I enjoyed this episode. I'll start with the Luffy and Cracker section. While the fight seemed to be a power scaling contest, it quickly became something more interesting. The teamwork of Nami and Luffy together allowed for them to utilize their powers and environment to hinder Cracker. Comically, after making the biscuit armour soggy, the fight became a power contest once more but in a very different light. What we should have expected coming into a land of food was for Luffy to eat his enemies. Luffy has almost met his match, he is exhausting Cracker and can hardly eat anymore. A battle against infinite clones has become an eating contest between a man who can conjure infinite food and a man who can eat unlimited food so I must respect that insane shift which in retrospect I feel I should have seen coming! Still, I would have hoped that an emperor's top subordinate would have understood this obvious weakness and had some alternative strategies to cover it rather than 'continuously send in more minions', but I can't entirely blame him at the same time because Luffy is an enigma. His stomach is near bottomless, and Cracker's strategy to overwhelm would work on most people.
As for Sanji, the sequence was pretty heartfelt. Firstly, Reiju made sure that she was the one to tend to his wounds, it is just like the old days. Getting gang beat and then being secretly helped by his sister. Yet something has changed. Reiju had to ask where his chivalry came from, which sadly suggests it is a concept alien to her. Perhaps what she fears is by going against her brother's, she would be beaten as Sanji is, something worse than I had initially imagined but in retrospect makes sense. As for Sanji's response, way back when I had speculated that Sanji must have learnt his sense of chivalry from Zeff. What we saw was exactly that! We are adding value to the Baratie and the father-son relationship with Zeff many years down the line in and out of universe.
A young Sanji suggested that if a woman doesn’t learn, to kick her. An adorably shocking line coming from him. And Zeff’s response was to teach Sanji a lesson, that if he ever went against his manhood by hurting a woman he would kill both of them. And the reason? Because that's the price a parent shares.. That line got me teary-eyed, as obviously it did for Sanji as well, both of them considered each other family in explicit terms. And this makes one of Sanji’s most definitive traits all the more meaningful. It is dedicated to being someone that Zeff can be proud of, a way of expressing his gratitude. Reiju asked why Sanji would come back for the sake of that cook, well that's why. But of course Sanji didn't say that, he simply parroted the reasoning that Zeff gave when he was a child.
It's a really nice move to go back into the crucial past of the main characters that we already know and love and to add even more value to them, as well as adding value to definitive character traits and character motivation. I think another side of this is how Sanji has always known violence, his brothers beat him, and so did his adoptive dad although in the name of tough love. This, similar to how Sanji would cook due to his past, the validation he gained from it and a promise to his mom. His tendency to be hotheaded or quick to violence is no surprise either. I mean, he was literally taught lessons by a hot headed dad's kicks. I cannot stress enough how wonderful this added past is for one of my already favourite characters. |