Posts made by Icefae

MAGA indeed… this doesn't surprise anyone but it's depressing to see nonetheless. A part of me is still expecting democrats to somehow lose in November, in which case I will probably just check out of all American politics forever for my own sanity.

My libtard cuck shill tears aside, the allegations will further empower the left to vote in November, but the whole experience gives Republicans a platform to preach that "liberals can dig up anything that happened in your past and try to defame you, nothing is safe, etc", effectively making this whole thing an "issue of privacy". And there's a good chance that like everything else, the very gullible republican voters will actually believe that.

I think some of you guys are being a bit harsh on the chapter, and that feels wild coming from me. This was frankly the first chapter with a Wano character whose design I genuinely liked. The time travel bit is also the only thing that has genuinely interested me since the Reverie. It doesn't seem far fetched at all that a devil fruit might give someone time manipulation at a seriously great cost. Let's not forget that Law can die to make a person dead ass immortal. I don't expect that Oda will get deeply into the time travel mechanics and luckily will keep it simple enough to avoid spoilers. All the same, when you look at One Piece as a whole, I think it's pretty cool that we encountered something this bizarre.

Basically, I don't have great expectations for how it works in the arc itself, but I do like that One Piece's world is still growing in every which way it wants. That's just neat to me.

@Count:

And Oda might even make an exception to kill him off since he actually wants to die.

Because it's that classic forum medium, I can't tell if this is meant to be tongue in cheek, but it got me thinking. It's seriously unlikely to me that Oda would introduce a suicidal character and then have them successfully kill themselves which does positive things for the narrative. I might be wrong though, because Oda bungled the shit out of parental abuse in the last arc, but suicide might be a rougher topic in Japan specifically. Either way, Oda might want to tread lightly in that shorthand, because kids do read One Piece

If anything, Kaidou being suicidal makes him more likely to survive than someone with telling deathflags like Blackbeard or even Shanks. I don't know enough about Kaidou's personality yet, but that idealogical supplanting is usually core to "defeat" in One Piece. That could potentially foreshadow Kaidou eventually getting a new lease on life, which could be pretty powerful.

I like this chapter a lot. Um, I'm a little late to point this out, but does anyone else think that it's a bit contrived that Zoro happens to be here? I'm wishing they pulled a less transparent and distracting narrative back flip to put Zoro back into the story as soon as possible.

So the expansion is out. It has some really nice zones and music but the story and dialogue are completely abysmal. The class design is simpler than it's ever been and I'm not sure I like the changes - what with the classes just being barely more robust than a Heroes of the Storm or Overwatch character. I'm all for simple gameplay, but usually there are some other mechanics that supplement some kind of long term interest.

At the end of the day, they do a pretty good job at making a 15 year old game not look awful. I'm just not sure what the long term plan is, here.

@Sereques:

I'm beginning to find Sanji's gag very boring.

Lol same. Such a loud asshole.

I appreciate their crash landing in Wano. Ship is like half destroyed and laying sidewise on a coast. Really shows how screwed they'd be without Franky.

I'm kinda bothered by how they glossed over the entire thing with Greg in just one line. I wanted a real reaction from him.

Aside from that, episode was fine. Amethyst MVP yet again, surprising no one.

@Robby:

If Steven was pulling in ratings like that it'd absolutely be renewed without question and we'd be getting constant marathons and new episodes every week.

I do think that the show would have consistently pulled better numbers if it had better scheduling and marketing. I think the SU promos are so off about the nature of the show - like there's this enormous disconnect between the drama of SU and the wacky "it's just a cartoon who fucking cares" vibe of CN marketing. Your post got me thinking about The Last Airbender, a show more similar to Steven Universe than Regular Show or even Adventure Time imo. TLA didn't follow the 11 minute format and it was actually correctly marketed as a family comedy that actually leaned mostly on its dramatic storytelling. Bismuth is still the only 22 minute episode to my knowledge and that's easily in the top 10.

Well, I'm still holding out hope that the crew can wrap things up in a deserving way. Maybe this is just the bitter reality of western animation that I need to swallow.

–- Update From New Post Merge ---

@Cyclone_Baroness:

I hate that it's so hard to even watch an episode. Hulu doesn't have season 5. Daily motion has these site links I don't fully trust. YouTube has annoying people streaming but talking over dialog. Ugh. I just wanna watch episode 20 lol.

If you don't mind associating with 4chan degenerates, I usually download the HQ files off Mega through https://sug.rocks/dl.html.

@Robby:

Adventure Time was the channel's biggest hit and while it was allowed to run 10 seasons, some of them exceptionally long, even it is getting screwed in its final season with random airings of blocks and little to no promotion, and constant hiatuses just to push out a batch of episodes.

And Regular Show we didn't know was ending until about a week before it happened. And though a different channel, Gravity Falls was constantly screwed too and similarly, didn't announce its end until the last minute.
See also how Korra got screwed around with Nick not ordering seasons until after they had finished a year, not advertising, pulling the show and only airing it digitially, pulling an episode's budget at the end of production forcing a clip show…. or when ABC cancelled Reboot and it had to keep going in Canada to get to its amazing thired season and then was cancelled again before finishing season 4...it happens all the time.
See also shows cancelled before they were ready to end and had a cliffhanger finale, like Sonic SatAm or Spectacular Spiderman or Teen Titans, or shows that were straight up only half done like Pirates of Darkwater or new Thundercats... or the way shows like Samurai Jack or Mysteries Inc had their final episodes held and stretched over ridiculously lengthy ammounts of time. Hell, Calamity Jane only ever aired its first three of thirteen episodes.

It's not just a Steven Universe problem, or even just a Cartoon Network problem. Animated shows get treated like crap all the time, because they take so long to produce and get greenlit so far in advance, it's possible for new execs to come along and completely hate them by the time they ever even start airing.

As for the 11 minute format? That format is fine, in theory. It forces you to cut all the fat and get right to it. In theory, the advantage of it is you can take an old 26 episode budget and get 52 episodes out of it, and so air a new episode every week all year. And in theory that's great and it was fantastic when Adventure Time basically did that model.
It's not so great when they instead decided to have multi-month gaps and then just binge 5-8 episodes in a week and then go to another drought, it completely defeats the purpose of the format.

What a huge bummer. SU is the only CN/Disney show that I ever got into but I'm surprised that it's so common.

This might not be an apt comparison, but adult animated shows get wildly different treatment. The Simpsons, Family Guy, Bob's Burgers (feels kinda wrong to lump that one in alongside but whatever) and Rick and Morty keep season contracts and have typical off seasons. The one exception is Rick and Morty which takes a long time to produce but Dan Harmon recently played hardball with the network and got them to agree to an "all or nothing" four season order. I'm not crazy about Rick and Morty on the whole but you gotta respect how Harmon went to bat for the series longevity.

So, even though my understanding of this is narrow, I still see that and then look at the crewniverse and wonder why they seem to let the show suffer as much as it does. Maybe not nowadays, but there really was a time a couple seasons ago that Sugar could have leveraged for a similar deal that fixed the formatting/scheduling issues and then some. I don't get the impression that crewniverse hates working with CN or anything, but they must have been reading the majority of the fanbase that has always been bothered by this and they've never really spoken up or been transparent about it. I'm really just trying to wrap my brain around the whole thing.

@Ubiq:

The Upfront for this year specifically said the show had three story arcs; several other shows either specifically mentioned new seasons being greenlit or airing through 2019 with the other shows not getting such notices being ones that we already knew were cancelled like Clarence.

From what we've seen, Cartoon Network really doesn't want to say that the show has been cancelled because it's critically well-liked and solid for merchandising but has little to no interest in continuing it beyond the previous seasons. That could be wrong and they're just being super secretive for some reason instead of announcing a new episode order but I see no upside for that at all.

God dude. I assumed the crew was still making episodes for the show, which would at least imply there are episodes that go beyond the next 8 or so that we know the titles for.

I'm really exhausted at this point as a SU fan since season 1. The constant hiatuses, leaks, and total lack of legit information. I still can't even buy the seasons on fuckin blu-ray. I really wondered for the longest time if CN secretly hated the show and then assumed that the crew themselves called the shots and wanted to produce it at their own pace. Now I kinda wish whoever was in charge kept a much tighter leash on the whole thing.

I would have rather gotten 5 coherent seasons rather than going months and months not sure if the show is going to end in 2019. I really do like the feeling that there will a new episode to watch tomorrow. While we're on this topic, the 11 minute format is such a insane hindrance. I can't help but imagine a different timeline where the show was canceled but then picked up by Netflix/Hulu/whatever and gave them free reign to make the episodes as long as they needed to be, tell the stories they wanted to tell, and was always giving us a notion of when the show would be coming back.

I know I'm not breaking new ground here, but the whole thing is depressing. If they really have to cut corners to wrap up a clean ending, it's going to bug me forever.

@Count:

Think of the Golden Age as one super longass dark and gritty One Piece flashback focused on Guts' origins, and that only now is the story truly starting in the present day status-quo where Guts is trying to become the Pirate King find a way to kill Griffith. It hones in on his vengeance not just for superficial cool action, but to demonstrate how his lone wolf demon hunter obsession arguably makes him look more like a selfish beast than the actual demons he kills. It provides a premise for meaningful progress from this unhealthy lifestyle fueled by the Eclipse's trauma afterwards, where he's trying to erase/escape from that pain rather than cope with it while supporting the people he cares about like Casca.

Do you remember when Guts was at the lowest point of his life where he only lived for survival and killing after killing Gambino but before meeting the Band of the Hawk? How he only lived off of accepting random bounties to kill people for cash? He's basically bacl at that low point. And like back then, he needs to see the consequences of his selfishness and meet new allies to help pull him out of that hole again. Remind him that there's more to living life than just fighting and sleeping.

Give the series more time to reestablish itself than only a measly five-six chapters after the less than 100 chapter long Golden Age arc. The short arc you're reading right now is meant to be similar to the very first arc right before the Golden Age to reestablish Guts' state of mind post-Eclipse, which you most likely totally forgot about (hence why Miura wanted to remind us) after all of the Elf demon stuff is done, then the series' themes and gradually growing cast/worldbuilding start to get rolling dynamically again.

Yeah I actually appreciated the feeling that everything up to this point was a super long flashback. Alright, that's cool then. I don't think I was actually going to drop the series or anything, but I wanted to vent the current frustration that I was having with it. The earlier chapters focused a lot on ambition, personal motivation, self-preservation, self-worth, and how different dreams could detract or even snuff out other's. Casca's character (and Griffith's too, I'm guessing) arc are stuck in limbo… I think it's important for the manga to portray where Guts is right now as not the right road, but it has been leaning heavily on some manga tropes that seem to celebrate his new "badass" direction as a character (gun hand, new sword/outfit, new thirst for blood) when it's a severe backpedal from where he was prior. I appreciate the response.

@Monkey:

how do you expect people to have this conversation with you when the people itt are up to date. You're talking like you're anywhere near caught up.

lol I don't mean to sound like I'm caught up. I'm obviously not even 1/3rd through the story - but this is a Berserk discussion thread and I just got finished with the first major arc so I'm here to discuss it. I could rush to the very end and discuss it but that would frankly be a big disservice to me as the reader.

I thought season 6 had already been confirmed? Regardless, the showrunners have said there is loads more story to tell, so I'm not really feeling the "endgame" vibe. I think 2 more seasons after this is enough time to make a satisfying conclusion, maybe 3 if they decide to go even bigger.

I'm curious to know when you all feel this story loses its stride. I've spent the last couple days reading it and I have mixed feelings. I'm on chapter 100, and he's lost me. I assume this was around the point when people started to lose interest (I've read online that the introduction of the monsters was really when it started to fumble).

I think so far the peak of the writing was in Guts and Casca's love making scene. It's definitely a depiction of sex I rarely see explored, and it was really poignant to have two characters with a history of sexual abuse redefine sex for themselves. These characters always had really great chemistry in my opinion and those couple of chapters were just beautiful. There's some really stand out imagery and shot composition too in those early chapters, but it seems to be shelved for now in favor of showing cool demons and action panels. I'm not at all interested in the action scenes, and I was really surprised by this. For such a renown action manga, I really do think the action is just totally boring to read. I felt that when the monsters were being introduced, they would frequently show up simply to stall character moments. I'm not the kind of guy who is blown away by intricate details in drawing. There seems to be a lot of thought put into the designs of these demonic characters but 99% of them are totally derivative and I can't care about them. The enormous panels showing sweeping vistas of "gross demon shit" is really lost on me. Maybe if it were a bit more subtle?

The most frustrated I'd been with the story was Guts fighting Rapeguy Horseface in the woods. Those were tremendously boring chapters, I hated the gratuitous Casca fan service, I hated that Casca in general just seemed to turn from "badass sword wizard leader" to "damsel in distress" on a dime, and the fight itself was just super lackluster. It was getting increasingly hard for me to care about the characters the more absurd the action got, because I didn't get the impression that it was tongue in cheek and it wasn't particularly fun to read. All the talk of dreams and ambition really get undercut by these JoJo levels of insanity sequences and the manga just hits this discordant note. Post Eclipse, I have no idea what the characters are fighting for anymore. I don't know why I should care at all.

I'm really bitter about the whole thing. What happened in the Eclipse was interesting but I really can't make out a coherent narrative. It's not a total mess, but it's messy. Should I even bother with the manga anymore or is it only going to get worse from here on out?

I agree that the pacing was a bit rushed. I really wish the show would ditch the short episode format because it's evolved so far past that. Nonetheless this provides some much needed context and there were some really great scenes.

I can't wait for tomorrow.

For anyone interested, I was compelled to color that last page.

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High res link.
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@Kaworu:

Okay so this basically confirms it for me. So this may have been posted but I haven't really seen it. This chapter is definitely an intentional parallel to Chapter 795 (the one where we visit Sanji's group in the middle of Dressrosa's conclusion). I was realizing there's already a bunch of similarities, then I looked at the chapter titles of both and 795 is Suicide and 909 is Seppuku.

Lol wow, that's a really nice catch.

@SuburbanErrorist:

10 to 15 year old Japanese kids aren't sweaty anime nerds that can binge watch 850 episodes.

Are you being sarcastic? That is literally the ripe age of otaku teens and they literally have all the time in the world. That is the obvious, unabashed, demographic of shonen manga.

@kmohyudin:

This, I can respect. If you feel that introducing trivia in the middle of dialogue breaks the flow of literary immersion, it's a fine argument IMO. It doesn't bother me personally, because I read it in narrators voice and I've gotten used to doing this over the years. To each their own I guess.

Right, I'm not like frothing at the mouth over it. I just think it's a totally unnecessary addition, while we're nitpicking.

A good story doesn't need fucking trivia right in the middle of a chapter. The idea is completely asanine and I can't believe people in this thread are defending it.

Imagine if A Song of Ice and Fire broke the fourth wall every couple chapters to remind us what fucking characters died in the previous book. One Piece is literally good enough that, if these people are intrigued by the conversation, they can look it up or ideally read what happened themselves.

The detour to explain Mr 3 and Buggy's power in Impel Down bugged me a lot too. It was rampant in the Reverie and it's still here. What gives Oda? There are already thorough explanations at the beginning of each manga volume.

–- Update From New Post Merge ---

Alternatively you could just allude to literally anything having to do with Whitebeard's death at the Summit War in the actual dialogue. It would literally be so fucking easy to draw people into the world rather than just explaining what happened.

@MrBits:

Has this actually been confirmed as a Zoro arc though? The only significant thing about him is that he has Shisui, but that's just one aspect of everything going on. Like calling WCI a Nami arc because she had the Vivre card.

I mean Zoro is a swordsman and they are in the land of swordsmen. Its not "Zoro centric" but Sanji barely mattered in Whole Cake past the whole business where he got his ass beat by the Vinsmokes.

By the way, WCI was totally a Nami arc. She and Brooke had insane feats of strength and cunning.

@Nilitch:

Sanji's arc: spends the whole time crying, baking cakes and stalling enemy pirates
Zoro's arc: Slashes through people who fuck up with him in the first chapter

Sanji didn't even get a W over his primary antagonists. This chapter seems like a deliberate attempt to show how WCI might have gone down differently had Zoro been there in the beginning. What in the world does Oda have against Sanji?

Thank fucking god Zoro is back

I haven't read the whole thread, but is there a concensus on the theoy that Ym could in fact be really small? We haven't seen how big they are on the throne (or how big the throne is for that matter). Perhaps the straw hat isn't giant but Ym is small?

This may sound asinine but it's possible maybe?

The fact that the Navy would just totally be okay with the princess of a kingdom at the Reverie being a sex slave really undermines the efforts of Koby, Smoker, Garp, and others who seem to think that there is a measure of decency in their ranks. So far this arc has just made me realize how beyond fucked the World Government is. No wonder seemingly half the population are pirates.

I'm a little disappointed that Lucci and Kaku make an appearance after so many years only to remind us that they are pieces of shit. I was sort of hoping that they had a little bit of development, but they seem just as cartoonishly evil if not moreso.

Let me pose this as a thought experiment: How many Fairy Tail characters have to appear in his new original work for it become a "Fairy Tail storyline?" As far as I can tell, it's already a Fairy Tail spinoff.

Huh, alright. I'll look through it today.

@Big:

Wasn't this theory pretty much disproven in this thread?

http://apforums.net/showthread.php?t=38205

I'm confused. Which posts in particular do you feel disprove the theory?

I like the idea that the Celestial Dragons intentially fractured the world. I think it's clear at this point that the final treasure and fall of the holy land will unite the four blue seas into "one piece". X marks the spot (reverse mountain), the destruction of Fishmen Isle, the surfacing of all blue, nami being able to make her map… Just, the pirate king freeing all the oceans of the world. Some of these things might not go down so cleanly but imo it's less so a matter of where the story will go but the little details like this weirdass giant hat that will take us there.

Yeah… Reverie and Mariejois. I'm amazed that you guys are even able to indulge Oda in these things. I've hated almost every romanization in this series. Arabasta, Thriller Park/Barque, Roguetown... I was even quite fond of Dogtooth but I'll stop there before I further damn myself.

--- Update From New Post Merge ---

I know this comes down to some preference, and I can't argue with what has been written in English by Oda, but like... Reverie and Barque are real words that have been butchered by someone who doesn't speak English. But we as English speakers can choose to not make the same mistake.

EDIT: I don't mean to slam people who honor Oda's writings, obviously. There's an obvious logic to going by the romanizations seen in the manga. I just want someone to understand where someone like me is coming from.

I could do without the trivia panels. New readers are completely capable of understanding the context of the scene without an entire page of text explaining what happened.

My favorite part of the chapter is actually the reveal that the moving road is being run by slaves longing for death. The nobles are so fucking despicable. I do wonder how the world will look once One Piece is found and Mary Geoise falls - there seem to be nobles here that aren't wholly corrupt and many that are personal friends of Luffy. I loved Sai's presence at this thing. He's the guy at the party who really breaks the ice.

Uh the hat thing… I'm as worried as everyone else I think. The theory I'm most comfortable with from the spoiler thread is that Joyboy had a Straw Hat of their own that Roger wore to honor them. I had always presumed that the destruction of the red line and Mary Geoise would lead to the destruction of Fishmen Isle (the people being lead to the surface by Noah's ark) and thus the world is united as "one piece". Although now that there's a new Straw Hat at Mary Geoise, it kinda feels like something else could happen

@uniaka:

It doesn't help zoro that all he cares about is swordmanship. Like even fukin Akainu has another hobby besides lava fisting pirates, he likes gardening, take away zoro's swordmanship and you got nothing. I find it ironic how people complain about germa because they are the ones that train all day and care about strength and are boring, when zoro is just like that!

And he is also the most villain like straw hat, and not the fun type like buggy or CC, more like akainu or vergo.
And growing more heads and arms and swords? that is out of the tough guy excuse, I didn't even see robin do that and she actually has a fruit that could do that.

I don't know who to quote for this big Zoro thing but I really want to chime in. The Vinsmoke comparison isn't apt because Germa possesses absolutely no moral code and actively abuses other people in horrific ways.

I'm actually someone who entered the timeskip loving Sanji and hating Zoro, but now if anything those feelings have kind of switched (although I don't hate Sanji, I just think Oda handles his character very poorly). I may be in the minority of those who like Zoro more after the timeskip, actually. It's unfair to say that all Zoro cares about is swordsmanship imo because he also genuinely cares about the strength of the crew and he obviously cares very deeply for Luffy. I might add that these aren't just empty words either - the things that he's done and said in critical moments speak for themselves. I especially like that Zoro puts aside his pride to train with Mihawk, and the fact that's all but wiped the floor with his enemies in the New World show that he took that training very seriously.

The shut eye thing intrigues me a lot. I'm not sure if anyone else brought it up, but this is potentially the most hyped powerup that we've had in the series imo. Is his eye missing or not? If not, why does he keep it closed? The common theory is that he simply refuses to open it out of shame, but that does suggest that there will be a time where he may have to open it… And what happens when he does? It may be sort of shallow battle manga stuff, but I think that particular aesthetic element really draws me to the character because there's still an air of mystery as to what he can actually accomplish. Literally even if nothing happens with his eye, I'll still love that Oda added that to his character.

I think swords are just about the lamest weapon out of all the wacky shit we've seen in One Piece but I really do look forward to a Zoro fight that really pushes him. I'll probably also add that his Mr 1 fight is probably my favorite fight in the series because it's paced expertly, doesn't overstay its welcome, and hits a real emotional high. I would like to see some Zoro characterization as well, but I don't think it's necessary.

My two cents on the guy. Of all the Straw Hats that got kinda screwed over post timeskip, I think he was spared amicably.

@BellisarioFaith:

Okay, chapter comparisons! Sorry they're a day late; I had Memorial Day plans. Quite a few in this chapter, which I guess makes sense for one that introduces lots of new characters and has tons of dialogue.

• Sakazuki is outraged at Fujitora showing his "lousy face" at a Marine base in Mangastream, but he doesn't say anything like that in Jaimini's Box (just notes that he returns so "shamelessly") or VIZ (where he calls it "slinking back here"). Also, the scanlations have him call Fujitora a "brat", while in the official translation, calls him a "boy".
• The wording of Fujitora's "infallible rhetorical weapons" (as VIZ puts it): "There are no 'Navy thresholds' here!" in MS; "This is not a Marine base." in JB; and "If you ask me, this don't count as military grounds." in VIZ. Sakazuki's reply is also worded differently in each version; in MS, he's shouting at the Marine who told him this ("That's just semantics! What kind of iron-headed dimwit are you?!"); in JB, he's yelling about Fujitora's words ("That's nothing but a ludicrous technicality! Does he think that he's some kind of whimsical monk?!"), while in VIZ he just shouts "He's just splitting hairs! That's not rhetoric, it's a brainteaser!"
• Sakazuki's question about Mariejois (that gets answered with "Admiral Ryokugyu") is also worded differently in each version. In MS, he asks who's there now, in JB he asks who else is going, and in VIZ he asks who's gone there.
• For name spellings of the newly-shown royals; VIZ uses the same spelling as JB for King Beer VI, of Roshwan Kingdom (with the princesses being called the Matryo-shesses); same kingdom spelling as JB (Tajine) but different name spelling than either version for Queen Morollon; and King Taco has his country's name actually translated, to Kingdom of the Dead. (Ham Burger and Ballywood are spelled the same as JB (name) and both scanlations (country).)
• The box that makes it clear in JB that Morgans is narrating ("This gathering is already big news!") isn't worded in a way that makes this clear in MS ("This was already quite the event.") and VIZ ("That alone made their presence noteworthy.").
• Less of a comparison and more of a punny tidbit: it made me chuckle that the word that was used in VIZ to describe the bird-like Morgans's infatuation with Shirahoshi was "twitterpated".
• Garp describes Stelly as a "stupid turd", "your face is dumb", in the VIZ version. Also, since the English writing of characters' names calls him "Sterry", JB duly follows suit and uses "Sterry" as his name from now on. MS just keeps it as "Stelly" anyway, writing over the "Sterry" text, and VIZ, as they usually do, changed the writing to keep it consistent with how it's been spelled in the past, so it also says "Stelly".
• When Stelly asks Garp for his connections, his response in MS is insulting to Stelly: "To a mongrel like you? Fat chance." But in JB and VIZ (which are worded almost exactly the same), it's insulting to the World Nobles: "You wanna be one of those scumbags?"
• Stelly's description of the Fishmen is a little different in each version. In MS, he notes that they're "the fish type"; in JB, he thinks that they're "classified as fish" (which hasn't been true for a couple of hundred years, so in this version he just has his facts wrong); and in VIZ notes that they're "more fish than man".
• In MS, Ryokugyu states that they should "try not to destroy this whole place", sounding like he means Mariejois. However, in JB and VIZ, he's instead confirming that Fujitora isn't going to "destroy this meeting", as in, the Reverie.
• The scanlations have Fujitora saying he didn't he "him" (Vegapunk). The official version has him say he didn't see "it" (the creation).

Cool stuff. Thank you for the contributions. I have some qualms with the Viz translations but these posts really help me appreciate them a lot more.

So I'm the first one to suggest that the "invisible" flash is a fairly common depiction of many different flashes going off at once?

The linework is more jagged and rough. For me, it started in Skypiea and the stylistic changes really started to solidy as early as Enies Lobby. Dragon Ball underwent a really similar change over time too, but One Piece hasn't taken a hit to background detail (yet anyway). Early One Piece had really thick line weight and was a little more focused, whereas nowadays the panels are sort of overflowing with detail.

By the way, I agree with Nilitch that the art is very closely linked to the narration - most notably the pacing. Early One Piece had much slower panel-to-panel pacing. I really prefer that, but I don't think that what its evolved into is by any means unreadable. To me, it can just sometimes be a little overwhelming.

@Boing:

Edit: I mean even the color pages and jump covers and cover pages and volume covers show the drop to me.

I try not to judge too much on the Jump covers (and even the volume covers) because it really seems like that stuff is done on an even tighter deadline. I've just never gotten the sense from the art that Oda ever really cared about how the Jump covers looked.

The only aspect of the kings and queens that I find offensive is how totally forgettable they and their countries are. It's odd to see these ostensibly important but ultimately fodder characters. It also seems weird to go for such low hanging fruit creatively when they've been making this story for decades. I had similar feelings about the coliseum character dump. The story calls for this huge collection of leaders and countries so Oda and crew seemingly pull some one-note guy out of thin air. It's supposed to make the world feel bigger and more rich but to me it just seems to have the opposite effect. But I'll eat my words if the Straw Hats ever find their way to the Chichano kingdom for some tortas.

But I'm just nitpicking really. I'll withhold real judgement until things are in full swing. I'm not a fan of Sabo but if he were the shoe in protagonist this arc I think I would learn to like him. It's high time he actually earned his place in the character polls.

@Barkworm:

Hilariously, the Revo men do the infiltration while the girls stay at home (supposedly to prepare dinner for the men's glorious return).

Yeah, what's the deal with this? Although I'm pretty sure we're still a day away from the Reverie so they still may make an appearance.

@Captain:

Fan theorists and conspiracy theorists are a lot alike. After you've decided the obvious explanation has to be untrue, you start to think any explanation could take its place, no matter how ridiculous.

Jack had reinforced his lungs with armament haki.

Final page of this chapter doesn't say OP will be on break, but ONE PIECE is not listed in the preview page. There's possibility that OP will be on break next week. Considering this chapter has only 15 pages, Oda might be in desperate situation for deadline..
(Information thanks to redon)

From the spoiler thread.

In other words, ¯_(ツ)_/¯

@Law-ya:

I agree with this statement. All the strawhats have flaws but Sanji's is the one we're most fixated upon. E.g: Nami's greed is never a topic of heated debates as much as Sanji's chivalry. However, this is not only because sexism is a current hot topic so Sanji's flaws come up more as means to a personal agenda. It's more that out of all the strawhats Sanji is the only one whose flaw is never sacrificed to show 'change' and 'growth'. Nami was wiling to pay for Camie's freedom and even gave Lola a lot of their loot, Ussop constantly tries to overcome his cowardice…

You seem to contradict yourself here. I wouldn't say that the Straw Hats are particularly 3 dimensional, but Sanji is one of the only main characters who is uncompromising when it comes to fixing his flaws, even when they endanger his life and the lives of his crewmates.

@Count:

That's actually a decent way to eventually rope them back into the story. Whenever the Straw Hats meet the Revolutionaries again, Germa can be there. And working with the Revolutionaries is how they can finally make their disgusting lives into being productive for the world's wellbeing.

Yeah, it keeps them on the sidelines just enough in my opinion. Sanji also has a connection with Ivankov as well as the new RA headquarters too.

You're just a rude boy, aren't you.

This was probably already said, but it's possible that Pinkbeard's bounty was also inflated due to his affiliation with Blackbeard.

@Nilitch:

Can you really read though ? What are you even talking about ? It's not my fault if people get triggered only because they see my name written somewhere. Just get yourself treated.
I'm not the one insulting people. I don't even get how I'm getting the blame on this one again

"wow, stfu, stop saying OnePiece has pacing issues asshole" uhhh

Honestly, I feel you. I come on here deliberately to critique the manga. I wouldn't even be on a forum if all I had to say every week was "another great chapter!" this is art appreciation 101.

@Kaido:

I'm not saying Betty Boop averts Oda's tendencies with women, but there's nothing about her that goes really low by shonen standards

One Piece deserves better in my humble opinion.

The designs are so bland I wouldn't be surprised if they were all KO'd or flat out dead by the end of this arc.

@uniaka:

Sanji is just Oda's alter ego, even trump has more respect for women. No wonder other mangas are still more popular then OP outside of japan.

I know right. From the spoilers I was excited at the opportunity to see a cool female character design but she's a fucking girl in a skirt. None of them look new or interesting in fact. This is the revolutionary army that the WG is so worried about…? Snore.