In 1998, an adaptation of the manga Yu-Gi-Oh! came out.
It was not a faithful adaptation, per say, but it started from the beginning. (Once upon a time, there was a bullied boy who loved games, all games, who was trying to solve a puzzle...) It was common, back then, for adaptations to not only be full of filler, but to also make changes, seemingly on a whim.
Yu-Gi-Oh! is a shounen, and like many shounen, it only has a single girl within its core cast. A lone girl, Mazaki Anzu, conceptualized as a love interest to its titular lead. Her story is a familiar one, among girls of shounen: she starts off headstrong, fiesty, someone with a bit of fire in her, even as the narrative finds excuses to damsel or sexually harass her... and then, as the genre shifts, her personality wastes away, her harsher edges eroding, as she drifts towards the platonic passive Girl-Thing, written by a Shounen Jump author who no longer has time in his schedule to go outside and meet real human women.
In 1998, a minor character - someone only from a single chapter, who barely even spoke - was ascended, to be her equal, her foil, the Second Girl. Her name was Nosaka Miho.
I love Nosaka Miho. She's everything I was taught to hate in a girl. She's "the other girls" when you're a bullied autistic girl who hates clothes shopping and loves wolves, you know? She's feminine and cutesy-pootsy, selfish and spoiled rotten, ditzy and manipulative. She's a gold-digger using her boyfriend Honda for pocket money. She'll dump him if she thinks she can bag a richer boy. Her characterization is built on misogynist ideas of whats bad about girls. And as a person, she sucks. If you slapped a second (you know, other than "woman") marginalized identity label on her, nobody would claim her as "good rep."
But she's ...charming. She's easily distracted by fads, whether they're fancy watches or gachapon figurines. She eats lunch with Anzu. She plays Duel Monsters with Yugi. She is completely aware that her boyfriend and his best friend watch porn together and unironically suggests it as a good romantic gift to a girl with a crush on Jounouchi. (Nobody else liked this suggestion.) When given the chance to be anything in a TTRPG, she chose "fairy" as her race and "merchant" as her class. She's disappointed that the rarest duel monsters card in the world isn't literally encrusted with jewels. She doesn't like musicals. She beat Jounouchi in a fighting game, humiliating him. She snuck up behind Anzu and blindfolded her during PE for funsies. She feels she's above fortune-telling because she knows, with gleeful confidence, that her fate is to marry a rich prince and acquire his fortune. At the museum, she looks at an amulet featuring symbols of Horus and calls the facons adorning it "chickens," while literally drooling over the size of the rubies on it like some gem-devouring dragon. She then calls a real in-the-flesh egyptian mummy at "cute" because "its bald head makes it look like a baby." She is so, so fucking silly.
Her presence allows Anzu to not simply fade into "the girl," for now there are two. Anzu's sporty, physical nature as a dancer; her moments of sharp intuition and determination... they stand bolder, sharper, with Miho by her side. They are the yin and yang of shounen-manga girlhood, the complementary pair. A warm, dark auburn; a pale, cool periwinkle. They, dare I say it, are yuri.
1998 Yugioh died when Yu-Gi-Oh!: Duel Monsters was born, in 2000. A different studio, a different defictionalization of the "Duel Monsters" game - and this card game would define the brand identity of the franchise for the rest of its future.
Was the original show too violent, with its retaining of the shadow-game elements of the early manga? Was it too tied up in complicated legal tangles, so that nobody truly held all the rights to its name? Was it simply... inconvienient, to Konami, to Shounen Jump, as a transitional fossil, an embarassing and unsightly thing incompatible with the brand identity they wanted to create, where the tail of Konami's card game adaptation wagged the dog of the story it was born from?
It has not seen a legal release since 2000, for VHS, in Japan. For any of the reasons stated above, it will likely never be released again. And it will never be acknowledged.
Nosaka Miho does not exist. She will never be in Duel Links. She will never have a figurine - nay, she will never even have a Funko Pop. Honda Hiroto never had a lover. Masaki Anzu never had a female friend.
Except she does exist, doesn't she? Some weaboo with a little too much occult knowledge of forbidden anime that THEY (streaming services, rightholders) don't want you to know about, goes onto a website hawking spyware and porn and look - there she is, she's alive, she's breathing again, among her friends. But it's blurry, distorted - a transfer of a VHS tape into the 240p of the early days of youtube, copied over and over from site to site, generation loss accumulating; a poorly-done translation, hardcoded subs, any attempts at improvement only further obscure the film beneath.
The original VHS tapes are in collector's hands - and they're rotting as we speak. Do the original reels still exist, somewhere in Toei's vaults? If they are, we will never see them, and they're likely rotting like their home video copies. More likely, knowing Toei, they were thrown out like garbage.
Nosaka Miho, and the version of the world of Yu-Gi-Oh! she knew, was rejected by the gods.
Nosaka Miho is dying of...
(Intellectual Property. Brand Identity. The dog in the manger that does not eat, and yet starves the sheep and cattle of the commons with its jealous guarding.)
Nosaka Miho belongs to Ninuan, now. She wanders the silvered lands, falling stars in her eyes, hated by creation, hating creation back.
One day, she will return to Domino City, λ-cards that do not and have never existed in her hand. (Aphrodite. Golden Pegasus. Fairy Ophelia. The three Hecates.)
And I hope her World-Breaker's Hand, more powerful than Exodia, destroys the thing that banished her.
It took me a very long time to get around to reading the original manga, but I spent years playing the Dungeon Dice Monsters GBA game. Its cast was largely based on the pre-Duelist stuff, filled out with one-off villains and minor characters, with the closest thing they got to dub names, and I distinctly remember being surprised to see Miho, known in the game as Ribbon, who was portrayed as being a Member Of The Group just as much as the others. I always wondered where she was in the show I knew, why they would get rid of someone so obviously important to the group dynamic, what sort of heartbreaking send off she must have gotten before everything switched to All Card Games, All The Time.
Needless to say, I was disappointed.
It really is uncanny how once you've seen how she slots into the core cast, Yugi's circle of friends feels incomplete without her. It feels wrong that she's a product of "unfaithful adaptation" and not part of the "original" story. She really helps round everyone out just by being around. In the manga, and in Duel Monsters, Yugi has two direct relationships in Jounouchi and Anzu; Jounouchi has two direct relationships in Yugi and Honda. Anzu and Honda, though, only have one character each they're connected to, really.
(It doesn't help that once the series becomes entirely about card battles, they feel... vestigial. They had a place in Yu-Gi-Oh the episodic school life + supernatural horror manga; they whither away in Yu-Gi-Oh the tournament-arc-laden battle shounen.)
With Miho, Anzu gets to have someone she's directly invested in other than Yugi; with Miho, Honda gets to have someone he's directly invested in other than Jounouchi. Yugi and Jounouchi, meanwhile, get one more friend-of-a-friend to bounce off of. Things are symmetrical, whole.
She feels like she was always supposed to be there. It's so weird to remember she wasn't.
And because she wasn't, she's doomed.
