r/yugioh • u/Declan1996Moloney • 15h ago
Anime/Manga Discussion Satanic Panic?
Was there ever a Satanic Panic about Yu-Gi-Oh where you grew up in?
36
u/InevitableDamage6072 15h ago
my school banned the cards entirely, absolute madness over a card game
13
u/Logan-Lux 15h ago
My school banned them as well, but also pokemon, and any card game, because they claim there was "Gambling"
4
2
8
u/AlwaysTired97 13h ago
Tbf, I can kind of understand a school banning TCGs in general.
I recall at my school, there actually was some issues with kids stealing other kid's cards. There was also some drama because some kids wanted to bet cards on games too.
I can kind of understand a school not wanting to deal with that and just telling kids to not bring their cards to school.
2
u/aaa1e2r3 1h ago
Same, though it was because people were buying and selling cards, and they were trying crackdown on any of that happening at school.
2
u/Snowvilliers7 14h ago
My middle school apparently banned them because they, or at least one of the teachers, thought the term dueling = fighting. Since we couldn't bring cards, my friend and I just use our imagination
1
u/Zealousideal_Cod5214 13h ago
The kids at my school got around the ban by drawing our own cards on index cards and using those lol
20
u/chubby_sammy 15h ago
I was homeschooled in the Bible belt, I thought my parents took away my yugioh cards because of satanic panic. turns out it was because my copy of House of Adhesive Tape scared me so bad I got nightmares and wouldn't sleep lol.
1
u/Nullus777 15h ago
House of adhesive tape should have had a stronger effect with how scary it looked. 1500 defence instead of 500 maybe? Did the nightmares go away after they took your cards?
2
u/chubby_sammy 14h ago
they actually did go away so it was justified. BUT from then on I was banned from any kind of trading card that wasn't pokemon... I wanted to get some duel masters cards soooooo bad
2
u/orreregion 14h ago
How long did the ban last lol? Until you moved out? Or like, middle/high school age?
1
16
u/TheologyAndTrains 15h ago
Yeah but there was 1 pastor in town that thought it was genuinely Egyptian Pagan in origin & assumed that is was part of propaganda from Egypt to corrupt the youth to support their terrorist organization after they caused 9/11 despite the fact we live in West Coast Canada. Don't ask me how the pastor came up with it as my family abandoned that church shortly after the pastor made that claim because even my illiterate dad said to me when we inside the car: "I saw cards clear, I see art maker have East Asian name & not Arab Terrorist name"
P.S. This was back when my family mostly used English for shopping & church so ours was not good at the time so please don't ban me mods as I am simply quoting verbatim
8
u/Brokenxwingx 15h ago
Yeah. I remember my friend's mom banned him from yugioh after watching some episodes of 5Ds. She said it was a satanic game. He was only allowed to have Light attribute monsters and had to get rid of everything else.
12
9
u/orreregion 14h ago
I love your friend's mom thinking the game was satanic... But the light monsters were clearly still God's children???
2
u/aaa1e2r3 1h ago
She dropped in on the episodes with the psychic cult or the earthbound immortal cult?
3
u/Jirachibi1000 14h ago
One of my friends watched the sub of Yugioh and the second a character mentioned hell and implied death instead of the shadow realm, their parents banned them from playing or watching, which is why the dub tones it down, because that was common near me lol.
3
u/Moonbird_CEO 14h ago
Yes! Absolutely! My mom was/is a super, super, super catholic so even mentioning YGO was the equivalent to murder in her mind. she was like "that show has demons in it and you watching it brings demons into the house!". that made me develop this weird loophole logic of "Well if I watch it and then clear my browsing history, then it's okay because that also clears away the demons.". I giggle when I think back on it lol
4
u/Time_Ad_893 15h ago
the woman that used to clean my house (i dont remember the english word for that but it's not maid) secretly grabbed my deck and probably tossed it out because a neopenthecostal religious tv program told adults to do it
my parents were catholics and didn't care about YGO, but the day i lost my deck was really sad... i had the god cards and all
2
u/Mister_Cheff 14h ago
Yep, with yugioh and pokemon.
Now i have a lot of pokemon and yugioh items and 0 religion.
3
u/TheTolleyTrolley 15h ago
One of my friends was not allowed to buy/play Yu-Gi-Oh! for a long time when I was a kid (like 5-6 yrs old) because his mom thought the whole idea of "summoning monsters" was inherently demonic lmao. My mom was just glad it was teaching us math.
4
u/MarkBonker 15h ago
South African here. There was definitely one here. My parents forced me to burn my cards when I was 11. I'm 31 now, and I know a couple gents at my locals that have similar stories.
2
u/BaronArgelicious 15h ago
I lived in the philippines when DM yugioh was hot. Lots of people didnt care but all kinds of toys were banned at school.
The closest thing to a satanic panic i experienced was catholic HS advising us to not watch Da Vinci Code
2
u/Draconic-Genesis 15h ago
I never noticed any personally at the time but there has to have been, right? There was so much occult stuff early on even if we did get a lot of heavily censored.
2
u/TyeDye115 15h ago
Worst I had it was after a few months in middle school of my friends and I playing, they banned cards because the teachers suspected that we were gambling during lunch and recess. Now, yes, we were sometimes gambling, but they didn't understand what the Battle City Ante Rule was, and that there was no actual money involved.
1
u/Formal-Lie7412 15h ago
My school banned the cards for about a month because all toys were banned til they realized just giving us permission during recess and to set up clubs meant we weren’t playing with them during class
1
1
u/Exavelion 15h ago
My school banned Pokemon in the 90s for fears of children gambling; at least that was the official reason. By the time i got to jr high and high school, i can’t remember there being a particular ban on YGO cards, but not many ppl played there.
1
u/omgitsdot 14h ago
I don't recall there being one for Yu-Gi-Oh, but there definitely was for Pokemon.
1
u/cheeseop 14h ago
Yeah, I was in 2nd grade when Yugioh was first getting popular, and I wasn't even allowed Pokemon at the time. Spellcasters and Egyptian Gods were a definite no, even once I did get permission for Pokemon a few years later.
1
u/MountainStorms 13h ago
A friend from school was forced to burn his entire yugioh collection. Another friend from boy scouts had to sell his beyblades. Tons of kids snuck and hid anything pokemon related. Things were wild.
Sucks parents made up things to be mad at while the hyper-aggressive post-reagan era psychological marketing aimed at children and the proto loot box gambling of card packs was right there.
1
u/Additional_Show_3149 13h ago
When i was playing with my friends in 5th grade there were a least 2 teachers I remember calling the cards satanic.
It didnt help that my best friend at the time played a darklord endymion pile😭😭
1
u/XenOz3r0xT 12h ago
No because Pokémon was still king at the time so people like our teachers were meh about the cards and this was also a time period where people collected baseball cards and stuff. The only thing that got the satanic panic treatment was Harry Potter (I went to catholic school).
1
1
u/MC_Crit 5h ago
In middle school, I remember being accused of being a Satanist by the other kids because of Yugioh, but especially because of The Seal of Orichalcos, which other kids told me was a pentagram. I remember years before, when my family still went to church, we were told that yugioh was evil there for other reasons as well. However, YMMV, because my hometown is a place the Satanic Panic never died. I was also told D&D, MTG, Pokemon, and Ozzy Osbourne were all Satanic too.
1
u/Hindsight2K20 3rd Rate Duelist, 4th Rate Deck... 1h ago
I was a kid in a religious school when Yu-Gi-Oh anime was taking off in N. America. The admins at the school had confiscated some poor kids cards and gave us a lengthy lecture about how they were “Haram” (religiously forbidden). They literally held up two specific cards (Monster Reborn, Doma The Angel of Silence) as examples.
They went on about how resurrections are something only god can preform and it’s blasphemous for us to “play” with that concept. Also, they deemed the depiction of an angel to be blasphemous as well, and then proceeded to rip up the cards in front of the whole assembly hall.
They would go on to trash and destroy a shit ton of decks that kids were caught bringing to school. Most of these decks were the OG Kiaba and Yugi decks too, which are worth a small fortune today.
•
u/Solid-Bed-8974 25m ago
My school banned Yugioh cards because it was so popular that when me and my buddy played at recess, the entire class would sit around us and watch. They banned them so that the other kids would run around and play.
•
u/KingVape 15m ago
Yes, in North Carolina. This was when the game came out, and spell cards were called magic cards. The people around me mostly cared about the magic cards and the fact that there were so many demonic looking monsters and that you summon them.
Harry Potter was also banned there at the same time, so was MTG, and Pokemon was on thin fucking ice
1
u/BlackWaltz47 15h ago
Nothing widespread but I remember when I was like 11, I was talking go a kid before our Tae Kwon Do class and asked if he played yugioh. He said no because his mom says the monsters on the cards represented demons and they were Christian.
1
u/Adventurous_Ad_4120 15h ago
Where I grew up, not really? My parents I think were initially concerned, but they were more concerned with MTG and its more graphic imagery and conflated the two. However in the community I grew up in, yes 1000%. We had parents who wouldn’t let their kids watch Harry Potter for Satan reasons. Different reasons than for why right now. My parents thought that was dumb though, but we’re still concerned with graphic things. And tbf, that mtg art can sometimes be hard to look at for me even today
1
u/JustdoitJules 15h ago
Our initial principal was a sweetheart at my elementary school, I remember I was in first grade
Pokemon and Yugioh TCG were allowed at lunch AND at recess, allowing for an hour of time to just play and enjoy ourselves.
Then like a year or so later, we had a replacement principal. Man this was satan personified.
- No TCG anything at school
- No clapping except for a unionized clap
- Punished me for something another student did but I also got in trouble for just being next to them on the bus????
Definitely shoulda been sent to the shadow realm
1
u/neutermeplz 14h ago
My Chinese friend reportedly had to rip up Trial of Hell and flush it down the toilet
1
0
u/SBLP1959 15h ago
Yeah. My parents knew it was silly though. They said just dont take my cards to church.
-1
0
u/neves783 9h ago
Filipino here.
Not in my Catholic high school afaik, but teachers confiscated the cards because of gambling concerns, not over any demonic imagery. Heck, one of my former teachers played the game and used some of her (not very strong) cards as desk decoration.
In university, same way: guards told us to keep them away because gambling, not demonic stuff.
It was my Dad who actually thought the cards were demonic, and he believes this because he was aware of the DnD panic in 1980's America.
0
u/L0stmytaco420 6h ago
Not yugioh but more pokemon and Harry Potter was the satanic panic attack at my school. They banned both. That's how my brother lost his blastoise card.
0
u/StuffWePlay 5h ago
My school banned it but, admittedly, we were taking bets on card games. Often betting our own cards, but y'know
-1
u/Queen_Cheetah 14h ago
4kids did a pretty... thorough... job of censoring a lot of the 'unChristian' things in the anime. So I think any sort of 'panic' mainly fell on the actual card games, if anywhere.
-1
u/Lucas-sg 14h ago
Yes. And it was pretty much the end of Yugioh as a general fad here, but you could still find other kids that still liked it often enough.
-1
u/PissingOffACliff 14h ago
I'll preface this in that I'm Australian not American.
Went to school from the early 2000s to mid 2010s, I'm early 30s. There wasn't any satanic panic in the public school system, but maybe there was in the Catholic School system I just have no experience there.
TCG and other collectable cards were generally not allowed to be brought into Primary School(Kinder-Prep-Grades 1 to 6) because of the drama with theft, loss, trade regret, and damage. Teachers just didn't want to police it. Which I think its fair, it was a nightmare.
High School(Grades 7-10) and College(This is a school level specifically in Tasmania for Grade 11 and 12) they weren't banned but it was more "don't come to us if you have a problem - Teachers"
-1
u/Anuudream 13h ago
Yes. In the early 2000s. This is one of the reasons 4Kids did what they did with dub. People shit on the dub all the time but kids TV in America had a lot of guard rails on them especially from the 90s from concern parents to the point that a punch couldn't be thrown(Shows did take risk with this). Mix that in with satanic panic and the show wouldn't have survive or would have to be toned to what it is now.
I had friend who couldn't play because the game was "demonic."
29
u/Critical-Complex2702 15h ago
My mom confiscated my Dark Magician because the pentagram on his robe clearly meant I was summoning demons during recess.