Dear Fanfiction Writers,
My gripes are many with ye who have defiled my reputation, trespassed in the hearts of my friends, and made me the laughing stock of the afterlife - but we really should begin at the beginning. First and foremost, I would like you all to get my name right.
Let me put it this way: I spent a good eight volumes of manga trying to discover my name. That would indicate that I did not know what my name actually was prior to the finding of it, yes? To make things easier for my friends, my partner simply referred to me as 'the other me', and I was called 'Yami Yugi' by everyone else - that, or 'the other Yugi'. My enemies generally called me 'Pharaoh' , though 'goth baby', 'midget', or variations thereof were admittedly common with those amongst them who had no knowledge of my illustrious background.
The thing is, there exists no birth certificate (or, indeed, birth tablet) bearing the name of one 'Yami Yugi' - or 'Goth Baby' - with reference to yours truly. It is but an alias, created to make talking about me that much easier. And all 'Yami Yugi' means is 'Dark Yugi' - it is naught but a label. I must say, it was amusing the first few times you all decided that Yami was my first name and Yugi somehow my last - can you imagine the sort of confusion you could cause if you applied the same rule to 'Yami Bakura' or 'Yami Marik'? - but after a while, it because tiring. To the dub, I say this: Don't believe everything you see on television. I believed that Pegasus was a borderline nice guy, and look where that got me.
So, I went nameless for a long time - and when I did find that name, it was not 'Kaiba' - for the record, we are not cousins, we are reincarnations of the Pharaoh and the Priest, and 'Kaiba' isn't even Seto's real surname. It was not 'Yami' - though I have to admit that the term 'Pharaoh Yami' is slightly appealing, I greatly prefer my real name, thankyou very much - and it definitely was not 'Yugi'.
I will say this once, and once only: My name is Atem - not Aten, not Aa-tem, not Amet, certainly not Anubis, and not Ra-Atem; please do remember to look up the spelling if you are ever unsure, because some of you seem to struggle with it almost as badly as you do with the name of Akhenamkhanen, my father-
-who is my father, by the way, which brings us onto the topic of unexpected extra family members. I am fairly sure that I never had a brother or a sister (and no, Mana is not my sister if she is like a sister), and certainly no older siblings. Female Pharaohs did exist in Ancient Egypt, so even if my elder siblings had been female, they would still have inherited my throne when my father died, at least until I was of age to rule myself - in short, it really does confuse me when you decide to give me a veritable plethora of extra brothers and sisters, most of whom are older than me, and all of whom carry extra Millennium Items.
And on the topic of those - a village had to be massacred in order to get anywhere near enough energy to create seven of them. Do you realize just how many people you would have had to wipe to create all of the Millennium Items you have made up between yourselves? We know that we made only seven of those 'awesome magical weapons' - the only reason my father did not make enough to give to everyone loyal to him was because we would have had to wipe out a large chunk of our own population! And no, I would have never done it myself - I do not kill for power, I kill to defend my friends, and did eventually learn to tone it down when they expressed their displeasure.
Which, by the way, means that though I have admittedly dismembered people in the modern-day plot, I would never run around brandishing a chainsaw. I am not to be compared with the likes of Chopman simply because I have killed; this is most unacceptable. Many of you look at me, you see me blowing someone up or setting someone on fire, and you all seem to think 'Oh, he must be so nasty' - but when you really look at it, I only killed because I felt the need to protect my partner - in hindsight, it was probably a little over the top to kill someone because they stole my host's toy - and this then means that I would never try to hurt my host, or his friends for that matter. Ergo, I do not rape my host; nor do I hurt him - the guard dog does not bite its owner, so to speak.
Not that that should indicate that I am at all weak, soft-hearted, or whatever you may have me be - all it means is that my partner is stronger than I am. I would never give up my quest if I was to, say, lose a game against someone - I lost against my self-proclaimed rival, and I'll have you know that I wasn't the one who was crying; and yet some of you like to have me becoming somehow depressed at the smallest loss or setback, and my partner having to help me up. In all seriousness - why exactly do none of you seem to understand that both of us are strong in our own right? We stand together - we're partners!
And before you say it - no, I don't mean it in the marital sense.
Yours truthfully,
Pharaoh Atem - also known as Yami Yugi, Goth Baby, Midget, and Kid.
UAB
This 'un's for you, oh patient guest reviewer - Yami E, you've waited a while, hmm?
Anyways - Yami Yugi doesn't seem like the sort to really rant at anyone, so I'm pleased with what I managed.
Addressed here:
- Names; I'll freely admit that this went into Millennium World territory, but only because the whole 'Yami' thing has escalated to such levels that now we have 'Pharaoh Yami' popping around to say hi, in a series where the finding of Yami Yugi's 'real' name is arguably the whole point of it.
- Extra family members; you'd be surprised at how big the family manages to getin some fics, and OCs not being shipped with Yami Yugi sometimes like to be the reincarnation of his sister in real-world scenarios.
- Extra Millennium Items; as he's the center of the Millennium Items plot, it felt right to put the obligatory 'fake Millennium Items' rant in here. Incidentally, the story of the Millennium Items was changed from its early manga explanation - in the second volume, Shadi states that the Millennium Items were created by the Pharaoh's magicians, to punish thieves who tried to rob the Pharaohs' tombs.
- In my less-than-humble opinion, you just can't run a Yami Yugi rant without mentioning the psychopath/abusive version - this, combined with the counterpart found in the rarer 'gentle' Yami Yugi is one of the big character breaks I've seen for him in the fandom. Yes, Yami Yugi did kill people; he was defending Yugi. Yes, it was utterly over the top, yes, he could best be described as a 'justice demon' - but all the same, he's not going to kill and/or hurt Yugi. Similarly - he uses Yugi's friends as a reason for some of his punishments, so he's unlikely to try and hurt them ('You have trespassed in the hearts/souls of my friends' was a phrase used on multiple occasions when he challenged the wrongdoer of the week).
- Gentle/angsty Yami Yugi is rarer - from what I've heard, I'm fairly sure that DOMA may have had something to do with it - unless it didn't. At any rate, for most YGO characters, there seems to be a wimpier version of them in the fandom...
Heads up: Honda and Bandit Keith are looking quite likely at the moment, and as always, suggestions are welcome - just no anime-only or Millennium World characters, please (YGO R is fine, though). Also - I am being dragged off to some remote bushland for a 'holiday', which basically means that when I get back on Sunday, you guys may well be spammed with chapters on this fic and 'Obligatory Crossover', due to my mind going into overdrive with no distractions.
Guest Review Replies (from now on, they'll be on whatever chapter the review was published on):
Yami E: At last, you get Yami Yugi, and I get to reply to ya. Dunno why I wasn't doing this before - laziness, I guess?
Yeah - I did hear something about the dub mangling his name, though I didn't know that they had doctored the plot so that he wasn't looking for his real name in Battle City (that's when it starts to become a focus, and flows nicely into Millennium World). The merchandising companies didn't get it right either - they had a tendency to call Yami Yugi 'Yu-Gi-Oh' as though that were his name; though I haven't seen most people using that one, xDD. The reason why it still came included in the rant is because all of my characters are based off their manga selves; and with names being such a big part of the manga's plot, I didn't think he would be very impressed, xD.
Playing Yami Yugi right can be very difficult when you're only aware of the dub-canon (which is probably a canon in its own right) - it's easy to make him even nicer than he is in dub.
Rebecca Hopkins is an anime only character, but because I have written things for her before, I can do it again.
Thanks for the good word, and you're welcome! -chews on cookie-