This episode went from making me genuinely frustrated to seeing the wrong of my ways but still being a little salty. I'll start with my initial reaction. While reflecting on my feelings towards the Katakuri fight, I thought about how on top of the clumsy and slow pacing of this fight, taking a questionable amount of time to get to engaging ground dragging behind our expectations, there's something slightly more insidious. As I initially stated when going into this battle, I do not have an emotional stake in this. I have no hard feelings for Katakuri, nor do I think his relationship with Luffy is a meaningful one. This fight may turn into something deeply personal for the characters, but at the moment it's not much more than a fight to me. A slow and tedious fight, one where I would be totally content with Luffy running away. Where I was looking forward to an engaging and fascinating fight based on mechanics unique to Katakuri, I haven't gotten that either. With the clumsiness of this encounter, and a lack of emotional or engaging weight, I feel like what was created is exactly what many One Piece fans distance themselves from within shounen. Where One Piece fans often say they enjoy the series, not for the battles, but for the characters, because it's very emotional and character-driven, this fight hasn't been that so far, nor has it been a good battle. What it has is two characters running at, yelling, and punching each other without a great feeling of advancement or substance. This fight feels like what people imagine when they describe bad shounen, obviously this is only my opinion.
But then to go from this feeling of a stereotypically boring battle shounen where the crux of the matter is monotonous fighting between characters without a great reason while we wait for the good guy to win, we then cut to another Sanji and Pudding joke which has already gotten old, and then we cut to Big Mom yelling “cakie!!” while she does what we already knew she was doing, the only new information was a detailed look at Nuts island. Yeah, I was getting seriously frustrated seeing how redundant and meandering everything felt.
However, that was when everything started to come together. With a great flow, we see the panic of Mom’s forces as they cannot track down their enemies and they don't understand why. We see Bege getting one of his lovably depraved smiles realizing the situation and heading towards his beloved wife. With some new information we pan directly down into the ocean and see firsthand what has been stopping the tracking, that is Aladdin and his girl, the Sun pirates! We have been ignorant to the plan enacted by Jimbei’s friends and seeing it come to light with this fun flow was a pretty great moment! We even got a jiggle from shark waifu.
But that's something small right? We cut back to Katakuri and what we witness is Luffy losing energy and running away for ten more minutes. To add on to the building feeling that this fight is the epitome of what One Piece tends not to be, we have the cheesy ten minute debuff occur, the one I particularly dislike. Yeah sure, this episode at least had something really fun but it still sucks, or so I thought. But then Luffy ran into Brulee and in a hysterical moment, Luffy takes hold of her and changes the entire environment. Still, it's not much on itself, but then we hear the chaos going on and it sinks in that the redundant Big Mom scene from earlier was incredibly important. Luffy has appeared in the midst of her hunger pangs. This created a wonderful sense of flow throughout the episode which even made the boring scenes feel coherent and surprising, connecting everything. To top it off Sanji and Pudding are finally ready to leave that kitchen.
Hopefully I have expressed the rollercoaster of an episode this was for me, and I would like to end by saying although the redundancy leading to me feeling jaded or irritated ended up being subverted, I still hold the position I take with the Katakuri fight. It began so exciting and it had so many prospects, not to say there weren't good moments, but I am super disappointed by what has happened. |