Beyond Sabody Archipelago
Jun. 28th, 2012 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopIf there's one advantage to being so thoroughly spoiled for a show as I am for One Piece it's... well, okay, if I had to pick just one, I would have to assert that the very best kind of spoilers are the ones that give you something to look forward to. But if there's one advantage of being spoiled for things you're not going to enjoy, it's that at least you get the chance to prepare yourself for the worst. So while I may have loved just about everything leading up to the Great Strawhat Separation, every casual spoiler I'd ever heard from events beyond that point suggested this might be a good time to lower my expectations. The Honeymoon is over. We're in for the long haul.
Luffy's next couple of stops on the road to Pirate Kingship were to be the Island of the Amazons and the Gulag of Minor Antagonists and Transvestites, promising a nice long arc of material which would be tedious and illogical at best, and frustrating or severely depressing at worst. Or to get into some specifics, tedious = episode after episode where the our reliably awesome supporting cast are replaced by the population of Impel Down; illogical = the notion that the overwhelming majority of the Amazon population could be this clueless about boys and/or sex without all dying out long ago, everything about Newkama Land; frustrating = Boa Hancock and the wealth of unfortunate implications arising from all that stuff already covered under 'illogical'; depressing = Aaaaaaaaaaccccceeeeeeeee ;_;. I've watched my sister go through the whole saga already, in real time. I know where it's all going. I know roughly what significance it's all going to have in the big picture. None of this guaranteed getting there was going to be much fun.
With all those caveats out of the way, there is a lot to be said for taking in the One Piece experience the way we've been doing it, which involves tearing through the anime at anything up to a dozen episodes in one sitting. The same story that devolves into mindless tedium when drawn out over a matter of months becomes infinitely more tolerable when taken in over the course of an afternoon, and even with the inimitable anime-filler problem to contend with, there quality of the voice acting alone adds so much to the series that we have no regrets about sticking with the animated version. With the benefit of what passes for hindsight, it does become a little easier to appreciate why Oda may have felt the need for such a very long build-up to the rescue of a supporting character when we all knew he'd never really kill anyone (she said, pausing to allow for laughter, or possibly rotten vegetables). Say what you will about spoilers, it's a lot easier to sit back and enjoy the ride when you already know roughly where you're going.
So on the balance of it all, the experience of watching those episodes did manage to exceed my expectations by a decent margin. But it certainly helped somewhat to to have pitched those expectations so low to begin with. Take from that what you will.
Boa Hancock
May as well get this particular can of worms out of the way right off the bat.
It dawned on me tonight that the few periods where One Piece has shifted down from it's usual standard of awesome, past being drawn out and tedious in the filler-tastic way, to actively drawing my ire, it tends to be because it's treating one of its female characters badly. The table-flipping incident in early Thriller Bark will be the obvious example, and my evaporating patience with the latter Alabaster arc correlates fairly well with the period that left me see-sawing between hating the way the story was treating Vivi, and just being completely sick of Vivi herself (mostly for, oh, y'know, having a fairly normal series of human reactions to the sight of her country being torn apart by civil war, and all that stuff ). The Amazon Lily arc was never going to go well for me.
Meet Boa Hancock. She's a certified arsehole – let's get that much out on the table where everyone can see it – but when a character actually goes out of her way to kick a kitten in her introductory scene, we are so far past the point of self-parody that it's hard to hold it against her. Given her background, her reasons for hating men are even fairly understandable (better yet, they don't involve rape, leaving Hancock at least a thousand points ahead of almost every other comparable example I can think of).1
All that said, there is no way around the awkwardness of discovering that the single most physically and politically powerful female character we've met in the whole world of One Piece proudly attributes her power to her beauty. Strike a pose, and men and women alike will forgive her all her sins with hearts in their eyes. I've sort of done my best to head-canon the worst of it away as a natural part of her devil fruit power, and now we're into Marineford it's nice to finally have some real confirmation that she's a certified badass even without the gorgon thing,2 but even that only goes so far. None of the original gorgons were ever accused of being sexy, so even the thematic excuse is tenuous at best.
Oddly enough, the one thing that's done the most to redeem Hancock in my eyes is the part where she goes and falls so hopelessly in love with Luffy – odd because this was one of the big things I'd been warned I probably wasn't going to like. There can be few plot points in all of One Piece so contrived as the excuse we're given for why she absolutely has to leave the island with him. It helps, though, that I could come at this development from the perspective of knowing she's not destined to join the Straw Hats after all (there is simply no way she'd have worked with the rest of the crew), so this was destined to remain a temporary development. It also helps that the attraction doesn't make her entirely weak or stupid, or leave her helpless to do anything but worry about her man. Instead, the scenes where she sneaks Luffy into Impel Down are my favourite she's been in yet, and once she and Luffy are separated inside, I do like the clear sense you get that she trusts to get the job done on his own terms, no matter the danger. Filler or not, that little extra bit where she silently whispers to Ace to let him know Luffy's on his way needs a special mention. I really loved that bit.
It helps, above all, that one cannot help but come at this development going, “Huh. It's a really focused female Sanji. Would you look at that.” - so that like it or hate it, at least the genders are something somewhere in the vicinity of equal, in this if no other regard. (I can't be the only person idly to picture what it would be like to see both her and Sanji caught in some sort of convoluted love triangle, right? It would have to be either utterly hilarious or utterly terrible, and probably both at once.)
And, I dunno, maybe I'm grasping at straws here, but I do have to award a few extra points for how Hancock does manage take full advantage of her 'beauty' without that necessarily meaning 'sex appeal'. Like, when she's ramping up the effect before turning someone to stone, she does it by smiling or flicking a bit of hair behind her ear or assuming some particularly good posture. There is no bending over, no drawing attention to her ample cleavage – hardly even a hip out of alignment. The Amazons as a whole are so utterly clueless about sex that I have more or less concluded the only explanation for how they manage to reproduce involves parthenogenesis. It may not be much, but I'm taking what I can get at this point.
Impel Down
Like so many One Piece arcs this one starts out quite strong, then starts to drag a bit in the middle as complication after complication falls into our heros' path and the gratuitous filler ratio increases, and before you know it we're waist-deep in some sort of subplot about a secret gay bar full of revolutionaries stuck between the floors of the world's maximum security prison okay what no why is this happening even One Piece does not usually get this strange
Details aside, if this arc is a disappointment, then I think it mostly comes from how for one, we're now an awful long way away the last time we saw the rest of the Straw Hats (the assortment of prison inmates we meet on the way down are in no way a substitute), and for another, the big hook of this arc – rescuing Ace – never actually happens. So when we finally get to the bottom there's no resolution; that's been postponed for yet another forty episodes or so. Knowing all that in advance, it's easier to appreciate that the the real purpose of this arc is to introduce us to some new characters, to dust off some old ones, to give Luffy yet another opportunity to stick it to the World Government, and to overturn everything we thought we knew about what Blackbeard is really after, while building up the suspense for the upcoming Whitebeard War. Going in with the right expectations does make a real difference on that front.
So with our expectations pitched suitably low (and our readiness to hit fast-forward at the first hint of another pointless Buggy and Mr 3. scene calibrated appropriately), there is good stuff to be found here. Those always-thorny questions of morality and exactly-who's-on-which-side-anyway get only more and more convoluted the further down we go, and from a continuity perspective, it's neat to have Luffy meeting all these guys who were major threats back when he first fought them but now are so far below his level he has trouble even remembering why he was supposed to hate them in the first place. And, y'know, it was nice to see Bon Clay again (inarguably the friendliest cross-dressing assassin the Straw Hats have had the good fortune to meet), especially with how happy both he and Luffy were to be reunited. Dawwwwwww.
The absolute highlight of this arc, however, would have to be Luffy himself.
Luffy
I touched on this subject back in my last post but it bears repeating here, because if there's just one thing which justifies the whole Strawhat-separation saga, he's it. There's nothing else that could highlight just how far Luffy's come like seeing him out on his own like this, under pressure and without a single member of his Thinking Brain support crew to keep him on track. The new Luffy is much, much faster to catch on and he deals with complicated instructions – even the need for subtlety or discretion – with relative ease.3 He's still Luffy, that loveable doofus who regularly does the impossible using nothing more than raw determination and a stunningly simplistic refusal to admit he's done anything particularly difficult.4 But if anything, his new brainpower only builds on that that foundation, because these days when Luffy takes it on himself to prove that 'impossible' only means 'for people who aren't me', it's much more likely you'll get the sense that he has a pretty good idea of what he's getting into, and he's decided to do it anyway. After all, it's not like he hasn't done it all before, to roaring success, over and over again.
But beyond even that, there's this shear magnetism of Luffy as a personality that's starting to shine through – what the Discworld fans among us might call the Captain Carrot Effect. Here, without his usual entourage, or even a recent victory over a local villain to justify how easily he converts the masses to his side, the effect he has on people just by being there is becoming more and more apparent. He's the kind of guy who can, for example, be genuinely glad to see that characters like Buggy and Mr 3 (a couple of minor former antagonists who helped him with his jailbreak but ditched him at the first opportunity) are doing fine and have managed not to get caught in his absence, much to the hilarious confusion of the men themselves who have no idea what to do with that much freely given good will that they so clearly don't deserve. Luffy has a big smile and a reputation for taking on the impossible, and wherever he goes even the most unlikely of allies find themselves swept along in his wake. It's got to be awfully hard to disappoint someone like Luffy, even before he's got as far as asking for your help.
This is the part of the series where one really starts to believe we're watching the Man Who Will Become The Pirate King.
The rest of Amazon Lily, Newkama Land and Ivankov, the Unfortunate Implications thereof, and other such Serious or Artistic Concerns
Don't even ask. At this point even my legendary need to analyse and critique the fuck out of everything has thrown up its hands and gone to curl up on the couch with a box of chocolate.
(Though I do have to give at least a few points for how even Bon Clay, of all fabulous queens, spent his first episode or so after waking up in Newkama land with an expression that suggested nothing so much as, “what the fuck is even with you people?” That alone says so much.)
1. I'd also note that between her, Nami and Robin, that brings us to no less than three different important female characters with fantastically angsty backstories, none of which involve rape, or romance, or heartbreak of any kind. (There are a lot of dead mothers to go around, but two out of three got still got to keep their siblings, and on the whole none of them seem particularly inclined to take it out on society, so.) In honour of this achievement, I would like to officially award One Piece with the Bronze Star of Being Totally Adequate In A Field Where So Many Others Will Dig Their Own Graves.
2. I'm telling you, this 'Haki' stuff everyone's into these days is some really good shit.
3. He really did try very hard to keep his promise to Hancock that he wouldn't cause a ruckus in Impel Down. Alas, fate had other plans.
4. The devil fruit powers don't hurt either, of course.
Luffy's next couple of stops on the road to Pirate Kingship were to be the Island of the Amazons and the Gulag of Minor Antagonists and Transvestites, promising a nice long arc of material which would be tedious and illogical at best, and frustrating or severely depressing at worst. Or to get into some specifics, tedious = episode after episode where the our reliably awesome supporting cast are replaced by the population of Impel Down; illogical = the notion that the overwhelming majority of the Amazon population could be this clueless about boys and/or sex without all dying out long ago, everything about Newkama Land; frustrating = Boa Hancock and the wealth of unfortunate implications arising from all that stuff already covered under 'illogical'; depressing = Aaaaaaaaaaccccceeeeeeeee ;_;. I've watched my sister go through the whole saga already, in real time. I know where it's all going. I know roughly what significance it's all going to have in the big picture. None of this guaranteed getting there was going to be much fun.
With all those caveats out of the way, there is a lot to be said for taking in the One Piece experience the way we've been doing it, which involves tearing through the anime at anything up to a dozen episodes in one sitting. The same story that devolves into mindless tedium when drawn out over a matter of months becomes infinitely more tolerable when taken in over the course of an afternoon, and even with the inimitable anime-filler problem to contend with, there quality of the voice acting alone adds so much to the series that we have no regrets about sticking with the animated version. With the benefit of what passes for hindsight, it does become a little easier to appreciate why Oda may have felt the need for such a very long build-up to the rescue of a supporting character when we all knew he'd never really kill anyone (she said, pausing to allow for laughter, or possibly rotten vegetables). Say what you will about spoilers, it's a lot easier to sit back and enjoy the ride when you already know roughly where you're going.
So on the balance of it all, the experience of watching those episodes did manage to exceed my expectations by a decent margin. But it certainly helped somewhat to to have pitched those expectations so low to begin with. Take from that what you will.
Boa Hancock
May as well get this particular can of worms out of the way right off the bat.
It dawned on me tonight that the few periods where One Piece has shifted down from it's usual standard of awesome, past being drawn out and tedious in the filler-tastic way, to actively drawing my ire, it tends to be because it's treating one of its female characters badly. The table-flipping incident in early Thriller Bark will be the obvious example, and my evaporating patience with the latter Alabaster arc correlates fairly well with the period that left me see-sawing between hating the way the story was treating Vivi, and just being completely sick of Vivi herself (mostly for, oh, y'know, having a fairly normal series of human reactions to the sight of her country being torn apart by civil war, and all that stuff ). The Amazon Lily arc was never going to go well for me.
Meet Boa Hancock. She's a certified arsehole – let's get that much out on the table where everyone can see it – but when a character actually goes out of her way to kick a kitten in her introductory scene, we are so far past the point of self-parody that it's hard to hold it against her. Given her background, her reasons for hating men are even fairly understandable (better yet, they don't involve rape, leaving Hancock at least a thousand points ahead of almost every other comparable example I can think of).1
All that said, there is no way around the awkwardness of discovering that the single most physically and politically powerful female character we've met in the whole world of One Piece proudly attributes her power to her beauty. Strike a pose, and men and women alike will forgive her all her sins with hearts in their eyes. I've sort of done my best to head-canon the worst of it away as a natural part of her devil fruit power, and now we're into Marineford it's nice to finally have some real confirmation that she's a certified badass even without the gorgon thing,2 but even that only goes so far. None of the original gorgons were ever accused of being sexy, so even the thematic excuse is tenuous at best.
Oddly enough, the one thing that's done the most to redeem Hancock in my eyes is the part where she goes and falls so hopelessly in love with Luffy – odd because this was one of the big things I'd been warned I probably wasn't going to like. There can be few plot points in all of One Piece so contrived as the excuse we're given for why she absolutely has to leave the island with him. It helps, though, that I could come at this development from the perspective of knowing she's not destined to join the Straw Hats after all (there is simply no way she'd have worked with the rest of the crew), so this was destined to remain a temporary development. It also helps that the attraction doesn't make her entirely weak or stupid, or leave her helpless to do anything but worry about her man. Instead, the scenes where she sneaks Luffy into Impel Down are my favourite she's been in yet, and once she and Luffy are separated inside, I do like the clear sense you get that she trusts to get the job done on his own terms, no matter the danger. Filler or not, that little extra bit where she silently whispers to Ace to let him know Luffy's on his way needs a special mention. I really loved that bit.
It helps, above all, that one cannot help but come at this development going, “Huh. It's a really focused female Sanji. Would you look at that.” - so that like it or hate it, at least the genders are something somewhere in the vicinity of equal, in this if no other regard. (I can't be the only person idly to picture what it would be like to see both her and Sanji caught in some sort of convoluted love triangle, right? It would have to be either utterly hilarious or utterly terrible, and probably both at once.)
And, I dunno, maybe I'm grasping at straws here, but I do have to award a few extra points for how Hancock does manage take full advantage of her 'beauty' without that necessarily meaning 'sex appeal'. Like, when she's ramping up the effect before turning someone to stone, she does it by smiling or flicking a bit of hair behind her ear or assuming some particularly good posture. There is no bending over, no drawing attention to her ample cleavage – hardly even a hip out of alignment. The Amazons as a whole are so utterly clueless about sex that I have more or less concluded the only explanation for how they manage to reproduce involves parthenogenesis. It may not be much, but I'm taking what I can get at this point.
Impel Down
Like so many One Piece arcs this one starts out quite strong, then starts to drag a bit in the middle as complication after complication falls into our heros' path and the gratuitous filler ratio increases, and before you know it we're waist-deep in some sort of subplot about a secret gay bar full of revolutionaries stuck between the floors of the world's maximum security prison okay what no why is this happening even One Piece does not usually get this strange
Details aside, if this arc is a disappointment, then I think it mostly comes from how for one, we're now an awful long way away the last time we saw the rest of the Straw Hats (the assortment of prison inmates we meet on the way down are in no way a substitute), and for another, the big hook of this arc – rescuing Ace – never actually happens. So when we finally get to the bottom there's no resolution; that's been postponed for yet another forty episodes or so. Knowing all that in advance, it's easier to appreciate that the the real purpose of this arc is to introduce us to some new characters, to dust off some old ones, to give Luffy yet another opportunity to stick it to the World Government, and to overturn everything we thought we knew about what Blackbeard is really after, while building up the suspense for the upcoming Whitebeard War. Going in with the right expectations does make a real difference on that front.
So with our expectations pitched suitably low (and our readiness to hit fast-forward at the first hint of another pointless Buggy and Mr 3. scene calibrated appropriately), there is good stuff to be found here. Those always-thorny questions of morality and exactly-who's-on-which-side-anyway get only more and more convoluted the further down we go, and from a continuity perspective, it's neat to have Luffy meeting all these guys who were major threats back when he first fought them but now are so far below his level he has trouble even remembering why he was supposed to hate them in the first place. And, y'know, it was nice to see Bon Clay again (inarguably the friendliest cross-dressing assassin the Straw Hats have had the good fortune to meet), especially with how happy both he and Luffy were to be reunited. Dawwwwwww.
The absolute highlight of this arc, however, would have to be Luffy himself.
Luffy
I touched on this subject back in my last post but it bears repeating here, because if there's just one thing which justifies the whole Strawhat-separation saga, he's it. There's nothing else that could highlight just how far Luffy's come like seeing him out on his own like this, under pressure and without a single member of his Thinking Brain support crew to keep him on track. The new Luffy is much, much faster to catch on and he deals with complicated instructions – even the need for subtlety or discretion – with relative ease.3 He's still Luffy, that loveable doofus who regularly does the impossible using nothing more than raw determination and a stunningly simplistic refusal to admit he's done anything particularly difficult.4 But if anything, his new brainpower only builds on that that foundation, because these days when Luffy takes it on himself to prove that 'impossible' only means 'for people who aren't me', it's much more likely you'll get the sense that he has a pretty good idea of what he's getting into, and he's decided to do it anyway. After all, it's not like he hasn't done it all before, to roaring success, over and over again.
But beyond even that, there's this shear magnetism of Luffy as a personality that's starting to shine through – what the Discworld fans among us might call the Captain Carrot Effect. Here, without his usual entourage, or even a recent victory over a local villain to justify how easily he converts the masses to his side, the effect he has on people just by being there is becoming more and more apparent. He's the kind of guy who can, for example, be genuinely glad to see that characters like Buggy and Mr 3 (a couple of minor former antagonists who helped him with his jailbreak but ditched him at the first opportunity) are doing fine and have managed not to get caught in his absence, much to the hilarious confusion of the men themselves who have no idea what to do with that much freely given good will that they so clearly don't deserve. Luffy has a big smile and a reputation for taking on the impossible, and wherever he goes even the most unlikely of allies find themselves swept along in his wake. It's got to be awfully hard to disappoint someone like Luffy, even before he's got as far as asking for your help.
This is the part of the series where one really starts to believe we're watching the Man Who Will Become The Pirate King.
The rest of Amazon Lily, Newkama Land and Ivankov, the Unfortunate Implications thereof, and other such Serious or Artistic Concerns
Don't even ask. At this point even my legendary need to analyse and critique the fuck out of everything has thrown up its hands and gone to curl up on the couch with a box of chocolate.
(Though I do have to give at least a few points for how even Bon Clay, of all fabulous queens, spent his first episode or so after waking up in Newkama land with an expression that suggested nothing so much as, “what the fuck is even with you people?” That alone says so much.)
1. I'd also note that between her, Nami and Robin, that brings us to no less than three different important female characters with fantastically angsty backstories, none of which involve rape, or romance, or heartbreak of any kind. (There are a lot of dead mothers to go around, but two out of three got still got to keep their siblings, and on the whole none of them seem particularly inclined to take it out on society, so.) In honour of this achievement, I would like to officially award One Piece with the Bronze Star of Being Totally Adequate In A Field Where So Many Others Will Dig Their Own Graves.
2. I'm telling you, this 'Haki' stuff everyone's into these days is some really good shit.
3. He really did try very hard to keep his promise to Hancock that he wouldn't cause a ruckus in Impel Down. Alas, fate had other plans.
4. The devil fruit powers don't hurt either, of course.