@lysimachias / lysimachias.tumblr.com
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Multifandom art blog! YGO, Zelda, Fruits Basket mostly. Multishipper, 25+. Formerly @winkle-pickers
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main: @sturionic ao3: lysimachias YGO/Zelda crossover: @ten-thousand-year-elegy
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#asks - As you can see from a cursory scroll I am very ask-friendly lol, come chat with me! #art tag - My art #my fics - Fic summaries & chapter updates #fic recs - What it says on the tin #bric-a-brac - Chatter, nonsense, etc
＼(≧▽≦)／ Finally made some Ganondorfs to go along with the Gerudo redesign for my fic, Ten Thousand Year Elegy!
Elegy!Ganondorf is younger than our usual Dorfs and from a TOTK AU with no secret stones, so I redesigned his motifs (like focusing back in on the geometric OoT-era pattern, adding more of the Gerudo sigil in place of dragon themeing, etc.) Battledorf has been given armour that is significantly more practical for both battle and deserts also i just thought the hakama was cool, Casualdorf is more dripped out, decorated and dressed for wandering about being a general menace. And as anyone reading the fic knows, Elegy!Ganondorf basically always has a book in hand... >:}
Further to the last post, I don't like DSOD Kaiba but I LOVE putting DM Kaiba through a pared-down version of DSOD and then exploring the fallout. (Seriously, it's in like half my fics lol.)
There's a very clear distinction there in my mind! It's like, grieving relapsing bad-behaviour Kaiba muddling through a tortured early adulthood, in which his bestie-upon-whom-he-has-staked-half-his-identity has peaced out for the afterlife; and the other half of his identity is growing up fast and may no longer want to simply exist as an extension of Kaiba Seto. VS, surveillance state technocrat Kaiba who has abandoned the entire Mokuba portion of his identity wholesale - like doesn't even pay lip service to a foundational part of his previous characterization - and is more "final boss of the entire setting" evil than "meh heh heh! Jounouchi drowning would be hilarious" evil. (<- personal taste regarding themes I enjoy writing about, NOT objective statement on Which Kaiba Is Better)
That said, I do have a favourite pathway connecting DM to 5DS that is neither of the above, developed over a series of long and increasingly unhinged conversations with the besties. A yes-and death spiral from hell, if you would
It goes like this: Kaiba loses to Atem and then dies at the end of DSOD (like, does not even get to stay in Aaru, just straight up dies and goes to purgatory or the capitalist circle of hell or whatever.) A grieving Mokuba goes mad, becomes his brother's technocratic dictator heir apparent, drives the research and ignoring-of-safety-concerns that leads to Zero Reverse, eventually blows up himself and the rest of the DM cast (except Ushio, lol) in the explosion, and has the entire absolutely fucking bonkers YGO spin-off canon as his legacy. The alive-and-well Kaiba we see in GX is Solid Vision, created by a secret crack team of engineers to Weekend-at-Bernie's him long enough for a smooth transition to Mokuba as CEO.
Why? Because it's fucked up and it slaps. I AM TAKING NO CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM AT THIS TIME 🌺 🥰🥰🥰
So much DSOD discourse…on my dash…again. in 2025?!?! 🗿
I find a lot of DSOD discourse very circular and frustrating, and I think it's because there's three different angles to consider, and everyone's talking past each other about all of them:
-Is DSOD a good movie? -Is DSOD canon? -Should the fandom at large retroactively apply DSOD to their understanding of YGODM canon?
Let's get the first one out of the way: yes, DSOD is a good movie, it rules in fact. It's consistently entertaining with decent pacing. The animation is incredible. There are great character moments ranging from hilarious to heart-wrenching; the Sick-As-Hell Factor is off the charts. Most DSOD criticisms as a standalone film just…apply to YGO as a series broadly (like not knowing what to do with Bakura most of its supporting characters.)
Is it official canon? Well…yes! It's clearly marketed as a sequel to YGODM, with Kazuki Takahashi deeply involved. DSOD's budget alone is a pretty firm statement: there's no arguing that the intention is for DSOD to be part of mainline YGO series canon. (There's a reason we're not constantly fighting about Pyramid of Light.)
The last angle is, I think, where a lot of the pain points in the fandom lie. If DSOD is canon, and the fandom is seeing fairly jarring discrepancies with characterization & canon as presented in YGODM (not just Kaiba, but bakura seriously what the fuck BAKURA), then we're presented with a conundrum: do we have to re-evaluate DM based on DSOD?
To answer this question, we need to talk in terms of Doylist analysis, and specifically about Yu-Gi-Oh! 5DS.
For anyone who has not seen 5DS, it is a very adult story. Not just tonally, but in its structure; the cast is made up of characters who function with the autonomy of adults, regardless of their listed ages. 5DS takes place years after a catastrophic explosion that killed a fuckton of people and literally tectonically split Domino City in two. The protagonist, Yuusei, is an ex-con living in the slums - and 5DS is not shy about exploring the topics of social stratification and corrupt policing. (Seriously, watch 5DS, it is SO FUCKING GOOD)
5DS is also, notably, the last spinoff that really attempts to connect to YGODM. It's very much aimed towards older teenagers who might have grown up with YGODM; you could kind of see it as a last desperate grab for that demographic before changing the strategy with Zexal and aiming to draw in a new, younger audience.
It is no secret that Seto Kaiba, and Kaiba Corporation as a brand, are cheat codes for the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise. Takahashi was pressured into expanding Kaiba's role in the manga, the anime stuck Kaiba in Memory World just to wander around doing jack shit, he was brought back for GX cameos, he gets an ungodly amount of merch, so on and so forth. With 5DS' audience in mind, and ratings struggles in the later seasons of GX, you can see why they might have wanted to try and hit that cheat code one last time for 5DS. Hence: KaibaCorp causing the catastrophic Zero Reverse incident.
The problem is that, canon-wise, it’s a bit of a difficult bridge from where we left Kaiba at the end of DM (literally jetting out of the storyline to go and build a new life in America) to where we start off in 5DS (KaibaCorp, EXPLICITLY rebuilt as a gaming company IN CONTRAST to its military history, has somehow become the architect of a YA dystopia. Kaiba also has probably blown up himself and most of the DM cast, RIP.) I’m not saying that DSOD was made specifically as a lore bridge to 5DS! I’m just saying it was very likely a consideration, and like 5DS, DSOD is going for more mature themes aimed at the older DM audience. PURELY IN TERMS OF DOYLIST ANALYSIS don't kill me, it does make a lot of sense to look at DSOD as an alternate-universe 5DS prequel rather than a standalone DM manga sequel.
So, the external factors influencing DSOD are pretty clear: merch! lore issues! nostalgia bait! This doesn't make DSOD bad, as a standalone film or as a YGO franchise entry. But we do have to understand that Kaiba's story arc, as Takahashi originally conceived it, was over when he flew off in his BEWD jet at the end of Battle City. If you read the manga or watched the anime back in the day, it was a perfectly reasonable conclusion that the shounen deuteragonist had learned at least some lessons and was now moving on to fulfill his (very endearing) dream of building amusement parks for kids.
This is still, in my opinion, a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
Yes, absolutely people often go backwards during the grieving process. Of course it's realistic for someone as troubled as Kaiba to still have deep-seated issues that the Shounen Lesson of the Day does not solve entirely. On the other hand, YGODM hits many beats of the classic Coming-Of-Age Shounens of its time, which means it's not necessarily always going for that type of realism; fans are not wrong or stupid for taking a shounen manga at face value with regard to where the characters end up, even (especially!) if it's cheesy and idealistic.
Where I see a lot of talking-past-each other is "DM Kaiba and his story arc should be re-evaluated with Kaiba's DSOD characterization in mind" versus "DSOD is a shitty movie, and DSOD Kaiba is an implausible version of Kaiba." They're just…not even remotely arguing about the same thing.
DSOD as a film is technically well-crafted, serves its purpose, is entertaining as hell, and stands well as a YGO series entry - personal taste aside. DSOD Kaiba, and the paths you can take to get to him, are very plausible. DM Kaiba's ending on its own is also very plausible and fits well with DM’s storytelling/genre. With those last two things being true, DSOD is hard to reconcile with DM, because it has to be; movies need conflict, and this particular movie needed the franchise's most popular merchandising all-star. To have a conflicted Kaiba who later goes on to blow up Domino City, you kind of have to re-frame an ending where he flies off into the sunset on a dragon jet to build theme parks with his beloved brother.
The fandom at large has obviously picked up on the tension between these interpretations, and to my eyes the underlying question is, how hard do we try to reconcile that tension. I don’t think there’s one answer! It’s not wrong to explore how DSOD incorporates with overall YGO series canon, nor to reckon with DM retroactively. It’s also not wrong to relegate DSOD to the corner of your mind in which Pyramid of Light dwells, and then carry on interpreting DM!Kaiba without factoring in DSOD or 5DS. It’s fine! It’s literally all fine, although I know we'll all probably continue to yell at each other about DSOD for time immemorial because reasonably benign fandom blood sport never loses its appeal.
Not "The Character did nothing wrong" or "The Character is irredeemably awful" but a secret third thing: The Character may display moments of deep love & compassion, may even have a strong sense of ethics, and may also be capable of brutal cruelty that is irreconcilable with those traits. The constant tension between the different sides of The Character's nature is exactly what makes them compelling, and attempting to reduce them down to simply "a terrible person" or "innocent & misunderstood" is missing the point of the questions a media with nuanced characters is asking you to consider
❌ Is this ship well supported by canon
❌ Does this ship make any sense whatsoever by any reasonable metric
✅ Does the thought of these characters standing next to each other make you want to chew concrete and then break apart a nearby automobile with your bare hands
Pulling out these v good tags by @finefeatheredfabler. I made this post initially after watching in fascinated horror as one group of shippers on twitter hunted another for sport, for the sin of non-canon shipping. The way I like to ship is less "canon is the bible" and more "what if we put these two interesting chemicals in a test tube and see if something blows up." It worries me that some people have locked themselves into weirdly concrete thinking where you're not allowed to be creative and explore canon elements in non-canon configurations!
but it is ALSO true that this mentality can sometimes take the form of "breaking up canon relationships that involve marginalized characters and sticking two random white guys together." Often the two random white guys are less characters in their own right and more templates used by the Migratory Slash Fandom, then this ship inexplicably supersedes the better-developed canon ship and pushes the marginalized characters to the fringes of fandom
Some will take this as an attack on their ships. It is not! Ship and let ship, have fun and do what you want forever. but also it can never hurt to step back and look at larger patterns in your fandom and examine what might be behind them, if only to stretch those analytical muscles
Some Kisara/Kaiba/BEWD thoughts...
Kaiba and Kisara were ostracized & exploited for similar things as children. Kisara's power, the united ka & ba of the Blue-Eyes White Dragon, marked her as a dangerous outsider and directly led to her being captured and forced to fight. Kaiba's power, his overwhelming intellect, also marked him as an outsider and was later exploited in a similar "captivity" for the military-industrial complex.
The Blue-Eyes White Dragon is a symbol of the source of their victimization becoming a source of ultimate agency and power. Because of the unified ka & ba, Kisara is passive and unable to consciously access the power of the white dragon until after her death; but then we see her make her very first decision as the actualized BEWD, which is to refuse being used as Seto/Akhenaden's weapon against Atem. Through this refusal she's able to break Seto's mind control and free him of his father's influence.
In the future, after Kaiba frees himself from his father's influence and begins to use his intellect for his own goals, we see him reassert the BEWD as a symbol of this self-determination over and over. When he rejects Obelisk the Tormentor (and the concept of a set future) in favour of the Blue-Eyes White Dragon, it's his commitment to himself to remain true to his identity. That truth includes rejecting brute-force, warlike sources of power conferred to him by outside forces (Obelisk/the old KaibaCorp) in favour of the things Kaiba has chosen as his own symbols (BEWD/the new KaibaCorp.)
On this tack, this is why I like to write Kisara as notably strange, 'off,' maybe a little feral - I think she's at her most interesting as a character when you're able to look past the 'pretty anime girl'-ness of her character design and use the data on how other people react to her, which is pretty much universally with suspicion, discomfort, or outright revulsion. Kaiba, too, is implied in the manga to be attractive (notably in a throwaway comment by Jounouchi, lol!) but again, if you look past the anime-ness of his design, the way other people react to him is similar to Kisara: he's very off-putting!
Priest Seto is one of the few to overcome this discomfort surrounding Kisara in the past; Kaiba in the future cherishes Kisara/BEWD in a way that not only overlooks but is inextricable from her fundamental inhumanity. I think you can interpret that love however you want. I myself tend to lean towards a soulmate bond where romantic sentiment is bordering on irrelevant to the depth of it. But to me kisakai is at its best when it's one strange, off-putting person who feels alienated from humanity, turning to another and saying "I love you for the things that set you apart."
Some Kisara/Kaiba/BEWD thoughts...
Kaiba and Kisara were ostracized & exploited for similar things as children. Kisara's power, the united ka & ba of the Blue-Eyes White Dragon, marked her as a dangerous outsider and directly led to her being captured and forced to fight. Kaiba's power, his overwhelming intellect, also marked him as an outsider and was later exploited in a similar "captivity" for the military-industrial complex.
The Blue-Eyes White Dragon is a symbol of the source of their victimization becoming a source of ultimate agency and power. Because of the unified ka & ba, Kisara is passive and unable to consciously access the power of the white dragon until after her death; but then we see her make her very first decision as the actualized BEWD, which is to refuse being used as Seto/Akhenaden's weapon against Atem. Through this refusal she's able to break Seto's mind control and free him of his father's influence.
In the future, after Kaiba frees himself from his father's influence and begins to use his intellect for his own goals, we see him reassert the BEWD as a symbol of this self-determination over and over. When he rejects Obelisk the Tormentor (and the concept of a set future) in favour of the Blue-Eyes White Dragon, it's his commitment to himself to remain true to his identity. That truth includes rejecting brute-force, warlike sources of power conferred to him by outside forces (Obelisk/the old KaibaCorp) in favour of the things Kaiba has chosen as his own symbols (BEWD/the new KaibaCorp.)
I know this is a genre staple and a common exploration in a lot of fantasy/adventure/coming-of-age type stories. But I really do love the specific poignancy of how LOZ explores the feeling of being too young and small to be significant in the eyes of the people around you.
Ocarina of Time is pretty direct about the things Link can do specifically because he is a child, even forcing Link to go back in time post-timeskip to revisit his younger self. Some of this is time travel fuckery, but sometimes it's just as simple as, "An adult can't fit through this very small passageway." There's ups and downs to taking up more space in the world, the autonomy of adulthood vs the freedom of being invisible.
In Majora's Mask, Link's first significant marker of functional adulthood is not his changing body, but obtaining a weapon, which is a visual signal that changes everyone else's perception of him to match what we already know is inside (someone who has already survived very adult experiences). Like Ocarina of Time, this adulthood is reversible. Even after Link starts carrying a sword, he's still small enough that people don't notice until he draws attention to it. Even after he assumes full-grown Zora and Goron forms, he can choose to shed those forms when he pleases. He can still slip under the radar as a 'child' - adults freely have conversations with him, or around him, with the assumption that he won't fully understand them. The appearance of adulthood grants Link access to the wilds of Termina, & the appearance of childhood grants him access to information and relationships in the world of Clock Town.
Again, lots of stories do explore this same theme, but to me the ending of OoT just hits somewhere really deep. Link and Zelda are both scarred and robbed of childhood. (A parallel here between Adult Link and Sheik - neither Link nor Zelda were allowed to grow up naturally, instead forced to adopt bodies more suited to the adulthood required of them.) Zelda so badly wants to fix it, to make things right by at least giving Link his own childhood back - even if she can't have hers - but neither of them actually had a childhood in the first place. Link grew up alienated from his peers as an outsider, and then the physical state of being a child became just another tool in his arsenal. Zelda grew up burdened by status and the crushing weight of prophecy. There's nothing to 'give back' because it didn't exist.
Majora's Mask makes this so explicit by starting the game off cursing Link into Deku form, putting him in a tiny body that constrains him and initially presents only limitations and frustrations. Zelda's aching, misguided kindness and Skull Kid's malice have the same functional outcome, and in some ways, the same root: Zelda's naive, desperate desire to help and Skull Kid's petty tantrums are both emotions associated with childishness.
There's other aspects to go into for another day. The fact that Link is always a villager, or a goatherd, or a soldier. The way that Link waking up in BOTW to a world that has moved on without him grants him a similar kind of functional invisibility. And of course the Hero's Shade in Twilight Princess: finally fully grown, powerful, a mentor, but stripped back to bones and hidden in shroud.
The corpse of Goht itself was still half-buried just as they’d left it, so completely devoid of life that it registered as part of the Temple itself; some ruined sculpture telling just one single tale from the mighty span of the Forgotten Temple’s long, long life. In the scant weeks since the Temple had come down, the sparse vines within had grown heartily, blanketing many of the ruined shapes in foliage. And that was how they found Hylia. The giant statue of the goddess lay toppled on its side, cracks spidering over the folds of her robes and marring her face, though she smiled at them as beatifically as ever from her prone position. Leaves had begun to consume her, too; reflecting blue-dark in the faint lunar glow, tendrils and roots snaking into and widening the cracks. If no one came to trim them back, it wouldn’t be long before she began to crumble entirely. One thing Link had never told a single soul about, not even Zelda: he hated Her. Hylia. A hatred that had been born when his father had told him that drawing the sword from the stone was Her will, and a hatred that had grown as Zelda had sobbed and beaten weakly at the maddeningly still surface of the Spring of Power with her clenched fist. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I - Link knew now that, in some ways, Hylia was Zelda and Zelda was Hylia. He knew he shouldn’t hate Her anymore than he should hate the most beloved treasure of his life. Still. A petty little feeling fluttered up in his chest at the thought of Hylia being eaten away by the vines, by the lifeblood of Hyrule itself. Serves you right. “Link,” Teba called. “Look. Back here.”
In which Link and Teba take to the sky to illuminate the secrets of the Forgotten Temple; while Zelda, Anzu, Paya, Riju and Eri venture deep underground to unearth the forgotten horrors of the Arbiter's Grounds.
