Happy Birthday, Yugi Mutou!!

Last time I didn't do much, this time around, it's a post to celebrate him as a character.

He went through so much growth from a shy and reclusive freshman in High School, with an appearance of a child that could fool an adult if wasn't for his school uniform and also very short into become a very mature and wise young boy about to become an adult.

I want to start with the evolution of Yugi's character art from Kazuki Takahashi-sensei, not only is noticeable the art evolution from rough and whimsical to a more straight and consistent style.

 

 

You can see the differences and how it gradually the lines become more straight and much smoother and more clean..., it also shows to some extent his physical growth too, to the most recent ones:

It's the last panels more or less, looking at his eyes and eyelashes, we see that Yugi is getting to look more how he looks like in Dark Side of Dimensions, speaking of which:

This is one is directly from the Instagram of the mangaka, Kazuki Takahashi, if you click in the picture, it will get you straight to his instagram, it's worth to follow, because he post his art there.

If you wish to continue click "Read More"

We seen from the visual aspect, now getting to his writing and profile of the character, the main theme of his character arc, self-confidence, self-esteem, independence and himself learning his own biggest strength which is kindness, that it may look weak and easily overlook, but teach us that kindness is a strength, like we see in Duelist Kingdom as someone who wasn't afraid to lose and prioritized someone's safety over gaining a chance to save a loved one, sometimes because he shows kindness to others because he wants to and not expect anything in return, if it touches someone, the person will be willing to help him (like Jounouchi, Atem, Anzu, Honda, Mai, Mokuba, etc) and wanting to learn from him as well.

Yugi learning to have confidence in himself from Atem, Mai, Kaiba and Anzu, courage and guts from Jounouchi and Honda, from Otogi and antagonist that made push himself in overcoming his own weaknesses from good and bad examples, he learns to draw the line within his pacifist principles and as someone who feels very strongly against violence.

Regarding Yugi's intellect, I have written in my analysis of how extremely intelligent and a fast learner, potential to be the best gamer in the world when comes to skills, but what always held him back was always his low self-esteem, comparing himself to Atem, as well the lack of willpower to get better (as shown his 0 effort and motivation on his studies in the early chapters and against Pegasus - when he was starting to have willpower, but since was in early stages, he didn't last long in the shadow game), in against Otogi in DDM, it is when it pushes him in working that field where he lacked, but got him motivated in getting better, which did happen eventually and polish his skills with more willpower and motivation.

Lastly, we're getting to his dream:

Yugi's dream is to be a game designer, not video games per se, but board games which can be transcribed later in video games, he is started working in this creative endeavour since the beginning of the series in how he is constantly inventing games in the early volumes, he was practicing it, to later when he graduated participate in this contest of gaming design, the question is did he won? in the movie Dark Side of Dimensions didn't give any indications if he won or not, it left pretty much ambiguous.

However in one of Takahashi-sensei's artworks displayed in his instagram (Studio Dice):

We can easily assume from the picture above alone, that not only he won the contest, he got a sponsor being Kaiba Corp and put his probably Kaiba's IP "Duel Monsters in the mix (even though is never explained later, but it seems Kaiba owns a portion of Duel Monsters IP with Pegasus's apprentices (if we consider Yu-Gi-Oh! R as canon), getting Kaiba's acknowledgement to this degree is a pretty big deal, being Kaiba who is very selective, picky and has extremely high standards.

See Ya Next, Post! (which will be in Atem's Birthday, 26th July)