Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V S1E5: “Aspiring Apprentice”
This episode starts with Yuya in a surreal arena being cheered on by an entire team's worth of professional cheerleaders under an atmosphere-less sky. A dream, obviously. The dream is hijacked by the appearance of blue haired girl, whose desire to be trained by Yuya for some reason makes him anxious whereas up until then the dream seemed to be framing him as a victor or champion. He's sucked out into the void of speech, and wakes up in his bed to provide us with a handy explanation that I'm sure everyone in the audience needed.
Thanks for that clarification, Yuya! I'd have had no idea!
He reminds himself that even though being the space action duel champion was a dream, his ability to pendulum summon was not. He STILL thinks pendulum summoning is down to some innate personal ability lmao. And, with pendulum summoning, he can still put on performances and please crowds, just like his father used to before he died of cowardice. Roll OP. Then, Yuya leaves his room wondering "what was up with that guy." I figured he was referring to Florida Boy, but no, apparently he meant Blue. Who is male, contrary to appearances.
What's with all the blue-haired femboys I've been running into in my reviews lately?
Also, I maintain that he should be WTFing much harder over Florida Boy's behavior than Blue's.
Anyway, it turns out that Yuya has a dog and a cat, so that's cool.
I forget if Yuya's living situation has been established. Is he living with his (widowed?) mother? Or has he been adopted by Zuzu's family? If it wasn't explained before, then I suppose it will probably will be in this episode. Or...maybe it's just going to be one of those spooky details that the show leaves unaddressed, like some kids' shows do.
He also gets downstairs to the ground floor of his house using a fireman's pole, which...sure, why not. It's not like he lives on a house-sized island and uses a submarine to get into town every day. He enters the kitchen, and sees that his mother is already entertaining an unexpected breakfast guest.
He must have gotten here awfully early. Did he let Yuya's mom know ahead of time without also informing Yuya? Or did Yuya just forget? The latter would be understandable, given how eventful yesterday afternoon was.
Also, maybe his mom will be able to shed at least a liiiiittle bit of light on what the deal is with his father? Whether he's dead or in hiding from the megacorp or in hiding in terror at the prospect of losing an I Can't Believe It's Not Pokemon match or whatever? Maybe.
Apparently, Blue was just wandering around outside of their house that morning like a creepy stalker, and Yuya's mom asked him if he was hungry. She can't resist taking in weird stray things and feeding them, which is implied to be how they came by their dog and cat.
Yuya is weirdly hostile toward Blue. Sure, the stalker-y-ness merits some wariness, but I feel like that should be easily counterbalanced by the fact that he saved Yuya's super valuable cards and also possibly the lives of him and his friends. Meanwhile, Blue charms Yuya's mother by mistaking her for an older sibling due to her apparent youth, which delights her to the point where she hands Blue the second plate of pancakes that she was about to hand to her own son. Wow, what the fuck lady.
On his way to school with Zuzu, Yuya is approached once again by Blue. And is even more aggravated by him than before. He angrily refuses to accept Blue as an understudy. Again, the lack of gratitude here is just bizarre.
Yuya's lashing out leads him to offhandedly insult the nearby Zuzu, who comically beats him over the head for it as she's wont to do. For the entire school day that follows, Blue keeps stalking Yuya. Including, like, cutting class so he can watch him through his own classroom's window from outside. Yuya gets more and more antsy about this, as you'd expect, but this whole sequence is kind of undermined by the way it began.
The fact that Yuya was weirdly hostile toward Blue to begin with throws the intended effect badly off. If we'd started with Yuya reacting graciously-but-slightly-confused to Blue's appearance in the morning as one would expect given that he saved him, and then had Yuya get slowly more exasperated and creeped out until the goodwill Blue earned is all spent, that would have worked. As it is, I can't really tell whose side the viewer is supposed to be on.
This COULD be meant to show that Yuya - for all his confidence as an entertainer - is deadly insecure about his ability to be anything besides that, and that being put on the spot as someone's mentor is scaring him. But in that case, we should have seen a lot more ambivalence from him when he was called upon to help teach the newcomers at You Show who were attracted because of his performance specifically.
The worst misstep along this route comes at the end, though. Yuya and Zuzu go to You Show after school as they do most afternoons. Zuzu sees how stressed Yuya is, and helps cheer him up with an encouraging pep talk. It starts to work, but then they arrive and Yuya freaks out at the sight of Blue among the students.
"You're even here?"
This is the one place where Blue is SUPPOSED to go if we wants to learn from or with Yuya. And, from the sound of things, he's paid his membership fee, so there's nothing objectionable about his presence at You Show specifically. This is by far the least transgressive thing Blue has done since the previous day.
It also boggles the mind that Yuya wouldn't be EXPECTING to see Blue here at this point. He's been hounding Yuya about wanting to learn Pendulum Summon all day. Why would Yuya ever expect Blue to NOT be in the one place where he's actually supposed to go to do this after how much interest he's shown in it?
So, they repeat the "I wanna be your student" conversation for the fourth time. Blue also says he wants to duel Yuya, which Yuya also refuses to do, until Blue agrees to a wager. Namely, that he'll leave Yuya alone unless he can beat him.
They go to the holodeck. Initially, they create a Wild West themed arena, but Blue doesn't like it, so they switch it to Candyland instead. Yuya rolls his eyes, but doesn't complain.
I regret that I'm not good at languages. I'm only fluent in two, and neither of them have the necessary words to express how little I care about this battle.
Even when there is a conflict with actual stakes happening, the duels have nothing to do with resolving them. And this particular conflict has anti-stakes. It has soft indentations.
And, this is one episode after an attempted kidnapping, theft, and possibly murder, with the culprits still on the loose.
-_-
Also, the match begins with all the characters chanting the words of the OP in this ritualized, hyper-exuberatn way. Like they're doing a commercial. Which I guess technically they are, since the point of this show is to make you buy the cards, but the way it's done is just creepy. In a way that could actually be effective capitalist dystopia set dressing, if you just leaned a little bit harder into Arc V's cyberpunk influences. Cheesy commercial slogans becoming cultural traditions, everyone becoming living, breathing free advertising on a cultural level.
However, since the creators of the show ACTUALLY ARE using it as a commercial to sell a real world product, I doubt it's doing anything that self-aware.
They play Calvinball. Yuya Pendullum Summons. Blue does some other weird trick that lets him fuse two of his monsters together to create a stronger hybrid. Some of the observers are shocked and terrified by this, while others just recognize it as a known - if rare - spell card. The unconvincing distribution of knowledge about this game that everyone is obsessed with is one of this show's many, many pieces of bad world building. End on a "cliffhanger" before the duel can reach its conclusion.
Even if I liked this show, I'd think this was a pathetic fucking excuse for a cliffhanger and that the creators were morons for expecting me to see dramatic tension here. End episode.
Two episodes to go. Two episodes to go. Two episodes to go. Two episodes to go. Two episodes to go.
