Sorry for taking so long to answer this question! We honestly had so many reasons for starting this project that it was hard to narrow them down.

A huge part of it was simply nostalgia! Thiefshipping has been around for a looong time and it was a lot of peoples' very first ship. We have contributors from all over the world that have loved Thiefshipping for years, some for over a decade! This sort of evergreen love for Bakura and Malik also partially influenced our zine's theme of 'time'.

Another reason was that we (the mods) felt like there wasn't a lot of official merch for Bakura, Thief King Bakura, or Malik, especially compared to some of the other Duel Monsters characters. Any that did exist just used the same stock art and screenshots from 2002 😭 So, if Konami wasn't going to give us what we wanted, we decided to make it ourselves.

We also wanted to make a Malik butt mousepad, but according to the interest check, no one else did 🎻