@King-Cannon said in One Piece Live-Adaptation Drama Announced:
@zeltrax225 said in One Piece Live-Adaptation Drama Announced:
It doesn't really help that Arlong Park's screentime and total duration were close to and almost the same as that of Syrup's. Which...would be fine if it was not THE arc of the entire saga. I've said this in another thread but a lot of the world lacks the charm of the source material and that is not because the live action medium disallow it to work. The liveliness and the feeling of a community is not something that is impossible to translate in this medium. The removal and irrelevance of certain key characters that form the very community that contributed to the bedrock of the straw hats as characters irritated me to no end once it became noticeable what they were doing. Islands don't feel like they have their own community and their own sense of life to them and exist just as a backdrop. When the straw hats were supposed to feel like a small of a greater whole, everything in this show shows the opposite: that they exist just for the straw hats to do things and have no agency of their own.
To be fair, worldbuilding before the Grand Line is rather poor. Most of the places are generic rural villages, Baratie and Gaimon's island being the sole exceptions. There's nothing like Arabasta, which has like three distinct, important towns, or even Drum, which has an unique climate and geography.
The focus in East Blue WAS the Straw Hats. That's why every prominent character had some relation to Luffy, Zoro, Nami, Usopp or Sanji. And when you have only 8 episodes to hook the audience, it makes sense to focus less on the "community".
There's a reason Oda once said East Blue was more of a prologue than anything, best apparent by the saga ending at Loguetown.
That is a valid point, thank for that. Looking back, the issue for me popped up during Baratie: it is a microcosmos of its own with its own people: the hardboiled chefs. It should have been possible to easily show off the Baratie with the quriky people without more effort. I think that is what is meant by everything around is just a backdrop