thoughts on Yu-Gi-Oh!
This month, I've read volumes 2, 3, and 5-7 of Yu-Gi-Oh! and volumes 1-4 and 6-12 of Yu-Gi-Oh! Duelist. I've also read a couple months' worth of Yu-Gi-Oh! Millennium World in issues of the English-language "Shonen Jump."
I'm not sure why I like it so much. The plots are fairly simplistic, people get way too worked up over little things, the darker undertones are glossed over disturbingly quickly, and really, it's awfully tacky. Also, the willful mutilation of both high technology and Ancient Egyptian history and religion is enough to make me cry, if I let myself take it seriously.
The story's kind of heartwarming, though, with the emphasis on friendship, family, trust, and hope. And by the end of the first series, Kazuki Takahashi's artwork has evolved/resolved into a very interesting stylized form. And the characters are so damn likeable...
Ah, whatever. Sometimes, you just like things 'because,' and you really can't give a rational reason.
Some thoughts, in no particular order:
1. Names
Apparently the makers of the American anime decided to Anglicize the main characters. Thus, Katsuya Jounouchi becomes Joey Wheeler, Anzu Mazaki becomes Tea Gardner, Hiroto Honda becomes Tristan Taylor, Sugoroku Mutou becomes Solomon Moto, Mai Kujaku becomes Mai Valentine, Pegasus J. Crawford becomes Maximilian J. Pegasus, etc. I've never figured out why people think it makes sense to give Japanese characters English-derived names, but apparently they did try to rationalize Jounouchi's new name by making him an American whose family moved to Japan. Given his blond hair, that actually almost makes sense. Almost.
Anyway, I think of Anzu and Honda by their Japanese names, but weirdly, I keep slipping in my mental 'tag' for Jounouchi. Sometimes he's Jounouchi, sometimes Jou, and sometimes Joey. I think I slip because his Anglicized name is so close to his real name. Sugoroku is 'Grandpa' in my head, so his actual name is kind of irrelevant. Yugi is Yugi, and to hell with the weird spelling/pronunciation change in his family name.
Pegasus's name change is incredibly pointless. It was already standard American!
Oddly, Seto Kaiba, Mokuba Kaiba, and Ryo Bakura get to keep their names. Favoritism? Or is it, perhaps, a subtle form of ethnocentrism -- we have to make the heroes 'like us,' but the villains can stay foreign? (This theory, however, does not account for Ryuji Otogi, an antagonist who gets renamed 'Duke Devlin.' Bother.)
The name switch that really gets to me, though, is a card name. I can accept the butchering of Ancient Egyptian stuff as the inevitable result of Takahashi picking and choosing pieces that worked best with his story and ignoring the rest. I can even go along with the dragon motif, since he's Japanese and he clearly has a thing for dragons. But the three God Cards are Obelisk, Ra, and Osiris -- one genuine Egyptian architectural feature, and two genuine Egyptian deities. (Though, seriously, the whole duality explanation? Hogwash.)
Osiris. Not Slifer.
*beats head against table repeatedly*
(Incidentally, the name thing can cut both ways. I love Death Note to pieces, but I wanted to scream during the chapters with Raye Penber. For one thing, Raye and Rae are female spellings; for men, it's just Ray, no 'e.' For another, that list of FBI agents' names? Those are not real names. Not in Japan, not in America, and not in any country I've ever heard of.)
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2. Yugi and What's His Name (Yugi/Other Yugi/the Pharaoh/Atemu/Yami)
A) Appearance: Somewhere near the end of the first series, Takahashi standardized the visual differences between Yugi and the other Yugi. The pharaoh has three jagged blond streaks going up from his bangs; one of them is the single lock that hangs in the center of normal Yugi's forehead. I haven't a clue where the others come from. (Well, presumably they come from the rest of Yugi's bangs, but Takahashi doesn't draw corresponding side-locks on Yugi when he's normal.) His eyes are basically rectangular instead of arch-shaped, and his eyebrows default to a downward slanting position. I cannot speak for any color change, since the manga is black and white and you really can't trust cover illustration color schemes.
I don't think there's an actual height difference between the two; it's just a trick of posture. Yugi tends to roll his shoulders forward and slouch a little, while his other self throws his shoulders back and stands straight up. This reflects their attitude differences as well, and is why the pharaoh can carry off outfits that look silly on normal Yugi.
It's hard to tell Yugi's height anyway. I've been trying to gauge him against Anzu, and he seems to vary from chest height, to shoulder height, to chin height, to nose height, to almost dead-level with her, and back again. The first series is particularly useless for this sort of comparison, since Takahashi hadn't settled into his style and was still drawing Yugi kind of compact and lumpy. Later he has the same slim, long-legged body type as everyone else, which makes it damn easy to forget that he's short unless he's standing right next to someone and Takahashi isn't drawing the scene at an angle.
B) Names: What does one call Yugi's other self? Fandom seems to have settled on 'Yami,' which makes a certain amount of sense. The character guides in early manga volumes call him Dark Yugi -- presumably 'Yami no Yugi' in Japanese -- so 'Yami' is a convenient shorthand. It's certainly handy to give him a name to distinguish him from normal Yugi, and one which doesn't spoil parts of the story or, you know, implicitly give him the most important piece of his memory at a point when he's an amnesiac spirit and/or thinks he's actually Yugi.
However, nobody in the story calls him that. Yugi calls him 'the other me,' and as of volume 12 of Duelist, everyone else still calls him 'Yugi' or 'the other Yugi,' and they go on calling him 'Yugi' up through at least the first few volumes of Millennium World. So while 'Yami' is a useful name for discussion purposes, it's starting to read very oddly to me in fanfiction.
C) Souls: Are the two Yugis the same person? Hard to say. Unless Isis (here I tweak the name, because 'Ishizu' is just wrong for an Egyptian woman) was playing tricks on the whole department of Egyptian antiquities, as well as Kaiba and Yugi, then Atemu was, physically, a dead ringer for Yugi, just like High Priest Set (or Seto, or Seth... *grumble*) was a dead ringer for Kaiba. Since Kaiba seems to be the priest's reincarnation...
The obvious problem with that theory is that Atemu's soul wasn't available to be reincarnated; it was trapped in the Millennium Puzzle. People get around this by saying that his soul was split in half, with half getting trapped and half getting reincarnated. I haven't read far enough to know if this is supported in the manga or if it's just fandom handwaving. (A similar theory is used to explain Ryo Bakura's resemblance to the tomb robber who became the evil spirit of the Millennium Ring.)
Apparently, at the end of the series, Atemu goes off to heaven -- this makes sense, since he's already dead and has been for thousands of years. If heaven is timeless, it's conceivable that his soul then got shunted back about 17 years and was born as Yugi, which would neatly solve the reincarnation issue. If he and Yugi are halves of the same soul, however, any ending that splits them is problematic.
(I once read a story in which Atemu's heaven was to be properly rejoined with Yugi, as the same person instead of two minds/personalities in one body. It was an interesting idea, and I wonder why nobody else seems to have used it.)
D) Partners: At the start of the manga, Yugi has no clue what's going on. He is completely unaware of his alter-ego, and only starts suspecting because he keeps blacking out. Yami, on the other hand, seems to have at least superficial access to Yugi's memories, and to be aware of whatever happens to Yugi. However, he is also unaware that he has/is an alter-ego -- he seems to think that he is Yugi, at least until he meets Shadi and gets several hints otherwise.
Even though what happens to Yami affects Yugi -- Shadi's strike, through Yami, at Yugi's heart is proof of that -- Yugi only starts remembering what happens to Yami after he decides not to be afraid of him anymore. That is just fascinating.
After some time passes (about six months) Yugi can feel Yami's emotions, and after a bit more time, they can actually 'talk' to each other -- this happens during the duel with Pegasus, and is when Yami acknowledges Yugi as his partner. Previously, I think he considered Yugi someone to protect, but he got past that because of his duels with Kaiba and Mai. Without Yami's change of heart, I'm not at all sure Yugi would have been able to talk to him, and they couldn't have pulled that mind shuffle trick on Pegasus.
Clearly their emotions and attitudes toward each other affect how much they can interact. They don't always know what happens when the other one is in charge, though, or Yami couldn't keep secrets from Yugi at the start of Battle City. How do they do that? Can they shut each other out involuntarily, or is Yugi just being polite and not paying attention that day? I hope that gets explained later on.
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3. Bakura
A) Characterization: Ryo Bakura is not a wimp. He's a little too trusting, a bit socially inept, and definitely clueless (or willfully blind) -- you'd think he'd get suspicious when he starts finding himself in strange places with no idea how he got there, especially since he's been possessed before. But he's not a wimp. He fought his evil self to a standstill and was willing to destroy his soul in order to save his new friends. I grant you, he couldn't do much until Yugi and the others gave him an opening, but he took his chance and ran with it.
I think the persistent mischaracterization in fanfic comes because the first manga series was animated by a different company and never got shown in America. (I almost want to see the main anime, just to see how they made any sense out of Duelist Kingdom without the backstory on Shadi, Kaiba, and Bakura provided in the first seven volumes... but only almost.) Possibly Bakura does something wimpy later in the Duelist series, but it'd have to be pretty pathetic to overcome my first impression from the Monster World storyline.
B) Names and Appearance: Like Yugi and Yami, Bakura has a name problem. The fandom tendency is to call the normal Bakura 'Ryo' and the evil spirit 'Bakura.' The thing is, as with Yugi, everybody in the story calls both personalities by the same name. They're both 'Bakura,' except one gets qualified as 'the evil Bakura.'
When the evil Bakura first appears, the only visual difference is his expression and his hair, which gets spikier. Over the Monster World arc, however, they develop a difference in their eyes as well -- normal Bakura has big sparkly irises and pupils, while evil Bakura has smaller irises and the pinpoint pupils Takahashi often uses as a shorthand for 'bad guy' or 'insane.' This difference is interesting because of the times it doesn't show up later on.
C) Degrees of Possession: I am not convinced that Bakura and his evil self have nearly as bad a relationship as people often think. It starts out pretty awful, with the evil spirit perfectly willing to mutilate Bakura's body to stop him from interfering with the RPG... but the spirit was, in a twisted way, granting Bakura's wishes. And even after Bakura knows about the spirit, he keeps the Millennium Ring, carries it around with him, and uses its magic. For another thing, Bakura is interested in the Millennium Items himself; it's not just the spirit's obsession. And finally, they almost seem to blend during part of the Duelist Kingdom storyline.
It's clearly the evil spirit who goes wandering in the night, leaving Bakura a bit confused when he finds himself out of his room, but it's harder to say which one of them gets Honda out of his cell and helps rescue Mokuba -- the eyes look like the evil Bakura, and knocking out a guard to steal his keys seems uncharacteristic for the good Bakura, but carrying out a rescue in the first place seems odd for the evil spirit. Then one of the Bakuras tells Yugi to kill Pegasus -- here the eyes say 'good,' but the words say 'evil.' And it's the good Bakura who asks for the replica Millennium Eye that his evil self leaves Pegasus as a replacement for the real one, which he tears out of the man's face.
I may change my mind as I read further. But I would like to stress that the evil spirit doesn't mutilate Bakura for kicks. He stabs him with the Millennium Ring's pointers to make sure that Bakura doesn't get rid of him, and he impales Bakura's hand when his host actively interferes with his plot to trap Yugi-tachi's souls and steal the Millennium Puzzle. That's all. And Bakura keeps right on interfering, impaled hand be damned.
ETA, 8/11/06: As of vol. 14 of Duelist, I still don't think Bakura's a wimp. Terminally clueless, yes. Wimp, no. (I am very interested in the hints of a creepy occult-based card deck, which seems an odd choice for the cardboard cutout who often appears in fanfiction.) And again, I would like to point out that the evil Bakura is not injuring his host for kicks -- he's doing it in order to carry out a plan with Marik.
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4. Kaiba
Seto Kaiba is a little bit insane.
That's okay. This is a world where, when Yugi admits that he might have multiple personality disorder, Jounouchi's response boils down to saying "We'll always be friends!" and ignoring the issue completely. Everyone else follows his lead. Nobody suggests counseling.
Seto Kaiba is also a massive jerk.
I like him anyway. I like him because he's had such a screwed up life, and is doing his best to work through it and rise above it. I like him because, to some degree, it's his own damn fault that his life was screwed up. And he knows it. And he doesn't care; he just accepts that and moves on.
I like him because he has a sense of obligation. I like him because he gets so obsessive over things. I like him because one of his obsessions is his little brother -- at least after Yami gives him the first and second jolts out of the really bad path he was following. I like him because he really does love his dragons.
I like him because he's rather terrifyingly intelligent, competent, and ruthless -- this guy can design sophisticated holographic technology, run a large (possibly multi-national corporation), and win a physical confrontation when the other man has a gun and all he has is a handful of cards. I like him because, when confronted with impossible things, he continues to insist that they're impossible instead of tossing rationality to the side. I like him because sometimes he tosses rationality aside anyway, while insisting that he's doing no such thing.
I like him because he doesn't believe in fate.
One of my favorite scenes, so far, is when Yami is dueling the Ventriloquist of the Dead, who is using Kaiba's stolen deck and a Kaiba-shaped dummy. He may also have ensnared part of Kaiba's soul -- that's not made clear. The Ventriloquist has drawn a Blue-Eyes White Dragon, and is about to defeat/kill Yami... when the dragon vanishes. At that moment, across the ocean in Japan, Kaiba wakes from a six-month coma and looks out the window.
Kaiba may not believe in magic, but he has the same freaky, freaky luck of the draw that Yugi, Yami, and sometimes Jounouchi all have, and I think he really does put his soul into his cards.
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5. Outfits and Hair
A) Kaiba's infamous white and black trenchcoat first appears in volume 10 when he's testing his new Duel Disk system. At that point, it doesn't have buckles on the upper arms. When he announces Battle City, one chapter later, buckled straps have mysteriously appeared. Is this an art goof, or did he accessorize?
B) In volume 9 of Duelist, Yugi switches from a cord to a chain to hold the Millennium Puzzle. He says it's kind of flashy, and when Yami says it's too subtle and he ought to wear silver chains on his arms as well, Yugi insists that's not his style. In that case, when and why did he pick up the really flashy bracelets that he puts on before sending Yami on a pseudo-date with Anzu in volume 10? And when and why did Yami decide that flashy bracelets meant that Yugi didn't have much fashion sense, especially after he pushed Yugi to wear stuff like that?
Also, Yugi wears a sleeveless leather undershirt with buckles and what looks like a dog collar, and he seems to own a cape. Where does he get off saying flashy punk stuff isn't his style?
ETA, 6/12/06: Okay, the cape isn't a cape; it's just Yami wearing Yugi's uniform jacket without putting his arms through the sleeves. Which raises the question of how he gets it to stay on his shoulders without fastening the collar... but I think I'll just call it magic and stop giving myself headaches. Well. Magic or nifty hidden velcro patches. *grin*
C) WTF is up with Mai's corset shirts? They look like they must chafe something awful -- is inducing a drastic IQ drop in men really worth it? Also, how the hell does she fit all those camping supplies into one over-the-shoulder sack? It doesn't even look big enough to hold a sleeping bag!
D) How do the characters get their coats to flare out dramatically when there doesn't seem to be any wind? (Kaiba, Yami, and Jounouchi are the big culprits here; Honda may wear the same uniform jackets as Yugi and Jounouchi, but his tend to obey the laws of physics.)
E) Jounouchi and Kaiba seriously need haircuts. Ryo, Otogi, Mokuba, and Honda need whole new hairstyles, though the first three could get away with just a hairbrush and/or a ponytail. Yugi and his grandfather are probably lost causes.
F) In a related point, Jounouchi and Kaiba have almost exactly the same facial structure and eye type. The hair color and eye color differences are minimized or non-existent in black and white, so if you crop a mug shot of either of them to remove tell-tale jacket collars and the wilder bits of Jounouchi's hair, the only difference left is that you can see Jounouchi's eyebrows, whereas the gaps between Kaiba's bangs and eyes are, for whatever reason, almost always filled in with solid black. That amuses me.
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6. Jounouchi
How much do I love Jounouchi? Let me count the ways. :-) Seriously, he's an idiot, and a goof, and a money-obsessed jerk, but I really don't see how you could not like the guy. Friendship is the big theme of the series, and everybody contributes to that some way or other, but Jounouchi and Yugi's friendship is the central one.
Jounouchi is interesting because he's a sort of classic tough guy -- he was in a gang, he's a sloppy but effective fighter, he charges in without thinking -- and yet his new best friend is Yugi. Jounouchi also spends the manga slowly turning away from being a brawler, and learning instead to play games and think strategically. It's an interesting character arc, since the usual 'fighting' manga storyline would go in the opposite direction and emphasize physical strength and skill.
Jounouchi and Kaiba, as a lot of people have remarked, parallel each other in a number of ways. They're both overprotective older brothers, they both come from undesirable backgrounds, and they both have some bad reflexive reactions because of their backgrounds. The difference is that Kaiba superficially got out -- he 'won' in terms of money and social status -- but Jounouchi 'won' in terms of emotional health and support structure. And each one (well, if Kaiba's being honest with himself) wants what the other one has, or at least wants not to have gone through his own past experiences and assumes the other one must have had an easier time.
Jounouchi's luck is a complicated thing. He's not lucky at all when playing Otogi's rigged games, nor is he lucky at rolling dice in Bakura's Monster World RPG, but he is lucky (sort of) when playing a rigged game show in the early manga, and his good luck with gamble cards in Duel Monsters is more than chance should allow. He loses constantly to Yugi, but he manages to beat a lot of strong players whom he statistically shouldn't be able to beat. In other words, his luck seems to be tied to the cards, and to his need to beat a person -- he doesn't seem able to summon that need when he's playing Yugi, or when he's just trying to show off against Otogi.
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7. Pairings
Takahashi clearly supports Yugi/Anzu -- maybe also Yami/Anzu -- but I don't think he's particularly interested in romance, so it only pops up now and then and is easy to downplay. I think he also supports Jounouchi/Mai, but again, it's not a big thing.
I don't know what I think about Yugi/Anzu, though I think that during the series it would be extremely awkward for a number of reasons. Jounouchi/Mai, on the other hand, I love! They're so cute when they interact, and the way Mai asks after Jounouchi at the beginning of Battle City is very telling.
I don't really see where people get Kaiba/Yami (or its less popular variants, Kaiba/Yami/Yugi and Kaiba/Yugi). I mean, I definitely see the intensity of the relationship, but Kaiba just screams 'asexual' to me -- or at least 'damaged; possibly explosive; handle with care' -- and it would be awkward for most of the same reasons Yugi/Anzu would be awkward.
As for Kaiba/Jounouchi... eh. If I didn't like Jounouchi/Mai so much, I could go for that. Heck, I could still go for it, presuming that the writer remembers that Yugi, Honda, Anzu, and Mai exist and would be concerned about this on several levels. (Mokuba would be concerned too, but he doesn't get forgotten as much.) It's messy, but it's interesting, and it's less problematic than any ship involving Yugi.
Doubled-soul pairings (yami/hikari, in fandom parlance) such as Yami/Yugi, or Bakura/Ryo, are a little problematic if you assume that they're really the same person. They're also problematic since there's only one body involved. (Come to think of it, that could lead to some very interesting masturbation-but-not PWPs... but that's not the issue.) And they're problematic, to me, because they imply a certain inward-turning focus and withdrawal from interaction with the outside world. However, those are clearly important emotional relationships, whether they're romantic/sexual or not.
Finally, Yugi/Jounouchi... again, as with Kaiba/Yami, I can sort of see where this comes from -- there's a lot of emotional intensity between them -- but for whatever reason, it just doesn't read 'sexual' to me. (This lack of sex goes double for Jounouchi and Honda's friendship.)
Any other pairings... well, either they're pulled from thin air or I haven't run across the canon justification for them yet. :-)
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8. Minor Timeline Problem
I refuse to accept that Pegasus is only 24 years old. Yes, in a world where Seto Kaiba could become a CEO at age 14 or 15 (it's not made clear), it's reasonable for Pegasus to have invented Duel Monsters at age 18 or so, and founded a successful company. However, that leaves only six years for the gaming community to organize enough to hold huge televised tournaments, with large prizes. That is much less reasonable.
I suppose that, this world clearly not being quite the same as ours, one could postulate that a large, organized gaming community already existed, and Duel Monsters was simply added as one of its sponsored events on tournament circuits... but then you run into the problem of Sugoroku Mutou's card deck. He built a deck and clearly spent some time playing the game. He also received a very rare Blue-Eyes White Dragon card from a friend. And yet Yugi, who seems to pay close attention to whatever games his grandfather plays, didn't know about any of this.
This would seem to imply that Yugi didn't live with his grandfather when Sugoroku was playing Duel Monsters. However, Yugi spent eight years putting together the Millennium Puzzle, and seems to have lived above the game shop during that period, which means he was definitely there when Duel Monsters first became public.
We have a problem here.
Now, for narrative purposes, Yugi can't know about the cards before the reader does, so whether he logically should've known or not, Takahashi had to show him being ignorant. But I want to make sense of this within the story, which means I need either a timewarp or a significantly older Pegasus. Therefore, I mentally tack five to ten years onto Pegasus's age, which means Duel Monsters could well have been around for Yugi's whole life -- it just didn't get imported to Japan on a wide scale until Yugi's teen years. That might also explain why the Japanese version starts out with a different name. If the Japanese rights were originally licensed to a different company -- which seems plausible, since Pegasus surely didn't start out with a huge company -- the importers might have renamed it. When Pegasus reacquired complete control, he could impose his preferred name on the game.
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As I read more, I may add to this.
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Additions, 6/12/06
9. Honda
A) Yes, he DOES exist: Honda gets shamefully ignored in a lot of fandom and fanfiction. This is a pity, because he's a great guy. He has the most normal family of all the characters -- parents, older sister (and her husband and son), dog, the works. He doesn't have a tragic backstory, he's not particularly into games, and he's apparently not quite as good a fighter as Jounouchi -- this is implied by what he says about looking up to Jounouchi back when Jou was in Hirutani's gang -- but you can't work the story without him.
Honda is the one who decides to rescue Mokuba during Duelist Kingdom, and who notices that Bakura is slipping between personalities again. Honda is the one who goes off to pick up Jounouchi's sister during Battle City. (Okay, so Otogi follows him, but it's Honda's idea.) If it comes to that, Honda is the one who, because Mokuba saves him during Death-T, starts the line of thought that lets Anzu help Mokuba open up and thus, perhaps, prevents Mokuba from continuing down Kaiba's path during the six months Kaiba's in a coma and Mokuba is trying to keep KaibaCorp from being stolen out from under him.
B) Teasing out the implications: It's interesting that the incident with Ushio, back at the very start of the manga, affects Jounouchi much more than it affects Honda. Jounouchi is, metaphorically, knocked flat by Yugi's refusal to turn on him even though he and Honda have been bullying Yugi. Honda presumably feels kind of bad about it, but it doesn't change his actions. He continues to pick on Yugi off-page for several chapters, until Jounouchi talks him into getting Yugi's help in his pursuit of the girl he likes. That time, Yugi's willingness to stand up for him and get punished in his place does make an impression.
I would love to know what made that incident different from the first one. I would love to know how Honda feels about his friends getting so involved in games he doesn't care all that much about. I would love to know why Honda got so worked up over the 'cowardice' roll during the Monster World storyline. I would love to know how Honda deals with losing his status as Jounouchi's best friend, and why he doesn't seem to be jealous of Yugi at all.
And yet, nobody writes about Honda.
Bah.
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10. Anzu
Anzu is Yugi's oldest friend. And she does seem to genuinely care about him... but she never managed to help him find other friends, and she's not all that interested in games. Also, she doesn't seem to have good friends besides Yugi -- this can be inferred from the way she easily falls into the new group with Jounouchi and Honda -- yet she seems reasonably popular in a general way. (She's their class representative, after all.)
I think Anzu is sort of like Yugi in that she has an obsession that prevented her from interacting all that much with people. But dancing is more socially acceptable than playing games, and Anzu seems to have a better knack for fitting in than Yugi, so she looks more normal on the surface. However, there are hints of other things underneath, particularly that obsessive drive that an awful lot of Yu-Gi-Oh! characters share to some degree.
I like Anzu. I grant you, the way she tried to manipulate a date out of Yami in the original manga series was pretty despicable, but they were 15 years old. Kids that age aren't always thinking logically about things, especially when romance rears its head. And by the time Yugi tricks Yami into going on a 'date' with Anzu before the Battle City arc, Anzu seems pretty platonic about the whole thing, and is more interested in helping Yami cheer up (and mending any flaws in Yugi and Yami's partnership) than in getting Yami to notice her.
(I think he noticed anyway during the dance challenge, though whether that was physical appreciation or just admiration for skill and determination is up for interpretation.)
Anyway, as I said earlier, I think any romantic pairing involving Yugi or Yami would be problematic during the series, unless it was effectively a threesome... but I am totally cool with any variant of Anzu/Yugi/Yami. (And yes, with Kaiba/Yami/Yugi too, though I still think I like that one better when it's gen with subtext.)
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I may continue extending this when the mood strikes me.
I'm not sure why I like it so much. The plots are fairly simplistic, people get way too worked up over little things, the darker undertones are glossed over disturbingly quickly, and really, it's awfully tacky. Also, the willful mutilation of both high technology and Ancient Egyptian history and religion is enough to make me cry, if I let myself take it seriously.
The story's kind of heartwarming, though, with the emphasis on friendship, family, trust, and hope. And by the end of the first series, Kazuki Takahashi's artwork has evolved/resolved into a very interesting stylized form. And the characters are so damn likeable...
Ah, whatever. Sometimes, you just like things 'because,' and you really can't give a rational reason.
Some thoughts, in no particular order:
1. Names
Apparently the makers of the American anime decided to Anglicize the main characters. Thus, Katsuya Jounouchi becomes Joey Wheeler, Anzu Mazaki becomes Tea Gardner, Hiroto Honda becomes Tristan Taylor, Sugoroku Mutou becomes Solomon Moto, Mai Kujaku becomes Mai Valentine, Pegasus J. Crawford becomes Maximilian J. Pegasus, etc. I've never figured out why people think it makes sense to give Japanese characters English-derived names, but apparently they did try to rationalize Jounouchi's new name by making him an American whose family moved to Japan. Given his blond hair, that actually almost makes sense. Almost.
Anyway, I think of Anzu and Honda by their Japanese names, but weirdly, I keep slipping in my mental 'tag' for Jounouchi. Sometimes he's Jounouchi, sometimes Jou, and sometimes Joey. I think I slip because his Anglicized name is so close to his real name. Sugoroku is 'Grandpa' in my head, so his actual name is kind of irrelevant. Yugi is Yugi, and to hell with the weird spelling/pronunciation change in his family name.
Pegasus's name change is incredibly pointless. It was already standard American!
Oddly, Seto Kaiba, Mokuba Kaiba, and Ryo Bakura get to keep their names. Favoritism? Or is it, perhaps, a subtle form of ethnocentrism -- we have to make the heroes 'like us,' but the villains can stay foreign? (This theory, however, does not account for Ryuji Otogi, an antagonist who gets renamed 'Duke Devlin.' Bother.)
The name switch that really gets to me, though, is a card name. I can accept the butchering of Ancient Egyptian stuff as the inevitable result of Takahashi picking and choosing pieces that worked best with his story and ignoring the rest. I can even go along with the dragon motif, since he's Japanese and he clearly has a thing for dragons. But the three God Cards are Obelisk, Ra, and Osiris -- one genuine Egyptian architectural feature, and two genuine Egyptian deities. (Though, seriously, the whole duality explanation? Hogwash.)
Osiris. Not Slifer.
*beats head against table repeatedly*
(Incidentally, the name thing can cut both ways. I love Death Note to pieces, but I wanted to scream during the chapters with Raye Penber. For one thing, Raye and Rae are female spellings; for men, it's just Ray, no 'e.' For another, that list of FBI agents' names? Those are not real names. Not in Japan, not in America, and not in any country I've ever heard of.)
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2. Yugi and What's His Name (Yugi/Other Yugi/the Pharaoh/Atemu/Yami)
A) Appearance: Somewhere near the end of the first series, Takahashi standardized the visual differences between Yugi and the other Yugi. The pharaoh has three jagged blond streaks going up from his bangs; one of them is the single lock that hangs in the center of normal Yugi's forehead. I haven't a clue where the others come from. (Well, presumably they come from the rest of Yugi's bangs, but Takahashi doesn't draw corresponding side-locks on Yugi when he's normal.) His eyes are basically rectangular instead of arch-shaped, and his eyebrows default to a downward slanting position. I cannot speak for any color change, since the manga is black and white and you really can't trust cover illustration color schemes.
I don't think there's an actual height difference between the two; it's just a trick of posture. Yugi tends to roll his shoulders forward and slouch a little, while his other self throws his shoulders back and stands straight up. This reflects their attitude differences as well, and is why the pharaoh can carry off outfits that look silly on normal Yugi.
It's hard to tell Yugi's height anyway. I've been trying to gauge him against Anzu, and he seems to vary from chest height, to shoulder height, to chin height, to nose height, to almost dead-level with her, and back again. The first series is particularly useless for this sort of comparison, since Takahashi hadn't settled into his style and was still drawing Yugi kind of compact and lumpy. Later he has the same slim, long-legged body type as everyone else, which makes it damn easy to forget that he's short unless he's standing right next to someone and Takahashi isn't drawing the scene at an angle.
B) Names: What does one call Yugi's other self? Fandom seems to have settled on 'Yami,' which makes a certain amount of sense. The character guides in early manga volumes call him Dark Yugi -- presumably 'Yami no Yugi' in Japanese -- so 'Yami' is a convenient shorthand. It's certainly handy to give him a name to distinguish him from normal Yugi, and one which doesn't spoil parts of the story or, you know, implicitly give him the most important piece of his memory at a point when he's an amnesiac spirit and/or thinks he's actually Yugi.
However, nobody in the story calls him that. Yugi calls him 'the other me,' and as of volume 12 of Duelist, everyone else still calls him 'Yugi' or 'the other Yugi,' and they go on calling him 'Yugi' up through at least the first few volumes of Millennium World. So while 'Yami' is a useful name for discussion purposes, it's starting to read very oddly to me in fanfiction.
C) Souls: Are the two Yugis the same person? Hard to say. Unless Isis (here I tweak the name, because 'Ishizu' is just wrong for an Egyptian woman) was playing tricks on the whole department of Egyptian antiquities, as well as Kaiba and Yugi, then Atemu was, physically, a dead ringer for Yugi, just like High Priest Set (or Seto, or Seth... *grumble*) was a dead ringer for Kaiba. Since Kaiba seems to be the priest's reincarnation...
The obvious problem with that theory is that Atemu's soul wasn't available to be reincarnated; it was trapped in the Millennium Puzzle. People get around this by saying that his soul was split in half, with half getting trapped and half getting reincarnated. I haven't read far enough to know if this is supported in the manga or if it's just fandom handwaving. (A similar theory is used to explain Ryo Bakura's resemblance to the tomb robber who became the evil spirit of the Millennium Ring.)
Apparently, at the end of the series, Atemu goes off to heaven -- this makes sense, since he's already dead and has been for thousands of years. If heaven is timeless, it's conceivable that his soul then got shunted back about 17 years and was born as Yugi, which would neatly solve the reincarnation issue. If he and Yugi are halves of the same soul, however, any ending that splits them is problematic.
(I once read a story in which Atemu's heaven was to be properly rejoined with Yugi, as the same person instead of two minds/personalities in one body. It was an interesting idea, and I wonder why nobody else seems to have used it.)
D) Partners: At the start of the manga, Yugi has no clue what's going on. He is completely unaware of his alter-ego, and only starts suspecting because he keeps blacking out. Yami, on the other hand, seems to have at least superficial access to Yugi's memories, and to be aware of whatever happens to Yugi. However, he is also unaware that he has/is an alter-ego -- he seems to think that he is Yugi, at least until he meets Shadi and gets several hints otherwise.
Even though what happens to Yami affects Yugi -- Shadi's strike, through Yami, at Yugi's heart is proof of that -- Yugi only starts remembering what happens to Yami after he decides not to be afraid of him anymore. That is just fascinating.
After some time passes (about six months) Yugi can feel Yami's emotions, and after a bit more time, they can actually 'talk' to each other -- this happens during the duel with Pegasus, and is when Yami acknowledges Yugi as his partner. Previously, I think he considered Yugi someone to protect, but he got past that because of his duels with Kaiba and Mai. Without Yami's change of heart, I'm not at all sure Yugi would have been able to talk to him, and they couldn't have pulled that mind shuffle trick on Pegasus.
Clearly their emotions and attitudes toward each other affect how much they can interact. They don't always know what happens when the other one is in charge, though, or Yami couldn't keep secrets from Yugi at the start of Battle City. How do they do that? Can they shut each other out involuntarily, or is Yugi just being polite and not paying attention that day? I hope that gets explained later on.
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3. Bakura
A) Characterization: Ryo Bakura is not a wimp. He's a little too trusting, a bit socially inept, and definitely clueless (or willfully blind) -- you'd think he'd get suspicious when he starts finding himself in strange places with no idea how he got there, especially since he's been possessed before. But he's not a wimp. He fought his evil self to a standstill and was willing to destroy his soul in order to save his new friends. I grant you, he couldn't do much until Yugi and the others gave him an opening, but he took his chance and ran with it.
I think the persistent mischaracterization in fanfic comes because the first manga series was animated by a different company and never got shown in America. (I almost want to see the main anime, just to see how they made any sense out of Duelist Kingdom without the backstory on Shadi, Kaiba, and Bakura provided in the first seven volumes... but only almost.) Possibly Bakura does something wimpy later in the Duelist series, but it'd have to be pretty pathetic to overcome my first impression from the Monster World storyline.
B) Names and Appearance: Like Yugi and Yami, Bakura has a name problem. The fandom tendency is to call the normal Bakura 'Ryo' and the evil spirit 'Bakura.' The thing is, as with Yugi, everybody in the story calls both personalities by the same name. They're both 'Bakura,' except one gets qualified as 'the evil Bakura.'
When the evil Bakura first appears, the only visual difference is his expression and his hair, which gets spikier. Over the Monster World arc, however, they develop a difference in their eyes as well -- normal Bakura has big sparkly irises and pupils, while evil Bakura has smaller irises and the pinpoint pupils Takahashi often uses as a shorthand for 'bad guy' or 'insane.' This difference is interesting because of the times it doesn't show up later on.
C) Degrees of Possession: I am not convinced that Bakura and his evil self have nearly as bad a relationship as people often think. It starts out pretty awful, with the evil spirit perfectly willing to mutilate Bakura's body to stop him from interfering with the RPG... but the spirit was, in a twisted way, granting Bakura's wishes. And even after Bakura knows about the spirit, he keeps the Millennium Ring, carries it around with him, and uses its magic. For another thing, Bakura is interested in the Millennium Items himself; it's not just the spirit's obsession. And finally, they almost seem to blend during part of the Duelist Kingdom storyline.
It's clearly the evil spirit who goes wandering in the night, leaving Bakura a bit confused when he finds himself out of his room, but it's harder to say which one of them gets Honda out of his cell and helps rescue Mokuba -- the eyes look like the evil Bakura, and knocking out a guard to steal his keys seems uncharacteristic for the good Bakura, but carrying out a rescue in the first place seems odd for the evil spirit. Then one of the Bakuras tells Yugi to kill Pegasus -- here the eyes say 'good,' but the words say 'evil.' And it's the good Bakura who asks for the replica Millennium Eye that his evil self leaves Pegasus as a replacement for the real one, which he tears out of the man's face.
I may change my mind as I read further. But I would like to stress that the evil spirit doesn't mutilate Bakura for kicks. He stabs him with the Millennium Ring's pointers to make sure that Bakura doesn't get rid of him, and he impales Bakura's hand when his host actively interferes with his plot to trap Yugi-tachi's souls and steal the Millennium Puzzle. That's all. And Bakura keeps right on interfering, impaled hand be damned.
ETA, 8/11/06: As of vol. 14 of Duelist, I still don't think Bakura's a wimp. Terminally clueless, yes. Wimp, no. (I am very interested in the hints of a creepy occult-based card deck, which seems an odd choice for the cardboard cutout who often appears in fanfiction.) And again, I would like to point out that the evil Bakura is not injuring his host for kicks -- he's doing it in order to carry out a plan with Marik.
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4. Kaiba
Seto Kaiba is a little bit insane.
That's okay. This is a world where, when Yugi admits that he might have multiple personality disorder, Jounouchi's response boils down to saying "We'll always be friends!" and ignoring the issue completely. Everyone else follows his lead. Nobody suggests counseling.
Seto Kaiba is also a massive jerk.
I like him anyway. I like him because he's had such a screwed up life, and is doing his best to work through it and rise above it. I like him because, to some degree, it's his own damn fault that his life was screwed up. And he knows it. And he doesn't care; he just accepts that and moves on.
I like him because he has a sense of obligation. I like him because he gets so obsessive over things. I like him because one of his obsessions is his little brother -- at least after Yami gives him the first and second jolts out of the really bad path he was following. I like him because he really does love his dragons.
I like him because he's rather terrifyingly intelligent, competent, and ruthless -- this guy can design sophisticated holographic technology, run a large (possibly multi-national corporation), and win a physical confrontation when the other man has a gun and all he has is a handful of cards. I like him because, when confronted with impossible things, he continues to insist that they're impossible instead of tossing rationality to the side. I like him because sometimes he tosses rationality aside anyway, while insisting that he's doing no such thing.
I like him because he doesn't believe in fate.
One of my favorite scenes, so far, is when Yami is dueling the Ventriloquist of the Dead, who is using Kaiba's stolen deck and a Kaiba-shaped dummy. He may also have ensnared part of Kaiba's soul -- that's not made clear. The Ventriloquist has drawn a Blue-Eyes White Dragon, and is about to defeat/kill Yami... when the dragon vanishes. At that moment, across the ocean in Japan, Kaiba wakes from a six-month coma and looks out the window.
Kaiba may not believe in magic, but he has the same freaky, freaky luck of the draw that Yugi, Yami, and sometimes Jounouchi all have, and I think he really does put his soul into his cards.
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5. Outfits and Hair
A) Kaiba's infamous white and black trenchcoat first appears in volume 10 when he's testing his new Duel Disk system. At that point, it doesn't have buckles on the upper arms. When he announces Battle City, one chapter later, buckled straps have mysteriously appeared. Is this an art goof, or did he accessorize?
B) In volume 9 of Duelist, Yugi switches from a cord to a chain to hold the Millennium Puzzle. He says it's kind of flashy, and when Yami says it's too subtle and he ought to wear silver chains on his arms as well, Yugi insists that's not his style. In that case, when and why did he pick up the really flashy bracelets that he puts on before sending Yami on a pseudo-date with Anzu in volume 10? And when and why did Yami decide that flashy bracelets meant that Yugi didn't have much fashion sense, especially after he pushed Yugi to wear stuff like that?
Also, Yugi wears a sleeveless leather undershirt with buckles and what looks like a dog collar, and he seems to own a cape. Where does he get off saying flashy punk stuff isn't his style?
ETA, 6/12/06: Okay, the cape isn't a cape; it's just Yami wearing Yugi's uniform jacket without putting his arms through the sleeves. Which raises the question of how he gets it to stay on his shoulders without fastening the collar... but I think I'll just call it magic and stop giving myself headaches. Well. Magic or nifty hidden velcro patches. *grin*
C) WTF is up with Mai's corset shirts? They look like they must chafe something awful -- is inducing a drastic IQ drop in men really worth it? Also, how the hell does she fit all those camping supplies into one over-the-shoulder sack? It doesn't even look big enough to hold a sleeping bag!
D) How do the characters get their coats to flare out dramatically when there doesn't seem to be any wind? (Kaiba, Yami, and Jounouchi are the big culprits here; Honda may wear the same uniform jackets as Yugi and Jounouchi, but his tend to obey the laws of physics.)
E) Jounouchi and Kaiba seriously need haircuts. Ryo, Otogi, Mokuba, and Honda need whole new hairstyles, though the first three could get away with just a hairbrush and/or a ponytail. Yugi and his grandfather are probably lost causes.
F) In a related point, Jounouchi and Kaiba have almost exactly the same facial structure and eye type. The hair color and eye color differences are minimized or non-existent in black and white, so if you crop a mug shot of either of them to remove tell-tale jacket collars and the wilder bits of Jounouchi's hair, the only difference left is that you can see Jounouchi's eyebrows, whereas the gaps between Kaiba's bangs and eyes are, for whatever reason, almost always filled in with solid black. That amuses me.
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6. Jounouchi
How much do I love Jounouchi? Let me count the ways. :-) Seriously, he's an idiot, and a goof, and a money-obsessed jerk, but I really don't see how you could not like the guy. Friendship is the big theme of the series, and everybody contributes to that some way or other, but Jounouchi and Yugi's friendship is the central one.
Jounouchi is interesting because he's a sort of classic tough guy -- he was in a gang, he's a sloppy but effective fighter, he charges in without thinking -- and yet his new best friend is Yugi. Jounouchi also spends the manga slowly turning away from being a brawler, and learning instead to play games and think strategically. It's an interesting character arc, since the usual 'fighting' manga storyline would go in the opposite direction and emphasize physical strength and skill.
Jounouchi and Kaiba, as a lot of people have remarked, parallel each other in a number of ways. They're both overprotective older brothers, they both come from undesirable backgrounds, and they both have some bad reflexive reactions because of their backgrounds. The difference is that Kaiba superficially got out -- he 'won' in terms of money and social status -- but Jounouchi 'won' in terms of emotional health and support structure. And each one (well, if Kaiba's being honest with himself) wants what the other one has, or at least wants not to have gone through his own past experiences and assumes the other one must have had an easier time.
Jounouchi's luck is a complicated thing. He's not lucky at all when playing Otogi's rigged games, nor is he lucky at rolling dice in Bakura's Monster World RPG, but he is lucky (sort of) when playing a rigged game show in the early manga, and his good luck with gamble cards in Duel Monsters is more than chance should allow. He loses constantly to Yugi, but he manages to beat a lot of strong players whom he statistically shouldn't be able to beat. In other words, his luck seems to be tied to the cards, and to his need to beat a person -- he doesn't seem able to summon that need when he's playing Yugi, or when he's just trying to show off against Otogi.
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7. Pairings
Takahashi clearly supports Yugi/Anzu -- maybe also Yami/Anzu -- but I don't think he's particularly interested in romance, so it only pops up now and then and is easy to downplay. I think he also supports Jounouchi/Mai, but again, it's not a big thing.
I don't know what I think about Yugi/Anzu, though I think that during the series it would be extremely awkward for a number of reasons. Jounouchi/Mai, on the other hand, I love! They're so cute when they interact, and the way Mai asks after Jounouchi at the beginning of Battle City is very telling.
I don't really see where people get Kaiba/Yami (or its less popular variants, Kaiba/Yami/Yugi and Kaiba/Yugi). I mean, I definitely see the intensity of the relationship, but Kaiba just screams 'asexual' to me -- or at least 'damaged; possibly explosive; handle with care' -- and it would be awkward for most of the same reasons Yugi/Anzu would be awkward.
As for Kaiba/Jounouchi... eh. If I didn't like Jounouchi/Mai so much, I could go for that. Heck, I could still go for it, presuming that the writer remembers that Yugi, Honda, Anzu, and Mai exist and would be concerned about this on several levels. (Mokuba would be concerned too, but he doesn't get forgotten as much.) It's messy, but it's interesting, and it's less problematic than any ship involving Yugi.
Doubled-soul pairings (yami/hikari, in fandom parlance) such as Yami/Yugi, or Bakura/Ryo, are a little problematic if you assume that they're really the same person. They're also problematic since there's only one body involved. (Come to think of it, that could lead to some very interesting masturbation-but-not PWPs... but that's not the issue.) And they're problematic, to me, because they imply a certain inward-turning focus and withdrawal from interaction with the outside world. However, those are clearly important emotional relationships, whether they're romantic/sexual or not.
Finally, Yugi/Jounouchi... again, as with Kaiba/Yami, I can sort of see where this comes from -- there's a lot of emotional intensity between them -- but for whatever reason, it just doesn't read 'sexual' to me. (This lack of sex goes double for Jounouchi and Honda's friendship.)
Any other pairings... well, either they're pulled from thin air or I haven't run across the canon justification for them yet. :-)
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8. Minor Timeline Problem
I refuse to accept that Pegasus is only 24 years old. Yes, in a world where Seto Kaiba could become a CEO at age 14 or 15 (it's not made clear), it's reasonable for Pegasus to have invented Duel Monsters at age 18 or so, and founded a successful company. However, that leaves only six years for the gaming community to organize enough to hold huge televised tournaments, with large prizes. That is much less reasonable.
I suppose that, this world clearly not being quite the same as ours, one could postulate that a large, organized gaming community already existed, and Duel Monsters was simply added as one of its sponsored events on tournament circuits... but then you run into the problem of Sugoroku Mutou's card deck. He built a deck and clearly spent some time playing the game. He also received a very rare Blue-Eyes White Dragon card from a friend. And yet Yugi, who seems to pay close attention to whatever games his grandfather plays, didn't know about any of this.
This would seem to imply that Yugi didn't live with his grandfather when Sugoroku was playing Duel Monsters. However, Yugi spent eight years putting together the Millennium Puzzle, and seems to have lived above the game shop during that period, which means he was definitely there when Duel Monsters first became public.
We have a problem here.
Now, for narrative purposes, Yugi can't know about the cards before the reader does, so whether he logically should've known or not, Takahashi had to show him being ignorant. But I want to make sense of this within the story, which means I need either a timewarp or a significantly older Pegasus. Therefore, I mentally tack five to ten years onto Pegasus's age, which means Duel Monsters could well have been around for Yugi's whole life -- it just didn't get imported to Japan on a wide scale until Yugi's teen years. That might also explain why the Japanese version starts out with a different name. If the Japanese rights were originally licensed to a different company -- which seems plausible, since Pegasus surely didn't start out with a huge company -- the importers might have renamed it. When Pegasus reacquired complete control, he could impose his preferred name on the game.
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As I read more, I may add to this.
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Additions, 6/12/06
9. Honda
A) Yes, he DOES exist: Honda gets shamefully ignored in a lot of fandom and fanfiction. This is a pity, because he's a great guy. He has the most normal family of all the characters -- parents, older sister (and her husband and son), dog, the works. He doesn't have a tragic backstory, he's not particularly into games, and he's apparently not quite as good a fighter as Jounouchi -- this is implied by what he says about looking up to Jounouchi back when Jou was in Hirutani's gang -- but you can't work the story without him.
Honda is the one who decides to rescue Mokuba during Duelist Kingdom, and who notices that Bakura is slipping between personalities again. Honda is the one who goes off to pick up Jounouchi's sister during Battle City. (Okay, so Otogi follows him, but it's Honda's idea.) If it comes to that, Honda is the one who, because Mokuba saves him during Death-T, starts the line of thought that lets Anzu help Mokuba open up and thus, perhaps, prevents Mokuba from continuing down Kaiba's path during the six months Kaiba's in a coma and Mokuba is trying to keep KaibaCorp from being stolen out from under him.
B) Teasing out the implications: It's interesting that the incident with Ushio, back at the very start of the manga, affects Jounouchi much more than it affects Honda. Jounouchi is, metaphorically, knocked flat by Yugi's refusal to turn on him even though he and Honda have been bullying Yugi. Honda presumably feels kind of bad about it, but it doesn't change his actions. He continues to pick on Yugi off-page for several chapters, until Jounouchi talks him into getting Yugi's help in his pursuit of the girl he likes. That time, Yugi's willingness to stand up for him and get punished in his place does make an impression.
I would love to know what made that incident different from the first one. I would love to know how Honda feels about his friends getting so involved in games he doesn't care all that much about. I would love to know why Honda got so worked up over the 'cowardice' roll during the Monster World storyline. I would love to know how Honda deals with losing his status as Jounouchi's best friend, and why he doesn't seem to be jealous of Yugi at all.
And yet, nobody writes about Honda.
Bah.
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10. Anzu
Anzu is Yugi's oldest friend. And she does seem to genuinely care about him... but she never managed to help him find other friends, and she's not all that interested in games. Also, she doesn't seem to have good friends besides Yugi -- this can be inferred from the way she easily falls into the new group with Jounouchi and Honda -- yet she seems reasonably popular in a general way. (She's their class representative, after all.)
I think Anzu is sort of like Yugi in that she has an obsession that prevented her from interacting all that much with people. But dancing is more socially acceptable than playing games, and Anzu seems to have a better knack for fitting in than Yugi, so she looks more normal on the surface. However, there are hints of other things underneath, particularly that obsessive drive that an awful lot of Yu-Gi-Oh! characters share to some degree.
I like Anzu. I grant you, the way she tried to manipulate a date out of Yami in the original manga series was pretty despicable, but they were 15 years old. Kids that age aren't always thinking logically about things, especially when romance rears its head. And by the time Yugi tricks Yami into going on a 'date' with Anzu before the Battle City arc, Anzu seems pretty platonic about the whole thing, and is more interested in helping Yami cheer up (and mending any flaws in Yugi and Yami's partnership) than in getting Yami to notice her.
(I think he noticed anyway during the dance challenge, though whether that was physical appreciation or just admiration for skill and determination is up for interpretation.)
Anyway, as I said earlier, I think any romantic pairing involving Yugi or Yami would be problematic during the series, unless it was effectively a threesome... but I am totally cool with any variant of Anzu/Yugi/Yami. (And yes, with Kaiba/Yami/Yugi too, though I still think I like that one better when it's gen with subtext.)
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I may continue extending this when the mood strikes me.