Thanks, I remembered her as very distinctly not brainwashed but didn't trust my memory enough to comment it. I'm glad not to be misremembering things that bad.
its clearly a fetish for someone at Gallop for how often it happens and how female victims were much more common.
- Joey and Téa in DM (Battle City)
- Chazz, Bastian, and Alexis in GX (Cult style)
- Luna in 5D's (hypnosis), arguably Akiza and Carly (different means)
- Tori and Cathy in ZEXAL (Barian's Force shenanigans)
- all four Bracelet girls in ARC-V (Fusion Parasite-related), Yuya (Demonic Possession from Z-ARC)
- Skye and Miyu in VRAINS (though the extent of it afaik was just a coma and for the former, a more aggressive streak)
ARC-V's case was def on the more fetishy end IMHO. That doctor was a straight-up creep.
Edited by MorningStar1337 on Sep 9th 2024 at 2:51:59 AM
I remember a WatchMojo video calling out Yugi for "grooming" Joey.
Edited by LLSmoothJ on Sep 9th 2024 at 3:00:59 AM
Zane's ideals were deconstructed and he himself exposed as a sham. Poor Zane was tortured and forced to realize that he did not really believe in those ideals. Zane wanted to win no matter what and to regain his lost pride. He later gets better in the later seasons but not without cost to his life.
"Fan, a Mega Man character."I can still remember Marik switching from Evil Gloating to freaking out when Atem caused Slifer the Sky Dragon to do an infinite loop.
x10
It's also worthy to note how much worse the girls tends to fare in their duels compared to the boys. Or how rare it is that they get to have a full on-screen duel to begin with. I get that the franchise is primarily dominated by males even in the target demographic, but the contrast is too noticeable. It's like Gallop legit hates writing good female duelists.
Asuka is probably the only one during Gallop era with an actually good record for an actual female duelist, and it's probably because she was their first actual female duelist (Tea wasn't really a duelist despite her clean record), so it was something new for them.
Arc-V and Vrains are definitely among the worst for this, with Yuzu not getting to duel beyond Synchro arc (not to mention that horrible duel against Sergey), Rin and Ruri only getting one on-screen duel when they are brainwashed, a lot of Serena's duels being mostly off-screen or against weak mooks, Ayu's only duel ending in her loss, Aoi's only notable win being against Baira of Hanoi, and Ghost Girl's constant losses with her only full on-screen duel win being against a character explicitly stated to lose to kindergartners in duels. And then there's Zexal having Cathy and Rio, supposedly good duelists, constantly lose whenever they got an on-screen duel. Rio only won an on-screen duel once, and Cathy flat out never won on-screen.
Edited by ShiningStardust on Sep 15th 2024 at 10:27:15 PM
Even worse, after getting Cathy's heart pieces, said dog girl only needed 1 more heart piece to qualify for the next round. But she couldn't get it before the day ends, so in the end Cathy's heart pieces were wasted anyway.
The duel absolutely could have ended in Cathy's win without disrupting the episode's plot, Cathy still can inspire the dog girl and boost her confidence anyway, and iirc if Cathy won, she would have completed her heart and thus immediately qualify for the next round.
Although, the whole WDC is really weird to begin with. How the heck it's stated that there were over 10,000 contestants, but these bunch of kids couldn't find weak enough people in two days to get enough heart pieces to complete theirs? And how the heck only 24 people managed to complete theirs? With over 10,000 contestants, the number of people who completed their heart should have been in the hundreds at least, if not reaching thousands. There should have been one off-screen round to weed those out into the final 24, for it to make more sense.
Also how the heck Tokunosuke slept through the entire first day outside, plus without his parent looking for him???
Edited by ShiningStardust on Sep 18th 2024 at 12:07:45 AM
It's unfortunately a rule of thumb that whenever there's a Tournament Arc, The Main Characters Do Everything, so no matter how confusing the rules are or how many people compete, it's practically guaranteed that only the heroes get to the finals.
A possible in-universe reason pertaining to your "why don't they just find weak duelists and beat them to get Plot Coupons more quickly" question is that they don't want to take the "easy way", or they are only interested in dueling tough or unique opponents rather than mediocre newbies, or both. For instance, Joey during Battle City, who had a whole debate with Tristan about this.
Of course, I'm only assuming that every non-villainous duelist in all the shows thinks the same way where tournaments are concerned, so I may be wrong.
Edited by Rissis on Sep 17th 2024 at 1:55:48 AM
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.""As I understand it, they didn't actually duel in the manga, since they wanted to avoid letting Pegasus see their decks (which didn't really matter, since Pegasus could simply read Yugi's mind to see all his cards)"
No only it didnt matter, Yugi beat pegasus first by crazy idea of using switching to fool pegasus mind reader power and then because power of riendship or something. Quite honestly letting Joey and Yugi duel was good.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"If Joey had dueled Pegasus he'd have one big advantage: Luck.
All the mind-reading in the world can't beat the luck of the draw or Time Wizard's spinning.
The Protomen enhanced my life.
