Yu-Gi-Oh!/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

General

• There is a Yu-Gi-Oh! card called Fire Kraken, which is a paradoxically fire-elemental squid/octopus thing. At least six years after randomly coming across this card, and easily five years since I've played the game, I just realized it's a pun on "firecracker."
• The Meklords are meant to just dominate Synchros; taking them and using them themselves. Unlike in the anime, there is nothing stopping players from using Synchros after Exceedes are released. The Meklords are meant to discourage Synchros in favor of Exceedes, which came out about a month afteer the Meklords were released.
• When the second season of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's introduced the Infinity monsters, their use struck me as being a continuation of the Assimilation Plot of Darkness in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, especially when the cards' users keep referring to Synchro monsters as "unneeded things". Odder still, one way of defeating these monsters proposed to the show's protagonist Yusei by one of his opponents is to use another Synchro, specifically one that uses two Synchro monsters to summon. At first, I didn't know what the writers were planning on doing with this, but upon reflection, I think he's figured it out: during GX, the writers pulled out a lot of Take That Deconstruction episodes of certain parts of the anime and/or the game - the duel with Dimitri being a jab against cookie-cutter elitists, the Society of Light being a reversal of Defeat Means Friendship, and the second part of season 3 and all of season 4's treatment of Judai being a look into the real consequences of playing a children's card game for the fate of the world. Obviously, this was yet another in a long line of Take Thats - specifically, a breakdown of the Internet Backdraft over whether or not the Synchros constitute Game Breaker material.
  • And consider the mastermind behind the Infinity monsters, who reveals that Ener-D and Synchro monsters caused the end of the world when humanity's evolution got too fast. It's a commentary on how the game has evolved so far from its roots and some say it has become Ruined FOREVER with all the new gimmicks and cards.
• Sure, Duel Monsters' primary demographic in-universe has always been males, but there never seemed to be any societal taboo against females playing the game, so I've always wondered where the 5D's taboo against girls in Riding Duels came from. I happened to be brushing my teeth when I suddenly thought, "I sure hope it's not due to the same superstition that once caused men to be apprehensive of women riding astride a horse."
• You know how most of 4Kids's edits are scorned by the Yu-Gi-Oh! fandom? Well, one impressed me. At the end of the Orichalcos arc, 4Kids makes Yami's eyes green, since Viewers are Morons and can't tell that he's starting to succumb to the Orichalcos. Like most of their blatant edits, I found it stupid. However, I heard the color of the eyes as being described as 'Orichalcos green' in a summary of the episode. Well, guess what? Who else was tainted by the Orichalcos and his eye changed color?
  • I haven't seen it; who?
    • Dartz. One of his eyes is blue, the other is 'Orichalcos green.'
• Looking back, I realize that some of the edits that 4Kids made were not that bad. Namely, having characters not die, just going into a comalike state, makes a lot more sense then them dying and coming back to life. Sure, when the character never comes back it is pointless, but most of the time it is good.
• A meta example: A few weeks before the English dub premiered, this troper received a short video tape in the mail. Said videotape was basically Pegasus giving a preview of the series. The marketing strategy was actually pretty good. This troper knew that the series was going to air on Kids WB, but wasn't all that interested in it until she received the video. It only occured to me recently that receiving a mysterious tape in the mail was exactly how Pegasus first made contact with Yugi, kicking off the whole plot. Say what you want about 4Kids, but that was actually pretty clever.
• Here's some Fridge Brilliance from me after watching an Abridged Series rap off between Yugi/Atem and Jaden. At the end of it, Yusei runs over Jaden and when he starts complaining about the pain, Atem says, "Suck it up, you Mary Sue." This coming from the guy whose only legitimate loss was at the end of the show against his own reincarnation. Anyway, I thought about it for awhile and noticed some parallels between Yugi and/or Atem and Jaden. Both are reincarnations of royalty (Yugi), have a friend who became a Duel Monster to protect them (Atem) and have a dark side that was Ax Crazy when first released (Yugi). However, as pointed out above that the GX season has a lot of deconstructions in it, Jaden's friend turned bodyguard Duel Monster harmed one of his friends out of jealousy and his dark side slaughtered hundreds of people to finish a card that almost cost Jaden his friends.
• It took a while to notice but a while back it hit me while watching the 3d movie on youtube.

Yugis Trump chard Dark Magician, 2500 ATK 2100 DEF, Jadens, Neos 2500 ATK DEF 2000, Yuseis, Stardust Dragon 2500 ATK 2000 DEF, Kaibas trump (yugis rival) Blue Eyes White dragon 3000 ATK 2500 DEF, and Jacks, Red dragon Archfiend 3000 ATK 2500 DEF... Now thats a funny connection.

• The 3 main characters all have a name that starts with YU, if jadens is spelled as the japanese tend to with surname first.

Yu-Gi-Oh!

• At first it seems stupid that the Egyptian god cards have the "egyption" bit added whenever they are mentioned, but then I rewatched the first VR arc. anyhow, everything that the protagonists encountered in that arc had been either an inanimate object. Anyway, the final encounter at the end of that arc is a monster resembling the most common representation of Tiamat, ( a babylonian deity) this monster also appears in the Defictionalized card game. With that knowledge, one would know that there are cards based on deities from other religions in duel monsters. Hence why everyone specifies that the god cards they own are in fact egyptian.
• While we're on the topic of Yu-Gi-Oh!!, the original season has the interesting duel where Yugi has to beat Pegasus, the guy who made the game, is equipped with a personalised Game Breaker deck and and a mind-reading eye. But there's a Fanfic out there that raises an interesting point, and a comparison to the Real Life game: just because Pegasus made the game, it doesn't mean he's the best at it. Yugi has a combination of strategy, good cards and mystical backup, and Kaiba obsesses over getting the tactical advantage, but Pegasus is an artist, not a duelist, and all his unfair advantages only make the playing field level against them.
  • Not really. It wouldn't be that hard to come up with a truly unbeatable card by any stretch of the imagination. Start with a monster you can special summon at any time, and you can easily search for. Give it blanket immunity to spells, traps and effects, have it gain double all power your opponents monsters gain, and a 4000 base attack, and a special effect to reverse and overturn special winning conditions.
    • We're talking about Pegasus here, as in Duelist Kingdom villain Pegasus. The rules for the game already made little sense and Toon World was pretty much broken during that arc. Even with Toon World, Pegasus was probably taking artistic license if most of the cards had Egyptian counterparts, which brings up some Fridge Brilliance for this troper. It's not that Pegasus would've been hard pressed to come up with an unstoppable card, but it's he never truly made the game and he was a little off his rocker.
    • Also it's one thing to know what you're opponent is about to do. It's another thing to have the right cards in your hand to do anything about it.
• Something that's always bugged I was how much of a Plot Tumor the game of Duel Monsters had become; it started as a normal (if popular) card game disguising an Artifact of Doom, to a game that you can actually go to a specialized school to learn how to play, to something so all-encompassing, everything from street games to the police are all based around it. No explanation for this increase of importance, and as was said above, the longer it goes on, the more ridiculous it becomes. It didn't make sense...until I started looking at the mystical aspects of the game, and realized that it grew alongside the game's importance - starting out as an obscure Sealed Evil in a Can, then to a hidden Alternate Universe that only certain people can see and interact with, then to whole public cults and psychic powers devoted to the game. Clearly, there's a connection, and with the Tenth Anniversary Movie revealing that Duel Monsters caused The End of the World as We Know It in the future, the implication is equally clear: the mystical aspects of the game are taking over, and as a result, is corrupting the world to make it more inhabitable for the Eldritch Abominations that lie just beyond the ink and paper... - SynjoDeonecros
  • Well, there IS a bit of an explanation as to why the game grew in importance. The richest man in the world grew up playing it. What did you expect?
  • Also, holograms. When you have Clash of the Titans playing out in stadiums worldwide, other pastimes seem to pale in comparison, wouldn't you think?
• While watching the Virtual World arc of Yu-Gi-Oh, there was one glaring question that came to mind about half-way through. When Noa forces the main cast (of sorts) off the airship, he says 'only the duelists', despite the fact that of the group, one doesn't duel professionally (Anzu) while the others (Honda, Otogi, Mokuba, and Shizuka) don't duel at all. At first, I thought this was just a plot hole that existed solely to get those characters into the arc itself... But then I realized, after counting the number of people who went into the Virtual World, that it was the exact number of competitors in the final half of the Battle City Tournament... Eight people. But since Malik and Ishizu never left the airship, while Bakura, Mai, and Rishid were otherwise fairly incapacitated, there was no way of knowing that the first eight to come off the ship weren't duelists, until it was too late; Noa was going based on the appearance of things.
• This is a minor one really, and it might be obvious to a lot of people, but still... was always a bit weirded out by the names they picked for Anzu, Jonouchi and Honda, especially since their surnames sounded kind of plain. Then I twigged: Gardner, Taylor and Wheeler are all names that are derived from occupations. Theme Naming, much?
• I will admit I don't watch Yu-Gi-Oh beyond the abridged series, but something occurred to me the other day: Who the heck makes Yu-Gi-Oh cards in-universe? Whoever they are, they are clearly insane. After all, these cards are so reality warping that some cards have very limited copies in existence. When Weevil throws Yugi's cards over the side, if this were a normal card game, wouldn't Yugi just order another set off the internet?
  • Pegasus.
  • Yugi couldn't order a new set, mainly because the cards Haga threw overboard were the five Exodia cards. There's a bit of the background mythos involved here, since in universe, not only is the Exodia set unique, the only reason Grandpa managed to complete it is because Exodia was originally his astral projection in a past life. There's no way you can get something like that on E-bay.
    • ...Even though Malik/Marik's goons explicitly stated (and showed) they they had THREE sets of Exodia in at least one of their decks, and Gozeburo later on had a set in his deck (albiet virtual, though he would have had the resources to get real ones.) There's no reason why Yugi couldn't simply get his three missing cards again.
    • Remember that the Ghouls were specifically reputed to make counterfeit cards near identical to the originals. Those multiple copies? Fake cards made using the same machines that I2 uses in-universe. Besides, It's a lot more plausible to see an online card database which has scans of near-impossible-to-find cards (like our universe has the Yugi-wikia) than to find someone selling them off of an E-Bay-ish site.
  • Even if they were online, how could he afford them? In our world, the cards are common enough, and the game low key enough that you could order a set for $50-200. In-universe, however, even replacing the three cards he lost would likely set him back millions of yen or more, if they were available at all.
    • To further support this argument, take a look at the Blue Eyes White Dragon. In RL, it's not really a rare card. In-universe, there's literally just three of them, all in Kaiba's possession. (I guess there are no reprints and stuff like that.) Moreover, he didn't just buy them (because nobody would sell this invaluable card), he actually drove people to suicide and used mafia connections in order to get them. And he didn't treat Yugi's grandpa all that kindly either. In the anime, it seems that he was just stressed out because of the holograms; in the manga, Kaiba had him experience death by getting torn apart by monsters (it wasn't real, of course, but still distressing enough and a more plausible reason for him to have serious health problems.)
  • The holograms in this series certainly do distract from the fact that Yugioh is set in the mid-90s. Yugi didn't even seem to have a computer, and if he had one (and internet access), he probably didn't use it to find new cards.
• To help validate the above though, even if Industrial Illusions makes cards, where do people get them at? I know Yugi's Grandpa runs the game shop, but very, very rarely in any of the series does anyone go buy cards. There's far more stories of people finding cards down wells or getting them via magic or inheritance than just buying them. Around 5D's they seem to start going strictly down the road of extremely important cards simply just existing because in their universe, if something is important, it has to be a trading card.
  • The season zero movie War Dragons shows the kids buying them at a regular convenience store.
• This troper had been among the many who cringe at how far 4Kids can go in its dubbing, least of all its continued efforts to wipe death off the face of the anime's universe, but then was surprised at the end of the Duel Ark when the dub acknowledged that Cecelia/Cynthia had died. No effort to make her run away for unexplained reasons to never be seen again, no being sent accidentally to the Shadow Realm somehow, none of that. She really died. However, when talking with another friend who caught on more to Pegasus's strong belief his toon monsters are the superior lifeforms than I caught, I realized just how touching it was (in a way) that the one death (at the time) that the dub allowed mention of had to be the one who would cause a man like Pegasus to regress back to the cartoon days. The type of cartoons, mind you, 4kids likes to dub many a show into (the cast never die, the violence they do never do visible damage, basically that kiddie veil that lets children grow up with them while they're still young and haven't been exposed to the harsh realities adults are constantly plagued by, the loss of a loved one, worse of all).
  • And then when it comes to her death itself, the scene is she and Pegasus are at their wedding, Pegasus puts the ring on her finger, and then she's swallowed up by a giant flower and disappears into pedals- cut to her grave.
    • The flower-explody thing was symbolic. Pegasus's narration says she died of a disease. She didn't literally turn into a flower and explode.
  • And on our wedding day... She exploded.
    • You really need to stop doing that.
• Just last night, years after I stopped watching Yu-Gi-Oh!, a thought suddenly struck me concerning the Battle City arc of the original series. So...Kaiba very obviously have the money, power and connections to essentially lock down the city for as long as he needs, to divert traffic where he wants it to go, and basically become its ruler...and in the original chapters of the manga during his debut, he had the power and connections to claim the Blue-Eyes White Dragon cards for himself, even making deals with the Mafia in one case and and driving one former owner to commit suicide in another case. True, he uses all that power to run a tournament based on frickin' card games, but if Kaiba ever actually felt malicious enough to do so, he could use all of those assets to become an Evil Overlord or even the Big Bad and hold Domino City (at minimum) in an iron grip without breaking a sweat!
  • Great, that's Fridge Horror for some of us: You have to keep in mind that Kaiba wasn't born with those riches. If he never won that 'Kaibacorp. custody battle' against Gozaburo, then KC as we know it WOULD be run by an Evil Overlord who mass produces weapons.
• To This Troper, the Friendship sign that Tea draws on their hands in episode one was some weird scribble. Until watching episode 51 of its Abridged Series, with its Stinger having Tea saying "Bitches Love Smiley Faces" while showing the sign. It really is a smiley face.
  • The changed friendship symbol never made sense to this troper either, considering in the manga it's a a stereotypical, 70's-peace-and-love-reminiscent smiley face. ^{[dead link]} Now this troper realizes that the anime version looks like an emoticon. The internet. Causing pointless art changes since 2000.
• A friend of mine that I was chatting with gave me a nice dose of Fridge Horror about the Pharaoh. We started off talking about how he went crazy spending 3000 years in the puzzle, then my friend said she needed some Brain Bleach because she'd just imagined the Pharaoh having a shadow game against a sexual predator and ...um..yeah.... as a result of winning. That caused ME to remember the fake psychic in chapter 5 of the manga. The psychic who seemed to want to use chloroform to rape Anzu. The Pharaoh went after the fake psychic for trying to kill Yuugi with books, and then at the end of the chapter (at least in the English translation of the manga) the Pharaoh looks at Anzu and makes a comment about Sleeping Beauty. And for the first time in years, I suddenly thought "What if he wasn't talking about the Disney version of the story, but the original one where the sleeping princess gets raped by the prince?" It did not help my imagination to also realize that this happened at a point when the Pharaoh still had a few screws loose from being stuck in the puzzle for so long.
• While randomly flicking through a website of name meanings to find something for a new roleplay character, I realized Katsuya Jounouchi has a Meaningful Name. Katsu is "victory" in Japanese, and Jounouchi relies a lot on luck and has a gambler themed deck. Plus over the course of the series he goes from being a literal unknown to one of the best duelists in the world. He may not be the best, but considering where he started it's still a significant achievement.
• The ba/ka theory that's rampant in fanfiction and was popularized/or started by Le Diz's Ankh, where Yugi was the part of the Pharaoh that was left behind, and then reincarnated again and again. After many still-births, Yugi eventually evolved to the point where he could survive long enough to meet Yami. That's why Yugi looks so young, has some childish interests, and was able to reassemble the puzzle. This theory may be more WMG than Fridge Logic though, considering that they don't really give us a lot to work with in canon beyond the fact Yugi is the Pharaoh's vessel and reincarnation.
• Some people find it weird and maybe even ridiculous that Yami needed to remember his name to defeat Zorc, and that it was the last key to release him in the real world (what Yami Bakura was after). But it does make sense. In Egyptian Mythology, Ra was so powerful because only he knew his name, and nobody else. Isis became quite powerful as well when she tricked Ra into revealing it to her. And Yami's real name, Atem, comes from a god usually asociated with Ra. Also, in the ancient Egypt, names were really important back then. And let's not forget: The fact that his name was erased from all records, including the stone, had the name erased were a security measure: If you erased all registers of a name and never mention it, you'll be denying the eternal life to it's owner. If Yami were to be ressurrected, somehow defeated and his name learned by someone evil in the future, that person would have a bigger chance to release Zorc. Neither Atem or Priest Seto would want to risk it, so they made sure the name was forgotten forever. Both being sealed into the puzzle without memories, the item being a very difficult puzzle as well, and the name being forgotten. Considering Zorc's power in the last Arc, that level of caution was truly called for, in case something failed.
• The Dark Magician duel of Yugi vs Arkana in Battle City isn't just a showdown between a rare hunter and Yugi, it's a rematch between Mahad and Thief King Bakura. If you look closely at Arkana's dark Magician, he has red clothes, dark skin, and silver hair. After five thousand (3000?) years, Mahad finally claims a decisive victory over his murderer!
• A small bit of Fridge Briliance regarding the Five-Headed Dragon. Remember it originated from Kaiba's virtual reality game, which he programmed himself, and Kaiba programs his simulations and such to challenge even him. At the time most of the strongest monsters in the game had 3000 ATK, like Kaiba's Blue-Eyes, and you only had 2000 Life Points. When Kaiba designed the dragon he gave it 5000 ATK so it could deal a One-Hit Kill.
• During the Dartz saga, Weevil pushes Yami Yugi into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. He plays Berserker Soul, which allows his monster extra attacks for each monster Yugi draws. He gets two monsters and drains Weevil's life points, but continues to draw monsters and attack Weevil at 0 LP. At first it looks like he's just exploiting Loophole Abuse and luck of the draw to deliver Weevil some extra punishment, but the true nature of the scene is brought to light with the revelation that Atem can (subconsciously, at that point) influence his draws.
• One thing that always struck me as odd about Arkana's duel, was how Yami retreated into the puzzle and let Yuugi take over after it ended, even though he had been in charge the whole time during previous episodes. At first I took at as a "for the sake of the plot" thing, otherwise Yuugi wouldn't have been able to talk to Marik and figured out that Yami was looking for his missing memories (in the Japanese version anyway); however, there's a Fanfic out there that raises an interesting point: Yami did not retreat into the puzzle to give Yuugi control of his body, rather, Yuugi asked the pharaoh to give him control to save Arkana because, as you can see if you watch the actual episode, Yami had absolutely no intention of saving Arkana from the chainsaw. Despite being more than capable of walking a few steps and save him, he only looked on, watching impassively as Arkana desperately struggled to release himself from gruesome death. This is something that I think speaks volumes about Yami's character, cause even though he mellowed out and stopped playing Shadow Games and mind crushing people after season one, he definitely didn't become the perfect, merciful Hero that the other main characters made him out to be.
  • To further elaborate on this, Yami was also the type of hero who was ready to do what had to be done in order to achieve his goals. More specifically, during the final duel between Dark Marik and the pharaoh, right after Obelisk's attack that left Dark Marik with barely enough points to survive, the latter comments about how fun it was that Yami was more than willing to hurt the other Marik to win the duel, who by now had nearly vanished. Yuugi immediately asks the pharaoh to stop attacking Marik or else he would die, reminding him of the promise they had made to Ishizu. Yami, however, doesn't agree to Yuugi's request, insisting that if he loses, Yuugi's soul would be lost to the shadows forever. Again Yuugi tells him that they would find a way to save Marik no matter what; but Yami inwardly worries about how he can do this, implying that if it came to it, losing Marik's other soul was a sacrifice he was willing to make.

Fridge Horror

• Fridge Horror: How many times did Dartz mess with kids lives to get people who would serve him?
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Yami Bakura has a creepy, evil-themed occult deck. Okay. Kazuki Takahashi says that decks reflect the hearts and souls of their owners. Okay. Now, whose deck was that in the first place?
  • What happened to all the souls at the end of the Doma arc returning to their bodies? Imagine a ten thousand year old soul returning to its body, except it wouldn't have a body to return to. The body would have completely decayed. Presumably they would just move on to the afterlife... Unless the body's been mummified, naturally or otherwise ... Incidentally, many mummies are in storage in major cities, such as London's Museum of Natural History, the Louvre in Paris, and the Cairo museum. So: zombie apocalypse. In major cities.
    • Not really, if you lose your soul, you don't die, but your body enters a comatose state, to be mumified, the body need to be actually dead(well, you can try mumify a living person, but he/she will die halfway to it), so even if they do return to their bodies, they would be unable to move, due to being dead for a few centuries now, and the soul would forever be imprisioned inside a lifeless body... wow, this suddenly got worse...
  • Pegasus imprisons the souls of Grandpa Muto, Mokuba, and Seto Kaiba into cards. Think about it: Their souls trapped in a card, presumably forever. Thankfully, Yugi defeats Pegasus and he releases their souls.
    • Worse: what was Pegasus planning to DO with those cards? Because this is Pegasus we're talking about. Gotta love him, but he wasn't quite sane at that point...
  • In the English version of the Battle City arc, after Yami Bakura defeats Bonz in a duel, he banishes him along with his friends, Sid and Zygor, to the Shadow Realm. It is never shown or mentioned that they were released or not. So...
  • In the Japanese version, he sent them to hell.
  • In the first series, Episode 15 Panik reveals flamethrowers hidden in the dueling arena. These arenas were built by Pegasus, meaning he must have intended or planned to kill the duelists, even if they were just kids.
  • To a certain extent, the Shadow Realm. In the Japanese sub, you normally died if you lost a Shadow Game. The Pharoah's court, Marik's dad...they were simply killed. The 4Kids dub decided to create a replacement-a nightmare universe where the imprisoned are tormented, supposedly for all eternity. And, going by Yu-Gi-Oh GX, this reality didn't vanish after Zorc was beaten. So essentially, 4Kids has replaced death with hell. Cecilia, The Big 5, Gozuboro Kaiba and Marik's mother are the only characters who's deaths aren't censored, and thus aren't sent to hell.
    • In the Japanese version, there WAS the whole dark-universe-where-you-are-tortured-forever thing going on, and THAT's what normally happened to the loser of a "Yami no Game" [examples include Mai, who ends up in an hourglass in some weird universe where she slowly loses her memories, and all the random minor characters from the beginning of the manga and the "Season Zero" anime]. HOWEVER, in the Japanese version, you can't just randomly send someone to the Shadow Realm/Darkness/Hell--you have to defeat them in a Shadow Game. 4Kids just decided to change that and make it so that any villain could randomly send anyone to the Shadow Realm at any time so that they could come up with explanations for people who are actually just killed. Take Marik's father, for instance--they took out the blood and used the Shadow Realm explanation because it's more abstract and therefore seems less horrible [or perhaps it was just to make it harder for children to imitate ^_~].
      • "No, these razor-sharp, spinning blades won't kill you--they'll just send you to the Shadow Realm. See? They're glowing blue. That means they won't actually hurt you."
    • Yeah, Gozuboro's death wasn't censored because he didn't die, he went to some cryo state linking his brain into the interwebz/that virtual realm where Noahs memories and brain readings were coded into. Think about it... Ok, so somewhere out there is a body being nourished and kinda rotting that got its brain DELETED. Yeah, good job Noah, the remains of your mind just made your father into a rotting tomato.
• Tabletop Game: The trap card "survival instinct" removes all dinosaurs from play in your graveyard to boost your life points. If you think for a minute, you realize that it represents dinosaurs eating corpses to survive! Tyranno Infinity gains attack for each dinosaur removed from play. One could assume that his diet is composed of cannibalized dinosaur carcasses.
• In the anime, it was mentioned the spell needed to fashion the millennium items was the only spell that could be translated from the spellbook. Given how the items are why the plot took five thousand years to solve and uprooted many lives, think how terrifying the other spells are.