Take Me There to Disneyland

And those are just a few that came to mind.

The first character I first fell in love with: Kaiba! Abridged!Kaiba got the best lines from the beginning, and his imitation was always one of LK’s best in my opinion. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now: Tristan! Talk about taking one of the most useless characters in the original series and really transforming him…he may just be a holding cell for memes and jokes, but at least he leaves an impression. The Hair Guy also fits here. The character everyone else loves that I don’t: Well, I don’t like Rex and Weevil as much (given that I have never understood the appeal of Beevis and Butthead), but I don’t think that opinion is amazingly unpopular. The character I love that everyone else hates: Are there any characters the YGO:TAS fandom really dislikes? I mean, if nothing else, everyone is already a parody of another character…it’s not like the series should be taken that seriously, it’s clearly a complete farce. Instead I think I’ll just list my other favorite characters – Yugi, Yami, Joey, Bakura, Marik, Melvin, Bandit Keith, Duke, Pegasus, Noah, Mokuba, Serenity, Mai, Dartz, Amelda, Raphael, Valon, Kuriboh, and Zorc! The character I used to love but don’t any longer:Shadi fits all right here, I guess…mostly because Borat just isn’t as funny to me anymore. The character I would totally smooch: Yugi, Yami, Joey, Tristan, Kaiba, Bakura, Duke, MakoThe character I’d slap: Yugi, Yami, Joey, Kaiba, Bakura, Duke, Mako (Pfft.)A pairing that I love: Joey/Mai…’s Breasts, Yugi/Yami, Mako/the Ocean, Bakura/Marik, Bakura/ZorcA pairing that I despise: Haha, nope! Nothing here.

Oddly enough, I actually answered the first question in this post a long way back.

As for the second, I sort of discuss that in my post, but I’ll go into a touch more detail. Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Monsters was my very first anime obsession – it was my introduction to fanfiction, it made me briefly consider becoming an Egyptologist, it fueled my love of history and mythology to the next level, and the main character – Yugi, not Yami Yugi – was my very first bishie.

When Yu-Gi-Oh GX started up, though, I completely dropped off. I tried watching it – truly I did – but the whole premise and characters irked me. In the first season, I saw that they’d dropped all of the great characters I already loved (don’t even try to tell me Kaiba or Pegasus or Yugi had cameos in future episodes later) for a whole new cast of characters that in my opinion were inferior to the originals in almost every case; they removed all of the Shadow Games and Ancient Egypt (again, don’t even try to tell me it pops up later: if it wasn’t going to play a role from the word go, it was already a downgrade from the first series to me); and they decided to host the whole thing at a school on an island where everybody just learns how to play card games. …SERIOUSLY!? I know that in the first series, duelists ended up somehow able to save the world and stuff, but…it wasn’t treated like a full-time career or anything! It wasn’t something you went to school for – it was a hobby! Hell, Kaiba had a job, Yugi and the others were in school – I’m sure Mai and some others earned money through competitions, but they probably didn’t go to school to learn how to play card games! It’s like having a university where one’s goal is to become the best Blackjack player in the world! And yeah, most notable of all, I really didn’t like Jaden. After such an amazing, different main character as Yugi, Jaden was a serious downgrade…and he was annoying. At least the Abridged series managed to make him funny-annoying, but this show certainly didn’t in my opinion.

After getting addicted to Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged, I did watch one episode of Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds (…yes, partly to find out if “card games on motorcycles” was as dumb as it sounded)…the premise itself is still kind of weird, but at least the characters seem better defined and more likable. I still think they made Duel Monsters way too complicated, but at least the show is better than GX. And I have steered clear of Yu-Gi-Oh Zexal – I’m already not a sci-fi person, and I just don’t have enough macabre curiosity to see whether “card games in space” is as dumb as it sounds.

Really, without Yugi, to me, it’s not really Yu-Gi-Oh. I’ll stick with the classic, thank you.