The Reason Why The Strawhats Aren’t Here It’s Because Zoro Got Lost In The Underground And The Rest

One Piece AU where the pirates have two factions; Peace Mains and Morgania. (Reference: Romance Dawn by Eiichiro Oda)

Peace Mains: Pirates who made a living by hunting Morgania.

Morgania: Pirates who made a living by pillaging and committing crimes.

Basically a more slice of life AU with some major lore, with Luffy looking for adventures rather than One Piece and meeting new friends along the way.

Ace and Sabo followed suit because Crocodile knows that his youngest won't be able to avoid trouble. All three aims to make a crew consisting of Peace Mains pirates.

They basically travel around for weeks and for 2 months and then they go back to their hometown. The rest of the Strawhats joined but they sometimes go do their own thing sometimes. Somehow they're always nearby when the brothers get themselves into trouble. Is it fate?

For the Shichibukai, they're made out of the strongest Peace Mains and they're the top amongst the pirates. They control a large region and prevents Morgania pirates from causing havoc. Unlike canon they don't work with the Marines and aside from nicknames from the public no one knows their true identity, the only exception being Kuma.

Crocodile: He guards Alabasta and the surrounding area. As a warlord, he is known for punishing Morgania pirates to near death as a warning. He is known as Mr. 0 by the Marines due to the number nickname given to his underlings and the Desert King due to the area he rules over. He often appear without his head during Baroque Works meetings, so not even his coworkers know how he looks like.

Dracule Mihawk: Known as the Sharp-Eyed Man and the Marine Hunter by the Marines, he is known for working alone. He takes down Marines and Morgania Pirates from the shadows, his hawk mask covering his face. He lives alone on an island until he met Zoro and Perona. He starts to leave his island more often. Used to be a normal hawk when he was hit with a Devil Fruit power that turns animal into humans.

Gecko Moria: Doesn't go by any epithet, but he is whispered amongst the Marines like an urban legend of the seas. Not much is known about him.

Kuma: Was called the Tyrant and the only one who the Marines know for sure his identity is. He never stays in one place for long, but wherever he goes the people said that a big, gentle man helps them.

Boa Hancock: Nicknamed Medusa, all who laid their eyes on her become stone, and they all forget how she looks like after turning back. Lives in Amazon Lily and send out ships to help free slaves to the outside world. Hopeless romantic. She and Jinbe are friends.

Jinbe: Known as the Knight of the Seas. He frees slaves and destroy human auction houses. Marines are not sure if he's human or something else. He went to Amazon Lily shore on weekends for tea with Hancock.

Donquixote Doflamingo: Known as the Heavenly Yaksha, he always foils Marines plans to capture Peace Mains pirates. His brother, Rosinante is still alive alongside their parents. Rosi joins the Marines and along with Sengoku resolves to make sure the Marines don't do much harm. He works at a boutique belonging to his parents when not doing pirates stuff. Law is his adopted nephew and Doffy isn't sure if the kid knows or not that he's a pirate.

What's your thoughts on Makoto rebuilding hope's peak? Do you think it's a good idea, or is it the perfect set up for another tragedy? The tragedy was put into motion since Junko knew that they had all the Ultimates there. She just had to do some.... hardcore manipulation and such.

Oh I have THOUGHTS about this alright, I’ve even talked about it before. I think it’s a very stupid decision to rebuild hopes peak but ENTIRELY in character. Junko is such a fascinating character to me because just as much as she’s an important figure in starting the tragedy, she’s also it’s scapegoat. Without the literal human experimentation on children hopes peak was doing she would have been so much less successful, potentially unable to even do the tragedy. The parade doesn’t exist without the abuse of the reserve course, the ultimate tragic event truly started with the reserve course RIOTING over the fact their money was used to fuel human experimentation on THEMSELVES. You don’t need Junko for that, Junko pushed the riot to an extreme yea, but she wouldn’t have a riot without Izuru. Junko threw a match on a pile of rags soaked in oil, but she didn’t make the pile, and if she didn’t start that blaze, someone else would have.

However if everyone points at Junko they don’t need to think about how she only succeeded because hopes peak enabled her, how hopes peak set up a society of cruel hard castes, and suffering that let someone like Junko thrive. It’s easy to blame a single human person for everything when in reality, the fall of the talent system was inevitable. Which makes it easy to repeat history if you are someone directly traumatized by Junko. Makoto is also a Hopes Peak Fanboy, he idolizes the academy because society tells him that the academy and talent system is good and just and perfect, it tells him that the institute is hope and all its war crimes is just a Few Bad Eggs. He’s simply recreating the caste system that he was raised to admire, buying into the propaganda that his childhood and future foundation pushes. Plus he’s inherently privileged by being an ultimate, he knows basically nothing about the plight of those actually crushed under hope peak’s boot. Which from the reserve course and comments from Toko in UDG about Komaru’s lack of talent, and attitudes like Komaeda’s, the plight of the untalented is a very real one.

It’s easy for him to be optimistic and think “well if one Bad person ruined the system that was always inherently Good then a Good person can put it back” but he’s wrong, you can’t fix hopes peak, you can’t fix the talent system, the desperation for talent broke the warriors of hope, it broke the reserves, and it broke the world. I think he means so so well I think he genuinely believes this will work, but in reality its doomed, eventually it’ll fall again. It’s the perfect example of how Makoto Naegi believes so hard he can change the world, but unlike with the remnants, this change will not be a good one. Plus he’s like what, 21? And trying to run a school? Good fucking luck sir you’ll need it.

Tldr; it’s really in character for him to do it because of the fact he was raised around it, thinks it’s to be a force of hope like he was taught his entire life, and is himself the privileged cast a talent system supports. I doubt someone like Hajime, someone burned by the system, would support it so easily. It’s a bad idea that’s only going to hurt people because Makoto accepts Junko as a scapegoat and fails to truly grasp the atrocities hopes peak did before Junko, thus dooming them to be repeated in the future, maybe not by him, but in the future, when another headmaster goes “hey what if we made a new ultimate hope” or “what if we push a young child’s talent to the limit” and starts this whole damn thing over again. It’s so very Makoto Naegi, and it will be his biggest mistake.

Top 5 Warriors of Hope

From my least to most favourite, here they are!

5. Monaca Towa

As the main antagonist of the game, I’m obviously bound to dislike her. But there wasn’t really anything redeeming about her. She was manipulative and calculating, and had tantrums whenever things didn’t go her way. I didn’t warm to her at all, unlike the others.That said, in DR3 Future Arc, she was totally different and I did start liking her there. But I’m basing this on Ultra Despair Girls, so bottom of the list she goes.

4. Nagisa Shingetsu

Unlike Monaca, I don’t actively dislike Nagisa. He’s just really forgettable. Despite surviving the longest of all the Warriors (except Monaca), I can’t remember anything much about him.

3. Jataro Kemuri

Poor Jataro, always getting put down by the others. I have a soft spot for him, but it’s not much more than that. In the game I found him rather irritating a lot of the time, and I’m not sure it was intended.

2. Kotoko Utsugi 

She’s generally the upbeat, funny one in the group, and I liked that. She also seems to be the most focused on what they are doing, constantly reminding the others about the game they are playing. She was good.

1. Masaru Daimon

I saw something the other day where someone had said Masaru was their least favourite DR character. And I just can’t agree with that. He’s the most personable of the Warriors, and I didn’t mind having him around. I think a little bit of that was where he was the first of the Warriors you fought, and that meant he was the one that made you think “whoa hold on, these kids aren’t the monsters I initially thought”. The scene where he stops and beats his arm for trembling..that was pretty uncomfortable (in a game where everything was uncomfortable) and my heart really went out to him.

-Alice

The Post-Tragedy Horrors of Despair Time

Hello everyone, Mod Bubbles here!

This Halloween, I decided to do something a little different. Rather than a dedicated post or song parody, I've decided to share a worldbuilding analysis. A pretty fortuitous one, since we've recently completed Chapter 2 of Despair Time.

I'm sure it's no exaggeration to say that DT is a pretty dark fangan, especially within its own context. I wouldn't say it's as grimdark and nihilistic as some people are convinced it is, but there's some elements to it that I feel are worth analyzing going forward.

See, it's been established that DT is set within the Hope's Peak continuity. This would mean that the canon games sans V3 (and if you want to have fun with it, other fangans like the Another series) have all happened here.

According to a Q&A, DT is set around 70-80 years after the end of the Tragedy, so if you wanted to estimate based on in-universe dates (such as Makoto's Hope's Peak brochure saying 2010 in the earliest version of the game but 2014 in a re-release), that would put it sometime around 2080 to the mid-2090s. Veronika backs this up in Chapter 2, when she mentions the Tragedy happened "almost a century ago."

Why do I bring all this up? Because if you looked at DT, you'd probably never guess it was that deep in the future. I know I didn't at first. And this is all by design, but it goes beyond simple cosmetic details. Allow me to explain to you why this is probably the darkest timeline that could've happened after Class 78's victory over Ultimate Despair.

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Modern Stagnancy

So if we look at the obvious, the world of DT looks pretty much identical to our own, which should be a good thing. When you consider that this is set after The Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in Human History- an event that saw societal collapse, wars happen for the sake of destruction, massive pollution, rampant murder, and countless killing games- then it almost seems utopian.

Cities have long since been rebuilt, the skies are clear, there are functional trains, movies, celebrities, schools, music, art, Ted-Talks, the internet, all the trappings of normality. And that's really the problem.

Once the recovery efforts were underway, the goal of those in power was to rebuild things exactly as they used to be. Bear in mind, the world looks like our modern day, yet this is set deep into the late 21st century. In that context, the world almost seems stunted in its growth or even that it's regressed, given that CDs and DVDs are used rather than USBs or digital downloads.

Not only that, but this extends to societal attitudes as well. Nico was the victim of bullying over their status as an enby by everyone who knew, including their own father. It's almost the 22nd century and anti-LGBTQ bigotry like this still exists.

In that context, it feels less like the world is recovering and more that it's been stuck in its pre-Tragedy status quo, right down to continuing the Ultimates program that contributed to The Tragedy in the first place. And who would be motivated to do that?

2. Hope's Peak And Their Kin Are Stronger Than Ever

Probably one of the most contentious aspects of DR3's ending is that, after everything the people in charge of it were responsible for- exploiting their students, covering up crimes, human experimentation- Hope's Peak Academy was rebuilt by the survivors, now with Makoto as headmaster.

Now, one could make the argument that Makoto is a better example of hope and thus better suited to lead the school to follow its stated ideals than the Steering Committee ever was. That very well may be true, but as they also proved, nobody stays in charge forever. And now, because of his decision, Hope's Peak isn't contained to Japan.

There now exist Hope's Peak branches in every major country on Earth, with two in the United States. Teruko and co. are students of the East Coast Division's 27th class, meaning that one opened almost thirty years ago. This would also mean that Japan's Hope's Peak would have seen over 150 classes since its inception.

I bring all this up because, as has been made very clear by canon, Hope's Peak is a terrible place even in concept. When you remove the idyllic aspect of fostering talent and guaranteeing its students are set for life, the truth is that ultimates are stunted in their development. They're only encouraged to excel in their particular field, whether they really want to or not.

In addition, Hope's Peak has always quietly held this belief that only people with talent hold any worth; those without talent are just "ticks" who leech off the success of their betters. Characters like Byakuya and Nagito echo those very same sentiments, this extreme elitism that encourages people to view the "99%" as inherently inferior.

Even if you wanted to say Makoto managed to undo that idea, can we really say this divide would never come up again? No matter how many years pass or how many divisions of Hope's Peak are set up across the world? That seems really far-fetched to me.

Consider Min's bonus video. As she explains, she was never scouted by the school. Instead, America's Hope's Peak announced something called the Ultimate Contest for Eminent Students, where eligible high school students would be allowed to take a test, the best of whom would be admitted to the school when they graduated. The catch is that they had 12 years to prepare. Min, who was only 5 at the time, wasn't initially going to participate, but then the founder of a company called XF-Ture Tech approached her family- who was quite poor- and wanted to sponsor her in exchange for her participation.

She spent her entire life preparing for that test. And when she passed, she realized it was all really just an experiment to create their ideal version of the Ultimate Student. She even doubted that she was the best in terms of raw score, just that she met their desired expectations by cutting out everything else in her life for that test.

It also extends beyond just Hope's Peak itself. Those with power and influence now hold a strangle hold over the most vulnerable people out there, as we can see with the Lacroix family.

Rose wanted to help her family out of their financial limitations using her painting skills and her photographic memory, which lead to her becoming an art forger. However, at 15, she was found out and her family faced tens of millions in fines. This would've been the end, but then they were bailed out by a billionaire named Richard Spurling, founder of the Spurling Foundation. In exchange for clearing her charges, Rose had to sign a contract that meant she doesn't own the rights to anything she paints.

She hates what her life has become, where she can only ever really paint things at the whims of the Foundation because it was the only way her family could survive that mountain of debt. The exploitation there is undeniable.

No matter where you look, there's still exploitation and experiment abound with the school, corporations and the wealthy. And if you think the Spurling Foundation sounds bad here, they're implied to be responsible for something much worse.

Which is also brings us to Xander. See, there's a curious detail when we first meet him in the prologue:

And I agree. Xander being the Ultimate Rebel really doesn't fit him, as he's better described as the "Ultimate Revolutionary." Except there's no chance Hope's Peak would call him that, instead paying lip service to the idea in a digestible format to still support the status quo.

Xander is an activist who works to oppose corruption, but the ones who benefit from corruption wouldn't want him to flaunt that. It's a subtle but very clever detail that shows those in power still maintain a hold even over their beloved Ultimates.

They probably had no issue throwing the obviously corrupt under the bus to save their own hides, and raised Xander up with a quasi-supportive title. It gives them a chance to look like they're supporting what he's doing while still tying an element of a "rebellious child" to his image with the name.

Had Xander survived, he had a good reason to want to bring them down, especially the Spurlings.

3. Illness and Poverty

Xander's bonus video clued us in on what I believe is one of the most important parts of DT's continuity: the fate of the town of Chariton, implied to be where he lived. It seemed to be a small town, home to a couple hundred or a couple thousand people, where the only hospital for miles was "dinky, understaffed" and barely able to handle a minor flu outbreak. They were completely unprepared for what became known as the Chariton Incident.

When he was around 14, the town was hit by a disease that caused those infected to decay from the outside in; their limbs would stop working before their organs did, meaning they would just lay there and feel themselves slowly dying. So many died that nobody was left to move the bodies, so they were left where they fell, rotting in the summer heat.

The cause of this outbreak? A contaminated river that served as the town's water source. Chariton was an impoverished community, where people had no money to treat their water, get medicine from a nearby city or to even move out. It's also implied, based on Xander's anger, that Duke Spurling was partially responsible and that he got off the hook, which may be what drove Xander to become the Ultimate Rebel. Especially when you consider he's the only surviving member of his family.

Duke Spurling is, as the named implies and Dev has confirmed, the younger brother of Richard Spurling. The money and influence needed to get his brother off the hook is the very same that has the Lacroix family under his thumb.

So as we can see, Chariton was a major event in DT's canon. Not only does it showcase corruption, it also showcases understated but still prominent problems in the post-Tragedy U.S. If you pay attention, you'll also notice Teruko, Min, and Rose mention poverty playing a role in their lives.

As we can see, poverty plays a major role in their lives, and that extends beyond a personal level. Chariton's poverty is why the incident happened at all, and a big reason is because it's also an example of a medical desert.

"Medical desert" is a term used to describe regions whose population has inadequate access to healthcare. This can be all healthcare in general or in specialties such as dental care or pharmaceuticals. This is an especially prominent problem in rural areas, but it can affect urban ones too.

If that sounds implausible to you, today it's believed that around 30 million Americans- over 1% of the population- live over an hour from a hospital. Can you imagine how bad the problem is in a world after The Tragedy? All the damage to infrastructure, established institutions, the economy, and the population? I doubt Chariton was the first to see something this bad.

Ace's execution gives us more clues. In the Death By Illness section, there are several newspaper clippings on the wall, most of which are readable. One flashes on screen saying "Unexplained Illness Kills Thousands," which I believe is another reference to Chariton (why else would it flash on screen?), but there's more as well:

"More people are dying of cancer than ever before"

"Flu season claims thousands of lives"

"Falling rates of survival for hospitalized patients"

"Antibiotic-resistant infections a growing threat in this hospital"

One is harder to read, but I believe it mentions Chronic Kidney Disease being tied to an early death

Now, the interesting thing is that most of these are modern headlines, and they can be pretty misleading. The cancer one is actually based on the fact that more people are living longer lives, thus are reaching ages where they develop cancer due to their cell infrastructure breaking down naturally. It doesn't mean there's more cancer cases overall across all ages.

The only one that's not true is the falling rates one. Which suggests that not only was it Chariton, but healthcare infrastructure in general after the Tragedy seems to be a mess.

See, I was assuming that these articles are identical to what we see today. But it's also possible that the cancer one is now literally true, and it could be because The Tragedy was rife with this kind of horror. We know that terrorism, coups and wars happened for no reason other than to spread despair across the world.

Could you imagine how many nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological weapons were used? How many diseases and hazardous materials were seeded into the environment? If it's unsafe to drink tap water after a serious hurricane or earthquake, how bad is the problem when contamination is the goal?

And this doesn't even touch on how disturbingly easy it would be to spread long-term illnesses such as HIV or CJD in contaminated food and medical supplies. Some diseases have latency periods that last decades, meaning they could still be killing people even by the time DRDT is set.

Antibiotic resistance is also a very real and serious problem. Even today, some strains have become immune to even the strongest antibiotics available. This has given rise to Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococci or VREs, which are immune to basically every medication we can throw at them.

Now, it's still possible to deal with them, such as with naturally antimicrobial metals or experimental treatments such as CRISPR and Phage Therapy, but in a world that saw such a massive hit to everything? I'm certain antibiotic-resistance bacteria have become much more serious, potentially resulting in epidemics over the years.

And when these things happen, it's always the poor who suffer the most.

4. Lethal Repetition

Now we come to the most obvious example, something highlighted by the same reveal that DT is set nearly a century into the future:

Veronika, who provided us with information on the effects the Tragedy still has, apparently has never heard about The Killing School Life.

Now, it's important to keep in mind that most of the Killing Games in DR were pretty secluded and motivated. SDR2 was only broadcast to Future Foundation with the goal to allow Junko to escape into the real world, for example. However, DR1's Killing School Life was broadcast globally as a means to break humanity's hope by showing the Ultimates slaughtering each other. Instead, Makoto and co. managed to reinvigorate the world's hope and played a pivotal role in ending the Tragedy.

...And yet Veronika apparently hasn't heard any of it.

Now, there's two possibilities here, neither of which are good:

One is that the Mastermind has removed their knowledge of previous killing games, specifically. Now, I actually consider this an unlikely explanation because, not only does Teruko seem to vaguely remember the Killing School Life happened, but what's the goal in doing so for the participants?

The canon games all had solid reasons why the other masterminds erased the participants' memories: the revelation that they'd been killing their friends, the fact that their past identities were supposed to be undone to save them, even the fact that they weren't even who they were supposed to be in V3.

But what's the purpose of suppressing the memories of the Killing School Life in the participants themselves? Especially since this game is also apparently being broadcast to the outside world, although we only have MonoTV's word on that. Is it to undermine everything the survivors achieved or to get the participants not to consider the same strategies?

The other, more plausible explanation to me is that the mastermind isn't the one who erased their memories. The outside world did.

It's possible that, in the decades since the Tragedy and the drive to return things to the status quo, knowledge of the Killing School Life has been suppressed. It would be so easy to blame Makoto's decision to rebuild the school, but it's just as plausible that his attempts to genuinely reform the school were undone over the years.

Corporations and those that came after had a vested reason to improve their own reputations, and why would they allow their connection to the Tragedy to remain public knowledge? The entire thing began as a revolution of lower classes against the rich before it became a whirlwind of mindless violence.

So what does this mean for DT? This is more hypothesizing on my part, but I'd say this could tell us a lot about the potential motivations for this very killing game. Could it be someone trying to remind the world about this event and how we got here? Is it more retribution against the wealthy? Is it someone who was inspired by Junko to slaughter her friends? Or is it something else entirely? And what role does Teruko have if someone involved is so hellbent on trying to kill her?

For now, we can only speculate. But I can tell you that, based on what we've seen here, DT is probably the darkest future we could've gotten out of the canon series.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Ecosocialist praxis

thank you horikoshi sensei.

This audio from Star vs the Forces of evil worked way too well in reference to how the Neo World Program works! It could have fit any character but I always associate Star with Sonia so I decided to use her!

Fun fact, within a day of posting this on tiktok it became my second highest viewed video ever and highest viewed animation I’ve done which is wild! (It’s currently at 163.0k views!!)

Is it weird that I actually prefer DR3’s explanation for how Chiaki was created over DR2 implying that Chihiro created Chiaki? It more sense to have the memories Class 77-B have for Chiaki, be used as basis for which an Observer can be built from.

And while Chihiro creating an Alter Ego ai for the NWP makes sense (a completely separate Alter Ego from the one he eventually makes in DR1) I don’t really buy Chihiro is able to create three separate ai’s with distinct personalities and roles for the NWP. Especially since Chiaki and Usami are therapy ai and Chihiro definitely doesn’t have any therapeutic knowledge.

Plus, making three ai’s a lot of work for just one person and this isn’t a project he owns, he’s only collaborating with the development along with many other people so I imagine Chihiro would only be here to develop the Alter Ego ai and the development of an Observer system would be handled by other people.

I personally believe "Alter Ego" is just multiple copies of a single A.I. program — once that we happen to see put to work in a variety of different situations/ways.

But other than that, I think I can generally agree with you. Maybe not for the exact same reasons, but I still agree with your concluesions.

I understand that we're supposed to believe Fujisaki, Gekkogahara, and Matsuda all worked together to develop the Neo World Program. That's why we see Gekkogahara's personal avatar, Usami, working as a therapeutic A.I. program within the NWP. But once you have Fujisaki developing Alter Ego (based on themselves) and then co-developing Usami (based on Gekkogahara), the thing about the Chiaki is: Why would Chihiro develop two separate therapy A.I.s for the same program? And then, despite basing their previous A.I.s on specific people, how and/or why would Chihiro create a third A.I. that somehow has its own completely unique, distinct personality that ISN'T based on anybody else?

For those reasons, I think the justification for Chiaki's uniqueness and distinct function given in DR3 is actually better than going without those explanations.

Ultra Despair Girls is honestly probably the best Kodaka has ever gotten at writing traumatized characters.

Recently I bought game pass for pc and finally got to play Psychonauts 2. I’m still very far from the ending, but I’m really liking the game so far. The only bummer is that I feel like every character is either dismissive or completely rude towards the protagonist, which makes me not like very much any of the new characters. So I thought, “Raz surely deserved a better group of friends… What if I draw other psychic characters in Psychonauts style?” It was challenging trying to emulate the game style, I don’t know if I nailed it, but it was a great learning experience.