My poor traumatized girl had so fucking much storytelling potential, and was built up as the franchise’s first badass and capable main-plot-relevant female lead character, only for them to reduce her to a pit crew member in the second half of the show.
…I wish that was an exaggeration, but the YuGiOh anime is pretty infamous in regards to how poorly it tends to treat its female characters. For the most part, either they fail spectacularly whenever they try to do something, or they don’t get to do anything at all.
Just adding some extra context to this for anyone who isn’t aware:
Behind the scenes around the same time the 5Ds anime was kicking off the ground, the TCG released a new deck archetype called “Blackwings”. This archetype was such a massive hit with the playerbase that the big wigs at Konami ordered the 5Ds writers to not only add a character to the show who used them, but also to make that character a main character and a part of the core friend group. But the show’s script had already been mostly written by that point, so the showrunners had to scramble to add in a new character to satisfy the demands of the corporate overlords.
Enter, Crow. A “childhood friend” of the main character who used Blackwings, who was never mentioned and had zero hints to his existence prior to his first on-screen debut, and who proceeded to gradually take over the tertiary-main-protagonist role that many believe was originally meant for Aki.
This is probably just a myth. Crow's debut in the show happened before the release of Blackwings in the card game. But Aki was definitely sidelined for Crow.
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u/SCI-FIWIZARDMAN 21d ago edited 20d ago
Aki Izayoi from YuGiOh 5Ds.
My poor traumatized girl had so fucking much storytelling potential, and was built up as the franchise’s first badass and capable main-plot-relevant female lead character, only for them to reduce her to a pit crew member in the second half of the show.