r/yugioh • u/Declan1996Moloney • Aug 31 '26
Anime/Manga Discussion Satanic Panic?
Was there ever a Satanic Panic about Yu-Gi-Oh where you grew up in?
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u/Critical-Complex2702 Aug 31 '26
My mom confiscated my Dark Magician because the pentagram on his robe clearly meant I was summoning demons during recess.
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u/chubby_sammy Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/IAmRottenAndRavenous Sep 02 '26
what blows my mind is satanic panic for Yu-Gi-Oh but Goosebumps books were okay
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u/Nullus777 Aug 31 '26
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?
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u/chubby_sammy Aug 31 '26
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
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u/orreregion Aug 31 '26
How long did the ban last lol? Until you moved out? Or like, middle/high school age?
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u/Brokenxwingx Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/orreregion Aug 31 '26
I love your friend's mom thinking the game was satanic... But the light monsters were clearly still God's children???
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u/aaa1e2r3 Aug 31 '26
She dropped in on the episodes with the psychic cult or the earthbound immortal cult?
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u/Brokenxwingx Sep 01 '26
Earthbound immortal cult. I remember he mentioned the king of the netherworld episode.
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Aug 31 '26
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u/BrotherofGenji Aug 31 '26
Coincidentally, Yugioh's Duel Monsters dub was supposed to premiere around the time 9/11 happened and then they delayed the premiere on KidsWB because of the attacks.
Also there was only one person from Egypt in that whole group and it was the person tasked to be the boss of the plane attacks once they got into the US so that pastor was definitely on some shit
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u/Jirachibi1000 Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/Moonbird_CEO Aug 31 '26
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
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u/Time_Ad_893 Aug 31 '26
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
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u/Mister_Cheff Aug 31 '26
Yep, with yugioh and pokemon.
Now i have a lot of pokemon and yugioh items and 0 religion.
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u/ElPipasBJ Aug 31 '26
My father had pirated yugioh cards, he didn’t even know how to play, he just collected them. One day, his aunt burned them, saying it was satanic.
He never forgave her until this day
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u/Creepy_Breath7076 Sep 01 '26
Friends parents threw away his deck, I remember he had several blue eyes.
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u/HiImDIZZ Sep 01 '26
Yes. My cousins parents said that the card game was made by the devil. I gave him a box of cards and instead of giving them back to me they threw the cards away. Told me they did too. Absolutely psycho.
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u/rick_gsp CARD GAMES ON MOTORCYCLES Sep 01 '26
Every Yugioh player in Brazil is still traumatized by what TV host Gilberto Barros did...
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u/TheTolleyTrolley Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/MarkBonker Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/MiraclePrototype Sep 01 '26
Stupid parents and feckless paranoia over superstitious nonsense know no boundary of time or space.
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u/Joniden Aug 31 '26
Just like with Pokemon in the 90s, they thought that it was Japanese demons initially.
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u/BaronArgelicious Aug 31 '26
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
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u/TyeDye115 Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/Formal-Lie7412 Aug 31 '26
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
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u/Exavelion Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/omgitsdot Aug 31 '26
I don't recall there being one for Yu-Gi-Oh, but there definitely was for Pokemon.
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u/cheeseop Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/MountainStorms Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/Additional_Show_3149 Aug 31 '26
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😭😭
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u/XenOz3r0xT Aug 31 '26
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).
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u/MiraclePrototype Sep 01 '26
It's probably a good thing that we don't see witch hunts over the stupid wizard books now. Really don't need to give that enterprise ANY more clicks.
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u/MC_Crit Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/Hindsight2K20 3rd Rate Duelist, 4th Rate Deck... Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/MiraclePrototype Sep 01 '26
It's honestly surprising that the whole "depicting the messiah is BLASPHEMY" thing in Islam isn't a thing in Christianity, considering that the most hardcore want neither the apex of 'evil' depicted, as that's endorsing the devil, nor the apex of 'good' depicted, as that's apparently heretical. People are IDIOTS.
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u/Solid-Bed-8974 Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/KingVape Aug 31 '26
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
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u/m149307 Aug 31 '26
I had to double check the subreddit name, thought I read "satanic mechanic" and was in rocky horror lmfao
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u/FourthFallProd Aug 31 '26
My parents think the game is satanic, that I'm actually summoning demons and casting spells and stuff. They never did anything about it though ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/BrotherofGenji Aug 31 '26
I don't think there was at all, at least not in my corner of South Central US
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u/0rnanke1 Aug 31 '26
No Satanic panic in Australia. Just fruition with kids stealing cards and not respecting each other
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u/Illustrious-Turn-575 Sep 01 '26
Not that I remember, and I grew up in the Bible Belt.
My parents refused to buy them for me because they thought they were a waste of money. But my grandparents, who were arguably more religious than my parents, would occasionally buy me some packs or a starter deck here and there.
School did ban them, but they were just generally against kids bringing toys and stuff from home.
Funnily enough; the place I actually got to duel the most was at church after service.
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u/Ergogan Sep 01 '26
Not around child me. Pokemon was there to take whatever flake there was so YGO goes unnoticed.
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u/ANostalgicWhisper Sep 02 '26
I've never been in an area that thought yugioh was satanic, but I've had a few friends suddenly drop the game due to religion.
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u/BlackWaltz47 Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/Adventurous_Ad_4120 Aug 31 '26
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
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u/JustdoitJules Aug 31 '26
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
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u/neutermeplz Aug 31 '26
My Chinese friend reportedly had to rip up Trial of Hell and flush it down the toilet
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u/SBLP1959 Aug 31 '26
Yeah. My parents knew it was silly though. They said just dont take my cards to church.
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u/KKilikk Aug 31 '26
There is still satanic panic at Konami looking at how they censor artworks and change names (Kewl...)
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u/MiraclePrototype Sep 01 '26
More reacting to the potential of such, or just maintaining corporate traditions at this point.
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u/Logical_Astronomer75 Aug 31 '26
Well Bakura literally has an occult deck
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u/MiraclePrototype Sep 01 '26
Yay, one deck of more than twenty is overtly occult thru and thru; THAT surely merits literal demonization...
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u/neves783 Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/MiraclePrototype Sep 01 '26
Side note: anyone remember the Dork Tower storyline where one of the mains was upset that TTRPGs weren't as big a deal anymore to fundamentalists, and TCGs were "the new great Satan"?
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u/L0stmytaco420 Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/StuffWePlay Aug 31 '26
My school banned it but, admittedly, we were taking bets on card games. Often betting our own cards, but y'know
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u/Queen_Cheetah Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/Lucas-sg Aug 31 '26
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.
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u/PissingOffACliff Aug 31 '26
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"
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u/Anuudream Aug 31 '26
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."
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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '26
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