It happens just before Yusei takes his final turn, when Yami Yugi encourages him. The animation clearly goes along with the lines Yami says in each version.
sub!Yami: In your era, you have friends who believe in you and await your return.
Yusei’s demeanor is calm, realizing Yami’s right. He remembers not only the Signers, but everyone else he has met and bonded with. He remembers who he’s fighting for, what he’s protecting. That’s why he can’t give up.
Now the dub line is obviously different, but still feels very important.
dub!Yami: It’s up to you now. It’s your move. Just know that we’re behind you, all of us are.
In this, Yusei is instead caught off guard by Yami’s faith, and it makes sense. For almost his entire life, Yusei was treated like garbage. For where he lived, the connections his father had to Zero Reverse. Yusei always felt he had to carry this tremendous burden, and even shame. Yet here he is with two guys who hardly know him, trusting him completely to save their timelines. And then he’s reminded of how many people he has in his life who do believe in him. How much his life has changed, so he knows he must believe in himself as well.
“Haha isn’t it funny that Neil Gaiman is the only celebrity we haven’t run off this site?” Actually no, it isn’t funny that tumblr has repeatedly launched harassment campaigns against every vaguely popular person who dared to be accessible and no, we didn’t “decide to let Neil stay”, he’s received a metric shitton of harassment he just refuses to be bullied off of social media by a bunch of teenagers with nothing better to do than to be shitty to people online just because they’re there
The dub of yugioh gx is so funny like jaden, sweet fun loving nice guy façade jaden, has to fight tooth and nail for a smeckledorf of respect and kindness from the student body that inexplicably doesn't really like him at all
meanstwhile this oil slick of a man that regularly calls himself "the chazz" is well loved by just about everyone and regularly gets the entire student body to chant chazz it up
Crack Theory: Jaden Yuki is (at least partially) Atlantian
As usual, this is 100% my own connection making brain going crazy, I doubt this is what the writers intended, if they thought about it at all. Also, this essay is not free of infodumping or absurdity.
So, Atlantis has always been… kinda weird, in yugioh. Other than just the absolute wildness of it just. Canonically existing. The Waking the Dragons arc has some of the most far reaching lore implications for the franchise as a whole, introducing ideas like the spirit world, duel monsters appearing in history (outside of egypt lol), and some major afterlife magic. Things that yugioh will expand on in following series, and things that were, I reiterate, introduced in a throwaway filler arc of the anime because they had run out of manga to adapt.
But one character in particular not just builds on the concepts introduced in DM’s Atlantis season, but shares some interesting similarities with the main villain of that season, Dartz.
Jaden Yuki.
The first thing that caught my attention was the eyes. While yugioh has an almost ridiculous number of characters with magical eyeballs, heterochromia with one turquoise, one orange/yellow? Incredibly specific. I can’t think of a single yugioh character whose weird eye horror even passingly resembles anothers, yet here Jaden and Dartz are. Even further, both of them spend time serving as a “king” with pure gold eyes, before coming into contact with a foreign entity and developing the bilateral asymmetry.
But Jaden’s eyes are based on Yubels, and more thematically, the colors of the polymerization card art. And Dartz’s seem to be just a random anime villain power up.
Let’s put a pin in this for now.
The next weird link between the two is in the strange flashback we see at the very end of GX season 3. Jaden sees one of his past lives, when Yubel pledged themselves to be his guardian. In this era, Jaden is the young prince of a vague and never named kingdom. When was this? Where? We don’t know.
But the few characters we see share some interesting design elements with the people of Atlantis.
The primary front skirt panel being this narrow rectangle ending in a point at the end. The gold crown featuring a solid band with a diamond shaped piece right over the forehead embedded with a bright red gem. These capes and the big round brooch thingies. Jaden’s father’s belt has this segmented gold design that looks quite a bit like the necklace of the Atlantian king. (His granddaughter, Kris, has a similar one, I was just running out of space for references.) In fact, both Jaden’s father and the Atlantian king use red gems as their primary design element.
And finally, the biggest detail I want to point out is this little gemstone on human!Yubel’s forehead. Crowns are a pretty universal thing, but a delicate little jewel right on the forehead? That’s an iconic piece of jewelry worn by one Dartz Yugioh. It’s also worth noting, Jaden supreme king armor has the same blue diamond on its forehead.
Now, before I tie this all together, let me take a quick aside to reassure that yes, I am aware, this sounds like the furthest reach I could possibly make. Sure, the two kingdoms might share some design elements, if you squint. Yeah, Jaden and Yubel might each have one weird feature that Dartz also flaunts. But really, is that enough to posit a connection between the two?
I mean, absolutely, I’ve built fan theories on far less and I WILL DO IT AGAIN
But no. Here’s the plot twist of this post:
I’m not trying to prove that past!Jaden was the prince of Atlantis.
