scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/2p5koo.md

Rational Yugioh Gx idea. Thoughts? [RT][D][Q]

• Author: u/Sailor_Vulcan Champion of Justice and Reason*

• URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2p5koo/rational_yugioh_gx_idea_thoughts_rtdq/

• Score: 4

• Created: 2014-12-13T06:38:53

Post:

Greetings! I am Sailor Vulcan, champion of justice and reason. And yes, I know my uniform is highly visually displeasing to most intelligent life forms. Deal with it. This is my first reddit post.

Below is an idea I had for a rational Yugioh Gx fanfic. I have little confidence that I can stick to writing an entire novel by myself because of real life, my rather short attention span and the vast number of novel ideas I've had to scrap over the years because I ran out of steam and lost my interest and/or motivation. So if there's anyone out there who's willing to coauthor this with me or write it themselves, I'd really REALLY appreciate it. I think this is too good a concept to let it die:

Meet Jaden Yuki—a creative and fun-loving comic book freak and chemistry geek. He loves playing Duel Monsters. It's one of his favorite games. ONLY ONE OF THEM. He'd love to play something else for a change. Unfortunately the high school he attends is Duel Academy, a prestigious private secondary school for Duel Monsters enthusiasts. Nearly everyone there is OBSESSED with the game. And Jaden is starting to wonder if maybe the Universe itself is too...

What do you think?

Comments:

u/Drazelic [+5] Dai-Gurren Brigade (56 minutes later)

Your entire post could really have been summed up as 'Rationalfic of YGO GX, Jaden is the rational protagonist'.

C'mon, give us a bit more of a conversation-starter than that. Where's the rest of the idea?

u/None [+2] (2 hours later)

Well, it at least looks like a comedic deconstruction based on the idea that the universe being obsessed with a children's card game is a bit of a WTF.

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (2 hours later)

Well, I haven't fleshed it out much, just a bunch of ideas in my head, some of them more tentative than others. For one thing, any smart character in the story, as soon as they first learn about the shadow games, should consider the implications of a game that resembles a fight but isn't actually a real fight, which their entire school uses as a means of conflict resolution (in fact that's one of the school rules!), and which, in the case of many shadow games, is actually used as a substitute for fighting to the death. So hypotheses where the shadow games were created as a substitute for normal fighting will have an advantage. Not entirely sure where I can or want to go with that. The only consistent and remotely feasible explanation I've been able to come up with so far is that it was a mad god's insane and ridiculous idea for keeping the universe from being destroyed by interstellar wars among sentient species by attempting to entirely replace wars and other violent conflict between large groups of people with something less far-reaching in its consequences. Maybe the shadow games originated because humans exploited a loophole in the rules. Or maybe they were there all along, but are being abused.

Still, this explanation seems kind of clunky and ungraceful. However, I'm not sure i actually have any better options, since the world of yugioh seems to behave with completely normal physics wherever and whenever Duel Monsters is NOT involved.

Of course, now that I think of it, I could also try something like that one Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfic where souls exist and operate on a different set of physical laws, and what happened to Duel Monsters with the shadow games is the result of a soul-mechanics experiment gone wrong. Maybe Pegasus was doing some research on it?

Or with the original idea, it could have the God character be something like Haruhi from EY's Suzumiya Haruhi fanfic.

Or maybe I could combine both ideas! Pegasus does an experiment in soul mechanics and accidentally soul-ifies the Duel Monsters card game, as well as accidentally creating the Gods as well as the God cards!

u/Bowbreaker [+1] Solitary Locust (2 days later)

Have you seen the original Yu-Gi-Oh series? Especially the Egypt time travel stuff should be used to flesh out this mad universe. And Atlantis. It is all still canon in GX after all.

u/WriterBen01 [+3] (10 hours later)

I really like the Yugioh game. I've watched the original anime completely, and have recently begun watching GX from the beginning on Crunchyroll. So I don't know where the GX storyline goes after the first few episodes.

I would not make Jaden lose his love of the game. Instead I would flesh out Bastian as someone who is incredibly intelligent and is planning to use his intellect to become the best duelist for money and for fame. Better, to become a great scientist. And good dueling stkills are important for anyone who wants to become anyone in any field.

In general, things to address:

• Holodeck technology is invented and is only used to make duelling more spectacular-looking
• 'Heart of the cards' is an actual thing. Jaden figured out as a kid that cards he likes are more likely to come up when he needs them. The probabilities don't work out as they should, unless he plays with somebody else's deck. Of course, he figures this out by playing thousands of games and keeping careful track of everything. Since then Jaden has done every psychological trick in the book to feel closer to his cards, like giving them names and acting out conversations.
• Duelists don't show off by explainging their cards to each other. If they say anything, it's that they should have studied harder.
• The side deck should be more important, and powerful duelists should have more than one deck depending on circumstances.
• in the anime rare cards are a really big deal, but the whole world duels, so most people will have the same kind of non-rare cards.
• in general, dueling is a really big deal. Law cases can be fought out with duels, most sports are hobbies compared to dueling, political battles are fought out with duels. It's a cultural thing, but also it's believed that the righteous win more duels than the wicked.
• Jaden is on a quest to document every single card in existence, to share with everyone in an easily searchable online format (Pokedex). It annoys him that most of the information is locked away from non-academy students, and even then from everyone but full graduates. Basically, he wants to make the Yugioh wiki. The school's director on the other hand is a brilliant professor who believes that the information should indeed remain secret, because society structure would collapse if the lower class would so easily learn the strategies to defeat the upper class. Wars would break out. Better to keep the status quo. Except of course lower classes are kinda miserable, with all technology and advances going to duelling and making it look more fun.

Probably the stakes should be a little higher and tie in a bit better with the actual anime, but these are my first thoughts on it.

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (11 hours later)

Hmm. I'm not so sure about the Heart of the Cards thing. That kind of validates the whole idea that Duel Monsters is somehow supernaturally and inexplicably superior to all other games, the "King of Games", so to speak. And that's just impossible. There are plenty of awesome games in real life that are on par with and IMO are even better than the Yugioh TCG. Duel Monsters is cool, but it's not the best most perfect amazing game ever. And a lot of its ideas were originally from Magic: the Gathering, anyway.

Maybe "Heart of the Cards" is propaganda invented by the upper class in order to justify their power. Basically, it's the idea that good, righteous people care for their cards and because of that their cards will respond to their wishes, while wicked people who mistreat their cards will not get good draws.

u/RolandsVaria [+5] (11 hours later)

Heart of the Cards is definitely something that exists in the anime. That's pretty much impossible to deny. Pretty much every duel we see involves some level of statistical improbability that only makes sense if some sort of power is at work apart from mere luck.

And beyond that, there are tons of things that show Duel Monsters has some incredible cosmic significance; people's inner spirits take the form of monsters which tend to have a card that corresponds to them. Most conflicts ultimately come down to the card game,for some reason or another. There's an actual Duel Monsters Spirit World. People dueling each other sometimes give off potent energy that can be harnessed. Powerful ancient beasts take the form of cards even before the game was invented. And according to a certain eldritch abomination that shows up in season 4, the entire multi-verse began from a single spirit that existed within a card.

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (12 hours later)

First of all, there are multiple Yugioh Gx timelines, and I'm not going to necessarily stick to the anime canon as is. My inspiration is partially drawn from the anime, and from the manga. However, I think the biggest inspiration will likely end up being Cypsiman2's almost-semi-rational take on Yugioh Gx:

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4703308/1/Year-One-The-Trial-of-Shadows

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5030789/1/Year-Two-The-Trial-of-Light

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5936476/1/Year-Three-The-Trial-of-the-Heart

Second of all, for the story to be rational, the world needs to be explainable. That means there has to be rules. Nothing of the plot demanded this. And having one game being ultimately and universally superior to all others like that REALLY doesn't sit well with me, especially since the Yugioh TCG is NOT the most amazing perfect game to end all games that ever existed. Not only would that be extraordinarily contrived, it reminds me too much of how people perceive and react to their favorite sports and sports teams. To a very large extent it's a form of religion. If the story world is going to be to some extent a Duel Monsters theocracy, I'd rather not pretend that's a good thing.

u/RolandsVaria [+2] (12 hours later)

True, there are 2 different GX timelines. The manga is far, far less high concept (and far more coherent), so you'd probably have an easier time going with that. I'm curious what elements from the anime you plan on incorporating, because if you're skipping over most of its major elements to begin with I don't see why you'd want to bother with it much in the first place.

Secondly, yes, the world does need to be explainable. The whole "everything comes down to card games" thing wasn't really the crux of my argument, but It's still rather key. If you're making a Yugioh story, you pretty much NEED to have things come down to some sort of game-based showdown. Otherwise it's not really Yugioh. Come up with logical reasons for it, sure (the series already tries to do that to some extent), but don't dismiss it.

Third, let's assume that Duel Monsters isn't cosmically important. Alright. In that case I guess you could go with how the original manga did things for a time; with shadow games being applied to ANY game, not just Duel Monsters. Though I should note you've just cut out like 80% of the series' worldbuilding in one stroke. What is so bad about the card game having cosmic significance? You're working with a world where magic definitely exists anyway, and that's contrived all on its own, so I don't see why that magic system can't take things a step further by revolving around one particular thing. I think that makes the setup for the story more distinctive and interesting myself.

Fourth. GX isn't a Duel Monsters theocracy. Duel Monsters seems to be more analagous to a popular sporting event in their world. It's near-ubiquitous, but for the most part I don't think it has much to do with the government or how laws work.

u/None [+2] (13 hours later)

Fourth. GX isn't a Duel Monsters theocracy. Duel Monsters seems to be more analagous to a popular sporting event in their world. It's near-ubiquitous, but for the most part I don't think it has much to do with the government or how laws work.

oh come on how awesome would it be if everything in congress was decided by children's card games?

u/RolandsVaria [+1] (13 hours later)

That's practically half a step away from rule by gladiator matches. I'd hate to live in a world where that was a reality. Besides, incorporating that would be aa large worldbuilding endeavor that'd make things far more politically focused, which seems unecessary and far from the core of what GX or the original was about.

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (13 hours later)

Yeah you're right. Save that for someone who wants to make a rational Yugioh 5d's fic. Also, the game doesn't have to be universally cosmically significant, just on Earth. If we go with the whole "Universe operating on laws of game theory" idea, as well as the whole "Duel monsters only became cosmically significant on Earth because of Pegasus's experiment gone wrong," then the case could be made that Duel Monsters can still be central to the plot without being the center of the whole universe. Maybe that experiment gone wrong could have happened to any other game, but coincidentally on Earth it happened to Duel Monsters first.

What I'm currently thinking is that regular physics (or something similar to it) would be a neutral baseline configuration of reality, and the rules can be temporarily changed from that baseline to other kinds of games within a limited space. When such a game resolves, the rules return to the baseline rules.

u/RolandsVaria [+1] (14 hours later)

So one person ran an experiment, and somehow that either drastically altered the laws of reality for an entire planet, or allowed for those laws to be situationally altered at certain times. And this is arbitrarily only for earth. That seems even more contrived than the universe always being centered around one game.

...I don't see the significance of what you're trying to prove. Yes, Yugioh isn't the most well constructed game in existence, but it is probably the best game to ever exist in the context of the Yugioh-verse. It's consistently said to be extremely skillful and enjoyable, a game that incorporates strength of will as well as the player's own emotions. And I must reiterate, you're considering throwing out most of Yugioh's worldbuilding just because you think it's unfair that Duel Monsters in particular was the game that had the world centered around it.

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (14 hours later)

Um, the idea's not that the experiment drastically altered the fundamental laws of reality. It's that the Universe would already fundamentally run on the laws of game theory, and that wouldn't change. But the apparent "surface" rules would always be changeable (maybe modular would be a better word) and no one knew about it before the experiment. And it's not merely a matter of unfairness. It's a matter of wanting the world of the story to be self-consistent and explainable.

And what do you mean, throwing out most of the yugioh's worldbuilding? You mean the speech the eldritch abomination gave at the end of the gx anime series, or the whole Duel spirit realm thing that didn't even exist in the original manga anyways because it actually contradicted the canonical origins of duel monsters in ancient egypt?

And while I liked the original yugioh series, the ridiculously extreme lack of cultural or historical accuracy in regards to ancient egypt is appalling. I'm still thinking I'll still use a lot of the original series' worldbuilding. There will just be some changes and some different explanations for how things happened.

u/RolandsVaria [+3] (15 hours later)

What surface rules? You mean the rules that make one particular game significant? What does "game theory," even mean in this context. It's regular definition refers to a category of study.

How does the world being centered around one game make the story less self consistent and explainable? The universe giving some sort of special significance to games is already an extremely bizarre setup. Making it centered around one game doesn't make things more contrived in any significant way. In fact, one could say that it's more bizarre if the universe gave special significance to all sorts of games, rather than just one.

I mean if you want to make Duel Monsters just some game, yes, that does throw out most of what the anime established in any of its series. You'd be sticking largely to the manga doing it your way, which isn't a bad thing, but that once again leaves the question of what you're hoping to accomplish here. As far as coming up with a rational explanation for why everything comes down to a card game, sticking to the manga actually leaves you further away from a cohesive answer.

To the best of my recollection, Pegasus has no good reason why he can't just print an "I win" card to defeat Yugi. Marik never tries to spring his death traps without challenging Yugi to a game first. Tragoedia explicitly says right before the final showdown that he is only dueling because he feels like it.

Conversely, the anime tends to attempt to have a reason for why the villains take the actions they do. Kagemaru needed to harness energy that's released from dueling. Saiou/Sartorious needed to control the wills of others, and his powers required that they first be defeated for his control to take hold. The Duel Monsters Spirit World had the whole "losing in a duel means death" rule built into it from the start, and refusal to play meant your opponent would just physically summon their monsters and attack you with them. Etc.

Is it contrived? Yes. But it's a different kind of contrived than the original often was. In the anime you're left wondering why the universe works the way it does, but the character's reasons for dueling make sense (well, sorta. They could definitely use some added ingenuity, and there's sometimes still the problem of why they don't use more traditional weapons, but you usually get why they're bothering with dueling in the first place because it will solve their problems). In the manga the antagonists make everything come down to duels for little discernible reason.

u/Anakiri [+2] (17 hours later)

Disclaimer: I know virtually nothing about Yu-Gi-Oh.

for the story to be rational, the world needs to be explainable. That means there has to be rules.

I do not believe that this is true. The world needs to be predictable, so that rational agents can make working plans and inferences. But as long as it can be predicted, it doesn't matter if the rules make any sense. (Yes, I am directly opposing an item on the sidebar.)

And having one game being ultimately and universally superior to all others like that REALLY doesn't sit well with me, especially since the Yugioh TCG is NOT the most amazing perfect game to end all games that ever existed.

Why should the One True Children's Card Game be amazing? Reality doesn't optimize for fun and balance and game design. If a card game fell out of the laws of the universe, I'd be surprised if it was any good. However, I would expect a lot of people to delude themselves into thinking that it's super awesome.

u/Bowbreaker [+1] Solitary Locust (2 days later)

Have you seen the Pharaoh duel? There sure is something special about the game.

u/eaglejarl [+2] (15 hours later)

My suggestion: start writing it.

1. If you keep enjoying the idea, you will keep writing. If you stop enjoying the idea, you wouldn't have wanted to read it anyway.
2. You probably will not enjoy someone else's take on your idea better than your own.
3. Having a co-author doesn't work if your concern is that you're going to lose interest and stop working on it. If that's a concern then, when you quit, your co-author would quite likely get disheartened and quit themselves.

u/krakonfour [+1] (10 hours later)

I would love a rational YGO GX fic. Imagine a character that simply plays the meta instead of flavour of the week/asspull monster of the episode.you know, someone who calculates odds ratios and works out combinations in the deck that actually work, and isn't above using cards from other decks.

Or you could have a practical!evil character that uses scramblers to stop the opponent from activating traps at the crucial moment... or pulls a gun on someone who tries to kill him in a shadow game.

We can go even more rational. Creatures with souls you say? Has anyone considered the fact that when you summon a monster....nothing is forcing you to play the game? You can have the monster solve problems for you. A summonable, use-anywhere anyhow sentient computer with absolute loyalty to the summoner. But... Where does the energy come from? Calculating is work, and the summoned monsters run on nothing... Maybe Jaden realises from that that magic actually exists...

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (11 hours later)

I don't think the monsters should be truly sentient, nor have too much independence from their summoners. Let's not forget that even soul-ified, they're still trading cards. I would imagine that if they have some kind of mind-like capabilities, that wouldn't necessarily change their terminal value as components of a trading card game.

Perhaps the soul-ified cards absorb some sort of soul-energy from their summoners to materialize?

As for the gun scenario, if the game itself is soul-efied, that could perhaps include the rules of the game, which means if someone breaks the rules it's like violating laws of soul-physics. Could cause a paradox between soul-physics and normal physics or something like that.

Yeah. Magic would have to exist. Probably something similar but not quite the same as the magic in Saga of Soul. Or... and this will sound a little weird, maybe this story's universe, on a fundamental level, operates on the laws of game theory, and regular physics is the Minecraft-ish baseline configuration for reality. Or something like that.

u/TimTravel [+1] (14 hours later)

Just don't make Bond show up. That's my thing. :P

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (15 hours later)

Bond? James Bond? Or do you mean Power Bond?

u/TimTravel [+2] (15 hours later)

Nope, James Bond. License to Duel. It's gonna be a thing.

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (12 days later)

I've started writing it, but got stuck before the first duel. Here's a description of the problem I encountered:

• Elemental hero decks pretty much all rely on elemental hero stratos, and elemental hero stratos is WAY overpowered, and was banned.

http://www.reddit.com/r/yugioh/comments/1pki61/why_stratos_was_banned/

As such, I'm not even sure it's possible for Jaden to use elemental heroes as his main deck if I want this story to work. I have an idea for a deck that uses “HERO Flash!!”, a spell card that allows normal elemental hero monsters to attack directly. I have no idea whether it's good enough to be competitive or even viable though. I'm going to have to test it a bit before I start writing the first duel. It has no fusion monsters in the extra deck, since fusion monsters are always effect monsters, not normal monsters.

• This deck has Elemental Hero Neos in it, and there is no way to make it work without him, even though I really want to just ignore the Neo-Spacians. As cypsiman2 put it, Jaden

“...will not be travelling to Hippy-Space to meet with the Hippy-Space dolphins to learn about his Hippy-Space Destiny and then use his Hippy-Space powers to summon the Hippy-Space Guyver and his friends the Hippy-Space aliens to defeat the Hippy-Space radiation and save the Hippy-Space universe.”

At least, I hope he won't. I really hope he won't. I'm thinking of replacing Elemental Hero Neos with another fanmade normal elemental hero monster with the same stats and no contact fusion. Contact fusion is a lot more powerful than regular fusion, and the ONE DOWNSIDE that evens things out, the “returns to the extra deck at the end of turn” effect, is NEGATED by the field spell, “Neos Space”! The neo-spacians overshadow elemental heroes with their no-need-for-polymerization “Contact Fusion” which didn't start with them btw, the VWXYZ union machine monsters ALSO fuse without polymerization, although the fusion materials get banished instead of being sent to the graveyard, and the resulting fusion monsters STAY ON THE FIELD without another spell to keep them there.

• I'm starting to wonder if I should just keep the metagame as it is in real life. There's bound to be countless problems like this everywhere I look. I'm just worried that if I use the real life metagame, there might be plot inconsistencies. After all, the rarities of cards in the anime are wildly different to real life. Everyone in real life wants to play the cards that are one-of-a-kind in the anime. I cannot imagine how different the anime metagame would be if it were real, assuming such a metagame actually is possible. I suspect Kazuki Takahashi, the original author of Yugioh, as well as the anime writers, weren't all that familiar with the Yugioh CCG's metagame, or metagames in general.

What do you guys think I should do?

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