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Happy birthday to Honda Hiroto, holder of the nerd herd’s one shared brain cell and resident beauty on duty 😎 🌸🌸🍈

#Honda day Honda day wake up everyone it's Honda daaaayyyyy

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🦈🎁🚀 for the ask game! (If you're still doing it ofc)

Omg YES, I am doing all ask games in perpetuity 😂💞 Thank you for checking, and I'm delighted to answer!

🦈 Which character is the toughest to write?

I think last time I answered Jounouchi, and that is still true to an extent, but oh my god BAKURA. I just tried writing my first Bakura fic recently. Like yes I know being mysterious and strange and (deliberately?) confusing is like his whole thing, but if you haven't been steeped in the Bakurae/Ishtar side of the fandom for the last 20 years...it's a lot of meta to catch up on. A LOT. So many good takes, many in direct opposition to each other, many of them equally compelling despite that. WHEW. I tried my best, I hope I didn't write an offensively wrong Bakura, everyone's gotta start somewhere right?!?! ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ

🎁 Have a piece of a WIP you want to share?

Ooooh, yes!! A little Kaibros character study from years ago that has been languishing in my drafts, that I'm re-working and may actually publish someday. I'll stick it under a readmore, tell me what you think!

🚀 Do you like to outline your fic first or create as you go?

Unfortunately, I don't have the kind of brain where I can sit in front of a blank document and think a story out in bullet point form. I desperately wish I did lol. But alas I must charge in headfirst and get a few thousand words in before I have any idea of where I want things to go. Sometimes (often) I blast through the entire thing without outlining. Sometimes I hit a snag somewhere and realize I done fucked up and need to put myself back on the tracks.

And then there was the time I got 100k words into a YGO/Zelda crossover and realized oh no i think this will be MUCH more than 100k and wrote a very rough outline, then another Zelda game came out halfway through the fic and I had to spend a solid month rewriting my outline to accommodate lore from the new game, and also I somehow accidentally turned the whole thing into a huge ensemble cast with multiple concurrent plot threads balancing both YGO and Zelda character arcs, Hyrulean politics, and an imminent multiverse collapse. My Scriv file now has a 120k word planning & research section. (Oops.)

tl;dr I have exactly one fic that is well outlined and the rest are me doing the writing equivalent of a Leeroy Jenkins. congrats if you get that reference and are ancient like me

ANYWAYYYYSS thank you for the ask!!! Kaibros snippet under the cut 🐉

“Come on, nii-sama,” Mokuba pleads. It comes out weirdly desperate, more pathetic than he’d intended. “This is so unfair. It’s unfair enough that I don’t have parents, and it’s even more unfair that you won’t tell me-”

“You do have a parent.” Seto's reply is so sharp that it makes Mokuba flinch.

“I know, I know,” Mokuba replies, irritated at the pedantry. “You’re my parent legally. But you’re not, you know...I just want...”

Mokuba realizes as he’s talking that he’s said something terribly wrong. The change in his brother’s face is minuscule and significant and makes his stomach flip in shame. He trails off, the words curling up and dying as they fall off his tongue.

“Please go to bed,” Seto says. His tone of voice is so perfectly even that Mokuba gets up and leaves without another word.

Mokuba doesn’t go to school the next day, opting instead to stay in bed and stare at the wall. Seto either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.

For the first time in years, he cries. And then he thinks about the fact that it’s been years since he last cried. Mokuba spends so much time wondering what the fuck is going on in his brother’s head that he’s maybe neglected to turn the same scrutiny on himself. And he’s maybe leaned a little too far into his role as the ‘normal’ Kaiba - the charming one, the easygoing one, the one who exists to balance out the bombastic, powerful force of nature looming tall at his back.

But who had cried - just once - after Gozaburo hurled himself from the top of the Kaiba Corporation building, and who had watched the coroners wheel away the black-draped gurney with impassive, bone-dry eyes?

#asks #ask game

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You knew this was coming: Pegasus.

You will talk about my poor little meow meow cartoon babyman and you will like it.

LMAAOO YOU'RE RIGHT I SHOULD'VE SEEN THIS COMING.

I really do love Pegasus though lol. When I was younger I used to laugh at his "reading comic books all alone with a glass of wine and one(1) wheel of cheese" thing, but. Ahem. My oven broke last week and 90% of what I've been eating since has been shitty discount charcuterie boards I make for myself out of whatever tf is left in my fridge i.e. mostly cheese, and I've been in yet another villainess isekai manga phase lately, and OK I'm allergic to red wine but I was gifted some really nice soju lately, anyways let's just say that I am right now as we speak having a moment of clarity about being an adult sitting alone with a wheel of cheese and an alcoholic beverage whilst laughing at comics.

That is, it slaps. Pegasus was so right, and if I could be doing this in a castle while a bunch of people fight to death on my lawn for entertainment...well I can't say I wouldn't...

Also when my sister and I watched YGO as kids, we somehow got our hands on a few subbed episodes, and one of them was the one where Shadi and Pegasus go into the tomb together. There's this point where out of fucking nowhere Pegasus yells "JEEEESUS!! OHHHHH GREAT!" in mangled English. Twenty years later my sister and I still pop around corners yelling "JEEEESUS!! OHHH GREAT!!!" at each other. ICONIC.

#asks #ask game #also that one person on tumblr who draws those incredible comics got me into Pegasus x Cyndia x Shadi #which is now my only ship for all three of them #pegasus crawford #maximillion pegasus

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I’m so late: paya

PAPAYAAAAAA 😭

God I just love her lol. I love her and Impa's "GRANDMA YOU'RE EMBARRASSING ME" dynamic in BOTW, and I love their "OK kiddo you're in charge now" "WHAT?????" dynamic in TOTK. I like her even more retroactively in BOTW now that I've gotten to know her post-timeskip. She's SO cool!! I teared up a little the first time I got to Kakariko in TOTK and saw her with her chief hat on!! So fucking proud!! It's the growth, man!!

Also I think it's such a neat little thing that they gave her a little parallel but contrasting storyline to Princess Zelda - young women who take their leadership responsibilities seriously, but are also big nerds at heart who just want to look at old rocks in the dirt. And it's really kind of sweet and sad that whereas for Zelda it was this huge thing that defined her entire childhood, for Paya it's like "ugh grandma is nagging me about this AGAAAIIINNN" which shows how secure she is in both Impa and herself.

P.S. Very, very funny that Impa was giving Paya shit for being too into the Zonai ruins because CLEARLY THAT RUNS IN THE FAMILY YOU CRAZY OLD HOT AIR BALLOON ENTHUSIAST, WHERE DID YOU THINK THAT CAME FROM. Even funnier that the fandom lost their shit over Tauro but canonically Paya doesn't really seem to care that much about him, she's more into the actual ruins and he's just kind of a beefy walking dictionary to her. Bless.

#asks #ask game #oh I so enjoyed this one lol #I WANT PAYA AND ZELDA AND RIJU TO BE BESTIES BY THE WAY #ALL THREE OF THEM #breath of the wild #tears of the kingdom #paya #impa

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Mai for character bingo :)

BLESS YOU ANON FOR GIVING ME ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO TALK ABOUT ✨MAI ✨

OK so here's something else I really love about her. I love that she follows a lot of the checkmarks of the sort of 'Femme Fatale' character, and it would be so easy to spin her inherent loneliness as a really true-to-archetype 'it's lonely at the top/I don't trust anyone' thing. And it IS that in some ways. But in other ways. She's awkward! A little strange! She's a dork!! A massive dork!!

It's so sweet too how she specifically interacts with other female characters - she takes Shizuka under her wing right away (and is so kind and patient with her) and it's evident that she really enjoys teasing Anzu and also genuinely respects her. (Also how she is the ONLY adult on the whole freaking island to take Anzu aside and be like...girl are you OK what on earth are you doing in a forest alone with a bunch of idiots and no food?? Blink twice if you need help??) She really does just assign herself 'everyone's cool older sister' and that's such a fascinating character beat for someone who seemingly grew up entirely - like entirely alone - especially because she's good at it.

Which I think is even more poignant when she's framed as a lonely character, because she has so much going for her and so clearly has the desire and inclination to make these connections, and it always falls just short for her. I think a lot of us have been there, you know? You have all or most of the right ingredients for the close relationships you desperately want, and somehow the dough just never comes together. Ahhh man (ಥ﹏ಥ) MAI....

#i got too excited and lost track of my blogs LOL #asks #ask game

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Discount Mountie for the character bingo! And I mean the OG Abercrombie one, not the butt chin replacement 🙏

Heh. Heheh. HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE i was SAVING THIS ONE.

BITCH ASS DISCOUNT ABERCROMBIE MODEL MOUNTIE, MY NEMESIS (shakes fist, screaming into the sky)

I'm not even going to say his name. He doesn't deserve one. Also I genuinely can't remember it because I've been calling him Discount Abercrombie Mountie for so long to distinguish him from Forgettable Butt Chin Mountie. (What fucking factory do they make these guys in?!?!)

Like OKAY I get they were going for a slap-slap-kiss dynamic between Elizabeth and Discount, but it's just. It's not cute. Elizabeth is an accomplished, kind, brave woman who sticks around in a town full of people who are rude af and does her best to make a difference. Discount Abercrombie lurks around with a pouty look on his face because he apparently has More Important Mountie Things to Do than, idk, his actual job. Notorious for arriving at conflict situations an hour late, looking so awkward on a horse I was genuinely spending a lot of screentime wondering if he was going to fall and die (he does but not until Season 5, wow talk about blue balling me), and tipping his stupid hat in the stupidest way known to man. That hat should be CONFISCATED.

My mom doesn't like it when she texts me to talk about the latest episode and I have only mean things to say about Discount Abercrombie and/or his successor Forgettable Butt Chin. Both of them are very popular with moms. So I bite my tongue, and only here can I unleash my rage <3 <3

#asks #ask game #I'm not naming the show #If you're as tapped in to Canadian Mom TV as I am you'll know #if not count your blessings #Also lmao my mom isn't in season 5 yet no one tell her that he dies 🙏🥰

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Mokuba for the character bingo??

ಥ╭ʖ╮ಥ

Ohhhhh this kid. One of the only characters I have no impulses to put in a washing machine for eighty spin cycles (because canon has done that enough waaahhhh). I love this little bastard so very much and would absolutely hand him all my money if he mugged me behind an arcade.

Did I write a significant portion of my YGO/Spider-Man crossover about Mokuba finally having his own smug little asshole genius pals that he can get together with on a Friday night surrounded by sour candy and mountain dew and hack into SHIELD servers together just to piss off Nick Fury? ABSOLUTELY I FUCKING DID. Look at me. Look at me and picture Michelle Jones-Watson, Ned Leeds and Mokuba Kaiba in a room together and tell me that is not the ideal shit disturbing squad.

ANYWAYS LOL UNHINGED CROSSOVERS ASIDE I think Mokuba is so wonderful precisely because he's a rude little jerk and also sweet and earnest, willing to do unspeakable things in his brother's name and also being the only person on the planet who will be like "Seto Kaiba Perhaps That Is A Little Much Innit," etc etc, he really is the best spiky little critter of all.

#asks #ask game #mokuba kaiba

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Character bingo: ANZU ANZU ANZU 😎

ANZU ANZU MY DARLING MY BELOVED JOCK BALLERINA WHO PROBABLY KILLED A GUY IN S0 I will put this on the record for all to see, when I checked "Literally I would kiss them" on all the other character boxes I meant "I would tenderly smooch their forehead and hand them some werthers candy" but with Anzu literally I would kiss her <3

Damn I wish I didn't have to check the "everyone else is wrong about them" and "fandom is so mean" boxes about Anzu because people really have come around on her quite a bit since the Dark Days of Early YGO Fandom, but I still see enough rancid ass takes about my sweet baby angel on Al Gore's Green Internet that it shocks me. I think the most shocking thing is that a not insignificant amount of her behaviour maps 1 to 1 with Kaiba (roasting people with snappy quips, solving problems with violence, putting oneself in grave danger to see one's ghost pharaoh crush, etc etc) and yet Kaiba gets to be the Fandom Meow Meow and Anzu still. STILL!!!! Gets the 'bitch' label slapped on!! You're all WRONG!!! KAIBA IS THE BITCH. IT'S KAIBA.

ALSO P.S. IF YOU COUNT THEM, JOUNOUCHI & ATEM GIVE MORE FRIENDSHIP SPEECHES THAN ANZU DOES. BY FAR. IT'S JUST THE NUMBERS. Anzu is an amazing friend and we love that about her, but she is out there beating up the guy who made fun of you behind the lockers and then offering you a half crushed granola bar out of her purse for comfort and you take it because you just watched her beat someone up and you're not arguing with her. Jounouchi is the friend making earnest sappy declarations of eternal friendship and probably crying at the end while you awkwardly pat his back. Atem is the friend making earnest sappy friendship speeches that veer off into extremely questionable metaphors and uh oh now he's talking about something that sounds suspiciously like organized crime in the name of friendship, but it's okay, go off king. Honda is the friend making sure you wear a jacket and giving you a non-crushed granola bar out of his bag plus a Gatorade too because he thinks you look a bit dehydrated. Get Yuugi's entourage straight y'all!!!

(Also I desperately want Anzu and Kaiba to be friends and roast people together, but also in the friendship Kaiba gets roasted most of all, and he kind of respects it so he keeps hanging out with her.)

#asks #ask game #ANZU MAZAKI #ANZU I TELL YOU!!!

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Isono for the character bingo!

ISONOOOOOOOOO

I couldn't not check the "projects onto them like a mf" box when the Isonomoji is one of my most used discord emojis and also I make all my server announcements in Isono Voice. ANYWAYS

In my time honoured tradition of getting weirdly obsessed with Normal Guys who are Just There, I LOVE THIS MAN

Yes yes give him a raise and a vacation but really I want Isono and Fuguta, Proletariat Heroes, to lead the union charge at KaibaCorp because their struggles are OUR struggles and also I like to put Kaiba in a salad spinner, what better way than to have the people finally rise up against his bougie well...aristocrat really flat ass and force him to sit down for negotiations with an organizing committee where he has to promise to stop putting his employees in proximity to Shadow Games and exploding islands and suchlike.

Maybe they can get Pegasus' guys in on it, perhaps Raphael & Valon and assorted bikers, form the United International Federation of Goons, negotiate industry wide safety pay, etc. etc. Oh no. A fanfiction is growing in the back of my brain like a fungus.

#asks #ask game #isono #roland #COMET WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME

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Pegasus, Isis, or Mai for the ask meme! Take your pick! 👀

MAIIIIIII 🩷🩷🩷🩷🩷

I love her so much. She deserves to swindle anyone she wants and they should thank her for it. And okay LISTEN I KNOW I'M A DOMA APOLOGIST BUT COME ON THAT SEASON IS WORTH WATCHING FOR MAI ALONE I'VE SAID IT BEFORE I'LL SAY IT AGAIN. Like??? The montage where she talks about how she competed obsessively in tournament after tournament, but no matter how much she won and how powerful she became in the moment, she just couldn't feel safe again and the nightmares were still after her? What right did an anime filler arc have to go that hard?!?!

AND THEN. AND THEN!! She joins up with an evil biker gang and gets some PRETTY FUCKED UP POWER, misuses it thoroughly, and you can see her actively making the choice every time to keep doing it even while she obviously regrets it. It's such a delicious complexity we don't see often from, well, female characters in shonen anime - because Mai is still sympathetic throughout! You GET why she's doing this, you were there watching when she got excluded from all the Friendship Montages, maybe it's a little sad that these teenagers seem to be her only friends in the first place, and it's a LOT sad that she experienced The Horrors just like the rest of them did but didn't get any of the closure or catharsis.

When tumblr users make posts about how they want fucked up little hissing sopping wet cat characters to put in a jar and shake THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT MAI. AUGH I JUST. MAN. FERAL ABOUT THIS WOMAN. I'm in the middle of a training montage set to 80s music lifting weights and writing every day with sweat pouring down my face so that I'll be good enough to write a Mai fic someday!!!

#asks #ask game #mai kujaku #mai valentine #also her dub name slaps fight me about it

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I have two for bingo. Because my brain be braining.

1. Anzu

2. Samwise motherufkcing Gamgee

HE. HE. HEHEHEHEHE. OK so someone else did ask Anzu, which works out great bc I can focus all my attention on

SAMWISE MOTHERFUCKING GAMGEE!!!

God. The ORIGINAL blorbo. My perennial hallowe'en costume as a kid (every year I didn't go as Link anyways). The progenitor of my longest-lived username. The first lemon I ever clicked on fanfiction DOT net (iykyk)

But really Sam was little me's first introduction to all these ideas about forms of heroism and love and goodness that rewired my small brain; but also he has all these persnickety hobbitish qualities that still make him seem like such a Person and not an abstract representation of an ideal. Idk. Real good shit that you can be out there as a humble little fella admiring all the fancy elves and men who pass you by, putting good out into the world chiefly by virtue of being there and being asked to and saying yes because it's the right thing to do. And you can still carry on being a persnickety, funny, dreamy-eyed, earnestly loving fellow even as you accomplish huge things just by taking one more step after you'd prefer to turn around and go home - then one more - then one more again. WAAAHHHHHH EXCUSE ME I HAVE TO GO RE-READ FOTR AGAIN THE BIT WHERE HE'S SO EXCITED TO SEE THE ELVES. Sam.... (ಥ ͜ʖಥ)

#asks #ask game #SAMWISE MOTHERFUCKING GAMGEE

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shuzou ootaki for the meme 🐧

You know what. When I was a kid I thought he was hilarious. Like 'ha ha this guy didn't get his way in a meeting so he went full nut and decided to be a cyber penguin instead.'

Now I'm an adult with a job and sit on several boards myself. I actually chaired a board meeting this week where I had to clarify for the ELEVENTY BILLIONTH FREAKING TIME what a restricted fund is and why we can't just take money out of it to hurl at the wall like spaghetti and hope something sticks. With that memory still fresh in my mind, I actually do believe I could be pushed to a point where I give it all up and flee into the wilds of Virtual Antarctica and create a society of penguins that all have to listen to me and anyone who comes into my ice palace asking stupid questions gets immediately dueled to death.

So anyways I get it Crump buddy I get it. Maybe be a little less perverted, but like, if my snot nosed asshole teenage boss rejected my proposal with a quippy one liner, I couldn't be held accountable for what I'd do. You live your dreams!! You MAKE your proposal happen, one way or the other!!

#shuzo ootaki #adrian randolph crump III #asks #ask game #i'll take 'characters you didn't expect to empathize with as an adult' for 400 alex

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Ask game bingo suggestion if no one already asked, Yugi

Yuugi yuugi my spiky little lad <3

Tbf I'm not a huge fan of Sad Anime Boys and I think I read too much fanfiction about him in the early aughts along this vein so my brain had put him in a filing cabinet and tucked him away. Just a sort of vague fond affection for a main character of a series you like. BUT.

Once I did a swan dive back into YGO a few years ago and re-read the manga/rewatched the anime/etc etc, he was pleasantly spikier than I'd remembered!! A spicy pinch of anger and a little bit deranged in the best way!! Another one of those characters (like Jou) where when I first started writing him I wasn't sure what to DO with him, but then as you get acquainted there's all these really fascinating little nooks and crannies. And I found out I like him. Like, REALLY like him. Once I got the hang of finding the kind of fics and meta about him that made sense to me, it was kinda...you know when you're coworkers with someone for years and they're in a different department and you see them in the lunch room sometimes and exchange pleasant hellos, and you're sure they're lovely and that's all you think of it, then you get assigned to a project and you discover they are an active SCA member and have the title Grand Duke of Northern Ontario and go to period accurate medieval feasts every weekend. Then suddenly you are kind of obsessed with them and want to get to know them well enough that they invite you to a feast and maybe help you pick out a neat doublet.

ANYWAYS yes Yuugi he is Very. Love that critter, I'm sorry we were pleasantly removed coworkers all this time, wish I had encountered you in the lunch room earlier you mad little hedgehog!!!! (*¯ ³¯*)♡

#asks #ask game #yuugi mutou #squeak squeak

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Tristan for the character bingo?

(;´༎ຶД༎ຶ`) YAYYYYYYY TY TY FOR ASKIIIIINNNGGG, MY FAVOURITE ROBOT MONKEY MOTORCYCLE DUDE BEAUTIFICATION SQUAD LEADER MELON APPRECIATOR, THE GUY OF ALL TIME.

The fandom isn't actually that mean to him lol, I'm mostly joking. They were meaner 20 years ago but nowadays there are far more Honda Appreciators, bless you all. ALSO NO I'M NOT KIDDING ABOUT THE AESTHETIC AND GENDER SQUARES I OWN SEVERAL CERTIFIED HONDA OUTFITS, that guy dresses like a greaser bisexual, is that me projecting YES, oh WELL, let me live in my world!!

I think out of all the YGO characters I have the most Typical Blorbo Impulses towards Honda like I want to beat him up in fics then patch him up after, put him in Situations, create elaborate backstory details for him that follow the sort of Internal Logic Train that chugs ever onward in your brain when you're way too obsessed with a minor character, and maybe the train tracks have skewed off a bit from both canon and reality, but really is it MY fault that the poor guy is in every single episode and is still somehow considered a minor character, you are putting him in front of my eyeballs and ASKING for me to think about him but not giving me substantial train tracks so I have to build my own, jumping christ I lost control of both this sentence and this metaphor. Anyways yeah love this dude and big ups to my friends, beloved mutuals, people trapped in servers with me, etc who will sit in a circle with me and join me in trying to set him on fire with a magnifying glass. P.S. I mean "He Sure Does Exist" in the absolute best way, it is my firm belief that every shonen anime needs some Dudes that Exist, it's a vital part of the shonen anime ecosystem. How insane does Kaiba look REALLY if there's no Hondas in the biome going 🧍'man WHAT' (and also Honda has his own moments of drama and ridiculousness but I will cap myself here or else I'll have to submit to the indignity of a read more tag.) P.P.S. the "canon isn't real" square is about the love triangle with Shizuka and Otogi in Virtual World I DO NOT SEE IT just remove poor Shizuka from the triangle please save her she doesn't need to be in there

#asks #ask game #honda hiroto #HONDAS UPON YE!!!! #<3

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Jounouchi for character bingo

Jou has been such a slow burn character for me! I wasn't super interested in him as a kid, then he was my blorbo-in-law through multiple friends when I got back into YGO, then I started writing him into fics and trying to get to know him, and now I am SO very fond of him. He's such a Guy. I think my brain puts him in the same petting zoo enclosure as Peter Parker, Heart of Gold Dirtbag Extraordinaire Who Should Probably Be Dead But Isn't, Gets By on Luck Friendship & Duct Tape, etc Anyways 10/10 superb golden boy I love him and would let him hang out at my place and eat everything in the fridge

#asks #ask game #jounouchi katsuya

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Kaiba for the ask game!

There are some characters I'm pickier about but I feel like I'm a real Kaiba Generalist lol, I love seeing lots of varied takes on him, like YES put that guy in a thousand different fishbowls and funhouse mirrors!! Also Kaiba is one of those characters where I feel the fandom is exactly the right amount of mean to him. HOLD HIM GENTLY IN THE PALM OF UR HAND AND GIVE HIM A LIL SMOOCH BC HE'S A SAD ORPHAN <3 PUT HIM IN A SALAD SPINNER FOR ALL ETERNITY FOR HIS CRIMES <3

P.S. He is so right for being The horse girl of all time about his dragons ♡( ◡‿◡ )

#ask game #asks #kaiba seto

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If anyone wants me to say my opinion on a character with this bingo

#:)