A New Champion Takes The Stage,

You know the One Piece brainrot is bad when you see a wanted poster for Feathers McGraw in the new Wallace and Gromit and think it's a reference 💀

today is an important day to remember this poem 💙

no sentence fills me with utter loathing so much as "i asked chatgpt"

EXACTLYYYY

I feel like a lot of people really want/wanted Kuina to be Tashigi because they can't accept that all the potential she had was ruined because she had a tragic accident.

What makes Zoro's backstory sad isn't so much the scale of destruction, like on Robin's, but rather how down to Earth it is, as Kuina tripped, fell and probably broke her neck in a bad landing. It's that simple, and it serves as a good contrast to the larger scale backstories.

Today I was showing my nephew the second episode of OPLA with Usopp, and we've got to the scene when Zoro was trying to get out of the well, while thinking about Kuina. My nephew complained about how in anime Kuina died in an accident which he found lame, and I started to think about it deeper.

I came to conclusion that Kuina's fairly normal death via tripping accident is meant to be doubly tragic. She didn't just die young in a stupid, easily avoidable accident, while having such grand plans as becoming the greatest warrior ever; she didn't even die in combat. All of this happens some time after Zoro and Kuina promised each other that one of them will become The Greatest Swordsman in the World, so Kuina's ordinary accident feels like a cruel twist of fate. She didn't even die a warrior's death; she just tripped.

I playfully flirt with some of my friends constantly 😭😭😭

On a serious note, do any other aromantic people relate to wanting to platonically kiss a friend, like just on the cheek? I get that urge really often but don't want to come across as weirder than I already am. Platonic hugs just don't cut it half the time 😞

(I think I just want a queerplatonic relationship with another aromantic person but don't know how and at what age I can actually consider that)

Were any other aroaces/aros originally terrified of saying things like "i love you" to your friends because you really didnt want to come off as flirting or nah

For some reason I absolutely love Roronoa Zoro/Kozuki Hiyori, but the tag on ao3 only has 75 fics (I check daily so I know) and half of them don't actually ship it (background at most).

Also they hardly have fanart.

It truly is the saddest part of shipping something not super well loved by the fandom 😔

thinking about how spoiled i got with reading bnha fics because there was a million and one fics over any au i could think of and now im suffering because i wanna read a million and one fics over one piece but there’s just. not as many

People after Luffy takes down dictators and corrupt power systems on different islands: Yayyy Yippeee I love Luffy <3

People after seeing Hiyori say the dictator of Wano who caused immense suffering for both her specifically and her people should die a gruesome death: Woah ok :/ Didn't you know he had a sad backstory? :( This goes against the themes of One Piece god what a bitch

okay, whew. lots of thoughts about how dark one piece can get…

so i've reached the part where hiyori publicly humiliated one of the corrupt individuals in flower city in front of all the people in the brothel for falling into the trap of greed and lust.

and wow

i just. it's so fucking dark. and it's like in your face and it gets under your skin kind of dark. the laughter of the courtesans, kyoshiro mocking and ordering his underlings to beat him up in front of everyone, and hiyori's "i spent it all" laced with no remorse at all… it's just so cruel. and rightfully so tbh, since it was displayed how the man caused so much trouble to innocent people just to fulfill his disgusting fantasy of objectifying hiyori and viewing her as a trophy he can have.

i know that hiyori's identity as komurasaki was for the agenda of bringing down orochi, but a royal ending up as an oiran makes me sick. im not saying this because sex workers disgust me (i dont. but im of the opinion that sex work can be very dangerous and it is such a difficult job. and also it caters to the objectification and commodification of their bodies, which i find to be extremely damaging.), but i find it to be really tragic.

but at the same time, there's no definite answer as to what really happened to hiyori growing up, nor if she slept with men as an oiran at all. it's kind of up in the air for us to decide. i think this is a smart decision on oda's end as a writer.

are we going to interpret it as close to reality, or are we going to use the bounds of fiction and say that hiyori was relatively safe growing up?

i mean, we can say that hiyori did sleep with men as an oiran in exchange for manipulating them to drain all of their money. but we can also say that hiyori just entertained them until they're not of use to her anymore.

idk but to me both scenarios make sense.

it's like with hancock and her sisters. we know that they were abused by celestial dragons, but to what extent? were they physically tortured or did something far more sinister happen to them? also the same with robin's life. she spent most of her life running away from powerful people, and most of them are men. we can never say for sure if she always got away unscathed.

i think oda puts these types of situations in the story to keep younger audiences from digging too much into it while teaching them to be aware of the dangers lurking in the society ー but for us who are older it will really make us think and it kind of serves as a reminder of how scary the world is.

anyway back to hiyori, im of the opinion that she didn't actually sleep with any men, but thinking about all the mind games that she played with them just makes me feel bad for her. i imagine she had to endure so much of that from a young age, all while dealing with the death of her parents and the fall of their empire. it's just too much for a little girl. and now she has to put up a front for the sake of rebellion. it's like all her life, up until the strawhats freeing wano, she never got to truly live as her own person.

it's pretty fucked up. i want to say that there are better ways to write hiyori's character but yeah, i can't really think of one that would have bigger impact than what she was in the story. that scene of her stating her name as a kozuki sends chills down my spine. i honestly don't get how people would just dismiss her as a 'whore' or an 'evil, manipulative cunt who doesn't care about the lives she'll ruin'. as if kaido and orochi weren't the root cause of it all.

i just love how deep the lore can get. there have been so many characters in the story of one piece and im just amazed at how oda can maximize their stories to the fullest potential of the specific arc that they belong to.

truly a work of a genius.

On my ao3, someone just commented that they can't wait for the next part of a fic when I know DAMN well that I haven't uploaded on it for the last year and that I have no plans to.

I honestly feel so bad.

Not bad enough to continue writing it, though.

subscribing to a fic isn’t enough I need the author to blast a bat signal into the night sky whenever they update