Your gateway to endless inspiration
I was feeling nostalgic thinking of the show and had this thought, where did Yusei, Jack and Crow learn to ride their duel runners? The show says that the duel runner Jack stole from Yusei was the first one he built, but they already knew how to drive and do so well enough that Jack became the King of turbo duels shortly thereafter. All three do some pretty spectacular stunts while riding, and that’s not the kind of thing you learn in a day. So I was thinking, Satellite’s a dumping ground for junk and trash, and something that probably became a lot less popular after duel runners were invented are regular old motorcycles. What if the guys found some, or parts of some that Yusei and Crow then built into bikes, and taught each other how to ride. Martha’s great but there’s no way she had the time to keep constant supervision over all the kids she was raising all the time. It’s canon that Yusei, Jack, and Crow had the time and lack of supervision to get caught up in gang fights, so clearly they had pretty free reign to get up to who knows what. So we’ve got three pre-teen boys with little supervision who find and reconstruct some old motorcycles where they then teach themselves how to drive. They would have had plenty of space to run around and I imagine they probably dared each other into doing stupid stunts. They also probably taught themselves turbo duels with regular duel disks. I’m just picturing them being the adrenaline junkies that they are and doing all sorts of stupid stuff that probably eventually ended in the three beat up motorcycles being destroyed and then after they met Kyousuke and made their gang. We never got a full idea how long that stuff went in for, but I’m guessing only like a year or so. So, pre-teen trio teach themselves to drive and run their bikes into the ground over the course of a few years. Then the three, probably age 14-ish meet Kyousuke and all that stuff happens. The three split after the gang fell apart, at some point Yusei falls in with the three friends we see at the start of the show and he builds his first duel runner. This was something he probably started after their motorcycles broke and worked on off and on over the next three-ish years until Jack steals it at age 16-ish. Two years later and we’ve got the beginning of the show with Yusei at 18.
I’m going to completely ignore Zexal and on.
I really liked Yugioh 5Ds when I was younger, I don’t really know why considering it was kind of a blatant cash grab, but the English theme was really catchy and I really loved Yusei’s voice actor, I might have had a bit of a crush on Yusei in general. I guess I just totally fell for the cheap “edgy” gimmick, which is funny because it isn’t like DM and GX weren’t dark themselves, but whatever. Yusei is definitely the best protagonist of the three. Anyway, my problem.
DM anime happened in, like, the early 2000s, and GX was supposed to be 10 years later with 5Ds a couple decades after that in some nebulous future point. But all of the shows were produced in the mid to late 2000s, so all of the tech looks pretty much the same across the three shows, though 5Ds has some generic futuristic looking stuff that still manages to look out of date. This really doesn’t work with what we now understand of the progression of our tech, by the time of GX everyone should have migrated to touch screens and, like, holo decks and stuff, not still using the clunky duel disks. And who even know by 5Ds time, the digital age is making things pick up steam, fast. None of it makes sense, as driven home by Dark Side of Dimensions when Kaiba and Yugi has their ridiculous high tech VR duel, makes it look like VRAINS should be the series that comes in 10 years instead of old school GX. Whatever.
Yusei, Crow and Jack learned to turbo duel on regular motorcycles using old duel disks. Duel runners actually have quite a few modifications to them in order to use them in dueling, autopilot and connected duel disks are part of that. Yusei has to jerry rig a separate device that lets them add speed counters and had to hack their disks to allow for speed spells so the boys could learn to play.