On to Fishman Island
Jul. 16th, 2012 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopTimeskip time! It’s one of the great staples of the shounen genre, but it’s one of those gambles that can go either way for your audience. Dragonball had (IMHO) a solid record for getting steadily better with each big skip it pulled, while the Naruto timeskip is effectively the cut-off point beyond which the series gradually lost all appeal for me. When it came to the One Piece timeskip, my usual source made sure to warn me to expect mixed results.
Running through the usual suspects, in roughly descending levels of disappointment.
Nami
I’m not really digging her new look. I think I could probably have dealt with the longer hair or the bikini top or the new-and-improved cup size, but all three together make it very hard to pretend that this redesign has any purpose beyond upping the babe factor. Especially when, nevermind all the time she’s already spent in clothing stores on two different islands, she apparently hasn’t managed to acquire a single bikini top which is actually in her size.
I’m willing to cut a show like One Piece a fair bit of slack when it comes to gratuitous fanservice. Oda’s wasp-figures and F-cup cleavage do exactly nothing for me unless you count the occasional wince of sympathy – and I say this as a fan who’s sexual preferences very much include girls. But on the flipside, the girls remain characters first and girls second, and at least he bothers to balance the girl-candy out with the likes of Ace, Mihawk and Smoker (all far too manly to do up their shirts), not to mention the refreshing anti-fanservice factor of Franky or Kokoro. It’s only fair to point out that in this post-timeskip era, Sanji and Robin are the only people left on the Sunny who are still covering most of their chests (though in Robin’s case that may be debatable), so Nami’s hardly the only one wearing less than she used to. There’s even precedent for Nami running around in a bikini top – back on Skypeia she changes into one for a day on the beach and ends up spending the latter half of the arc like that after jumping off the Merry after a drowning friend. Pretty contrived even by fanservice standards, but hell, I like that she’s comfortable enough in her own body that she doesn’t let stuff like that bother her. As long as the show balances it out with the occasional scene of Zoro training with his shirt off I’m not going to flip any tables over it.
The thing is though, weak as that excuse may have been it was still an excuse, which the post-timeskip era notably lacks. Short skirts aside, Nami’s been picking her outfits for comfort and practicality above emphasising her assets since way back in Loguetown – even in Skypeia she had a t-shirt on over her bathers as soon as she was back on deck. I could have easily handwaved away her being back in swimwear within minutes of arriving on Fishman Island – water everywhere, duh. But I cannot make head or tail out of why a couple of years on a cloud with a bunch of stuffy old scientists would have transformed her into someone who’d lounge around on Shabondy Archipelago in a swimsuit. Let alone one two sizes too small. Let alone when the show is so set on letting us know that recent traumas have apparently left Sanji unable to more than glance at a pretty girl without suffering a near-fatal nosebleed.
Nami’s new look makes about as much sense to me as Sanji in a dress did. I can’t stop noticing it. It’s a constant distraction, which really sucks when there’s important character stuff going on for her in this arc.
Even putting her looks aside, she’s felt criminally underused thus far. Her reaction to the Jinbe-Arlong connection was understated to the point where, I don’t know, it just felt a bit flat to me, and how the hell are we supposed to believe she’s spent two years studying the New World without so much as learning she’d need a new log pose to navigate there? Really not happy with how she’s been handled, and as a card-carrying Nami fan, that’s not fun.
Robin
I like her new look, but I’d like it a lot more if she was allowed to do up her top a little higher. As Usopp might put it, my boobs-do-not-work-like-that disease is playing up again. Robin’s clearly got some nifty new powers, so it disappoints me immensely that neither she or Nami got a major fight in this arc even though every single one of the guys did. You can do better than this, Oda. You’ve demonstrated that plenty of times in the past, and I’m holding you to that standard.
Brook
…okay, perhaps this is only tangentially relevant, but his concert scenes more or less cemented my suspicions that the One Piece anime team has not in fact spent a single yen on new music outside of the opening credits since sometime around Water 7. Background music quality remains the one big area I feel has been letting them down of late.
Getting back on topic, Brook remains the one member of the Straw Hats who is still struggling to win me over. He has his moments, but on an episode to episode basis he’s a character with about three jokes, and he ran two of the three into the ground long ago. (Yes, Brook, we know you don’t have eyes. Or a heart. Or skin. Maybe you could try some material surrounding your lack of balls, guts or brains, just for variety? Also, exactly what would you have done had one of those mermaids produced some panties to show you? No seriously, that I would have laughed at.)
Luffy
Liking his new look very much. The floofy open shirt works better on him that I’d have thought. I am very, very much enjoying his new haki-powered badassery.
I’m not so much enjoying him being periodically shoved back into his old idiot role. Mistaking fake!Zoro and fake!Sanji for the real thing gets a pass under the rule of funny, and him taming the kraken wasn’t a hard sell. However, the days when I would buy a scene where Luffy gets himself lost in a castle because he smelt food ended somewhere in Impel Down and were all but forgotten by the end of Marineford. The joke is old, it’s no longer fun, and as a character he should be past it. His objections to being hailed as a hero seem a little odd too. It’s not like he hasn’t already been the hero of Cocoyashi village, Drum Country, Alabasta, Skypiea, Water 7, a whole hoard of pirates freed from Thriller Bark… people throw huge feasts for heros, Luffy! You know this!
Chopper
Well, his reindeer form certainly looks older, but his default chibi look hasn’t changed a bit. This is because had Oda actually let him age in any obvious manner, a multi-million dollar industry built around marketing his likeness would have gone belly up overnight. ‘Nuff said.
Sanji
Putting aside all those issues he’s developed in his two years on the island of okama, he doesn’t seem to have changed much? A little new stubble (there is a joke in there somewhere about manliness cred or the presumable availability of razors on an island where no-one in a skirt ever shaves their legs, but I’m not sure it’s worth finding) and there is some amusement in how his fringe has switched sides, but it’s largely superficial. His new geppo-thing definitely suits him though.
Zoro
Has his jaw gotten squarer than it used to be? Can’t quite make up my mind. Besides inheriting Mihawk’s approach to shirts, the lost eye is obviously the biggest question mark hanging over him, but presumably we’ll get to that when we get to it. He seems even gruffer than he used to be, but I guess that mostly stands to reason.
Franky
The only excuse I can make for Franky is that everyone else on board with a mental age of more than twelve thinks he looks just as ridiculous as I do. Other than that he’s still Franky, and for that I will forgive him almost anything.
Usopp
Well damn, if I had put on that much muscle since I last saw my friends, I would go shirtless too. Everything that has changed about Usopp pleases me. He’s still the coward we know and love – at least if one considers it cowardly to freak the fuck out at the sight of gigantic sea monsters right outside your fragile air bubble at 10,000m down – but in the face of an ‘ordinary’ threat like a few pissed-off fishman guards he’s cool as a cucumber. Usopp will never be in Luffy’s league, but he has one hellacious new arsenal and he’s gotten a damn sight stronger over the timeskip, and he knows it.
Other highlights from this arc: You have to love how the Straw Hats managed to subvert the local government by accident, in less time than it took them to argue about it afterwards. The Franky+Caribou+barrel scene was just about made of solid-gold win (for all that he’s an irritating little ball of snot, the Straw Hats really aren’t the kind of people who could’ve just tossed him in the ocean, and I cannot blame them for forgetting about him so quickly with everything else that was going on). It so completely figures that Luffy and co may have accidentally declared war on one of the Yonko on their way out. Perhaps only more so considering that Luffy was already just about ready to challenge Big Mam for patronship of the whole island without having the issue forced for him. He is exactly the sort of guy who could find himself becoming a Yonko by accident; he has so much form for this sort of thing it’s not even funny.
Love that we get a nod to Franky’s mentor Tom, if anything I’d have liked a little more time on that element. I am guessing no-one saw ‘Poseidon’s’ true nature coming – none of the little we knew about it ever suggested the ancient superweapons would include a power passed on in someone’s bloodline. One of the things that stands out most about this arc is that for all the convoluted politics involved, we didn’t see the Straw Hats take on a single enemy capable of making them break a sweat without relying on their underwater advantage, did we? Nice way to highlight just how far they’ve come, and it’s certainly to OP’s credit that it can keep up the drama and tension without having to lean on the usual unbeatable arc boss tropes.
I’m really not sure I can see Jinbe working as a member of the crew though. He’s just not insane enough. Jinbe’s world is a terribly serious place that vexes him something awful on a regular basis. (Also, his backstory isn’t nearly traumatic enough to qualify.)
And on that note, I am quite thoroughly out of anime, and rapidly running out of manga too.
Running through the usual suspects, in roughly descending levels of disappointment.
Nami
I’m not really digging her new look. I think I could probably have dealt with the longer hair or the bikini top or the new-and-improved cup size, but all three together make it very hard to pretend that this redesign has any purpose beyond upping the babe factor. Especially when, nevermind all the time she’s already spent in clothing stores on two different islands, she apparently hasn’t managed to acquire a single bikini top which is actually in her size.
I’m willing to cut a show like One Piece a fair bit of slack when it comes to gratuitous fanservice. Oda’s wasp-figures and F-cup cleavage do exactly nothing for me unless you count the occasional wince of sympathy – and I say this as a fan who’s sexual preferences very much include girls. But on the flipside, the girls remain characters first and girls second, and at least he bothers to balance the girl-candy out with the likes of Ace, Mihawk and Smoker (all far too manly to do up their shirts), not to mention the refreshing anti-fanservice factor of Franky or Kokoro. It’s only fair to point out that in this post-timeskip era, Sanji and Robin are the only people left on the Sunny who are still covering most of their chests (though in Robin’s case that may be debatable), so Nami’s hardly the only one wearing less than she used to. There’s even precedent for Nami running around in a bikini top – back on Skypeia she changes into one for a day on the beach and ends up spending the latter half of the arc like that after jumping off the Merry after a drowning friend. Pretty contrived even by fanservice standards, but hell, I like that she’s comfortable enough in her own body that she doesn’t let stuff like that bother her. As long as the show balances it out with the occasional scene of Zoro training with his shirt off I’m not going to flip any tables over it.
The thing is though, weak as that excuse may have been it was still an excuse, which the post-timeskip era notably lacks. Short skirts aside, Nami’s been picking her outfits for comfort and practicality above emphasising her assets since way back in Loguetown – even in Skypeia she had a t-shirt on over her bathers as soon as she was back on deck. I could have easily handwaved away her being back in swimwear within minutes of arriving on Fishman Island – water everywhere, duh. But I cannot make head or tail out of why a couple of years on a cloud with a bunch of stuffy old scientists would have transformed her into someone who’d lounge around on Shabondy Archipelago in a swimsuit. Let alone one two sizes too small. Let alone when the show is so set on letting us know that recent traumas have apparently left Sanji unable to more than glance at a pretty girl without suffering a near-fatal nosebleed.
Nami’s new look makes about as much sense to me as Sanji in a dress did. I can’t stop noticing it. It’s a constant distraction, which really sucks when there’s important character stuff going on for her in this arc.
Even putting her looks aside, she’s felt criminally underused thus far. Her reaction to the Jinbe-Arlong connection was understated to the point where, I don’t know, it just felt a bit flat to me, and how the hell are we supposed to believe she’s spent two years studying the New World without so much as learning she’d need a new log pose to navigate there? Really not happy with how she’s been handled, and as a card-carrying Nami fan, that’s not fun.
Robin
I like her new look, but I’d like it a lot more if she was allowed to do up her top a little higher. As Usopp might put it, my boobs-do-not-work-like-that disease is playing up again. Robin’s clearly got some nifty new powers, so it disappoints me immensely that neither she or Nami got a major fight in this arc even though every single one of the guys did. You can do better than this, Oda. You’ve demonstrated that plenty of times in the past, and I’m holding you to that standard.
Brook
…okay, perhaps this is only tangentially relevant, but his concert scenes more or less cemented my suspicions that the One Piece anime team has not in fact spent a single yen on new music outside of the opening credits since sometime around Water 7. Background music quality remains the one big area I feel has been letting them down of late.
Getting back on topic, Brook remains the one member of the Straw Hats who is still struggling to win me over. He has his moments, but on an episode to episode basis he’s a character with about three jokes, and he ran two of the three into the ground long ago. (Yes, Brook, we know you don’t have eyes. Or a heart. Or skin. Maybe you could try some material surrounding your lack of balls, guts or brains, just for variety? Also, exactly what would you have done had one of those mermaids produced some panties to show you? No seriously, that I would have laughed at.)
Luffy
Liking his new look very much. The floofy open shirt works better on him that I’d have thought. I am very, very much enjoying his new haki-powered badassery.
I’m not so much enjoying him being periodically shoved back into his old idiot role. Mistaking fake!Zoro and fake!Sanji for the real thing gets a pass under the rule of funny, and him taming the kraken wasn’t a hard sell. However, the days when I would buy a scene where Luffy gets himself lost in a castle because he smelt food ended somewhere in Impel Down and were all but forgotten by the end of Marineford. The joke is old, it’s no longer fun, and as a character he should be past it. His objections to being hailed as a hero seem a little odd too. It’s not like he hasn’t already been the hero of Cocoyashi village, Drum Country, Alabasta, Skypiea, Water 7, a whole hoard of pirates freed from Thriller Bark… people throw huge feasts for heros, Luffy! You know this!
Chopper
Well, his reindeer form certainly looks older, but his default chibi look hasn’t changed a bit. This is because had Oda actually let him age in any obvious manner, a multi-million dollar industry built around marketing his likeness would have gone belly up overnight. ‘Nuff said.
Sanji
Putting aside all those issues he’s developed in his two years on the island of okama, he doesn’t seem to have changed much? A little new stubble (there is a joke in there somewhere about manliness cred or the presumable availability of razors on an island where no-one in a skirt ever shaves their legs, but I’m not sure it’s worth finding) and there is some amusement in how his fringe has switched sides, but it’s largely superficial. His new geppo-thing definitely suits him though.
Zoro
Has his jaw gotten squarer than it used to be? Can’t quite make up my mind. Besides inheriting Mihawk’s approach to shirts, the lost eye is obviously the biggest question mark hanging over him, but presumably we’ll get to that when we get to it. He seems even gruffer than he used to be, but I guess that mostly stands to reason.
Franky
The only excuse I can make for Franky is that everyone else on board with a mental age of more than twelve thinks he looks just as ridiculous as I do. Other than that he’s still Franky, and for that I will forgive him almost anything.
Usopp
Well damn, if I had put on that much muscle since I last saw my friends, I would go shirtless too. Everything that has changed about Usopp pleases me. He’s still the coward we know and love – at least if one considers it cowardly to freak the fuck out at the sight of gigantic sea monsters right outside your fragile air bubble at 10,000m down – but in the face of an ‘ordinary’ threat like a few pissed-off fishman guards he’s cool as a cucumber. Usopp will never be in Luffy’s league, but he has one hellacious new arsenal and he’s gotten a damn sight stronger over the timeskip, and he knows it.
Other highlights from this arc: You have to love how the Straw Hats managed to subvert the local government by accident, in less time than it took them to argue about it afterwards. The Franky+Caribou+barrel scene was just about made of solid-gold win (for all that he’s an irritating little ball of snot, the Straw Hats really aren’t the kind of people who could’ve just tossed him in the ocean, and I cannot blame them for forgetting about him so quickly with everything else that was going on). It so completely figures that Luffy and co may have accidentally declared war on one of the Yonko on their way out. Perhaps only more so considering that Luffy was already just about ready to challenge Big Mam for patronship of the whole island without having the issue forced for him. He is exactly the sort of guy who could find himself becoming a Yonko by accident; he has so much form for this sort of thing it’s not even funny.
Love that we get a nod to Franky’s mentor Tom, if anything I’d have liked a little more time on that element. I am guessing no-one saw ‘Poseidon’s’ true nature coming – none of the little we knew about it ever suggested the ancient superweapons would include a power passed on in someone’s bloodline. One of the things that stands out most about this arc is that for all the convoluted politics involved, we didn’t see the Straw Hats take on a single enemy capable of making them break a sweat without relying on their underwater advantage, did we? Nice way to highlight just how far they’ve come, and it’s certainly to OP’s credit that it can keep up the drama and tension without having to lean on the usual unbeatable arc boss tropes.
I’m really not sure I can see Jinbe working as a member of the crew though. He’s just not insane enough. Jinbe’s world is a terribly serious place that vexes him something awful on a regular basis. (Also, his backstory isn’t nearly traumatic enough to qualify.)
And on that note, I am quite thoroughly out of anime, and rapidly running out of manga too.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-17 09:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-17 10:03 am (UTC)I mean, dude, LJ lets me enter that into the tag field. How could I possibly resist?
no subject
Date: 2012-07-17 10:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-17 02:27 pm (UTC)stuff Korra you should watch One Piece instead it is so much better!wait I mean(Seriously, I know you have nothing like the free time to get into something that huge but that was still pretty much my gut reaction on such topics atm)
oh hey I just remembered I still owe you some fic recs, and I am going to go send you that email now before I forget again
no subject
Date: 2012-07-17 02:51 pm (UTC)YES FIC RECS YAY I even have time to READ them now!