#anti yugioh zexal dub

[fanfic-lover-girl]

Yuma & Astral > Yugi & Atem. Fact

As usual, my disclaimer. Yugioh DM and Yugioh Zexal were the only two Yugioh series I watched completely. I watched DM in the dub and Zexal in the sub. If I had known about the sub as a kid, I would have watched DM in sub :'(. But I was not watching the whole series again. I have watched several sub clips though so I have a fair idea of the Yugioh DM sub.

Now that I have listed my credentials...let me start what may be a hot take.

I love both partner pairings though I like Yugi & Atem more just because I was never a huge Astral fan. But objectively, Yuma & Astral are the superior pair when I look at their story arcs.

The problem with Yugi & Atem is that Atem feels more like the main protag than Yugi. It was not until the Memory Arc during the Yugi vs Bakura duel that it hit home that Yugi was meant to be the main protag. Sure, Yugi has his moments but Atem does all the heavy lifting. Yugi and Atem had great teamwork in the Pegasus duel and it was epic to witness. But otherwise, Yugi does not really have any memorable duels until the last arc. Yugi only duels when Atem is unavailable (eg. in the Bandit Keith duel) or for emotional duels (eg. possessed Joey). Atem is the guy who ultimately defeats the main players: Bakura, Pegasus, Kaiba, Marik, and Dartz. Yugi is basically Atem's support guy and is delegated to the background. Which is why I was never a huge fan of their ceremonial duel. It felt totally unearned to me. First, Yugi has the advantage of knowing Atem's deck while Atem has little knowledge of his. Frankly, the ceremonial duel is quite forgettable and underwhelming. The main moments were Yugi defeating the Egyptian gods and that last symbolic move with the Ressurection of the Dead card. I like Yugi but he never felt like the main character of the story. Atem fought all his battles for him. When things got tough, Atem took over and Yugi took the backseat and got all the glory. Yugi deserved better and I wish his title of King of Games felt more earned in the narrative because Yugi is canonically a prodigy gamer too. In the dub, Yami's thoughts while dueling sound like Yugi so it makes it appear that Yugi is contributing. It's a nice touch but hardly enough to compensate, especially since the sub does not have anything like it as well to bolster Yugi.

Now Yuma and Astral. Thank goodness I found the sub. Dub Zexal is annoying to watch. Yuma is one of my fav Yugioh protag. Honestly, a lot of times I have Yuma as my favourite. Yuma's development was incredible and he is unlike the others who were just naturally amazing duelists. Because Yuma started off as a bad duelist, he relied a lot on Astral. However, what makes the dynamic between Yuma and Astral more interesting than Yugi & Atem is that they are separate entities during the duel so we get to see their interactions. So instead of just possessing Yuma's body, we see Astral coaching Yuma and even some amusing situations such as when Astral played reverse psychology on Yuma when the kid was being stubborn and refusing to listen to him. As Yuma became better, he became less dependent on Astral and we even see Astral congratulating Yuma on creative plays that impressed him. Then we see Yuma and Astral as equals when they fuse with the power of Zexal (cool power by the way **squeal**...although it can be too OP lol). Because of this, I always saw Yuma as the main character of the story, despite Astral's amnesia driving the plot. We see Yuma defeat the villains, sometimes without Astral. Yuma's rivals are HIS, not just Astral's. We see Yuma and Astral working together on screen. We see that Yuma and Astral's goals begin to conflict when Yuma befriends the Barians who are the enemies of Astral world. Therefore, Yuma's ceremonial duel with Astral had so much more buildup and was way more climactic. Yuma grew as a duelist to the point where he could defeat his teacher and step up to save the world from his best friend if need be. All with a smile on his face. I don't care what the Zexal haters say! Yuma is such an awesome character, despite being one of the youngest protags.

Both ceremonial duels have heartwarming endings. But I think Yuma and Astral had a better dynamic than Yugi and Atem. Yugi's only moment against a main villain was in the Duelist Kingdom arc but he never got a moment to really shine after that until literally the last minute.

[kuriboo]

so. yugioh vrains is over. the last episode has aired.and with that in mind, with three seasons of this show, i’ve still got a lot of feelings about this show. especially that last episode. so i guess this is sort of the final thoughts and feelings post about yugioh vrains. not the last post in general about yugioh vrains. just the big opinions post, i guess, because there’s a lot.

yugioh vrains was good

yugioh vrains was very good. i liked it a lot. and me liking it a lot is the only criteria here for whether i’ll say it’s good or bad. i liked it! so it’s good.

i’m also very thankful that vrains has broken a curse yugioh has been suffering for awhile now. we’re talking about the dub. and no, i don’t really care that much that the dub censored some bullets, i think it’s funny, but i don’t care otherwise. this is just about general dub quality. zexal’s dub was bad. written bad quite a bit of the time, and a lot of the voice acting was just, not good. arc v, i can’t speak for the writing, because i only have seen like ten episodes of it, which is to be fair more than most people on this website, but the voice acting in arc v is atrocious, it’s worse than zexal. i’ve seen 20 episodes of the vrains dub, and look, i know. i know arc v’s main villain sounded like iago from fucking aladdin, i know that dub yusaku is voiced by someone who did voicework in zexal. but in 20 episodes of vrains, there wasn’t a single voice i didn’t like. the voice acting in vrains is good. and the dub is written well! it’s actually funny! i think i actually laughed more with the vrains dub than the sub for those 20 episodes. you know how the zexal dub tried to be funny every episode but it was just obnoxious? vrains was actually funny. the jokes are actually good. it’s been awhile since yugioh’s been dubbed well, and it was refreshing. the only thing i don’t like about the dub is that it only airs in canada and it’s impossible to watch in like any way online. i’m not done watching the dub btw eventually i’ll be able to watch more and i will watch more and i’ll be back here in this tag. if nothing else, i’m hoping it joins the other yugiohs on hulu or something when the dub’s done in like, two years. and if there’s a vrains manga i’ll definitely read it but like. shrugs on that.

the show’s got big megaman battle network, code lyoko, and the world ends with you vibes. i’m not saying this to knock vrains or anything. i love vrains. but if you like any of those games/shows, and you haven’t given vrains a chance, even if you haven’t watched any other yugioh series, i highly recommend it. the card games in vrains were very secondary to the story itself, and i think that went a long ways here, it worked well. 

so like, how was vrains, how did i feel about it

season one...season one was really good. in hindsight, season one had some good foreshadowing for season three. season one was probably my favorite season, though, but not by much. season one showed yusaku in school the most and i actually loved all the school scenes. revolver’s a really cool and interesting character, and while i’m glad he stopped being a villain after season one and went the sort of anti-hero route, revolver did make a really good villain. uncovering the mystery of the lost incident was fun. a lot of people guessed early on that revolver was both the person yusaku was trying to take down and the person he was trying to save, way before yusaku himself figured it out, but that wasn’t a bad thing at all. i’m pretty sure the show wanted the audience to figure it out before our protagonist, and the reward itself felt pretty rewarding. revolver has cool dragons, yusaku got a cool dragon, ai got insulted a lot, kusanagi was there, definitely a solid season.

season two was easily my least favorite season. bohman and blood shepherd kinda ruined it for me. thoguh, to be fair, blood shepherd didn’t do much. he gave us an excuse to get some takeru flashback, which we could’ve gotten through other means, and he sort of revealed judgement arrows and helped everyone be able to prepare for it, but like, anyone could do that. i hate blood shepherd a lot, but he’s easy for me to forget. i forgot him between episodes a lot, actually, and when he’d show up i’d have to be like, oh that asshole exists. bohman was worse because he was the main antagonist of season two. and he shouldn’t have been. bohman wasn’t a good villain imo! i feel like he wasn’t written super well. i can sort of make him work out in my head, but i don’t like him, and he kept just pulling ideas out that seemingly came from nowhere. he’d make these leaps that were hard for me to follow, and this was after lightning stopped messing with his memories. and since bohman was the main antagonist and because i really didn’t like him, it made it hard for me to enjoy season two. there were other good things in season two. takeru joined the scene in this season, and i love takeru a lot. i require apologies from everyone who didn’t trust my man takeru. lightning was a really good villain (lightning should’ve been the main antagonist imo), was very interesting, and i liked lightning a lot. and hell, haru was alright! i kinda wish they did more with haru. season two wasn’t bad by any means. we also saw the story of how kusanagi and yusaku met in season 2, and those were some of my favorite episodes of the season, along with the yusaku vs kusanagi duel. the story and message was good (though that doesn’t boost it up a ton given season 3 had the same messages) but honestly i just really don’t like bohman.

season 3 is very close to being my favorite season. this is the season of the protagonist having to face against their partner. it happens in like, any yugioh where the protagonist has a partner. vrains didn’t disappoint on that front. this season felt short! season two felt like it dragged on forever and season three felt short. it didn’t necessarily feel like it needed to be longer, when it ended, though. i just wish the show wasn’t over lmao. everyone got baited super hard like episode 1 when everyone thought queen would be the next antagonist after lightning + bohman and then she super wasn’t, which was kinda funny. most of hte time this season i was just yelling at ai to tell me the truth. i loved roboppy and ai this season. and im SO sad about what happened to them!! ai and roboppy were written really well, they made really good villains. i’ll definitely be making more posts about ai in the future. and also, that epilogue though!!! i didn’t get into it when i watched bc i was in a hurry, but!!! jin looks really happy, i love his haircut! and kusanagi is keeping the hot dog truck open so that yusaku still has a place to come home to! im gonna cry!!!! the knights of hanoi are all super good now and i love them. akira’s the ceo of sol!!! it’s what he deserves!!!!! and the whole takeru + kiku scene was really nice. everyone was screaming about that ship being canon now, which i guess it is? i didn’t read it as romantic, i read it as “kiku is a little scared about everything with vrains and takeru is helping her feel safe and secure, like, making sure she doesn’t fall off his hoverboard and shit”. i honestly read it more as takeru still being gay for yusaku while thinking about how cool yusaku is lmao. but i know yusaku + takeru will never be canon, i never thought it would be, and knowing yugioh, takeru + kiku im sure is supposed to be canon so like. it’s not a bad ship. i’m surprised how many people i see like that ship? but it’s just not for me i guess. im happy for yall who wanted this though. and that last scene!!!! we saw ai!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i’ll save thoughts on that another time i guess, including yusaku post that time skip.

i liked shima a lot this series. i honestly wish there was more of him lmao. i mostly wanted more yusaku + shima interaction, not in terms of shima finding out yusaku was playmaker, i just wanted the two of them to bond more. i wanted to see more of them being friends (read: shima forcing his friendship on yusaku and yusaku reluctantly goes along with it but actually likes it more as time goes on). and i wish we got to see takeru in the duel club at least once. takeru and yusaku both going to one meeting and yusaku sleeps through it and takeru is pumped and like taking notes and shit and shima is just like how can yusaku sleep through it this is the best!!!

aoi....i have mixed feelings on. i liked her a lot in season one, and i liked her a lot in half of season two. i really don’t like the blue maiden avatar (i did like blue girl!), and i preferred the trickstars over marincesses. i did enjoy her figuring out yusaku was playmaker though, that was a fun scene. i like aoi a lot still, love that girl, but after a point i stopped liking what they were doing with her.

they did ghost gal dirty. ghost gal was GREAT in season one. i loved her. and then they gave her a brother, her brother was shit, and everything about ghost gal got thrown out the window so that her character could revolve only around her shit brother. i feel so bad for her. i mean, i kinda get it? this whole thing’s about bonds, a lot of the bonds focused on were familial bonds (either in the blood family or found family sense, there was both). but ghost gal was already developing a sort of family-ish bond with akira and aoi by that point. i never felt like she needed anything else. she still could’ve done cool things in seasons two and three without having a shitstain forced into her life.

im madly in love with kusanagi and if anyone says a single bad thing about him i will stomp you to death with my hooves

i’m running out of people to talk about here i can’t avoid it anymore i’ll talk about blood shepherd now. i hate him. i hate him. he’s an idiot. i’ve yelled about this before and i’ll do it again. some shit happened to him because of malfunctioning ai or whatever. cool. great. now he has a grudge against all ai. that makes no sense. if im playing basketball and i get hit in the head by a basketball (by accident) am i gonna blame the basketball? no, i’ll either blame the person who threw it or myself for not noticing it and letting myself get hit. if i sprain my wrist playing volleyball am i gonna get mad at the volleyball? no, i’m mad at myself for messing up and playing in a way that caused that injury. if i get in a car accident because my car brake stops working, am i going to blame the car itself? maybe a little, but not as much as either the manufacturer or, if i recently had work done on the brake, the mechanic i visited. see, these things are all inanimate objects with no malicious intent or free will. since vrains is one of those shows, it may sound cruel comparing an AI to a car or a basketball. but the ignis (all generations, we’ll include pandor and bohman and haru in here for simplicitiy’s sake) are a special case. the ignis specifically stand out because they were made with free will. other artificial intelligence does not have that. it cannot have malicious intent. artificial intelligence cannot do anything it is not programmed to be able to do. it cannot hurt or kill someone, unless it is either programmed to have that function, or you’re looking at an ignis. and blood shepherd KNOWS THIS, because he became a hacker, and even REPROGRAMMED AN AI THAT WASNT SUPPOSED TO LIE TO LIE FOR HIM. along the way, he would’ve had to learn that somewhere. an ai malfunctioned and caused blood shepherd and his mom to get in a car accident. the ai itself isn’t to blame for that! that’s the fault of whoever made it!! or if the car was hacked to cause that problem, it’s the car manufacturer’s fault! you blame those people!!! and if blood shepherd went after those groups it’d be fine! instead he goes after artificial intelligences because he’s the biggest fucking idiot the world has ever seen. this does not make sense, even in the vrains universe, because again, the ignis are the only ai with free will and who can make their own decisions. any other ai cannot do something like this on purpose. the solution is to make ai better, not get rid of them. the solution is to improve security. not get rid of ai. at this point ai is so ingrained in society that you’re not gonna accomplish that anyway. oh, and i hate blood shepherd for what he did to ghost gal’s character. other than that, he was cool for two episodes before we learned his bullshit backstory, and he hasn’t done a single thing i liked since except he died twice, and i liked those parts. i fucking HATE blood shepherd. easily one of the worst yugioh characters ever. i could rant on about bohman, too, but im tired.

i don’t have bad things to say about a lot of characters. yusaku, kusanagi, jin, ai, roboppy, revolver, lightning, aqua, akira, earth, go onizuka, windy, i don’t really have bad things to say about them now that the series is over. i liked them a lot!!! they were really good. 

i guess the bottom line of this is, i wish yugioh treated its girls and its “joke characters” or “comic relief characters” better. and i wish bohman and blood shepherd didn’t exist, or were executed better. other than that, very solid.

if you were curious about my preferred ships here, yusaku + takeru is the best ship this show has to offer and it’s a shame more people don’t like it, and miyu + aoi is really good. anything else is like, okay, but i don’t love it. the show’s most popular ships are fine but not for me. yusaku + ryoken is okay but doesn’t really work in universe for me, i don’t love it but it’s fine, and it’s aight in a like real au setting. i don’t think there’s any ships i don’t really like, not like, other than the obvious. but these two are the best. 

all in all, vrains was really good. this show helped me through some real bad times, and will continue to do so as bad times continue. i love it lots, it holds a special place in my heart, and im glad i was able to watch it. im excited for whatever yugioh has to offer next, especially following this, because vrains is definitely one of my favorite yugioh series over all. it was a lot of fun and made me suffer and cry a lot and it was just...a good time. please watch it if you haven’t. thanks for going on this journey with me. i’ll probably end up talking more about bigger characters like yusaku and ryoken and takeru and kusanagi and ai more in different posts. ive talked enough here already

[checkurselfb4umachuwreckurself]

9, 11, 20, 21, 22, & 25?

9: Opinion on TAS?

sighs a bit. I think LK HAS contributed a lot to the fandom, but he also is a big reason for fandom divide. Not only is there the separation between the ygotas people and the anti-ygotas people, but a further divide was between the DM fans and the spin-off fans. Literally the EPISODE after Vrains was confirmed, LK made a joke implying Vrains was dumb. Before we really knew anything about it. BEFORE THE SERIES EVEN AIRED. It’s disapointing how both he and the fans enjoying tearing the others down, before even anything happens (plus you know YGOTAS is essentially randomness the show? so why do they feel the right to insult ZeXal or Arc V for being jokey and colourful? Fuck off)

Now if you mean Yugioh Ketchup, they are a delightful abridged series. They well implement the other series (Yuuma and Juudai making tasteful cameos) plus they use the sub names, which is one hell of a bonus.

I haven’t seen ZeXal abridged, but I think the creator likes my jokes? That’s cool.

(Also did Vrains Abridge die. Like, last we heard of it was Feb. I’m guessing it’s dead)

11: How long have you been into YGO?

2012 was the year I watched my first episode of Zexal dub! I missed my 5th anniversary, but there’s always 6th!

20:Did you watch YGO as a kid? I was thirteen when I first watched it, so I’m saying yes. I watched a few stray episodes when I was 9-12, but i couldn’t feel myself be invested into it.