Yet more stuff about One Piece
Aug. 17th, 2012 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopYeah, not quite done blathering on about One Piece yet, folks. There's still a bunch of stuff I never found the right space to talk about going through my viewing experience saga by saga, so here's some assorted extras that I still felt like talking about.
Haki
Be it from chapter one or not until volume fifty, so many shounen series eventually hit the point where standard martial arts just aren't cutting it anymore and something of a more mystical bent will be invoked to explain the superhuman powers the cast have started to display. Call it Ki, Chi, Reiki, Chakra or even the Force, all you really need to know is that it's is the mysterious life-energy that the best of the best tap into in order to fly, throw fireballs or punch through several feet of rock without bruising a single knuckle. It's such a long established trope that writers don't need to go far out of their way to justify it these days, but it's also been done so many times that if you play it straight it's going to feel awfully by-the-numbers to much of your fanbase. This is not to say there's no life left in the idea; for all that I bitch about Naruto lately Kishimoto did bring a host of neat new ideas to the table, expanding the uses of chakra to everything from walking up walls or on water to summoning giant frogs to making ninja medics one of the terrifyingly dangerous specialities in existence. It's always refreshing to find a story that bothers to bring a few unusual twists to the formula.
In the case of One Piece, the biggest twist may be just how long it takes to come up. This isn't Dragonball, which meandered around for years before reaching the parts of the story most of us remember it for now. In One Piece, what initially defined how dangerous you were was your Devil Fruit ability – and while we've always had plenty of badass normals around to remind us that's not all that counts, Luffy's first major power up (when it finally happens somewhere around episode 300) is simply a new way of exploiting his Gomu Gomu powers that he came up with on his own between scenes. On the whole we've spent much longer learning about things like dials or rokushiki or thanking our lucky stars that Crocodile and Enel had easily exploitable weaknesses. Zoro and Sanji, meanwhile, stick to steadily improving their skills on their own steam.
Another think I've enjoyed about Oda's approach is how subtle he's been about introducing it. In typical One Piece style we saw it used as far back as chapter 1 without being given the first idea how Shanks just did that thing he did. Excluding the occasional name-drop, we don't see it again properly until after Enies Lobby, and after that we have the whole of Thriller Bark to get through before it finally starts building into a real plot point. We get our first proper look at it in action on Shabondy Archipelago, but even as it becomes more and more obvious to both us and the supporting cast that Luffy's hit the motherload, we still don't get The Lecture until right before the timeskip over a hundred episodes later (in fact the anime has postponed this even further, likely to be covered in flashback any week now). Even so, there's more than enough information implicit in what characters in the know are saying about it for the audience to put the main gist together: Luffy is in the process of unlocking one almighty hell of a mysterious power.
But I think what I've enjoyed most about the Haki subplot is the effects Oda ascribes to his Ki-substitute. You've got your three varieties: there's Kenbunshoku, which lets you 'sense' other living things and read their attacks before they hit (though I note it also seems to work just fine at letting one avoid cyborg lasers and boomeranging projectiles thrown from implausibly long distances). Your 'standard' power-up effects come mostly from Busoushoku, which allows for massively improved attack power and defence, and - more to the point - lets you punch logias without having to mess around hunting for a usefully exploitable weakness. Like all other logia weaknesses short of clapping the user in seastone, however, it's not an Instant-Win button, merely a relatively effective way to level the playing field. But the one that really defines the concept for me would have to be Haoshoku, which is the much rarer third variety that lets the wielder KO anything up to a veritable army of much weaker opponents by doing no more than, as best I can gather, impressing on everyone in range just exactly how hopelessly outclassed they are. No firey auras or fireballs anywhere to be seen sight, but it's still a stunning visual effect. Curiously, though the show has yet to address it out loud, this would also logically make the rarest and most mythologised form of Haki the least useful against powerful enemies. Actually, that may be one of the reasons it feels so original.
There's still a few details that could use a bit more explanation beyond 'because [plot reasons]'. Haki use does carve itself out a reasonably distinct niche from the earlier introduced Rokushiki techniques, which appear to be primarily based on speed, but one is left to mostly come up with one's own explanation for why CP9 would focus on Rokushiki alone (If I had to guess I'd probably have to go with assuming that being able to move at Soru speeds and walk on air are more useful for espionage and the rest of the techniques are related in some manner that makes them easier to learn.) If Ace had Haoshoku potential from the age of ten and all the rest of Whitebeard's division commanders looked to be well versed in Haki useage, why don't we ever see any evidence he'd learnt to use it himself in adulthood, even when it might have, oh, saved his life? Why bother to tell us Hancock has Haoshoku Haki when as far as I recall we've never once seen her use it? Are we supposed to interpret that little moment from Shabondy as evidence even Zoro has Haoshoku Haki, or was that a minor continuity snafu from before the writers had the mechanics properly worked out yet? And as much as I like how all this has introduced without resorting to infodumps, when exactly did everyone else on the crew become so familiar with the subject they instantly recognise what Luffy was doing, and when did Luffy find out Zoro and Sanji have mastered the (presumably) common forms when we've yet to see any discussion or on-screen evidence of it? Most of this is probably not worth losing sleep over, but I hope some at least will get explained in time.
Nitpicks aside, the internal logic is mostly fairly solid, and I have to give Oda credit for navigating his way through a plotline that so conveniently reveals Luffy as one of the 'chosen ones' without pinballing us into every one of the usual tired clichies on the way down.
On the subject of non-ranking female characters
I've talked a lot already about how One Piece treats it's female cast, because there's a lot to be said for it on in that area even if you do count a lot of fanservice and a more sketchy track record from the post-Sabondy era. One remaining detail that I never quite found space to bring up before despite how it's been bugging me on and off for ages is this: I'd really like to see just a few more incidental female marines and pirates in the crowd scenes. We've always had a smattering of them in key roles - everything from Nami and Robin to the likes of Lola, Hina, one of the marine giants and two of the New World captains who joined Whitebeard's assult on Marineford. As soon as you drop below officer ranks, however, suddenly the crowd thins out to zero. Why?
One can easily come up with fanon explanations - Whitebeard's 'family' did seem like it a bit of a boys-club, and maybe marines don't let women enlist at recruit level, sending them straight to officer's college or nothing. But even then why don't we see any other women in Lola's crew, or Bonny's, or Dadan's bandits? There were more okama in Ivankov's retinue than there were women on both sides at Marineford, how does that make sense?
The obvious answer is that it's when characters cease to be important enough to have names that the gender variety dries up. Extras may get a line or two, but on the whole their purpose is to be canon fodder, and thus there's arguably reason to limit the individuality of the masses, if only because it makes animation easier and the audience feel less sorry for them. At its roots though, I suspect the truth may be that people are much more comfortable with a man who shows up only to be punched out of sight than they would be with women getting the same treatment, even if those women are trained military personnel. All the same, I feel this is really no excuse for why we couldn't have the occasional female marine or pirate in a bar scene or reporting from look out or any of the myriad incidental roles that don't involve winding up up close and personal with someone else's fists.
I'm not bothered by girls being a minority in most pirate or marine crews. It'd just be nice to get the occasional nod that there's a role for us somewhere between "amazing enough to be leading the show" and "non-existant".
Cover Arcs
While I'd have to admit the minor hypocrisy of me voicing any further complaints about filler after that Korra post, it strikes me as a real wasted opportunity that One Piece never adapted a few more of the cover arcs for the screen. In the space of no more than a handful of still-frames, Oda lays out the general shape of what could have been whole mini-arcs in some of his cover pages. Some, granted, were probably best abandonned - I'd imagine the portion of the audience who really wanted to know what happened to the likes of Wapol or Enel after losing to Luffy would be relatively minor. But conversely, a number of the cover arcs do end up mattering to the main plot in some small way, such as the one where Hatchan meets Keimei, or the one which explained how Fullbody and Jango ended up working together and introduced Hina, or the one where Ace finds his key lead on Blackbeard (not to mention an excuse to give Ace more episodes, nuff said). It's for good reason we had a couple of episodes of Helmeppo and Coby joining the marines - quite apart from setting them up for later appearances, we met Garp for the first time there too. Same goes for the Straw Hat separation arc, which pulled of a suprisingly successful job of expanding one or two cover images per character into a whole episode's worth of material. Love, hate or merely tollerate the anime filler arcs - not to mention the acres of dead space inserted by the animators to pad out the action scenes - there's nothing that really drives home the futility of it all like realising that Oda has just about handed them the outlines for a whole catalogue of stories they could have used instead.
The Supporting Cast
So, broadly speaking, you can split OP's huge and sprawling cast into your main characters (the Straw Hats), your irregular recurring cast (mostly Marines, plus a few bad guys and some miscellaneous extras like Ace and Shanks), and your location-specific cast, consisting of locals and villains from whatever island we're on today. What keeps striking me about the location-specific portion just about every time the Straw Hats arrive somewhere new is that in any other series, these people would be supporting cast. Make no mistake, there are some great characters in this category - people like Zeff, Kureha, Kokoro and Chimney and the rest of the faces from Water 7, even the likes of Perona, Keimei or Reileigh and Shaki. Thing is, most writers, having put that much effort into creating them, wouldn't be nearly so willing to leave them behind, and would keep them around until they'd run their best material into the ground. One Piece, of course, is all about the journey, so it makes sense that we'll regularly leave people behind. But rather than populate each new location solely with disposable stock characters and obligatory villains, time and again we keep meeting all these people who I would happily have seen added to the regular cast. And then we move on.
Much as I miss some of those old faces, I think it's very much to Oda's credit that he's willing to let those characters go. It means the dynamic in the recurring cast keeps changing, and supporting members are cycled out long before they go stale. But arguably it's more realistic to talk about about how amazing it is that Oda's willing and able to go on creating so many weird and wonderful new characters to populate out each new location, and put so much life into them that you can so easily picture them as regulars rather than short-term extras. About the only other writer I can think of who does anything like it is Terry Pratchett, and that's a comparison anyone ought to be proud of.
Haki
Be it from chapter one or not until volume fifty, so many shounen series eventually hit the point where standard martial arts just aren't cutting it anymore and something of a more mystical bent will be invoked to explain the superhuman powers the cast have started to display. Call it Ki, Chi, Reiki, Chakra or even the Force, all you really need to know is that it's is the mysterious life-energy that the best of the best tap into in order to fly, throw fireballs or punch through several feet of rock without bruising a single knuckle. It's such a long established trope that writers don't need to go far out of their way to justify it these days, but it's also been done so many times that if you play it straight it's going to feel awfully by-the-numbers to much of your fanbase. This is not to say there's no life left in the idea; for all that I bitch about Naruto lately Kishimoto did bring a host of neat new ideas to the table, expanding the uses of chakra to everything from walking up walls or on water to summoning giant frogs to making ninja medics one of the terrifyingly dangerous specialities in existence. It's always refreshing to find a story that bothers to bring a few unusual twists to the formula.
In the case of One Piece, the biggest twist may be just how long it takes to come up. This isn't Dragonball, which meandered around for years before reaching the parts of the story most of us remember it for now. In One Piece, what initially defined how dangerous you were was your Devil Fruit ability – and while we've always had plenty of badass normals around to remind us that's not all that counts, Luffy's first major power up (when it finally happens somewhere around episode 300) is simply a new way of exploiting his Gomu Gomu powers that he came up with on his own between scenes. On the whole we've spent much longer learning about things like dials or rokushiki or thanking our lucky stars that Crocodile and Enel had easily exploitable weaknesses. Zoro and Sanji, meanwhile, stick to steadily improving their skills on their own steam.
Another think I've enjoyed about Oda's approach is how subtle he's been about introducing it. In typical One Piece style we saw it used as far back as chapter 1 without being given the first idea how Shanks just did that thing he did. Excluding the occasional name-drop, we don't see it again properly until after Enies Lobby, and after that we have the whole of Thriller Bark to get through before it finally starts building into a real plot point. We get our first proper look at it in action on Shabondy Archipelago, but even as it becomes more and more obvious to both us and the supporting cast that Luffy's hit the motherload, we still don't get The Lecture until right before the timeskip over a hundred episodes later (in fact the anime has postponed this even further, likely to be covered in flashback any week now). Even so, there's more than enough information implicit in what characters in the know are saying about it for the audience to put the main gist together: Luffy is in the process of unlocking one almighty hell of a mysterious power.
But I think what I've enjoyed most about the Haki subplot is the effects Oda ascribes to his Ki-substitute. You've got your three varieties: there's Kenbunshoku, which lets you 'sense' other living things and read their attacks before they hit (though I note it also seems to work just fine at letting one avoid cyborg lasers and boomeranging projectiles thrown from implausibly long distances). Your 'standard' power-up effects come mostly from Busoushoku, which allows for massively improved attack power and defence, and - more to the point - lets you punch logias without having to mess around hunting for a usefully exploitable weakness. Like all other logia weaknesses short of clapping the user in seastone, however, it's not an Instant-Win button, merely a relatively effective way to level the playing field. But the one that really defines the concept for me would have to be Haoshoku, which is the much rarer third variety that lets the wielder KO anything up to a veritable army of much weaker opponents by doing no more than, as best I can gather, impressing on everyone in range just exactly how hopelessly outclassed they are. No firey auras or fireballs anywhere to be seen sight, but it's still a stunning visual effect. Curiously, though the show has yet to address it out loud, this would also logically make the rarest and most mythologised form of Haki the least useful against powerful enemies. Actually, that may be one of the reasons it feels so original.
There's still a few details that could use a bit more explanation beyond 'because [plot reasons]'. Haki use does carve itself out a reasonably distinct niche from the earlier introduced Rokushiki techniques, which appear to be primarily based on speed, but one is left to mostly come up with one's own explanation for why CP9 would focus on Rokushiki alone (If I had to guess I'd probably have to go with assuming that being able to move at Soru speeds and walk on air are more useful for espionage and the rest of the techniques are related in some manner that makes them easier to learn.) If Ace had Haoshoku potential from the age of ten and all the rest of Whitebeard's division commanders looked to be well versed in Haki useage, why don't we ever see any evidence he'd learnt to use it himself in adulthood, even when it might have, oh, saved his life? Why bother to tell us Hancock has Haoshoku Haki when as far as I recall we've never once seen her use it? Are we supposed to interpret that little moment from Shabondy as evidence even Zoro has Haoshoku Haki, or was that a minor continuity snafu from before the writers had the mechanics properly worked out yet? And as much as I like how all this has introduced without resorting to infodumps, when exactly did everyone else on the crew become so familiar with the subject they instantly recognise what Luffy was doing, and when did Luffy find out Zoro and Sanji have mastered the (presumably) common forms when we've yet to see any discussion or on-screen evidence of it? Most of this is probably not worth losing sleep over, but I hope some at least will get explained in time.
Nitpicks aside, the internal logic is mostly fairly solid, and I have to give Oda credit for navigating his way through a plotline that so conveniently reveals Luffy as one of the 'chosen ones' without pinballing us into every one of the usual tired clichies on the way down.
On the subject of non-ranking female characters
I've talked a lot already about how One Piece treats it's female cast, because there's a lot to be said for it on in that area even if you do count a lot of fanservice and a more sketchy track record from the post-Sabondy era. One remaining detail that I never quite found space to bring up before despite how it's been bugging me on and off for ages is this: I'd really like to see just a few more incidental female marines and pirates in the crowd scenes. We've always had a smattering of them in key roles - everything from Nami and Robin to the likes of Lola, Hina, one of the marine giants and two of the New World captains who joined Whitebeard's assult on Marineford. As soon as you drop below officer ranks, however, suddenly the crowd thins out to zero. Why?
One can easily come up with fanon explanations - Whitebeard's 'family' did seem like it a bit of a boys-club, and maybe marines don't let women enlist at recruit level, sending them straight to officer's college or nothing. But even then why don't we see any other women in Lola's crew, or Bonny's, or Dadan's bandits? There were more okama in Ivankov's retinue than there were women on both sides at Marineford, how does that make sense?
The obvious answer is that it's when characters cease to be important enough to have names that the gender variety dries up. Extras may get a line or two, but on the whole their purpose is to be canon fodder, and thus there's arguably reason to limit the individuality of the masses, if only because it makes animation easier and the audience feel less sorry for them. At its roots though, I suspect the truth may be that people are much more comfortable with a man who shows up only to be punched out of sight than they would be with women getting the same treatment, even if those women are trained military personnel. All the same, I feel this is really no excuse for why we couldn't have the occasional female marine or pirate in a bar scene or reporting from look out or any of the myriad incidental roles that don't involve winding up up close and personal with someone else's fists.
I'm not bothered by girls being a minority in most pirate or marine crews. It'd just be nice to get the occasional nod that there's a role for us somewhere between "amazing enough to be leading the show" and "non-existant".
Cover Arcs
While I'd have to admit the minor hypocrisy of me voicing any further complaints about filler after that Korra post, it strikes me as a real wasted opportunity that One Piece never adapted a few more of the cover arcs for the screen. In the space of no more than a handful of still-frames, Oda lays out the general shape of what could have been whole mini-arcs in some of his cover pages. Some, granted, were probably best abandonned - I'd imagine the portion of the audience who really wanted to know what happened to the likes of Wapol or Enel after losing to Luffy would be relatively minor. But conversely, a number of the cover arcs do end up mattering to the main plot in some small way, such as the one where Hatchan meets Keimei, or the one which explained how Fullbody and Jango ended up working together and introduced Hina, or the one where Ace finds his key lead on Blackbeard (not to mention an excuse to give Ace more episodes, nuff said). It's for good reason we had a couple of episodes of Helmeppo and Coby joining the marines - quite apart from setting them up for later appearances, we met Garp for the first time there too. Same goes for the Straw Hat separation arc, which pulled of a suprisingly successful job of expanding one or two cover images per character into a whole episode's worth of material. Love, hate or merely tollerate the anime filler arcs - not to mention the acres of dead space inserted by the animators to pad out the action scenes - there's nothing that really drives home the futility of it all like realising that Oda has just about handed them the outlines for a whole catalogue of stories they could have used instead.
The Supporting Cast
So, broadly speaking, you can split OP's huge and sprawling cast into your main characters (the Straw Hats), your irregular recurring cast (mostly Marines, plus a few bad guys and some miscellaneous extras like Ace and Shanks), and your location-specific cast, consisting of locals and villains from whatever island we're on today. What keeps striking me about the location-specific portion just about every time the Straw Hats arrive somewhere new is that in any other series, these people would be supporting cast. Make no mistake, there are some great characters in this category - people like Zeff, Kureha, Kokoro and Chimney and the rest of the faces from Water 7, even the likes of Perona, Keimei or Reileigh and Shaki. Thing is, most writers, having put that much effort into creating them, wouldn't be nearly so willing to leave them behind, and would keep them around until they'd run their best material into the ground. One Piece, of course, is all about the journey, so it makes sense that we'll regularly leave people behind. But rather than populate each new location solely with disposable stock characters and obligatory villains, time and again we keep meeting all these people who I would happily have seen added to the regular cast. And then we move on.
Much as I miss some of those old faces, I think it's very much to Oda's credit that he's willing to let those characters go. It means the dynamic in the recurring cast keeps changing, and supporting members are cycled out long before they go stale. But arguably it's more realistic to talk about about how amazing it is that Oda's willing and able to go on creating so many weird and wonderful new characters to populate out each new location, and put so much life into them that you can so easily picture them as regulars rather than short-term extras. About the only other writer I can think of who does anything like it is Terry Pratchett, and that's a comparison anyone ought to be proud of.
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no subject
Date: 2012-11-05 12:21 pm (UTC)You raise great questions about haki! True, presumably if Ace had known Armament Haki he could have shielded Luffy from Akainu's punch without getting smashed through himself. Seems like a plot hole, really.
when did Luffy find out Zoro and Sanji have mastered the (presumably) common forms when we've yet to see any discussion or on-screen evidence of it?¨
Perhaps someone well-trained in haki in general and Observation Haki in particular becomes able to sense if people around him can use haki too - especially if it's people they know well? If so, that could explain why the C.P. 9 don't learn haki, as that would make it harder for them to be inobtrusive during missions.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-07 04:45 am (UTC)If you poke around the One Piece tag, you may also find a recent post with some details from a Q&A session with Nami's voice actor I got to attend recently, plus cosplay pics, if that would be at all of interest to you. ;)
I completely agree about the sad lack of background female pirates, Marines, etc. I tend to scan crowd pictures hopefully in vain as well. :(
It's only more frustrating because I went back through some of the Jaya episodes more recently and realised there were three girls on Bellamy's crew! So it's only more recently that the numbers have dried up, which is a rather depressing trend. Does not help that my patience with all Sanji's bullshit in recent chapters is wearing so very thin.
It's got to the point with me lately where I just about cheered when, during a completely unrelated show, I saw one of the heros punch out a (much weaker but definitely evil) minor female villain in one hit without a second thought. It is not a terribly healthy sign when 'female =/= so-inherently-fragile-we-must-protect-them-from-all-possible-damage' pings with me as a notably feminist statement, and yet...
You raise great questions about haki! True, presumably if Ace had known Armament Haki he could have shielded Luffy from Akainu's punch without getting smashed through himself. Seems like a plot hole, really.
I wouldn't go quite so far as to call it a plot hole, since we've got no indication Ace did know how to use Armament Haki, and there's probably some reason to assume he's so used to relying on his logia powers to do the same job that pulling out a defensive barrier strong enough to stop Akainu on the spur of the moment wouldn't have come naturally to him. But given how many of Whitebeard's other crew members were skilled with it - and how he must have known it was his own greatest vulnerability - it seems like a fairly significant omission that it's never been brought up. And that's without even getting into how having Haoshoku Haki could have changed his prospects. I would also really like to know whether a Devil Fruit-user could still use Haki while clamped in seastone, or whether it weakens them too much for that, but that's a whole other subject.
Perhaps someone well-trained in haki in general and Observation Haki in particular becomes able to sense if people around him can use haki too - especially if it's people they know well?
Now that you mention it, there has been some canonical support for that - I'm sure I remember Blackbeard's remarking on Luffy's Haki having increased since they last met when they ran into each other in Impel Down. But Luffy didn't have the first idea how to actually use Observation or Armament Haki at that point, so whatever one can detect about other people clearly has more to do with natural capacity than whether they've learned to utilise it. How Luffy could be so sure Zoro and Sanji had been trained in using it is what bothers me - potential for and competence with are very different things.
Above all, it was a strange way to work in a revelation that important. We don't see them using it, they don't tell us they can - we see a third person telling a fourth about it. And we don't even know how the third one found out. (Also, it's Luffy, and as much as I love the guy, he's never been the sharpest knife in the drawer.)