AND ANZU IS SURPRISED AND SHIZUKA IS PLEASED AND ROBOHONDA IS ALSO PLEASED AND OTOGI IS CAUGHT IN A PARALYSING RICTUS FOR SOME REASON

ANYWAY THEN JOUNOUCHI IS CARELESS

BUT YAMI ACTUALLY IS NOT YELLING AT HIM FOR YELLING BUT TO ;) GIVE HIM ;) A MESSAGE ;) WITHOUT ;) NOT-HONDA KNOWING ;) BUT HE LITERALLY HAS TO SMILE AND NOD BEFORE JOUNOUCHI GETS IT

IFYOUKNOWWHATIMEAN

OH AND NOT-HONDA HAS CHANGED TO ANOTHER MEMBER OF THE DISASTER TEAM AND NOW HAS JINZO FOR A DECK MASTER WHICH MEANS HE CAN DESTROY ALL THEIR TRAPS BUT

WHICH IS HONESTLY SUCH FUCKING BULLSHIT BUT ANYWAY

MY GIRL DMG SHOWS UP AND BLASTS HIM SO THAT’S GOOD 

AND THIS DUEL IS NOT OVER YET [MANIACAL LAUGHTER] BUT IT IS FOR THIS EPISODE SO LET’S CHECK IN ON EVERYONE’S FAVOURITE TEENAGE CEO SETO KAIBA!!!

WHO HAS SOMEHOW DESCENDED FROM THE REALLY REALLY TALL MOUNTAIN TO ARRIVE AT KAIBALAND

WHICH HAS

LOOK!!! A FUCKING!! LOOKATTHIS!!!

YOU HAVE TO WIN THIS CHESS GAME IN ONE MOVE TO GET IN!!!!

[Exhausted KaibaCorp Tech: Sir, about the chess door lock...

Kaiba: Brilliant, isn’t it? I designed it myself.

Exhausted KaibaCorp Tech: Sir, anyone with a good understanding of chess will be able to open the door, there’s no secondary authentication, it’s profoundly unsecure, not to mention expensive, difficult to maintain, and almost impossible to reset.

Kaiba: If they’re good at chess, they deserve to get in.

Exhausted KaibaCorp Tech (quietly weeping): Sir please.]

ANYWAY INSIDE, KAIBA FINDS ANOTHER MAGIC DOOR WHICH TAKES HIM TO A RANDOM ROOM WITH A PROJECTOR WHICH SHOWS

PRE-SETO KAIBA FAMILY HOME VIDEOS I GUESS??

THEY START CHEERFUL WITH A BIRTHDAY PARTY BUT CUT SHARPLY INTO FOOTAGE OF NOAH’S FUNERAL SO Y’KNOW THAT’S... A BIT OF AN EMOTIONAL ROLLERCOASTER, I’M SURE

SAYS THIS LOSER WHO ALREADY THOUGHT NOAH WAS A GHOST BEFORE HE KNEW HE WAS DEAD

#Yu-Gi-Oh! #sparklefists watches ygo #episode 112 #HALFWAY THERE #yami yugi #Jounouchi Katsuya #Anzu Mazaki #shizuka #Ryugi Otogi #Hiroto Honda #robot honda #the big five #seto kaiba