Tag Archives: One Piece

The Last Crime of Fisher Tiger

Posted by natechen on

Behold, Arlong the Saw.

Long considered one of the first landmark villains of One Piece, Arlong casts a long shadow across the history of Oda’s pirate epic. In spite of appearing in only two significant story arcs and last appearing in the pages of Jump over a decade ago, he remains a formidable figure in Luffy’s rogue’s gallery. There are many reasons for that.

The first is the most obvious, which is his striking physical appearance. Oda isn’t known for his standard character designs but Arlong is extreme, even for him. The serrated nose and wild, glaring eyes makes the Fishman captain uniquely memorable, so much so that when his sister appears, a decade after Arlong’s last appearance, their shared pupils made it immediately obvious to most that the two characters were related.

Arlong’s physical stature is significant in no small part because of how closely tied it is to his other memorable characteristic – his bigotry.

The pure contempt Arlong holds for human beings comes from an obvious source. As a fishman, he is bigger, stronger and tougher than a human and he can breathe underwater to boot. He routinely demonstrates all those qualities to keep the people who pay him tribute in line. When they don’t pay up he feels no qualms in destroying their livelihoods or ending their lives in order to serve as an example to others. Why should a fishman care for the lives of humans, after all?

Arlong’s insistence on categorizing people by species eventually sets him at odds with the protagonist of One Piece, Monkey D. Luffy. Luffy is unable to grasp why human or fishman are such important categories to Arlong. However, as is often the case, Luffy would have been perfectly happy to ignore Arlong’s ugly prejudice and brutal regime if not for one little detail.

Luffy was trying to recruit a member of Arlong’s crew. The only human member, in point of fact.

Yes, as odd as it sounds the crew known as the Fishman Pirates had a bonafide human girl serving as their chief cartographer and navigator. Arlong brought on the orange haired girl when she was only eight. Nami offered to serve Arlong after the fishman murdered her mother, on the condition that Arlong would allow her to buy back her village for the measly price of 100,000,000 beri, the world’s standard currency. (For those wondering, that’s the rough equivalent of $1,000,000 USD circa the year 2000.)

Luffy meets Nami when she’s in the process of robbing another pirate crew and eventually follows her all the way back to Coco Village and the eventual showdown with Arlong. For the entirety of the storyline, we’re primed to hate Arlong. This is a carefully balanced thing on Oda’s part, because the story goes to great pains to make it clear not all fishmen are like Arlong. In particular, Oda introduces us to the character of Hachi, Arlong’s first mate.

Hachi is a very likeable character. He’s cheerful, helpful and never demonstrates any of the overt prejudice that so clearly defines his captain. He just seems to like people until they give him a reason not to. In this respect, he’s not that different from Luffy. However, Hachi is agreeable to Arlong’s bigotry, so he’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.

Yet Hachi is important. Of all the characters introduced in the Arlong Park he is the only one Luffy will meet again.

For the next seven years, more or less, of One Piece’s publishing history very little happens to change our mind about fishmen. We only meet one who isn’t a villain. We meet several more we don’t really care for. Then the Straw Hats arrive at Sabaody Archipelago, an anchorage on the doorstep of Fishmen Island, and they run into Hachi again.

They find him in a cage. He has been captured by human traffickers, who are using him as bait to capture prisoners for a slave auction. This, we learn, has been the fate of fishmen for centuries.

Sabaody Archipelago tells us a lot about the state of the world but for our purposes the most important thing it tells us is the fate of the fishmen. Arlong’s hatred for humanity was ugly and evil. However it sprung up from a fertile soil of other evils such as slavery, ostracisation and dehumanization. That context opens us up to a new understanding of the fishmen we’ve seen before. It prompts Nami to forgive Hachi for his role in Arlong’s pirates. And, ultimately, when we arrive on Fishman Island, it prepares us to hear the story of Fisher Tiger.

The great explorer Fisher Tiger is one of the heroes of Fishman Island and he stands in sharp contrast to the other major figure his story is intertwined with, Queen Otohime. However, in order to understand the crime of Fisher Tiger she is unimportant. So I plan to set her half of the storyline aside and those curious about it can read it at their leisure. They are quite separate stories, for the most part.

What is important to understand about Fisher Tiger is that he lived and died in the past. Luffy and the Straw Hats hear his tale from Tiger’s first mate, a fishman named Jinbei. Among the fishmen, Fisher Tiger is a legend. He united the forces of Arlong and the Fishman Pirates with many powerful warriors from the Ryugu Kingdom, Jinbei first among them, to create the Sun Pirates. Then he dedicated his life to raiding ships and freeing slaves.

To Fisher Tiger, the species of slave did not matter. Slavery was an equal opportunity evil and both humans and fishmen suffered from it. And Tiger was a man particularly suited to recognizing the evil of it, as Tiger himself had suffered the humiliation of being a slave. He was wise enough to see that freeing every slave would create a larger push to abolish the institution than just freeing a few. So he fought against all slavers, although the fishmen may have benefited most from it.

At the same time, Tiger forbid his pirates from senseless killing. While fighting carries the risk of death Tiger knew that any killing beyond that would undo all the work he was doing towards abolishing the system and set fishmen and humans at odds for decades to come. 

The combination of these two strategies made Fisher Tiger very effective.

Unfortunately, it only made him effective in creating pressure to abolish slavery, it did not do much to improve the reputation of fishmen in the wider world. This would eventually lead to his downfall. When not hunting slavers and freeing slaves the Sun Pirates would help liberated slaves find their way home. When they freed an eight year old human girl named Koala they naturally set out to do so.

However, Koala’s home village was fairly far inland. The whole crew couldn’t go with her, so Fisher Tiger took her there himself. Once Koala was reunited with her family Tiger headed back towards the sea but along the way he was ambushed by Marines.

The people of Koala’s village had notified the World Government there was a fishman in their town and they showed up to arrest Tiger. When he refused to surrender they opened fire. Tiger managed to escape this ambush but he was badly wounded. The Sun Pirates were also attacked and lost their ship but managed to capture the Marine ship instead.

Most of the Sun Pirates were fine but Fisher Tiger needed a blood transfusion to survive. The Marine ship had plenty of blood in stock in the sickbay but when it was offered to Tiger he screamed, “No! I would rather die than have their blood inside me!”

In the end, Fisher Tiger lost his long battle against the hatred he had harbored and died saying, “It’s foolish to die and leave only hatred as a legacy. I know that! But my reason is overpowered by the demon in my heart… I cannot love humans. Ever.”

At that moment this was Arlong the Saw.

At that moment, he was me.

After escaping Marine custody due to the influence of his crewmate Jinbei, Arlong would set sail for the eastern oceans with a bone in his teeth. He would take his vengeance on the humanity of those seas, saving his cruelest treatment for an eight year old girl he found begging for the freedom of her village. 

Thus the circle closes and we see the full weight of the evils that had piled up. Arlong was just one final stone in the ever growing pillar of prejudice, hatred and abuse that had been building and building over generations. Yet he might not have been as vile if he hadn’t watched his captain try to break that cycle and fail. If the cycle hadn’t looked so inevitable perhaps even Arlong could have been someone different.

The crime of Fisher Tiger wasn’t that he tried to change the world and end slavery. It was that he tried to change himself and couldn’t.

Around these parts I have a simple concept. That the goal of art is to create an emotional response in the audience. If you are telling a story, try to make the audience share that emotion with a character in the narrative. I call this emotional synchronization.

This storyline, what I call The Last Crime of Fisher Tiger, is buried in four larger story arcs told across a dozen years of publishing history. It is one of the greatest examples of the power of emotional synchronization I have encountered. Through the use of it Oda showed his audience a person they despised.

And let me tell you, we despised Arlong in those days.

Then, over time, Oda gradually maneuvered the audience until we experienced an overwhelming wave of sympathy for Arlong when we saw him heartbroken by Fisher Tiger’s death. This moment was quickly tied back to the Arlong we saw torture Nami, creating a powerful dissonance in the audience. Never have I seen a moral message so seamlessly integrated into a story with such clarity.

Anyone can say, “You, too, would be a monster.”

To take the hand of the audience and slowly and patiently walk them through the path that would make them a monster demands incredible skill. Many writers today wish to tell morality tales. Yet so many of those who attempt it fail miserably. Fisher Tiger is a powerful model they would do well to learn from.

But that isn’t all they should learn from.

After the death of Fisher Tiger a strange custom takes root in the Ryugu Kingdom. The fishmen there refuse to share their blood with any human who passes through their ports. The kingdom isn’t strong enough to directly defy the World Government and this becomes their way of protesting.

In modern times the Ryugu Kingdom is not a peaceful place. Luffy takes up their cause and fights on their behalf, doing much to warm the hearts of Fishman Island towards humans. But things don’t end cleanly. Luffy suffers quite a bit in the battle and at the end he’s in danger of bleeding out. His own crew doesn’t match his blood type. Yet none of the fishmen he’s just saved will help him.

So it falls to Jinbei, Fisher Tiger’s first mate, to break the custom and offer his own blood to Luffy. When Luffy recovers he finds himself linked to Jinbei in more ways than one. So he smiles and says, “Jinbei, join my crew.”

With that, for the first time in centuries, the wound is closed and the crimes of Fisher Tiger are redeemed by his successor. The dawn of the world grows a step closer, and we raise our sails with hope once more.

Revolutionary Incomprehension – On the One Piece Revolutions

Posted by natechen on

Behold the flag of the Straw Hat Pirates. Once the ensign of a single-masted caravel from the tamest ocean on Planet Bluestar, this flag now flies over the heads of nearly five thousand merry freebooters plying the Grand Line. The most powerful enforcers of the World Government avoid confronting those who fly it. In a world of fictional pirates, those who fly this flag are among the most known and most feared.

On Planet Earth this flag has marched on the capitals of Nepal and Madagascar. The young men and women marching under it have toppled those governments and declared themselves free. The flag has been spotted around Paris, but the French have not surrendered just yet.

As someone who has followed the adventures of the Straw Hats for some twenty years, I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, it is wildly entertaining for me to know that Eiichiro Oda’s mythology has achieved a spot on the world stage. On the other hand, I feel like an important part of the story I know and love is being lost. 

Or perhaps it just hasn’t been seen. One of the most difficult elements of One Piece as a story is how stretched out it is and how buried many of its thematic elements are. Summarizing nearly thirty years of storytelling in one blog article isn’t possible. Summarizing the state of world politics on top of that demands even greater amounts of time and, further, isn’t something I’m well qualified to do.

So I am going to do something that I normally wouldn’t. I am going to point you to an excellent summary of the Nepalese and Madagascar revolutions as covered by Simon Whistler on his Warfronts vertical. Any attempt to recap these upheavals on my own would just be duplicating the work he and his team have already done.

Hopefully that satisfies your curiosity on the current event issues. The initial summary of the Nepal revolution also gives a reasonable summary of why the Gen Z revolutionaries might adopt the Straw Hat flag as their symbol. There are problems with this summary, of course. Simon pronounces Luffy’s name the way it’s spelled in English, for example, whereas the correct pronunciation is “loo-fee.”

Also, the revolutionary reading of One Piece is completely incorrect.

To put all my cards on the table, I am not the first man in the Straw Hat Grand Fleet to find fault with this reading of One Piece. Vice Admiral Liam of Grand Line Review has already done a decent job rebutting it. If you want to hear his thoughts on the issue I will include them here as well.

However, unlike Simon Whistler’s work I will be duplicating a part of Liam’s breakdown here, except from my own perspective. So let’s get started, shall we?

Just in case you didn’t watch the Warfronts videos, a brief argument for why One Piece is relevant to revolutionary movements around the globe goes like this: Planet Bluestar is under the control of a World Government. That government is incredibly tyrannical towards the people who cross it and is guilty of horrific crimes, including endorsing slavery, censorship of history and genocides. Everywhere you look, the people of Bluestar are in chains. 

However, when Monkey D. Luffy arrives in a new location he punches the local tyrants in the face and liberates the people. It is both cathartic and inspiring. The people transform the freed nation into a new, better place and Luffy sails onward, bringing the dawn of the world to the furthest reaches of the planet.

Thus, in conclusion, Monkey D. Luffy is a revolutionary figure whose example we should follow.

Let me begin my rebuttal to this premise by showing you this image.

These men are the Five Elder Planets, the supreme authoritative council of the World Government. They are one of the most significant antagonistic forces Luffy faces. They also share an important element with the Marine Admirals, another group of powerful World Government antagonists – they all seem to be based on real world people. However, where the Admirals are all based on Japanese actors the Elder Planets are a little more varied.

Let’s look at them from right to left, as Japanese is meant to be read.

The gentleman on the right is Saint Jaygarcia Saturn and his appearance is likely based on Giuseppe Garibaldi, a revolutionary Italian politician who contributed to the unification of the nation in the mid-Eighteenth Century.

Standing next to him is Saint Marcus Mars, whose appearance is probably based on Itagaki Taisuke, a member of the Meiji Revolution that overthrew the Japanese Shogunate and restored the Emperor to power.

Seated in the center in mustachioed splendor is Saint Topman Warcury, whose bald pate suggests his appearance is based on Mikhail Gorbachev, who held power during the revolutions that broke up the Soviet Union.

Beside him is Saint Ethanbaron V. Nuspar, who bears a strong resemblance to Mahatma Ghandi, the man who led the movement for Indian independence from Britain.

Finally, on the left is Saint Shepherd Ju Peter. It’s not clear if his appearance is based on any specific person but his name contains several hints that suggest he is based on Simon Peter, the disciple of Jesus who led the evangelical push that transformed the Roman Empire and, eventually, all of Europe through the establishment of Christianity.

For those keeping score at home, of the five supreme leaders of the World Government, all five are based on real world revolutionaries. There is a message in that, I think.

Very little is known about the founding of the World Government. It came at the end of a period of lost history known as the Void Century, a time period we, the audience, know very little about. All we know for sure is this: during the Void Century the world was ruled by a single, powerful nation. Other civilizations existed, of course, but they were all in thrall to this great power. That nation was eventually overthrown by a coalition of twenty other nations that banded together in a military alliance that would eventually become the World Government. In short, the World Government came into existence by revolting. It is, in and of itself, a commentary on revolutions.

It is not a flattering one.

However the World Government is not the only revolutionary thing to sail the seas of Bluestar. The Elder Planets are opposed by the world’s greatest criminal, Monkey D. Dragon, leader of the Revolutionary Army that works to destroy the World Government’s influence. Dragon has seen the evils of the world first hand and he despises them. His life’s work is to sweep the World Government and its founding families, the Tenryubito, from the face of Bluestar.

Names are important in storytelling but they are especially important in mythic storytelling. One Piece is a mythic tale and Dragon’s name is a signpost left for us from the earliest chapters of its narrative. Of course, it’s very easy to see that Monkey D. Dragon and Monkey D. Luffy must be related. In the Japanese name structure surnames come first so we see that these two come from the same family and thus it is no surprise that Dragon is Luffy’s father.

However, that’s not the only significance to Dragon’s name. It also draws another parallel between the Revolutionary Army and the World Government. The Army was founded by Dragon, the Revolutionary. The Government was founded by the Tenryubito, a term which translates to Celestial Dragons. Trust me, this is not superficial or a chance alignment. This is almost certainly a deliberate choice made to hint at the similar path the Tenryubito and Dragon are on (albeit at very different places along said path.)

Again, One Piece is not drawing flattering comparisons with its use of revolutionaries.

However, the analytical mind will no doubt object to this, recalling that the protagonist of the story is not Dragon but rather his son, Luffy. Surely the son will redeem the failures of his father. Clearly Luffy, who strives to be the most free person in the world, is the model revolutionaries should strive for. Right?

Well.

Let’s talk a little bit about Monkey D. Luffy.

Twice, when given the opportunity to overthrow the monarchs of Alabasta and Fishman Island, Luffy chooses to fight on behalf of those kings against the rebelling citizens instead.

In the kingdom of Dressrossa Luffy chooses to overthrow one monarch to restore the previous king to the throne.

On Drum Island Luffy approves of the election of Dalton as the new king of the nation.

One of Luffy’s first friends is Koby, a young boy who wants to join the Marines and defend the people from pirates. Luffy helps Koby to the nearest Marine base, parts ways on good terms and takes immense satisfaction whenever he hears that Koby’s career is going well, in spite of the fact that the Marines work for the World Government.

When his friend Camie is kidnapped by human traffickers Luffy searches the wares of several slave traders in an attempt to rescue her. He doesn’t lift a finger to help the other slaves he sees.

Luffy is a terrible revolutionary.

To be perfectly clear, Monkey D. Luffy has never once set out to overthrow the governing body or political structure of a nation. It’s not even certain he understands what governments or politics are. Monkey D. Luffy is out to have an adventure, to see new things and go new places, to eventually become King of the Pirates and thus, the most free man in the world.

The pirates, spies, Marines and governments that Luffy destroys are incidental to this process.

The protagonist of One Piece is a fascinating character. In many ways he is a chaos agent, pursuing his own ends without any regard for the social structures that stand in his way. He has no problem helping people he likes but insists he is not a hero. On the other hand, he also has no issue with fighting to the death when he runs into people who he hates.

Luffy is wild, violent, noisy and gluttonous. At the same time he is kind, friendly, warm and encouraging. It can be very difficult to square that circle in the abstract and if you are just looking at Luffy as some kind of a role model you are going to have a very hard time of it. If you are trying to understand him, let me suggest you begin by not viewing him as a role model. That said, analyzing Luffy is yet another thing outside the scope of this post.

What is important to the question of revolutions is how Luffy sets himself free.

You see, Luffy is always free. This is the great secret that underlies One Piece, that makes its protagonist so appealing and interesting to the audience and allows Luffy’s rougher edges to coexist with his softer side. Luffy is free for two reasons.

The first reason is that he takes everything as he finds it. Even if he hates a person, if they do something he likes he will praise them for it. Even if he likes a person, if they do something that makes him angry he will fight them over it. When Mr. 2 Bon Clay offered to work with the Straw Hats, in spite of the fact that Luffy had just destroyed Bon’s organization and sent his boss to jail, Luffy accepted immediately.

Luffy is free from expectations, he’s free from reputations and he is free of the past. With this freedom he chooses to progress towards a future that is promising for himself and those around him, up to the point where those around him actively get in his way. Because of this, Luffy has no need for revolutions. He’s already thrown off all the chains revolutionaries rage against and he didn’t have to scheme, assassinate or steal anything to do it.

The second reason Luffy is free is his own understanding of himself. When Luffy is confronted by Arlong, an amphibious bigot convinced of the superiority of his own species, Arlong asks what Luffy can do that makes him so special. Luffy responds by listing all the things he cannot do. He cannot cook, cannot fight with a sword, cannot lie and cannot navigate. His understanding of these limits drives him to seek out friends who will help him, whose strengths offset his weaknesses, who will make him more than he could be alone.

And, at the same time, Luffy uses the fullness of his own gifts to raise up those friends as far as he can. Because of this, Luffy has no need for revolutions. He has already organized a society that is as beneficial for himself and his friends as it is possible to be.

If Luffy were to spend all his time obsessing over systems and politics it would mean giving up the freedom he treasures. It would mean disregarding the friends who make him strong. It would mean seeing only the ugliness of the world, shackling himself far from the adventures and unexplored places he longs to see. Most of all, it would mean locking himself into the cycle of revolutions his father and the World Government represent, rather than chasing after something new.

There are many reasons to be skeptical of revolutionaries. Their focus on big picture systems frequently blinds them to the vicious damage they inflict on the people they claim to free. The flag of the Straw Hats represents the opposite of that. It’s the standard of a man who values his people and their dreams to the point he will not act until he figures out whether he can ensure everyone gets what they are aiming for.

Ultimately, Luffy is not a real person. He has powers beyond mortal men and he finds himself in situations where his own ideals and physical prowess are what are needed to solve problems. His approach to the ills of his world will rarely translate to ours. But his values often will. That’s why I hope more people will study those, and see what the story really says about them, rather than just mindlessly flying a flag without really understanding what it stands for.

The Eucatastrophy of One Piece

Posted by natechen on

I try to keep my rambling about my favorite manga to a minimum around here. It could very easily be my exclusive focus if I let it and there are so many other topics I want to write about so a certain restraint is called for. Three essays on the topic in one outing is certainly more than I had planned on and two of them on a single series is certainly excessive. Yet there is something in One Piece that I have been contemplating for a while that bears examination.

Eucatastrophe is a literary term coined by JRR Tolkien to describe the moment in a story where things go suddenly and inexplicably right for the protagonist. In short, it is the opposite of a catastrophe. It was Tolkien’s stance that eucatastrophe was the highest form of fairy story just a tragedy was the highest form of drama. They exist to remind the audience of the power of providence. They serve to reward moral behavior. And, let’s face it, when done well they serve to put a smile on our face that will not soon go away. The problem comes about when they are not done well.

The eucatastrophe is a literary device that is often employed by Eiichiro Oda, the author of One Piece. However it is also one of his most controversial tropes. That’s not surprising to anyone familiar with the Internet’s fascination with both trope talk and pessimism but it does bear examination. However conducting that examination is going to require an examination of several events scattered across several thousand pages of illustrated story. I don’t have time to recap all of it so if you’re not already familiar with One Piece you may feel a little lost. My apologies but it can’t be helped in this case. And, of course:

SPOILER WARNING

Oda has a terrible habit of not killing his characters. By this i don’t mean that he doesn’t put his characters in situations that would kill them. The problem is more that he puts them in situations that should kill them, then they just don’t die for no clear reason.

The most obvious example of this is the character Pell, who takes an explosive device that will supposedly level most of a city, and flies it away so no one is harmed. He is still holding it when it detonates. Yet Pell survives and returns home about a week later with nothing more than a bandage wrapped around his head.

A similar case is the butler Merry, who is stabbed through the chest five times, left on the ground overnight, and is up and walking again just days later. The butlers of One Piece are made of impressive stuff, it would seem.

It has been argued that all people in Oda’s world are of superhuman toughness as practically everyone in his story seems stronger, tougher and cooler than a normal person. However that’s not particularly satisfying either. We do see people die in One Piece. The obvious example is Nami’s adoptive mother Belle-Mere, who is executed by the pirate Arlong, but there are plenty of others. Typically they are the friends and family if main characters. This provides us insight into the nature of our cast and an emotional moment to connect them to. Oda is quite good art creating these moments.

However, after writing his story for nearly thirty years, Oda’s patterns are quite clear to anyone who goes looking for them. Deaths in One Piece exist to create emotional moments. The often cruel and arbitrary nature of death in the real world is absent from the world Oda creates. Instead deaths are clearly and deliberately calculated to evoke the strong emotional response Oda desires from his audience. In theory there is nothing wrong with that. I’ve often stated that I believe one of the goals of an author is to create an emotional response in their readership and, over time, I’ve refined that notion to include a corollary, that the best emotion to create in the audience is one in harmony with the characters in the story.

By creating moments where his characters and the audience are both moved to mourn a death Oda pursues this goal. The problem is when he reveals a death he implied took place did not actually take place it fractures this emotional resonance. The characters in the story feel relief, the weight of grief suddenly vanishing from them. The audience realizes their emotions were being manipulated. This shatters the harmony between audience and character and frequently undoes the investment the audience had in the previous emotional moment. In some cases that investment turns into actual hostility towards the creator or the story.

This brings me to the curious case of Jaguar D. Saul and many of the events surrounding him. Saul was a vital character in the history of Nico Robin, one of the main cast of One Piece. We last saw Saul frozen solid on a burning island. Before he was frozen he gave Robin a goal: to live out her life and find friends who would care for her in the place of the family she lost.

Saul was Robin’s last tie to her childhood hopes and dreams. When the audience learned of his death it contextualized one of One Piece’s most complex main characters, who started as a cold and distant antagonist and had slowly been pulled into the fold to become a beloved member of the crew. The Water Seven Saga, where we learned about Robin’s childhood and her brief but impactful relationship with Saul, is widely considered one of the best stories in One Piece. So when it was revealed that Saul was still alive the audience was disappointed, to say the least. To make matters worse, the reveal that Saul was still alive came coupled with not one but two other characters who appeared to die but, in point of fact, did not. These three case studies in “fake out” deaths are illuminating. You see, the audience had no real issue with two of them but a third has really irritated a lot of people. Most interesting is the fact that the fake death of Saul, which had the biggest emotional impact of these three false deaths, is the one the audience has accepted the most readily.

While Saul’s case is the one which prompted this essay I’m going to briefly discuss all three fake out deaths to make my point. But before that, there is one element present in all three cases that most people have cited but I’m going to dismiss by examining Saul’s case on its own. That is the issue of “justifying” the character’s survival.

Saul was presumed dead because he was “frozen solid” by a character with the power to create ice. This is not the first time we’ve seen this power in use nor is it the first time we’ve seen people survive being frozen solid in this way. In fact, Robin herself survives one such attack. When added to the fact that Saul was on the shores of a burning island it’s not unreasonable for him to thaw out in the heat then take refuge in the ocean and thus survive both freezing and burning. At least, not by the logic of One Piece. Given that Saul was also a wanted man, the fact that he never revealed his survival to the outside world but rather retreated to an isolated island where he could lay low also makes sense.

None of this is discussed when people analyze the impact of Saul’s apparent death and survival. That isn’t because the logic of his survival is flawed but rather because the logic is irrelevant. What people are really trying to grapple with is, as I have already stated, their emotional investment in the story and whether it was misplaced. I believe this is also true in the case of Bartholomew Kuma and Dr. Vegapunk, the other two characters who “died” and survived alongside Saul.

Kuma, like Robin, was introduced as an antagonist. Unlike Robin, Kuma was much harder to pin down as friend or foe (and I’m not saying Robin was easy to work out.) Over time we came to understand that Kuma, who was uniquely strong and robust, even in the One Pieceworld, was being used as part of an experimental program to create cyborgs. The project was headed by Dr. Vegapunk. Kuma submitted to the experiments in exchange for medical treatment for his daughter, Bonney, which Vegapunk also oversaw.

However, Kuma was also a wanted man and Vegapunk worked for the government. This created a certain conflict of interests.

In order to overcome that conflict the government demanded that Kuma surrender his free will and allow his consciousness to be completely eradicated, replaced with machine programming. Kuma agreed to this happily out of his love for Bonney. The scene where Kuma and Vegapunk reflect on Kuma’s life before throwing the switch that transforms him into an unfeeling machine is one of the most tragic scenes in One Piece, a series known for making it’s audience weepy. Less than a year later the audience learned that Vegapunk would probably be able to undo the modifications and restore Kuma’s thinking mind.

Of course he was willing to do this because Vegapunk had made discoveries that put him at odds with the World Government and they had ordered his execution. Eventually that execution was carried out and Vegapunk was dead. Except the most brilliant man in the world had made provisions for that, creating a clone and backing up his memories using technology the audience knew he already had.

On a spectrum of audience reactions, Vegapunk surviving his execution is the most disliked by far. Yes, it was in keeping with his character as a forward planner and an inventor but it wasn’t particularly satisfying. While Vegapunk has only been making appearances “on screen” in the story for two years or so he had quickly won the audience over. He was a sympathetic figure to Kuma and his daughter Bonney and he had a certain kind of integrity to him. His death caused a lot of consternation among the cast and the readership. The offhanded reveal that he had a cloned body ready to go just didn’t sit right, even though all the pieces were in place for it. In fact, most people saw those pieces in place and fumed about the inevitable reversing of Vegapunk’s death long before it was made official.

This is a clear case of a moment intended to create harmony between audience and character emotions instead creating dissonance. Oda has been writing One Piece for nearly thirty years and the audience knows his tricks. When we see them coming it prevents our investing in his story even when the emotional moments are fairly good in and of themselves.

On the other hand, the revivals of Kuma and especially Saul were taken very gracefully by the fanbase. The euchatastrophe that Oda offers lands much better in these two cases and I think it’s vital for anyone who wishes to include such an element to at least try to understand why.

The first factor, in my humble opinion, is time. Robin lived for twenty two years from the moment she sailed away from Saul and the burning island of Ohara to the moment she reunited with him on Elbaf. It was a long and trying time for her, full of danger and sorrow. It also gave her the opportunity to meet her closest friends and allies and revive her passion for her childhood dreams. For the audience who read One Piece, the publication history from Ohara to Elbaf spans a period of nineteen years. Nineteen years.

I read One Piece in real time over that entire nineteen year span. I occasionally wondered if, given everything we knew about how Saul supposedly died, we would ever see him again. I watched Robin and the Straw Hats struggle and suffer through all the many cares of Oda’s world. When I heard of Saul’s survival I was a bit surprised, but not terribly. Then I watched as Robin changed her hairstyle to reflect how she looked as a child and got ready to meet Saul again. And eventually, when they met again, for the first time in decades, I was struck by a sudden and surprising sense of relief, as if something I didn’t even know I had been waiting for had inexplicably come to pass.

The moment had been building so gradually I didn’t even realize I had wanted it until it was already past.

The second factor is connection. Saul was a character with a big impact in spite of very little narrative presence. However Bartholomew Kuma has been a mover and a shaker in One Piece for a very long time, appearing in the story for the first time almost twenty three years ago in mid-2002, and having numerous contacts with the Straw Hats over the course of the story. His daughter Bonney appeared six years later, although we wouldn’t know they were related for another decade. We’ve seen Kuma with free will and without it and he has been an antagonist and surprising ally to the Straw Hats over the years.

While Kuma’s actions were often mysterious and his transformation into a machine with no human will was only fully explained in 2023, more than two decades after his introduction, we already knew all we needed to about him through the way other characters acted towards him. The villains of the tale were never fully comfortable with Kuma, even after replacing his mind with a machine, and the love and devotion of Kuma’s friends and daughter spoke volumes about him. That these factors would eventually merge to overcome mere mechanical forces and restore his humanity just makes sense. We’ve seen the tragedy Kuma’s family and friends suffered when they though he was lost. We also get several small moments where Bonney sits quietly with her father, trusting that the man she loves is still in there somewhere, no matter how machine like he behaves at the moment. These moments of connection to Kuma made it much easier to draw him back into the story. They build the emotional harmony between the characters and the audience and make it clear that what we felt when we saw Kuma “die” is not being undone. Rather, that emotional payoff is now the investment in another, even greater moment of resolution.

The third factor is providence. Eucatastrophe is inherently providential, a reaffirmation of what is good and worthwhile in the human condition as stronger than mere fate or circumstance. That Saul fought an ice man on a burning island and was frozen solid in the one place where circumstance would allow him to survive was providential. That the lonely child Kuma would meet and form a family willing to follow him into the worst places on earth and love him even when all his warmth and kindness were gone is nothing short of providential. That added element, the feeling that you can’t quite earn these moments of grace, is ultimately what makes them work. Sometimes the world is just arbitrary and capricious enough that you lose what you love most. Sometimes its providential enough that you get it all back.

Ultimately, I think it’s these three factors that make the difference between “fake” deaths like Saul and Kuma and “fake out” deaths like Vegapunk’s. Vegapunk had no providence in his revival, just his own scientific prowess, he had little connection to other characters outside his role as the most brilliant man in the world (except Kizaru, a subject way outside of the scope for today’s essay) and he hadn’t been around in the story long enough for the sudden reversals in his fate to feel organic.

However there is one other thing to keep in mind if you set out to write a eucatastrophy. The trope is, in and of itself, an idea that revolves around the concept that the universe is created and maintained by a loving and graceful God that desires to know and be known. It assumes that the universe we live in wants us to feel and reciprocate God’s love. Thus, if you seek to write eucatastrophy you are writing a story that mimics that part of the universe in your story – and that notion about the universe has never been widely accepted. It’s very clear, from his persistence in writing One Piece in the way he does, that Oda has simply made his peace with the way the audience reacts to his eucatastrophies. He wants to write them, so he has poured more time and skill into making them the best they can be. If you or I wish to write euchatastrophy, I suggest we make the same peace with whatever response we may get.

One Piece of the Puzzle

Posted by natechen on

“One Piece Fan Letter” was a special episode of the One Piece anime series, released after episode 1122 but not counted as one of the numbered episodes. It is a fascinating and touching love letter to the series itself, from fans who have worked their way into positions where they can work on the show they love. This could be a disastrous concept. Fans writing themselves into stories they love has such a bad track record that one of the best known examples of bad writing, Mary Sue, was created as a satire of the practice. (Ironically, Mary Sue succeeds in this satire, which makes her story an example of good writing.)

As an artistic achievement “One Piece Fan Letter” is remarkable. The animation is beautiful, the story skillfully weaves a number of narratives from the book Straw Hat Stories and the characters grow to be memorable and lovable in a very brief window of time. However, I’m not here to break down the approaches and techniques used by directors Megumi Ishitani and Nanami Michibata and their teams. I’m not really the best person to tackle that. I’m pretty out of touch with the anime, its production and it’s history. However it does achieve something I find very impressive. The narrative creates several characters that feel like members of the audience who have ascended into the story, while avoiding the many pitfalls satirized by Mary Sue.

It’s difficult to discuss if you haven’t seen the episode and it’s about 25 minutes long so if you have the time, I’d recommend checking it out. It may not make a huge amount of sense if you’re not familiar with One Piece in some form or another, at least up to the Return to Sabaody Archipelago, but many of the broad strokes are clear even if you’re a novice. You can find it for free here:

https://www.crunchyroll.com/watch/G14UVQ5D5/one-piece-fan-letter

Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s start with the element I find the most interesting. None of the new characters in “Fan Letter” have names. The closest is the Marine captain called the Benevolent King of the Waves, who is known by a very grandiose epitaph. However the rest of the characters are known by their family or profession. The book seller, the wholesaler’s daughter, the green grocer’s boys. In one sense these people exist to be broad archetypes, entities that don’t even need names, because they represent the normal people in a world of pirates. Most normal people never make a name for themselves in any world. That goes double in a world as chaotic and cutthroat as one in the midst of a Golden Age of Piracy.

At the same time, a forgettable, nameless kind of character with a murky background is typical of a self insert protagonist. It could be a marker of lazy writing. But in practice, in “One Piece Fan Letter,” it is an invitation to the audience. These characters are like us, looking up towards the nearly mythical pirates of One Piece from their mundane, dreary lives and dreaming of adventure.

However the closest they can get is a distant admiration.

That brings me to the second element I find interesting, namely the separation between the protagonists of “Fan Letter” and the protagonists of One Piece as a whole. While all the episode’s new characters, including The Benevolent King of the Waves, catch at least a glimpse of the Straw Hat they admire, there is always a degree of remoteness to it.

The Benevolent King finds the tiny Chopper adorable. Yet the King is also a Marine officer with a duty to arrest pirates so he can’t give too much thought or deference to the Straw Hat’s mascot character. Several characters debate the world’s strongest swordsman, unaware that Zorro, one of the contenders, is in the bar with them. The elder green grocer boy admires Monkey D. Luffy. Not because he’s a pirate or even because Luffy did him a favor once. Rather, we see how Luffy’s desperate struggle to save his brother from execution gave the green grocer’s son the extra measure of inspiration needed to drag his own brother out of danger during the Paramount War. They were in the same place but their paths barely crossed for more than a second.

These are not direct connections. These are characters who see the Straw Hat Pirates from a distance and glean a little relief from mundanity or inspiration for the day by admiring them. There is no one this is more true for than the wholesaler’s daughter. When the Paramount War turned her world upside down she saw it as nothing more than a nuisance. In the years since Gold Rogers called the adventurous to the seas many pirates have sailed through her home, flexing their muscles and pushing people around on their quest for legendary treasure. The Paramount War was a particularly bad brush with the world of piracy but Sabaody Archipelago had seen many similar disruptions before and would doubtless see just as many after. The cynical child clearly believed there was nothing she could do about that.

Except one of the pirates responsible for that brush with piracy was Nami. Navigator for the Straw Hat Pirates, a woman with no particular powers beyond her sense for the weather, Nami held her own on that crew through her wits and charm. Over time, the wholesaler’s daughter convinced herself that if Nami could thrive in a world of power and violence so could she. And in the confines of this one brief story, she does just that.

The wholesaler’s daughter is one of the characters that changed the most from Straw Hat Stories to “One Piece Fan Letter” in that there was no such character in the book. The comparable character in Straw Hat Stories was, in fact, a man who admired Nami for… other reasons. This girl is, in my opinion, what really solidifies “Fan Letter” as a story about a self insert characters.

See, Ishitani and Michibata are two women who have had to make their way through the world of entertainment. It’s a world where the powerful often take advantage of the weak. They’ve had to make their way by wit and charm, and they clearly have a great admiration for Nami, who has done the same in a world much the same. They invite us along on an adventure to try and reach the characters that have inspired us over the years. It turns out those characters were much closer to us than we thought. At the same time, there is a gulf between us and them that cannot ever really be bridged, no matter how sincere our admiration or how meaningful the impact their stories had on us.

Stories are real, in a sense, but we cannot cross into them.

Yet we can look into them. If we are very, very lucky we can ever create a part of them. What Ishitani and Michibata chose to do with that rare, precious opportunity was to create a place for all of us to stand and admire those stories from a point just a little bit closer. Through the eyes of the wholesaler’s daughter. The green grocer’s boys. The book seller and the bar patrons and the Benevolent King of the Waves. Together share that admiration with one another for a few magical minutes. That was their love letter to the fans and I am very grateful for it.

I haven’t been fortunate enough to create a part of a cultural touchstone like One Piece but I have created a few stories of my own! If you’d like to support my work the simplest way to do so is to pick up my book Have Spell, Will Travel, available in ebook from Amazon today!

Fall of a Villain – Cipher Pol 9

Posted by natechen on

This is a continuation of last week’s discussion of villainy as seen through the lens of One Piece’s Water Seven arc. For the first half, introducing the story and characters and examining the ascendancy of Cipher Pol 9, the saga’s villains, click here. Further links, if you wish to go back and reread the Art of Evil series where we discussed villains in depth, are available at the end of this post.

Knowing what to do with your villain after they reach apotheosis can be difficult. Many stories have the villains ascending for the vast majority of the story, reach apotheosis for the climax, and then rapidly fall into defeat. Some have the villain reach apotheosis then disappear to the top of a gigantic tower for half the story and never influence the plot again *coughKefkacough*. Not so CP 9.

The Cipher Pol agents hit apotheosis at the end of the Water Seven saga’s first act and remain at their most powerful and threatening throughout the second act. This helps ratchet up and the tension through parts of the story that would otherwise slow things down.

The second act kicks off with Dr. Chopper rescuing Iceberg and the other Galley-la people left to die in the fire CP 9 set to cover their tracks. Iceberg then tells the Straw Hat pirates that, while CP 9 was searching the other room for the blueprints they wanted he interrogated Robin about her motives for helping the world government. It turns out that CP 9 had access to a Buster Call code, a terrifying military clearance that would let the leader of CP 9 summon a fleet capable of wiping most national fleets off the map from a nearby World Government garrison. They threatened to deploy the Buster Call against the Straw Hat pirates unless Robin acquiesced to their demands and, out of loyalty and love for the people that gave her a home for the first time in twenty years, Robin agreed.

Resolve hardened, the Straw Hat pirates gather themselves together and try to catch the last sea train before it leaves the city and Aqua Laguna seals them in.

Usopp winds up with Franky in a hidden warehouse in the city. Franky’s brought Usopp and the Merry Go there as bait to lure Luffy out so he can continue a fight they started earlier but, being quite the emotional kind of guy, after hearing how Luffy and Usopp came to blows over the fate of the ship he’s been moved and has a friendlier disposition. Some interesting character building happens but the most important part is that we learn Usopp has seen a Klaubatermann, a kind of sprite that appears on well loved ships. Franky tells Usopp he’s heard of them but never met anyone who’s seen one before, and that they’re basically a sign that the ship has become a touch self aware and cares for its crew. This will be important down the line.

CP 9 has been searching the city for Franky, convinced he has the blueprints they want, and at this point they find him, defeat both Franky and Usopp, and take them prisoner. We learn that CP 9 also had an agent keeping tabs on Franky all this time, along with the three watching Iceberg. Out of respect for their old profession, before leaving the warehouse one of the Cipher Pol agents drains the drydock and lets Merry Go out for the tide to take her. Then there is a flashback.

Much of this flashback isn’t relevant to our discussion but it gives us a few useful facts: It confirms that Franky has the blueprints for the superweapon CP 9 is hunting. It introduces Spandam, the commander of CP 9, and establishes his history with Franky. And it sets up the sea train’s connection between Water Seven and Enis Lobby, an island where the World Government holds prisoners until they can be transferred through the Gates of Justice and put beyond the reach of the rest of the world.

Back in the present, the Cipher Pol agents take Franky and Usopp to the sea train and join Robin there to set out for Enis Lobby and put the whole lot of them beyond the reach of the Straw Hats. Luffy doesn’t catch the train before it sets out but it turns out there’s a prototype of the sea train stowed away in an old Galley-la warehouse they can use to chase CP 9. The prototype is just like the normal sea train with two exceptions. It has fewer cars and no brakes. The Straw Hats are on a one way trip.

Once they hit the rails Luffy and crew have several close calls, nearly getting swamped by Aqua Laguna as the tide comes in and having other close shaves with CP 9’s backup. Unfortunately Cipher Pol gets to Enis Lobby ahead of the Straw Hats and digs in to wait until the Gates of Justice open and they can transfer their prisoners. CP 9’s other field team is introduced and Spandam reappears, followed shortly by the Straw Hats making landfall. Luffy bounces his rubber self over the walls of the island fortress on Enis Lobby, rushing ahead to engage the troops there as the Straw Hats trail behind at a more normal pace.

Luffy gets far enough ahead to fight and defeat the first member of CP 9, a moment that might signal the beginning of the end for the agents if not for the fact that their goals don’t require they defeat the Straw Hats, just move Robin and Franky through the Gates of Justice before Luffy and Co. can rescue them. Instead the fall of CP 9 begins a few moments later.

It takes some time for the Straw Hats to navigate the layers of internal defenses that make up Enis Lobby. As they wait for their allies to lower a drawbridge across a moat the Straw Hats reassemble on top of the gatehouse where the bridge will lower from. The full roster of Cipher Pol 9 assembles on the far side, waiting for the pirates’ move, and Spandam takes the moment to mock them. He tells the Straw Hats how Robin’s home city was leveled by a Buster Call, killing her mother and all her friends, which explains how a normally coolheaded woman could be bullied with one so easily. Then he directs their attention to the World Government flag that flies overhead and warns Luffy that if they cross the bridge and try to take Robin back they’ll not be fighting CP 9 but rather the entire world.

Without hesitation Luffy orders Usopp to shoot the flag down. Without hesitation the crew’s biggest coward puts a hole through the center of the World Government’s symbol of authority and declares war on the world.

CP 9’s apotheosis is an interesting one and reflects their goals quite well. Their ability to hunt down Franky quickly once it’s clear he’s the missing piece is noteworthy and, on top of the way all four undercover agents were introduced long before their reveal, establishes that Cipher Pol is indeed the world’s foremost experts in intelligence and infiltration. Their willingness to turn on old friends and a well crafted plan to escape the city is testament to their cold and professional conduct. But all this will not be enough to save them.

Villains are destroyed by their contradictions. Cipher Pol 9 was an organization built on secrecy and information gathering. But they failed to gather who had the plans they needed and what he had done with them. They failed to understand Luffy’s temperament, that he would ignore what his crew said under duress and refuse to give up on them. And they missed numerous other small things, like Sanji stowing away on their train as they escaped, that would add up to just enough of a delay to keep them in the Straw Hats’ reach. Additionally, in chasing superweapons, making threats with massive fleets and finally invoking the public face of the World Government they ceased to be anything like a secret organization. Spandam’s ambition and tactics ignored the nature of his role in the government and doomed him to failure.

The long apotheosis of CP 9 gave us time to not only see them at their best, dancing away from the Straw Hats time and again, but it showed us all the cracks in the armor that would ensure the pirates would catch them in the end and win out.

Once the Straw Hats confront Cipher Pol at Enis Lobby the collapse of the World Government’s top spies is only a matter of time and the defeat of the individual members of the group aren’t really important from the perspective of building villains. But the finishing touches on their defeat that wrap up the story’s plot threads and seal CP 9’s fate are instructive.

First off, One Piece is a “shonen battle manga”, meaning the emphasis of the story is on action, typically in the form of one on one duels. Usopp doesn’t have a duel with a CP 9 member per se, somewhat fitting since he’s not officially a member of the crew at the time. But he knows that the fact he hadn’t parted ways with Luffy when Robin left means she’d taken a fall for him as much as the others and so, when Spandam is dragging her towards the Gates of Justice and none of the other Straw Hats are in any position to help her, Usopp takes to the top of the gatehouse once more and snipes Spandam and his men, guaranteeing that the World Government will always consider him part of the Straw Hats. CP 9 didn’t take a direct hand in dividing him from his friends but they were the driving force that would bring the Straw Hats back together. Usopp ultimately stays with the crew after they leave Water Seven.

Second, as his minions are defeated one by one Spandam begins the Buster Call protocol and brings the Navy down on the Straw Hats like a hammer. With the sea train far behind them on the other side of the island the Straw Hats have no way off the island and find themselves surrounded by more and more powerful Navy combatants. As the situation begins to look hopeless Usopp hears the voice of the Klaubatermann and the Merry Go arrives, now aware enough to sail itself to its crew, to take the Straw Hats to sea one last time.

From the moment Kaku of CP 9 declared the ship useless the ship has served as a symbol for the health of the crew. Every setback the crew suffers in the Water Seven saga sees the ship become more and more tattered. Multiple people declare Merry Go will never sail again, including Iceberg and Franky. The infiltrators from CP 9 tell the Straw Hats over and over again the ship is dead. They might as well be saying that they’ll never have Robin back, that they’ll never be a family again. But when Merry comes for its crew we realize that all that disdain was meaningless. The Straw Hats hung together in the end and so did Merry. The crew was broken and struggled through to a new unity and Merry answered that. Sadly, the stalwart ship was still well and truly done for with this final task complete. But that… is not a part of the story of CP 9. For now, just know that the ship’s final act, not Usopp sniping Spandam, Luffy punching out Rob Lucci or Franky freeing Robin from her chains, marks the final defeat of Cipher Pol 9. When Merry sails into view every last aspersion cast on the crew’s honor is blown away and the crew is whole again, if only for a brief time.

Your villain is not defeated when he lies on the ground. He is defeated when the shadows he cast are gone.

As the villains of the Water Seven arc, CP 9 stands out as one of the best parts of one of the best arcs in One Piece. Built less as an extension of the One Piece world and more to oppose the Straw Hats at this particular juncture Cipher Pol 9 is, in many ways, an inversion of the Straw Hat Pirates. Their personalities match in many ways but the group dynamics are completely opposite. CP 9 has none of the Straw Hats’ camaraderie or cohesion. Spandam is a small and petty man who engenders no loyalty, Luffy a generous man who’s comrades trust and love him. With over a year and a half to tell the story of Water Seven, Oda clearly layed out these contrasts and made it very easy to see why pirates like the Straw Hats are better than self proclaimed emissaries of justice like CP 9 and his excellent command of the first two thirds of villainous storytelling made the third act less a flurry of realizations and desperate gambits and more the visitation of a well deserved reckoning on misguided villains. It’s worth the reading if you have the time and opportunity.

Further reading on the art of the villain: