Poll Pic: Titty Gardner

Apologies for the fact that the poll prompt said she'd be wearing a one-piece swimsuit. If it's any consolation those scraps of torn cloth used to be a one-piece swimsuit, I just couldn't resist having the growth tear it off this time. Also shoutout to my irl friend Hunter for speaking some Japanese and confirming that I used that onomatopoeia correctly.

I wanted to show the original manga from before the card game was introduced some love and have something other than a spell card effect be what makes a Yugioh girl expand. Not only has that just been done already, even by myself, but I recently, completely independent of this being on the poll and really itching for an excuse to write about it, had to come to a very painful conclusion. I don't like the Yugioh card game, and I kinda never did, I only thought I liked playing it in high school because of the people I played with rather than it actually being any fun.

If you asked me back then, I'd complain just as hard as I would today about long combos and having to sit there with my thumb up my ass for minutes at a time waiting for a turn while my opponent uses half their deck all at once, and the only solution is to run a deck you can also use half of all at once to disrupt their combo, but I shouldn't have to do that, I just wanna run a damn Toon deck! Why is that such a crime? I'm not asking to win all the time or even most of the time but can I get a damn turn? I have forty cards in my deck, can I actually see some of them? And I'm not talking like an old Toon deck from back when you actually had to use Toon World, I'm talking an up-to-date Toon deck with the modern support cards, some of which are unreasonably expensive for a deck nowhere close to competitive! And don't even get me started on the card text and how often I'd attack blindly and get boned by a card effect I didn't bother reading and how for some reason players don't understand how that can possibly be a valid complaint because "herpaderp just read the cards bro," but they just played a metric buttload of cards with comparable amounts of text one after the other, if I actually stopped to read every single one to understand what you just did and how to not bone myself, you'd just get mad that I'm making the duel take longer. Don't tell me I'm making that up, that was literally the reason I didn't get far with learning Pendulums back when they first came out. I made an Odd-Eyes deck on YGOPro to test them out with and couldn't even read my opening hand half the time without getting disconnected on, and that wasn't just one person, that was one after the other disconnecting before I could even play a card, and anyone who didn't disconnect would go to the text chat to bitch at me directly. So yeah, I didn't bother learning Pendulums, other players didn't want me to apparently, and the rest of my friends never really used them either so not only did they probably feel the same way about them I did, but because of that it was really no skin off my ass. Yeah, keep your Pendulums, they look tacky anyway, like something you'd see in a Yugioh parody. And actually, nobody uses Pendulums anymore, it's all about Links now, so I doubt a lot of people are gonna get offended that I shat on them. The point is that I've only ever gotten the impression that nobody actually wants you to read the cards, at least not when it's relevant, they either want you to THINK they want you to read the cards so they can call you stupid when you don't want to, or they expect you to just memorize what every single card in the game does on your own time. Which is basically homework. Duel Academy from the show just keeps becoming less and less of a silly idea all the time. And for some reason players don't understand why you'd criticise that either, encouraging new players when they get surprised by the more-extreme-than-basically-any-other-card-game learning curve to "stick with it, there’s a reason we all still play." But like, who in their right mind would play five matches of a game, have no fun whatsoever, and then keep playing because a YouTuber promised it'll finally be fun the hundredth time? Don't you think it would be better to just play a game that's fun right away? And if you picked up Yugioh and did think it was fun right away and continued to have fun with the process of learning the meta, fine, no accounting for taste, but THAT'S the reason you should keep playing, not to prove...I dunno, your manhood I guess? Normally I wouldn't pick on someone or try to attack their supposed mental state for liking something I don't, but the way Yugioh players talk to non-players, the way they aggressively defend it so tooth-and-nail, the way I've seen people straight-up admit that the game wasn't fun for them right away but they "buckled down" and busted their ass to "earn it" and think you're just closed-minded and lacking ambition if you don't wanna do that, makes me wonder if they have stockholme syndrome or something. I value ambition more than just about anything else, to put it in even geekier terms you could say I'm a Slytherin, I'm all about a good bootstrap success story, but like...we're talking about a card game! If you see no problem with having to "earn" the ability to have fun with it, not even to win (should DEFINITELY have to earn that) but just to play the game at a basic level, and on top of that look down on anyone who does see a problem with that, then I am very concerned for you.

Aside from the specific summoning mechanics mentioned, nothing in that previous paragraph is a recent development, I started playing Yugioh again when I was sixteen after having not touched it since I was like seven or eight, and the whole time I played it was always like this, I just didn't used to think much about it, let alone care, because I just played with my friends at the library two nights a week during summer vacation. And my friends didn't have much more tolerance for bullshit than I did, so if we didn't like a specific strategy or mechanic, we'd just ignore it, and anyone who would think we were stupid for it could just kiss our asses. It really just didn't effect me that much. Sadly though I don't really have much of a means of playing with those people anymore. Not that I'm no-longer friends with them or anything like that, but life took us all in different directions. Everyone's got jobs and college and families and relationships and responsibilities, we all grew up and my friend circle's basically become more of a friend universe. It's something that happens to most people when they grow up, and sadly I wasn't prepared for it, nobody warned me, except movies, but movies are never right about anything, why was THAT the one thing they were right about!? And when I tried finding new people to play with it just wasn't the same. Yugioh used to be much more than a card game to me, but without the secret sauce that was my very specific friend group, now a card game is all it is, and the cracks show more than ever. For some reason it never occurred to me that if the game was no fun outside the context of playing with specific people, then maybe it's not as good of a game as some people want me to think it is. Now that I've actually seen that, and I've given up on waiting for Rush Duel to come out in English which actually would have been a decent alternative, and with me in desperate need of a social outlet that will get me out of the house once in a while, I should probably look into a game that's fun to play on its own merits so it won't matter whether or not I've already formed some kind of personal connection to the other player. That Digimon one is pretty fun, so if I can find a comic store near me that has events for it I'll see if going to those is any better. That's what you get for not localizing Rush Duel Konami, I have money, I was gonna start giving it to you again, but apparently you don't want it so I'll give it to Bandai instead.