I have come out of a three year hiatus because there is a post going around the fandom that is driving me crazy.
You guys, 4Kids did not *invent* the Shadow Realm out of whole cloth. The Duel Monsters anime invented the Shadow Realm.
Near as I can tell, the Shadow Realm does not exist in the manga, or if it does, it’s certainly not a Thing. I also don’t think it exists in Season 0.
The anime has a place called Yami no Seikai, which the fan dubbers in the commonly available translation of the anime called “The Dark World.” To their credit, “Dark World” is perhaps a more literal translation of Yami no Seikai, but it doesn’t take a tremendous leap of logic to go Yami no Seikai -> “Dark World” -> Shadow Realm. Most importantly for this discussion, the Shadow Realm comes up a couple times during the Duelist Kingdom arc. It’s where Yugi’s grandpa is during the whole tournament.
(In the manga, Grandpa is stuck inside Pegasus’s videotape. He even manages to give Yugi advice a couple times during the tournament!)
There’s also Episode 28, where Anzu, Honda, and Bakura try to bust Pegasus for cheating, but Pegasus ends up sending them to the Shadow Realm, then showing them a stone tablet battle.
There is no manga analogue for any of this, because none of these things happen in the manga. This entire episode is a drug trip.
Here’s where 4Kids comes in. They only have the first season available to base their translations on, so they see this Yami no Seikai and go, “Great. Millennium Items can send people to the Shadow Realm. Cool. We can do that.”
Then Season 2 came around with all of it’s threats of bodily harm, and they grab this Shadow Realm concept and FUCKING RUN WITH IT.
Where in Japanese, people really are under the threat of getting their legs chopped off or falling to their deaths, in English they are sent to the Shadow Realm. Bakura sends Bonz and his crew to literal hell in Japanese. English? SHADOW REALM. Malik’s dad is stabbed to death by the Millennium Rod in Japanese. English? SHADOW REALM.
The only time the threat of death isn’t turned into the Shadow Realm is when Yugi and Jonouchi fight on the docks, but I’d hazard a guess that’s because they were afraid of what would happen if they had the nerve to turn the ocean into the Shadow Realm. They might have to deal with Yu-Gi-Oh’s real villain.
I just get bothered when people say 4Kids invented the Shadow Realm, because they didn’t. They expanded its scope comically massively, but they didn’t invent it.
