Well, effectively it's the threshold to the New World - they're actually able to navigate it now, as opposed to being almost wiped out by one Kumadroid.
So it's 'new' to them in the sense of 'no longer being way out of their league'.
Well, effectively it's the threshold to the New World - they're actually able to navigate it now, as opposed to being almost wiped out by one Kumadroid.
So it's 'new' to them in the sense of 'no longer being way out of their league'.
One Piece is probably attuned to certain people - Will of D. holders, I'm guessing - and the WG can't get to it since their D. guys (Garp and Saulo, the only ones I know of at least) weren't obedient enough to get it for them.
Roger left it there to keep it safe; Luffy will get to it and the WG will try to seize him to control it by proxy. Dragon'll show up and try to get it since he's finally got enough Revolutionaries to make a play for the throne, and Luffy'll realize his dad is also a bad dude who shouldn't have it. He will then use One Piece to MAGICALLY FIX EVERYTHING - since at heart this is an optimistic series. Likely he will seem to die in the act but really head off to adventures, finally passing his Straw Hat on to someone else.
Vague on what EXACTLY One Piece is - weapon? Databank? - but I'd put a few bucks on that broad structure for the final act.
@JERK:
Are you seriously suggesting the only difference is Oda doesn't have the time to make something as insanely complex as Watchmen? Watchmen is a super human feat, don't even think of watering it down to being easy.
Wow - I'm just saying he never tried. It's impossible to judge what he would do given carte blanche to make a 12-chapter comic devoid of commercial pressure to make the story last for years. Equally, we can't know how good Watchmen would have been if it had been drawn out for 15 years. I only meant to draw attention to the different intentions of the artists - not to make theoretical comparisons over whether Oda could do Watchmen - or, for that matter, if Moore could do One Piece. Arguably Promethea, Tom Strong, etc. show you what happens when he keeps a story going too long. (Prepared for flames re: above, but I think his best stuff - V for Vendetta, Top 10, Watchmen, his D.C. oneshots - benefit a lot from being concise.
@JERK:
Either you never read Watchmen or at least 75% of it went over your head. It's a massive mosaic of imagery, thematics, and comics only techniques.
No need to be offensive. If you want to PM and grill me I think you'll find I got the book pretty well. I was merely arguing by analogy - saying that Moore got to work really hard on one type of work and Oda got to work really hard on another, and that they have different generic demands to consider - as, BY ANALOGY, a TV writer has different generic demands to consider than does a film writer. Do you see my point?
@JERK:
I doubt it. Alan Moore is a Frank Zappa type, a genius dictator.
Granted he knows what he wants - but there's a million years in between his descriptions and the finished product, and Gibbons made a fair few positive changes to the design, just look at Moore's original pitch (in the notes for some editions). He's always the first to admit that he works with artists who will collaborate well with him and complete his vision. Look at From Hell (arguably his most satisfying book for me) - he went in an entirely different artistic direction, Eddie Campbell and he fought like dogs over every page and the result was brilliant. I think the 'lone creator deity' myth doesn't really fly in comics unless you do the art yourself - these guys are incredibly talented and, from what I've heard in interviews, reeeeeally bristle at the idea that they're 'hired illustrators'.
Anyway - this is sooooo off topic I guess. (^_^). One Piece is serious enough for me. As is Watchmen. I read them when in different moods. Isn't life grand?
They're made of Ivankov. S/he's stuck in Big Mum's Candy Factory running on a treadmill and they're freezing his/her sweat into pills. S/he looks so good now that s/he doesn't care. (^_^)
On some level I guiltily hope that the first arc is going to be like the intro arc for a new group in a battle manga, a series of effortless victories/surprise OHKO's. Especially Usopp - stopping avalanches or no, he still seems a bit of a crybaby thus far and I'd love to see some of that Batman spirit that let him make Luffy get semi-serious. (Also more on Sogeking now being his mentally ill alternate persona!)
Oda is too far in to have the arc be this obvious I think - it's basically:
a) Oda gives a redemption point (but NOT a 'Join the crew!' chance) to Hodi et al. They're just freedom fighters in their way!
If yes, HUZZAH!
If no, go to b)
b) Oda has someone SUPER-SERIAL turn out to be involved (Yonkou/WG/Shichibukai, basically) and masterminding this all for ULTERIOR MOTIVES.
If yes, HUZZAH!
If no, WTF Arlong Park II - but probably go to c)
c) We expect the fights to be involved but the new Strawhat powers just massacre everyone.
OR
d) It's a colossal disappointment.
OR
e) Oda proves once again he's much smarter than me. :P
Yeah, regarding how 'strong' or 'weak' the New Fishman Pirates turn out to be, we've already seen that swordsman octopus underling block a Jet Pistol without breaking a sweat - and if Luffy didn't happen to have magic poison resistance to everything (sweet! Thanks Ivankov!) he'd be dead by coming into contact.
I figure the NFP crew can take our heroes (especially those outside the Monster Trio) to the brink if they're drugged up, seeing as a lieutenant can block a non-trivial shot from the Strawhats' main nuke. I really hope we get an updated version of Usopp's "Fire! - OMG RUN - Fire!" strategy.
Luffy probably won't take pills deliberately since I expect they'll turn out to be addictive or otherwise Very Bad News; he tends to react badly to people 'cheating' in brawls. Thinking they're candy or being fed them by nasty sorts entirely possible.
Also - re: Fishman Island being safe? Oda's had characters affirm repeatedly that it's not, and had them make it clear they need a Yonkou patron. At the very least I'd guarantee that the WG can use its Vegapunk tech to get Admirals etc. down there with some alacrity in a crisis.
Let me just say - I'd really like to see a Crew Meeting at some point soon where they lay out where they are, where they're going, what immediate goals they have, etc. For example - do they feel like they need to fix every problem on the Grand Line? Assumably a lot of them, but Robin now knows a lot of bad WG stuff if she's been hanging with the Revolutionaries for 2 years - any interest in that? Shall revenge against Akainu et. al be a priority? An 'if we get a chance'? A non-concern? I just feel like they've been running to get here so long that arriving is a good time to stop for a second and work out what EXACTLY they intend to do re: the New World.
Coming in late on the Watchmen comparison - Moore got to plot out one, tightly-packed story with a definite ending. And he didn't have to do the art. Or come up with 16+ pages a week with no real sense of when he can quit. The demands that puts on a narrative are incomparable - it's like asking someone to make a whole TV series as consistently amazingly intense as a 90-minute movie. Different horses for different courses.
Speaking more broadly? There are series that do any element of shonen better - better fights, more complex plots, nicer art - but they don't last like this does, and this in aggregate is like a solid Top 5 in most categories I can think of, and almost certainly it's the funniest mainstream manga I can recall when it's at it's best. (Chopper's greatest hits are EPIC.) It's both inherently interesting and basically wholesome - and be honest, how crap should a series about a rubber pirate be?
As Steven King says of his own (sometimes excellent) genre fiction, "I make salami. I think it's damn good salami - perhaps the best available - but it's salami." This is the best salami money can buy. You could write a poem about how good the salami is. It doesn't need to be a five-course meal steeped in BIG - COMPLEX - IDEAS to be one damn sight more useful.
I mean seriously - collected One Piece, or collected Henry James. Which do you take to the desert island?
I really am starting to like the 'Neptune Bad' theory - maybe he won't be the big bad in terms of 'one fought', but in terms of 'morally evil' - i.e. Spandam is really the main antagonist of Enies Lobby, behind all the plotting, ongoing symbol of the Ohara Buster Call, Lucci's primarily his psychotic bodyguard.
Straw Hats fighting New Fishmen is gonna happen since that many 'Box-Intros' of names on a posse of strong-looking guys is a clear 'henchmen! to be beaten!' sign. I really like the idea, though, that they end up reconciling or seeing the Fishmen's point of view, even showing them that humans aren't all bad.
I'm currently…well, hoping (theorizing a little) that Van Dekken's some kinda resistance fighter, or at least complicated, and that Neptune is authoritarian as anything and/or co-opted by the drug suppliers. A scenario where the villain mob to be beaten undergoes a Franky Family-style moral side-change would be wicked fun. AND avoid all the well-pointed-out "Boo, Arlong Pirates w. drugs YAWN" possibilities inherent in the concept as currently laid out.
I think that it's way too early to meet Big Mom; sure she's not likely to be the strongest of the Yonkou (with Shanks around) but it's down to her, Kaidou, Shanks, Blackbeard, Sengoku/Garp(?) and the Admirals as far as the known A+-listers go.
IF we meet her it's likely to be a modified Mihawk intro - lots of
Luffy: "Wow, granny, you're super strong!"
Nami/Usopp: "STOP OFFENDING HER!"
Big Mom: "Kekeke...still standing after that? That red-haired idiot wasn't wrong about you..." etc. (standard Shonen 'one-day-but-not-yet' stuff.)
Well, I hope he just wanted to take those drugs for fun this time - since otherwise Hodi Jones (one of the big bads for the arc, most likely, though I DEFINITELY expect a Face-Heel turn from the Dragon Palace) just needed to go to 3-4 pills, or 8x-16x base strength, to beat up a ship that looked not especially dissimilar to one that ZORO CUT IN HALF WHILE WAKING UP several chapters ago.
Cool designs, but as "Ooh I'm badass" intros go, comparing it to "EL THOR!" or Leopard-Lucci perhaps shows it not doing so hot in comparison? Iono.
(Also I really enjoy that Starfish. Every arc needs some of that Buggy-esque energy (I keep expecting him to call his moves 'flashy') to avoid excess SUPER-SERIAL PLOT too soon.
Yeah but 'ambition' doesn't have to mean 'personal advancement'. He had a huge attachment to protecting Luffy, just like he had a huge attachment to seeing Whitebeard take over as Pirate King. Also if Whitebeard thought Ace was a good candidate for Pirate King himself, it means he must have had at least some Haki or a) Whitebeard's a total idiot and bad judge of character or b) He was always going to have Haki people around to defend him or else the first person with a really strong Conqueror Haki would have the pirate king foaming at the mouth on the ground. Both seem like silly options.
Also, since most top-tier people we're meeting now have it as a matter of course, it seems to follow that no-one gets to be a New World pirate captain and then a Whitebeard Division Commander without at least a fairly-well developed Haki. To keep harping on the same joke: COBY has Haki. Don't tell me you think the son of Gol D. Roger and adopted heir of Whitebeard, a "Will of D." bearer, has less power and self-belief than that.
Either way. I totally agree with you that this is cartoon physics and that at a certain point we can't really know what would happen when a man made of lava punches a man made of fire while attacking a man made of rubber. Let's not even get into "how does Zoro have any organs left after the Mihawk fight alone" or "Where do Nami's kidneys go in her torso" or "Why do clothes stretch for DF size changes but rip from damage".
As such, I think it's unfair to provide logical reasons for why Ace was 'stupid' to sacrifice himself like he did when we will never ever have quantifiable data about his options unless Oda tells us so in the story. Maybe Luffy's often-bruited destiny is a real force that actively alters events to preserve his ambition, and maybe it just used Ace as a convenient human shield/distraction without his consent, we don't know how any of this works until the next text-heavy exposition chapter. Maybe Vegapunk's from the lost civilization, maybe Blackbeard's an alien, the nice thing about the series is that it's so goofily slapstick in its logic that it can fit all the weird little ideas that wouldn't make sense in a more serious work (I don't care, Sanji trying to die as he lived - a total clown regarding women - is like Greek tragedy in its ridiculous symmetry.)
I think the most disappointing thing about the manga thus far has been the inexplicable power ranges at various levels:
-no F'ing way Moria should have once been Yonkou-class, but now (without zombies) weaker than the pre-skip SH crew. Zoro says it's a matter of time rather than power for them to kick his ass and I believe him; did his 'even fight' with Kaidou leave him crippled or something? He already had neck stitches before that fight.
-no way, no offense to Crocodile, does he even vaguely match up to Boa, Doflamingo or Kuma…or assumably Mihawk (who keeps standing up to heavyweights without really using any special techniques but is frustratingly difficult for the scouter to fully analyze); 70 mill bounties in with 320 mill bounties? It seems like everybody who gets to Shabondy ends up stronger/more notorious...none feel like a sweet letter of marque from the WG?
etc. - maybe it's just since a) not much power-level-numbering (thank god Douriki didn't stick around) is a good thing but tends to vagueness and b) a lot of new super-elites all got intro'ed at once and no-one's really made a big chart of who ranks where (what is a Floor Six Impel Down prisoner relative to a Vice-Admiral, etc.).
I assume it'll sort out in time - but sometimes it seems like every group has a token weakling to get the SH's through their teething stage at higher tiers - admittedly shounen bread'n'butter but at times illogically done. Weaker CP9s with 3 supermen made sense (800 douriki = 80 armed soldiers, how strong do most missions need you to be?) but if the Shichibukai are meant to counterbalance the Navy and Yonkou, they should all at least be on the same planet as the admirals and Shanks/WB types.