While watching the recap a thought hit me that I didn’t realize before. The animals are amazing in One Piece and we all know it. All the way back to Chouchou the dog we’ve known how voiceless animals can be genuinely great characters that we grow to care about immensely. That’s why the inclusion of Chopper is so genius. We already love and understand that there is more to characters like Pierre, Carue, or in this case Sodom and Gomorrah, but with someone there able to translate the already very well written animal characters they can get a whole new level of depth. Seeing Gomorrah charge in blindly to keep its promise to Sodom actually reminded me of the epic displays of friendship such as Usopp standing up for Luffy against Mr.4 and Mole Lady covered in blood. He had a promise to keep with its close friend and Franky and it wasn’t going to let that go unfinished, even if it was blind and hurt. And we got to understand its backstory and its motives on a level far greater than we otherwise would have because of Chopper. :) What a great idea from Oda.
Sanji and Zoro helping Gomorrah by breaking down the wall before it lied there triumphantly happy was great.
I also laughed hysterically hard when Zoro casually sliced down the massive stone gate. Zoro always has been a monster but he’s totally turned into an absolutely rule of cool monster now. There’s nothing he can’t do!
Aokiji is entrusting Spandam with a buster call and the ability to have it all the time in the future and Aokiji was a smart guy. The background works are really throwing me for a loop. I wonder what role Spandam has in this and exactly how he’s being used as a puppet, because at least to me he seems like he’s the absolute least qualified person out of Aokiji and all the CP9 underlings.
Ohara was the island of archeology. It stands from that, that it makes sense that the “Ohara devils” were able to read poneglyphs. And from that it leads to the question of, why are they “devils”, is it because they had the ability to bring back the ancient weapon or were they big contributors in it’s inception? Regardless, I seem to recall the government wanting to get rid of the ancient weapon before deciding to take it for their own power, so maybe the original buster call was to eliminate all chances of it being revived and later they changed their mind and hunted down the sole survivor. I can’t wait until we get too understand it in more than bits and pieces.
It’s taken far too long to get the news to Spandam but now that it finally has it’s incredibly satisfying. But it kinda illuminates my problem with this entire place feeling as if its set up to give attackers an advantage. I mean it’s outrageous that the first time Spandam learns that there’s more than 5 casualties is when there’s 2000, the attackers have made substantial development in their plans, and some of their best soldiers(the giants) changed sides. If one of the guys was able to run in and warn him now why not earlier? No one could reach Spandam but I’m sure there were closer soldiers they could have called and got to deliver the message. At least him getting his arrogance knocked off his face when he learned the news made up for it, especially with Franky laughing in his face over it.
To be fair, however, assuming this place has been around forever perhaps it's One Piece's goal to show us just how awful of a leader Spandam is. Surely he wasn't always the person in charge and maybe his arrogance and cockiness and stupidity have led him to this troubling scenario and the goal itself is to show us that. Criticizing the place for not having sea prism stone weaponry is one thing, and even criticizing the guards for not having a single one think to themselves that they should tell him is another, but criticizing an awful leader for poor leadership seems silly. Perhaps my issues with Enies Lobby are half intentional and half unintentional.
And the final scene was yet another very small section of the Luffy vs Blueno fight. We’ve been getting it in bits and pieces but it’s really great regardless. I have to wonder how you can moonwalk, or whatever they call the air jumps, when it isn’t a devil fruit power. The body control of iron body, or the speed of shave, or the strength of their finger pistols is imaginable but the air jumps have be perplexed.
So Luffy has been training off screen ever since he lost so easily to Aokiji because he didn’t want to lose again and not be able to protect his friends. I always prefer foreshadowing or even directly showing us training and figuring this stuff out because it can make it far more satisfying and feel less out of nowhere. At least Aokiji happened a good while ago and it’s not like this is an asspull, it’s just something we were not aware of, or at least I wasn’t. I could have missed it. And it seems Luffy is finally doing that thing I’ve always talked about, mastering his devil fruit power to the likes of someone like Ace or Crocodile or especially Aokiji who has immense control over it. I can’t tell exactly what he’s doing but he seems to be coiling his limbs in some way to become extra stretchy and I do hope it gets explained. It’s certainly been something I’ve predicted since Alabasta finally coming true! |