@MetaMario:

Well, I do agree on your last point.

But you don't think there's not going to be more Fishmen villains, in this arc? They don't have to be in the majority, just a oppositional force.

Apparently, more pirates than Luffy go there. If a meathead like Caribou knew enough to strap a Sea King onto the front of his ship, there's bound to be others. And they'll probably be of the powerful variety, unlike the ones who Surume ate and crapped out.

But no, it'll probably be a power struggle, and there will probably be some sort of connection to the WG of some sort. I bet Van Der Decken and Hammond aren't nearly the main players, though. Then again, Oda may try to break out of his mold of introducing complementary and supporting characters first, then slowly building up to introducing the boss…but I just don't see him breaking that cycle right away. Though it would be nice if he accelerated things a little like he did between Whiskey Peak and Arabasta. I don't think every arc needs to be an epic one.

I don't even know how you can really compare Luffy pre-skip and the Caribou Brothers. I can kind of get the picture that the reason the Caribou Brothers have such a high bounty is because they're a pair of sadistic, psychotic boneheads. It doesn't seem like Oda's given any clue as to what they did to merit that bounty besides murder a bunch of Marine grunts in particularly horrific ways. They haven't given much of a picture as to what those guys can actually do, but they don't strike me as even being up to the weakest Supernova if they weren't butchering weaklings and leaving them out as a message to boost their bounties.

Then again, you really can't make sense of this series sometimes. The marines are constantly biting at the bit to put the Straw Hats with their smiley and generally benign wanted posters under, when they go and make absolutely uncontrollable scumbags with the same ambitions like Gecko Moria and Crocodile their hitmen. But as far as we've all seen, the Caribou Brothers are a couple of meatheads who think that fat guy who doesn't look anything like the wanted poster is Straw Hat Luffy.

As far as I can tell, you get bounties for two things: sticking it in the face of the world government, which Luffy does with glee, and doing nasty things to Marines. The first seems far more dangerous than the latter, considering that a good majority of the Marines struggle just to keep guys like Don Kreig in check.

@Crossword:

Can't you appreciate how difficult it is to reproduce such an exquisitely multi-layered and complex sound?

On that note, I wish I was a voice actor. Can't really think of any other profession where I could get paid for making gutteral noises for twenty minutes.

I wouldn't blame the VA as much as whomever thinks it's a grand idea to dub in the prerecorded sound whenever Ace has a closeup. Someone thinks that tv silence = bad news.

Garp sucks. He didn't want his kids to be what they wanted to be, he wanted them to squash their dreams and be footsoldiers for the WG. Just so the WG wouldn't hunt them down for being the children of their enemies. Yeah, he was trying to look out for them, but he certainly didn't want them to live their lives to their fullest. Hiriluk was all about Chopper getting out on the ocean and living the best life he could.

@SSJLuffy:

That was a great episode. I'm loving this arc so far, I may be alone on this, but I think Toei is doing a great job so far on this arc.

I totally agree. I didn't think Toei could capture the same feeling this arc had in the manga, but it's as close as I could have hoped for. So far, I'm liking it better than Water 7.

Getting a little worried about the copout flashbacks, though…not the ones that actually hold real backstory, but the ones where they're flashing back to the start of the same episode. Or replaying them like they did with Skypeia. What they seem to be doing is giving depth and screen time to a lot of Whitebeard's crew that got only one or two panes in the manga, and that gets a big thumbs up out of me.

Dude, Urouge is kinda awesome. Devil fruits aren't everything. Zoro doesn't have one, and he's probably the most universally popular character in the series (the only One Piece theme for my smartphone prominently features Zoro instead of Luffy). Urouge pulled an Apache Chief when he was up against a Pacifista. Interesting to see how he did that without a DF.

Drake seems like he's got interesting backstory, as well as Bonney…but it's hilarious how people are all down on Law because he's "cool". That's not "cool", that's being smart, and being smart wins in the end. Wonder why Shanks is as far along as he is? It's not because of the amazing devil fruit ability he doesn't have. It's not because of his will...it's because the character is insightful and smarter than the competition.

Kidd is awesome in a superficial way. He's made up as an anti-hero, like a combination of Wolverine and Magneto. That character is practically made to appeal to fans that are put out by the general lack of ambiguous darkness to the story. Hawkins is deadpan funny, a little corny and melodramatic but also pretty interesting. Apoo is cool in a Usopp-like way. When he's cool, he stops the show...when he's not, he's comic relief.

And don't criticize me for my US comic references. I grew up with American comics and only got into manga later on. I relate manga with classic Marvel and DC. Manga is like a second language and I translate it in my head to the first language.

Any of the Ice Hunter arc filler characters. Or the Rainbow mist kids.

You got a LOT more filler characters to add to this deal.

Of this group, I disliked Noko the most. The memory arc was just plain stupid. The art was good, but the story was slow, boring, and predictable. Everyone I know who watched that arc gave up on it halfway through.

Apis is mostly disliked because she was one of the first prominently displayed filler characters in a long running filler arc and K-F used her as part of a rating system for filler episodes. The Rainbow Mist arc made me wish I was watching the Millennium Dragons arc again. If you skip the filler, the only filler character you might be familiar with would be Apis. Sadly enough, she's not the worst, not by a long shot. She could kick the crap out of all of the snively Rainbow Mist kids. I've watched the fillers out of a mild sense of curiosity, I know.

To put Johnathan in that list though…that Marine filler arc after Sky Island was easily one of the best fillers ever in OP. Watched it with a friend of mine with a sharp instinct for filler, and she had no clue that it wasn't canon. It was a premise that could very well happen in OP.

As for the Ice Hunter arc, I know some loved it because Oda purportedly designed some of the characters, but please. It was horrific and didn't fit at all with the storyline. A fat naked guy who makes things warm? Figure skaters? This is what happens when you have your writers write a story to fit some vague character designs. You get crap. The typical "Straw hats are totally helpless for the first 5 episodes, but suddenly overcome enemies that are so far below what they've just beaten in the previous arc that it makes you wonder if they were just kidding earlier" storyline. Wasn't even funny, it just made me scratch my head and wonder if the writers had even watched or read any of the manga up to that point.

I like Jinbei's chances for the time being. He seems like he'd have the least negative effect on the overall crew's chemistry and balance. He's probably going to stay at Fishman Island, though, considering how Whitebeard did most of the work defending it and it's pretty much chaos at this point (with all of that making a beeline at his people's home). Hancock will have to stick around to defend her island since I doubt that the Marines still think she's cooperating with them (but they're concerned enough about her ability that they probably wouldn't risk wasting guys on an attack), and Perona doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. She doesn't have much of a backstory, she's not really all that deep of a character, and even Sanji couldn't cope with her attitude. Considering that we've got no clue what the whole Fishman Island thing is going to be all about, that's probably the best bet for now. Since Jinbei seems like he feels some responsibility for Luffy's situation, he seems like he's got no other choice but to hitch a ride.

But attacking Amazon Lily? That's a freaking waste, big time. Sengoku isn't an idiot. The marines ranks have got to be slammed pretty hard, hell, Akainu took out more than a few of his own men. Not to mention they've got what, like 3-4 Shichibukais left? The only one they can really depend on is Kuma, anyway. The only reason the Marines would attack is if he knew for absolutely sure that Luffy was there, and the whole catch of this thing is that he doesn't know and believes that the Amazons would run his manbutt off the island right quick.

I am only amazed by the insane amounts of manga spoilers without tags in everyone's profile pic and sig posting in an anime thread. Other than that, it's Naoki Tate. What did you expect. Tate is about cleavage and action and taking literally gross liberties with everything else.

! It would be just as hilarious if that Sabo kid weren't actually dead as it would be if he were. When you watch two goofy nerd kids squabble over their cute little hypotheses, it's really amusing and brings back warm memories. I'm the type that pulls for the goofy kid with the screwball ideas over the jerkoff kid who takes every opportunity to try and slam the goofy kids with a "fact" that hasn't happened yet. I'd laugh if that Sabo kid WERE dead…but I'd laugh so much harder if he weren't AND Oda did something as gutsy as make him a major character in one of the next arcs. Instead of waste reader's time with a big pity party flashback like some must think he did. I love seeing people that are way too cocky get theirs...but it rarely changes them much, unfortunately. They still grow up to be jackasses that no one really likes, deep down. But hey. Maybe Oda just wanted to write a little story about Luffy as a kid, and was just looking for an opportunity to force it in there.

The way I see it, and the point I tried to make before, is that when Oda drops a hint, it's not always something obvious.

When he dropped the hint that a character would die, he anthropomorphized the ship into a character then axed it when it was convenient. Did people think it was a character before? Maybe crazy people. Up until Sky Island, it was a boat. It was better than their previous boats, and it was a nice boat, but it was a boat. If your car broke down and you had to send it to the scrap heap, that would be a shame, but you wouldn't have a funeral for it. But Oda then wrote the ship a "soul" with the whole Klaubautermann thing, all the fans said "aha!" when the ship got axed, and all the strings were tied up then.

Powerups and timeskips are generally the result of either lazy writing, or an author that is bored with the direction things are going and wants to shake things up. Sometimes it's both. Too many shonen manga serials are stuck on that whole "if the next enemy isn't tougher than the last, then the story will become stale" thing. When you're just trying to keep the attention of 15 year old boys, that's just how it goes. Don't think Oda can really turn One Piece into a full on seinen series and have it catch on, but he's got such a wide fanbase (heck, I'm old, and I'm sure there are other old farts who've read it for almost ten years like I have) that maybe it would work. I'm betting Luffy has a big 18th birthday celebration on Amazon Lily when he heals up. I just don't see Oda jacking up their ages and darkening up the plot much more, because it probably would need a fairly major artistic design shift to really work out…and I think a lot of the current fans would not like it. The whole thing is about becoming a Pirate King...that probably wouldn't be such a goal if it were more of an adult storyline. That storyline would probably focus a lot more on the political/revolutionary aspects of the series rather than attaining status. I don't think they've really got enough there to really make that all that different from much else, but maybe Oda can refine what's there.

There's just too much of a youthful, optimistic message that the storyline is built around. Thing is, with Naruto, Kishi could timeskip a few years and the show is still shonen, it's still speaking the same message and keeping the same kind of fans. With One Piece, you timeskip 10 years and keep the same theme, and you have a bunch of late twenty-somethings acting like high schoolers. That could be pretty lame.