Yet another One Piece squee post
Jun. 20th, 2012 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopFinished through Sabody Archipelago (well, technically I am well past that now, but these posts take a while to write), and heart-wrenching as the experience may have been, I don’t think I can point to more than the odd detail that I didn’t love about this arc. If anything, it only served to remind me of a whole lot of things I love about this show that I actually hadn’t got around to squeeing over yet.
The world of One Piece feels enormous
There’s nothing terribly subtle about the way One Piece goes about railroading its heroes along the One True Path to riches and glory. The whole structure of the Grand Line from Calm Belts to Log Pose navigation is calculated to ensure the Going Merry will stop at these islands, in this order, for a minimum of not less than N days. But even with that rigid framework, we’re forever being reminded that what we’re seeing is no more than a tiny fraction of a much greater world. We’re probably never going to see more than snippets and legends from three of the four major oceans, and even the Grand Line can be traversed via any of half a dozen different island chains. If Nami really does want to complete that map of the world, she’s got at least another four or five voyages still to go along the Grand Line alone – and probably more, because the Straw Hats haven’t even been stopping on every single island on their own route. There were at least another couple of islands on the train circuit out of Water 7 that hardly get mentioned in more than passing, and we can only guess how many they may have skipped when they got hold of those eternal poses to Alabasta and Jaya (or for that matter, whether they’re even on the same route they started on anymore). Skypeia isn’t the only Sky Island up there, and the Knock-up Stream supposedly isn’t even the usual way people reach it. The world isn’t just huge, it’s huge in three different dimensions, if not more.
It’s got the population and history to match all that too. There are humans and sky islanders and giants and two different varieties of mermen and birds that always face south and sea monsters you could see from space and a mollusc for every application – and shame on you for daring to assume anything is a throwaway element you can forget about as soon as we’re done with this particular arc. There are events from four hundred years ago that turn out to have key bearing on the plot, and a missing century from four hundred years before that which is central to one of our heroes’ search for the truth. Everyone you meet has a story, and the cast of faces you’ll want to remember for future reference just keeps getting longer. Which brings me neatly to my next point of awesome.
The Straw Hats are A Big Deal
Here’s the thing about the Straw Hats – on a day to day basis, one does not get the impression they take themselves terribly seriously, and from out here in the audience, nor do we. Luffy did not leave home with any intention of liberating entire countries, bringing down the government or conquering the world. It just sort of happened while he was making other plans. But it did happen, and it keeps happening, and certain people have been sitting up and taking notice.
Post-Alabasta, and even more so post-Water 7, Luffy’s wanted poster has been distributed far and wide. Of lately, marines rarely waste time reporting “There’s some crazy guy trying to break into Enies Lobby!”, they go straight to “Oh shit, it’s Straw Hat Luffy,get in the car we need reinforcements!” The general populace tends to do much the same. They still deal with their share of enemies who critically underestimate them, or who struggle to connect Mugiwara-no-Luffy the terrifying reputation with Mugiwara-no-Luffy the-bottomless-stomach-with-the-big-smile, but the fraction of the population who have never heard of Mugiwara-no-Luffy at all is shrinking fast.
Even if they may be a long way short of being able to take on a Marine Admiral without breaking a sweat, they’ve been a force to be reckoned with for a long time and they’re only getting stronger. One of the most ridiculously satisfying things I have experienced in my One Piece marathon is the occasional chance to watch the Straw Hats take on some new enemy who shows up with great fanfare… then proves to be no match for them whatsoever. (Their first encounter with the Wapol pirates remains one of my favourite moments in the show’s history, and IMO it does not happen often enough.) Yes, naturally there has to be some sort of complication to satisfy the laws of drama, but a true Straw Hat curb stomp victory is a beautiful thing to see, and a very nice reminder that those bounties on their heads are a result of far more than pure dumb luck.
The Straw Hats are not merely fondly remembered in a handful of island nations on one route through the Grand Line, they have made their mark on the world.
…but they’re never the only Big Deal in town, and not everyone else who is necessarily has to be evil
For all that it’s a given our heroes will roll into town just in time to be present for some great disaster, save the day, accept the adulations of the populace and roll out again, it’s very much to One Piece’s credit that the Straw Hats are never made out to be the only people on the planet capable of getting anything done. Locals get to be all shades of powerful, competent and clever without being automatically shoehorned into the role of an obstacle to be overcome, or put out of action before anything important happens. Instead, we get the general badassery of characters like Kureha and Dalton, or the fighting cooks of the Barate and the shipwrights of Water 7, not to mention Wiper coming damn close to actually defeating Enel himself. Conis single-handedly convinces the Skypieans to evacuate in time, then goes back for Luffy and his crew. Kokoro drives the Straw Hats to Enies Lobby and later saves them from drowning in the tunnel, and her granddaughter was the first to find the hidden passages Spandam was using to get out. They might never have beaten Moria without the help of the Thriller Bark Victims’ Association, and that’s all before we even reach Shabody. The Straw Hats would never have made it half as far without such a talent for making friends with the right people.
And then we get to all those times when they found themselves up against someone who was completely out of their league.
They always make it through, of course, or we wouldn’t have a story. They escape, they’re let go, or someone else intervenes to save them, and the battle is postponed for another day. Already they’ve faced down Mihawk, Smoker, Blackbeard, Aokiji, Kuma and Kizaru and lived to tell the tale without a single clear victory. There are rematches pending on some of those accounts, but for others I honestly don’t know yet quite what role they’re ultimately going to play. That’s what makes it interesting.
As it stands, of the ‘three great powers of the Grand Line’ which were set up as the major threats to be overcome along their voyage, it’s fascinating just how few have turned out to be actual villains. The Marines are part of an organisation as corrupt as corruption comes, but they’ve still got people like Tashigi, Smoker, Aokiji, Coby, Garp and Jonathan in their ranks, and your average grunt is probably just following orders. Only three of the original seven Shichibukai have proven to be actually evil, and of the remaining four, Kuma appears genuinely conflicted and Mihawk, Jinbe and Hancock have all proven themselves valuable allies. Between Shanks and Whitebeard we’re halfway through the Yonko without meeting anyone terribly unpleasant. Even a number of former antagonists have helped out our heroes in one way or another.
Try and split the world of One Piece into the bad guys, the helpless and the heroes, and you’re going to struggle right out of the gate.
To bring all this generalised fangirling back to some sort of arc-relevant point, it’s at Sabody Archipelago that the Straw Hats reach the milestone of the Grand Line halfway point, and bam, we learn there are no less than nine other pirates in town with bounties comparable to Luffy's. Since they've all been travelling different routes we've neither seen nor heard of them before, but as long as they're all after the One Piece they're guaranteed to find themselves clashing with the Straw Hats before long. Some of them are very likely to become serious obstacles. Others might pose no challenge whatsoever, or get taken out of the running by third parties somewhere along the way. Some might well end up as unlikely allies, or enemies on the level of a major arc boss. But mostly, for the moment none of them seem to be looking for trouble, though if trouble finds them they're hardly going to be found unprepared.
So it is that we end up with Luffy, Law and Kid standing shoulder to shoulder in the auction house doorway, ready to show a small army of marines how badly they wasted their last opportunity to apply for a transfer, while I'm busy grinning my head off at a couple of characters who thus far have maybe five minutes total screentime to their names and only the barest of introductions, sure of very little except that I'm going to enjoy the hell out of whatever is going to happen next. :3
We're nearly four hundred episodes in, and the world of One Piece is still full of exciting new people.
All that said, this does mean that Law and Kid were singled out as The Ones To Watch pretty quickly, and I cannot help but feel Oda was phoning it in a little on most of the rest of them. Bonnie is the main exception, combining typical fanservicy dress sense with the manners and appetite of a true shounen hero, a pretty weird devil fruit power and a fairly impressive ability to think quickly in a crisis. That's a weird mix, and it could go somewhere interesting. Kid sounds like he could be bad news, but he doesn't seem to be either a criminal mastermind or a hotheaded idiot, and thus far has established himself in my head mostly as 'Magneto, but without any of the style'. All spoilers aside though, if there's just one guy in that crowd to watch it had already been made abundantly clear that that guy is Law, on which note I can only say how really really okay I am with the likelihood he's going to be the one to steal most of the screentime.
A few other recent highlights:
That whole scene with Rayleigh
Because you really couldn’t ask for a much better way to celebrate the show’s four hundredth episode than the crew getting to meet a guy who actually sailed with Gol D. Roger himself. But in particular, that bit where Luffy hears that Shanks is waiting for him not so very far ahead. There is just not enough dawwwwww in the world.
That whole thorny Fishmen vs Humans issue
Using inter-racial tension as a source of conflict in speculative fiction can be a bit of a minefield. While it’s about as good an example of truth in fiction as you’ll ever see, it’s incredibly easy to end up hammering on the moral point until your audience gives up out of sheer boredom, or adrift in the seas of unfortunate implications, and this only goes double when (as is usually the case) the fictional minority in question has superpowers 1. When we first met Arlong way back before the crew had even reached the Grand Line and he gave us his ‘humans used to enslave my people, so now I’m doing the same to them!’ justification for all the suffering he’d forced on an unrelated human community on the other side of the planet, it was hard to feel it was an excuse that held much water, and as a plot point we left it behind with the rest of East Blue. After all, writers have been using similar throwaway sob stories in lame attempts to make their villains slightly less completely one-dimensional for just about forever. Nothing new here.
But then, some hundreds of episodes later, we reach Sabody archipelago, and suddenly we’re meeting Fishmen who aren’t fundamentally twisted people, 2 and that ugly history of slavery is turning out to be very much alive and well in the present, and impacting on the lives of characters we care about. If that wasn’t bad enough, the system which allows the slavers to stay in business is institutionalised to such high levels that when Luffy inevitably makes the rash decision to step in and defend a new friend, the retaliation from the authorities is so swift and so devastating that we’re soon watching the Straw Hats being dealt the first truly crushing and lasting defeat they’ve ever experienced, all the while I’m sitting there reflecting on how I’d never imagined this show was going to handle any of this stuff so well.
As for exactly what One Piece did right where so many other stories flounder, I think there are a lot of details that contribute. It’s the fact that it shows as much as it tells, that we see that slavery is a horrible thing humans do to other humans as well as to other species, that thanks to Franky’s old mentor Tom we’ve met at least one fishman who’s whole life and tragic death were in no way defined by this whole ugly cycle of violence and hatred, that Ceimei and Hachi have roles and personalities well beyond ‘helpless victim’, and that we’re shown so very clearly that not even the full power of Luffy’s shounen determination can produce an easy solution to a problem this big. But on the simplest level, I think a lot of what works is as simple as the story taking the time to show us that both fishmen and humans can be good people, and both fishmen and humans can be evil, and assumptions on that subject from either side do nothing but make the situation so much worse. And it says all this without stopping the story to lecture us on the subject.
The bar may not be terribly high in this area, but it’s still damn nice to see someone clearing it for once.
Luffy is getting smarter
This is one of those things that’s been happening gradually for so long it’s difficult to chart, but nothing hammers it home the way the end of this arc does. I’ve made the point before that Luffy has never been quite as dumb as he appears on casual inspection, but he’s still a guy who seems to save most of his brainpower for special occasions 3. Every once in a while, however, we do get to see Luffy run head first into a situation that he can’t solve by the power of raw shounen machismo alone, and then things get interesting. One of my favourites was way back in the Drum Island arc, when a violent confrontation between suspicious islanders and a crew of impatient Straw Hats is narrowly averted when Vivi, of all people, forces Luffy to stand down, and resorts to diplomacy to convince the locals to give them a chance. Luffy, to his credit, immediately apologises and thanks her. By the time we’ve reached Water 7 and Luffy is having to deal with the news that the Going Merry is beyond repair, we’re well into the land of harsh realities and hard decisions. And ever since Aokiji, we’ve been seeing Luffy process the information that there are enemies ahead who are going to be way out of their league, and he and his nakama aren’t getting stronger nearly fast enough to be ready.
None of this could prepare me for the sight of Luffy in the final battle of Sabody Archipelago ordering his nakama to run for their lives – not because he was going to take this one himself, but because none of them, himself included, could hope to come out of this alive. It was a turning point for the series on so many levels, and utterly heartbreaking in all the ways One Piece is so damnably good at, no matter how well I knew no-one actually was going to die 3. But even in the midst of all that drama, I’m genuinely impressed that Luffy’s reached the point where he could make that call, not to mention so clearly and easily as he did under the circumstances. Speaking of which, whichever of my Luffy-cosplayer friends I should happen to see in person next is getting a hell of a hug whether they are in costume or not, because it’s the closest I have any chance of getting.
And on that cheery note, I think I will call this post done.
1. Merlin will always stick in my memory as a particularly egregious example of how to do this wrong. While it was quick to assure us King Uther had no-one but himself to blame if every magician in the country was out for revenge after decades of literal witch-hunts, by the second season it was becoming painfully evident that we were never going to meet a single magic user besides Merlin who was anything less than a moustache-twirling villain. Even formerly likable characters like Morgana and the dragon were shunted into that role eventually. Merlin, meanwhile, has saved Uther’s life more times than I can count. Rarely have I found myself cheering for the bad guys nearly so hard as I was right before I finally ragequit the hot mess that show was becoming.
2. Speaking of Hachi, I would like to take a moment here to mention how much I loved that when it comes to the crunch, everyone looks to Nami to make the call on whether he gets a second chance. Because sure, this guy may have messed up Zoro pretty bad that one time, but he'd worked for the guy who made Nami's life a misery since her early childhood, and if she’s not ready to forgive him, it’s not even an option. It always gives me such wonderful fangirl joy to see a character like Nami treated with so much respect.
3. Early in my One Piece viewing experience I took to describing a particular expression Luffy often pulled during serious scenes with, ‘either he’s paying deep and careful attention to every word he hears, or he’s fallen asleep with his eyes open’. With Luffy it’s sometimes hard to be sure.
The world of One Piece feels enormous
There’s nothing terribly subtle about the way One Piece goes about railroading its heroes along the One True Path to riches and glory. The whole structure of the Grand Line from Calm Belts to Log Pose navigation is calculated to ensure the Going Merry will stop at these islands, in this order, for a minimum of not less than N days. But even with that rigid framework, we’re forever being reminded that what we’re seeing is no more than a tiny fraction of a much greater world. We’re probably never going to see more than snippets and legends from three of the four major oceans, and even the Grand Line can be traversed via any of half a dozen different island chains. If Nami really does want to complete that map of the world, she’s got at least another four or five voyages still to go along the Grand Line alone – and probably more, because the Straw Hats haven’t even been stopping on every single island on their own route. There were at least another couple of islands on the train circuit out of Water 7 that hardly get mentioned in more than passing, and we can only guess how many they may have skipped when they got hold of those eternal poses to Alabasta and Jaya (or for that matter, whether they’re even on the same route they started on anymore). Skypeia isn’t the only Sky Island up there, and the Knock-up Stream supposedly isn’t even the usual way people reach it. The world isn’t just huge, it’s huge in three different dimensions, if not more.
It’s got the population and history to match all that too. There are humans and sky islanders and giants and two different varieties of mermen and birds that always face south and sea monsters you could see from space and a mollusc for every application – and shame on you for daring to assume anything is a throwaway element you can forget about as soon as we’re done with this particular arc. There are events from four hundred years ago that turn out to have key bearing on the plot, and a missing century from four hundred years before that which is central to one of our heroes’ search for the truth. Everyone you meet has a story, and the cast of faces you’ll want to remember for future reference just keeps getting longer. Which brings me neatly to my next point of awesome.
The Straw Hats are A Big Deal
Here’s the thing about the Straw Hats – on a day to day basis, one does not get the impression they take themselves terribly seriously, and from out here in the audience, nor do we. Luffy did not leave home with any intention of liberating entire countries, bringing down the government or conquering the world. It just sort of happened while he was making other plans. But it did happen, and it keeps happening, and certain people have been sitting up and taking notice.
Post-Alabasta, and even more so post-Water 7, Luffy’s wanted poster has been distributed far and wide. Of lately, marines rarely waste time reporting “There’s some crazy guy trying to break into Enies Lobby!”, they go straight to “Oh shit, it’s Straw Hat Luffy,
Even if they may be a long way short of being able to take on a Marine Admiral without breaking a sweat, they’ve been a force to be reckoned with for a long time and they’re only getting stronger. One of the most ridiculously satisfying things I have experienced in my One Piece marathon is the occasional chance to watch the Straw Hats take on some new enemy who shows up with great fanfare… then proves to be no match for them whatsoever. (Their first encounter with the Wapol pirates remains one of my favourite moments in the show’s history, and IMO it does not happen often enough.) Yes, naturally there has to be some sort of complication to satisfy the laws of drama, but a true Straw Hat curb stomp victory is a beautiful thing to see, and a very nice reminder that those bounties on their heads are a result of far more than pure dumb luck.
The Straw Hats are not merely fondly remembered in a handful of island nations on one route through the Grand Line, they have made their mark on the world.
…but they’re never the only Big Deal in town, and not everyone else who is necessarily has to be evil
For all that it’s a given our heroes will roll into town just in time to be present for some great disaster, save the day, accept the adulations of the populace and roll out again, it’s very much to One Piece’s credit that the Straw Hats are never made out to be the only people on the planet capable of getting anything done. Locals get to be all shades of powerful, competent and clever without being automatically shoehorned into the role of an obstacle to be overcome, or put out of action before anything important happens. Instead, we get the general badassery of characters like Kureha and Dalton, or the fighting cooks of the Barate and the shipwrights of Water 7, not to mention Wiper coming damn close to actually defeating Enel himself. Conis single-handedly convinces the Skypieans to evacuate in time, then goes back for Luffy and his crew. Kokoro drives the Straw Hats to Enies Lobby and later saves them from drowning in the tunnel, and her granddaughter was the first to find the hidden passages Spandam was using to get out. They might never have beaten Moria without the help of the Thriller Bark Victims’ Association, and that’s all before we even reach Shabody. The Straw Hats would never have made it half as far without such a talent for making friends with the right people.
And then we get to all those times when they found themselves up against someone who was completely out of their league.
They always make it through, of course, or we wouldn’t have a story. They escape, they’re let go, or someone else intervenes to save them, and the battle is postponed for another day. Already they’ve faced down Mihawk, Smoker, Blackbeard, Aokiji, Kuma and Kizaru and lived to tell the tale without a single clear victory. There are rematches pending on some of those accounts, but for others I honestly don’t know yet quite what role they’re ultimately going to play. That’s what makes it interesting.
As it stands, of the ‘three great powers of the Grand Line’ which were set up as the major threats to be overcome along their voyage, it’s fascinating just how few have turned out to be actual villains. The Marines are part of an organisation as corrupt as corruption comes, but they’ve still got people like Tashigi, Smoker, Aokiji, Coby, Garp and Jonathan in their ranks, and your average grunt is probably just following orders. Only three of the original seven Shichibukai have proven to be actually evil, and of the remaining four, Kuma appears genuinely conflicted and Mihawk, Jinbe and Hancock have all proven themselves valuable allies. Between Shanks and Whitebeard we’re halfway through the Yonko without meeting anyone terribly unpleasant. Even a number of former antagonists have helped out our heroes in one way or another.
Try and split the world of One Piece into the bad guys, the helpless and the heroes, and you’re going to struggle right out of the gate.
To bring all this generalised fangirling back to some sort of arc-relevant point, it’s at Sabody Archipelago that the Straw Hats reach the milestone of the Grand Line halfway point, and bam, we learn there are no less than nine other pirates in town with bounties comparable to Luffy's. Since they've all been travelling different routes we've neither seen nor heard of them before, but as long as they're all after the One Piece they're guaranteed to find themselves clashing with the Straw Hats before long. Some of them are very likely to become serious obstacles. Others might pose no challenge whatsoever, or get taken out of the running by third parties somewhere along the way. Some might well end up as unlikely allies, or enemies on the level of a major arc boss. But mostly, for the moment none of them seem to be looking for trouble, though if trouble finds them they're hardly going to be found unprepared.
So it is that we end up with Luffy, Law and Kid standing shoulder to shoulder in the auction house doorway, ready to show a small army of marines how badly they wasted their last opportunity to apply for a transfer, while I'm busy grinning my head off at a couple of characters who thus far have maybe five minutes total screentime to their names and only the barest of introductions, sure of very little except that I'm going to enjoy the hell out of whatever is going to happen next. :3
We're nearly four hundred episodes in, and the world of One Piece is still full of exciting new people.
All that said, this does mean that Law and Kid were singled out as The Ones To Watch pretty quickly, and I cannot help but feel Oda was phoning it in a little on most of the rest of them. Bonnie is the main exception, combining typical fanservicy dress sense with the manners and appetite of a true shounen hero, a pretty weird devil fruit power and a fairly impressive ability to think quickly in a crisis. That's a weird mix, and it could go somewhere interesting. Kid sounds like he could be bad news, but he doesn't seem to be either a criminal mastermind or a hotheaded idiot, and thus far has established himself in my head mostly as 'Magneto, but without any of the style'. All spoilers aside though, if there's just one guy in that crowd to watch it had already been made abundantly clear that that guy is Law, on which note I can only say how really really okay I am with the likelihood he's going to be the one to steal most of the screentime.
A few other recent highlights:
That whole scene with Rayleigh
Because you really couldn’t ask for a much better way to celebrate the show’s four hundredth episode than the crew getting to meet a guy who actually sailed with Gol D. Roger himself. But in particular, that bit where Luffy hears that Shanks is waiting for him not so very far ahead. There is just not enough dawwwwww in the world.
That whole thorny Fishmen vs Humans issue
Using inter-racial tension as a source of conflict in speculative fiction can be a bit of a minefield. While it’s about as good an example of truth in fiction as you’ll ever see, it’s incredibly easy to end up hammering on the moral point until your audience gives up out of sheer boredom, or adrift in the seas of unfortunate implications, and this only goes double when (as is usually the case) the fictional minority in question has superpowers 1. When we first met Arlong way back before the crew had even reached the Grand Line and he gave us his ‘humans used to enslave my people, so now I’m doing the same to them!’ justification for all the suffering he’d forced on an unrelated human community on the other side of the planet, it was hard to feel it was an excuse that held much water, and as a plot point we left it behind with the rest of East Blue. After all, writers have been using similar throwaway sob stories in lame attempts to make their villains slightly less completely one-dimensional for just about forever. Nothing new here.
But then, some hundreds of episodes later, we reach Sabody archipelago, and suddenly we’re meeting Fishmen who aren’t fundamentally twisted people, 2 and that ugly history of slavery is turning out to be very much alive and well in the present, and impacting on the lives of characters we care about. If that wasn’t bad enough, the system which allows the slavers to stay in business is institutionalised to such high levels that when Luffy inevitably makes the rash decision to step in and defend a new friend, the retaliation from the authorities is so swift and so devastating that we’re soon watching the Straw Hats being dealt the first truly crushing and lasting defeat they’ve ever experienced, all the while I’m sitting there reflecting on how I’d never imagined this show was going to handle any of this stuff so well.
As for exactly what One Piece did right where so many other stories flounder, I think there are a lot of details that contribute. It’s the fact that it shows as much as it tells, that we see that slavery is a horrible thing humans do to other humans as well as to other species, that thanks to Franky’s old mentor Tom we’ve met at least one fishman who’s whole life and tragic death were in no way defined by this whole ugly cycle of violence and hatred, that Ceimei and Hachi have roles and personalities well beyond ‘helpless victim’, and that we’re shown so very clearly that not even the full power of Luffy’s shounen determination can produce an easy solution to a problem this big. But on the simplest level, I think a lot of what works is as simple as the story taking the time to show us that both fishmen and humans can be good people, and both fishmen and humans can be evil, and assumptions on that subject from either side do nothing but make the situation so much worse. And it says all this without stopping the story to lecture us on the subject.
The bar may not be terribly high in this area, but it’s still damn nice to see someone clearing it for once.
Luffy is getting smarter
This is one of those things that’s been happening gradually for so long it’s difficult to chart, but nothing hammers it home the way the end of this arc does. I’ve made the point before that Luffy has never been quite as dumb as he appears on casual inspection, but he’s still a guy who seems to save most of his brainpower for special occasions 3. Every once in a while, however, we do get to see Luffy run head first into a situation that he can’t solve by the power of raw shounen machismo alone, and then things get interesting. One of my favourites was way back in the Drum Island arc, when a violent confrontation between suspicious islanders and a crew of impatient Straw Hats is narrowly averted when Vivi, of all people, forces Luffy to stand down, and resorts to diplomacy to convince the locals to give them a chance. Luffy, to his credit, immediately apologises and thanks her. By the time we’ve reached Water 7 and Luffy is having to deal with the news that the Going Merry is beyond repair, we’re well into the land of harsh realities and hard decisions. And ever since Aokiji, we’ve been seeing Luffy process the information that there are enemies ahead who are going to be way out of their league, and he and his nakama aren’t getting stronger nearly fast enough to be ready.
None of this could prepare me for the sight of Luffy in the final battle of Sabody Archipelago ordering his nakama to run for their lives – not because he was going to take this one himself, but because none of them, himself included, could hope to come out of this alive. It was a turning point for the series on so many levels, and utterly heartbreaking in all the ways One Piece is so damnably good at, no matter how well I knew no-one actually was going to die 3. But even in the midst of all that drama, I’m genuinely impressed that Luffy’s reached the point where he could make that call, not to mention so clearly and easily as he did under the circumstances. Speaking of which, whichever of my Luffy-cosplayer friends I should happen to see in person next is getting a hell of a hug whether they are in costume or not, because it’s the closest I have any chance of getting.
And on that cheery note, I think I will call this post done.
1. Merlin will always stick in my memory as a particularly egregious example of how to do this wrong. While it was quick to assure us King Uther had no-one but himself to blame if every magician in the country was out for revenge after decades of literal witch-hunts, by the second season it was becoming painfully evident that we were never going to meet a single magic user besides Merlin who was anything less than a moustache-twirling villain. Even formerly likable characters like Morgana and the dragon were shunted into that role eventually. Merlin, meanwhile, has saved Uther’s life more times than I can count. Rarely have I found myself cheering for the bad guys nearly so hard as I was right before I finally ragequit the hot mess that show was becoming.
2. Speaking of Hachi, I would like to take a moment here to mention how much I loved that when it comes to the crunch, everyone looks to Nami to make the call on whether he gets a second chance. Because sure, this guy may have messed up Zoro pretty bad that one time, but he'd worked for the guy who made Nami's life a misery since her early childhood, and if she’s not ready to forgive him, it’s not even an option. It always gives me such wonderful fangirl joy to see a character like Nami treated with so much respect.
3. Early in my One Piece viewing experience I took to describing a particular expression Luffy often pulled during serious scenes with, ‘either he’s paying deep and careful attention to every word he hears, or he’s fallen asleep with his eyes open’. With Luffy it’s sometimes hard to be sure.
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Date: 2012-06-20 09:34 pm (UTC)The Straw Hats would never have made it half as far without such a talent for making friends with the right people.
Absolutely. Also - this doesn't fit for all the arcs, but sometimes I get a feeling that if it hadn't been for the impressive actions of local people, the Strawhats wouldn't have been as motivated to fight. Like way back in Usopp's introduction arc, when Zoro tells him after the battle with Kuro & crew, "I wouldn't have fought if you hadn't". They're motivated to fight when they see a new friend stand up bravely for what they believe in: then they can take over because the friend needs help (it's sometimes a future crewmate, sometimes a local like Cricket).
But then Sabaody comes along and breaks the whole pattern. Like you say, the slavery and the World Nobles are too big problems for Luffy to handle. So for once they don't much bond with the locals (Caimie, Hachi and Pappagu aren't locals; Shakky and Rayleigh are, but they don't need any help), and not much is made better by their visit (except that about a dozen slaves have been freed). It was very unexpected to read at the time.
Early in my One Piece viewing experience I took to describing a particular expression Luffy often pulled during serious scenes with, ‘either he’s paying deep and careful attention to every word he hears, or he’s fallen asleep with his eyes open’. With Luffy it’s sometimes hard to be sure.
:DD Seldom has truer words being spoken. *adopts this*
no subject
Date: 2012-06-21 04:09 am (UTC)Sure, but that's largely just a way of establishing the stakes. They'll also fight because someone asked them nicely (Thriller Bark), because the bad guy hurt one of their own (Water 7, for both Robin and Usopp), or for whatever other reason. 'You are stronger when you fight for someone else/a good cause' is such an old trope that it never struck me as notable. (Not that I don't enjoy a good dose of Straw Hat Righteous Fury as much as the next fan, but there are various ways to go about inspiring it.)
When you get to Sabody Archipelago, there's not much need to bond with the locals when it's clear that the people like Hachi and Ceimei who are in the most danger wouldn't even dare live on the Archipelago. You're very right, though, that it would have been hopeless to let the Straw Hats get any more involved with the downtrodden masses of the area when they ultimately fail to make any real difference. Beyond that though, I think the other deciding factor is that it all happens so fast - their big defeat happens at around the same point where your regular arc would be only just getting up to speed. We've seen so many villains insist the Straw Hats have waded way out of their depth shortly before getting stomped into the dirt that it's a real shock when it suddenly turns out to be true.
and not much is made better by their visit
Well, you know. Luffy did get to punch that one guy in the face. As little difference as that might make in the big picture, it was awfully satisfying to watch. *g*
:DD Seldom has truer words being spoken. *adopts this*
In retrospect he hasn't done it nearly so often since the Arlong Park era - since then he's been getting a lot better at processing complex information without having to shut down all other motor functions or suffer the mental equivalent of the blue screen of death. But as much as I've enjoyed his development, that particular look will always hold a special place in my heart.