Ship hate where you don't actually have beef with anyone in fandom who likes it and are primarily just annoyed with what canon is doing in the actual narrative.
You know, it's aggravating to read fics where the writers have created Blorbo-Centered Morality - you know, the fics where everyone who's ever been mean to Blorbo are horrible irredeemable people, and Blorbo himself had never done anything bad ever, and we will reinterpret all of canon through this lens and divide the cast into Camp A (who understand Blorbo is perfect) and Camp B (monsters to be utterly condemned)
BUT
Sometimes you find a writer who has done this for, like, a D-list minor character, and suddenly the heroes who saved the world several times are having their worth defined by whether said world-saving involved being nice to this one random dude or being mean to him. Because said random dude has become this writer's Specialest Little Guy. THAT'S very funny actually.
I'm seeing warnings about scammers trying to commission artists but the "reference sheet" for their character they want commissioned isn't an image but a .vbs file ("visual basic script"), and will run a script when you open it, probably to yoink your account(s), but I haven't seen this from anyone who's actually clicked it yet. Just be careful and never open a file like that, 'cause people suck.
Chapters: 5/6
Fandom: One Piece (Live Action TV 2023), One Piece
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Mugiwara Kaizoku | Strawhat Pirates & Nami, Arlong & Nami (One Piece)
Characters: Nami (One Piece), Monkey D. Luffy, Roronoa Zoro, Arlong (One Piece), Original Characters, Original Arlong Pirate(s)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Daemon Touching (His Dark Materials), Non Consensual Daemon Touching
Series: Part 2 of Endless Forms Most Beautiful
Summary:
I am afraid to own a Body -
I am afraid to own a Soul -
Profound - precarious Property -
Possession, not optional -
Double Estate - entailed at pleasure
Upon an unsuspecting Heir -
Duke in a moment of Deathlessness
And God, for a Frontier.
-Emily Dickinson
Seven years into the most difficult and most necessary decision of Nami’s life, she meets a boy in a straw hat, whose daemon has a rainbow on its wings.
Chapter 5 up! Arlong Park setup, and where everyone else is a less-than-reliable narrator, for a change
I originally thought about labeling this chapter "(fish)men who hate daemons", to go with the episode title (as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's original title is Men who Hate Women), but so much of the action (and drama) of this chapter still focuses on the humans. Still, Arlong and Kaneshiro are possibly our least reliable narrators (which is… saying something), because they straight up lack the context human characters have with daemons - neither of them think there's anything particularly weird about Nami's daemon going missing, for instance.
Kaneshiro is kind of a Hacchi stand-in here, with a bit more perception but also less context. I mentioned this in the chapter where he first showed up, but he's an ex-slave who worked with a crew of other ex-slaves to hunt down slavers prior to Fisher Tiger, and slaves in this AU are all intercised, so he hasn't seen all that many daemons with what you might call his peers… but the fact he's been around humans for a substantial length of time at all still puts him at the top of Arlong's crew for experience with daemons, and you can see that a bit in his attempts to curtail the daemon-touching. He also is one of the crew members who buys the least into fishman supremacy, and (not unrelatedly) he's one of the people who does make a genuine effort to connect with Nami - and she's also the crew member who, in her own chunks, she's mentioned the most, and has the most affection for. Too bad that doesn't change much!
Arlong, on the other hand, is at like absolute zero for any awareness of daemons. Including: he doesn't refer to them by personal pronouns, he thinks adult daemons can shift, he thinks it's entirely plausible for them to disappear and reappear at will. To be fair, a lot of his crew probably would also assume those things, but many of the old-timers would've known about Koala's daemon prior to Fisher Tiger's death (which we see a bit of here! It's on the list of things in this verse to write) because she felt safe to reveal her daemon around them. (Kaneshiro, eg, probably knew about it from like, month two.) Arlong knows Claudius is a point of contention between Nami and the village, but he knows that because it's something literally any of the fishmen would've noticed because Cocoyashi is not subtle about Nami's perceived flaws, lack of daemon among them.
Speaking of Arlong, Nezumi's daemon is not (technically) a rat, but rather a water vole (or water rat). This is so the ears match, since rats don't have fur on their ears.
And speaking of Nami's flaws, everyone here (except Luffy and Nojiko) assumes she's severed from her daemon, but Genzo's the one who makes the social implications of this most explicit. The didn't have a daemon/didn't have a head comparison is lifted directly from The Golden Compass (when discussing a witch's apparent lack of daemon), and Genzo's the only one to extend that into Nami being functionally dead. (Which, if she were severed at the point Genzo thinks she would've been, before Claudius settled… yeah. As Zoro said, severed kids ain't pretty.) In part, this absolves him of ongoing guilt vis a vis her situation (while heaping more on his head for the initial incident), but it is also a way of coping with Nami doing the things no true Cocoyashi resident would ever do; after all, if she's truly dead in the manner he thinks she is, she's basically a meat puppet.
(We also get more implication of Bellemere's Marine tour being shady as fuck here! Thanks for being old and in the right place enough for me to do that, Genzo!)
The different perspectives on intercision here was something I really wanted to emphasize, if only because by the time we actually see Nami's daemon the vast majority of our humans believe that to be the case. (And, for two out of the three Strawhats who buy into it, it's directly connected to emotional trauma! Sanji directly, off of the bond-pulling he was forced into pre-Zeff, and Zoro implicitly via what may have been Kuina's terrible accident.) The stories they're pulling from are in many ways the same - illicit power, ruthlessness, and kind of an implicit horror of daemons being severed in the first place - but they're taking slightly different messages away from them. (Genzo, for instance, has a purported origin story for fishmen that calls them soulless! One other small detail: neither Genzo nor Nojiko refer to any of the fishmen besides Arlong by name.)
Nojiko probably holds to the conclusion of ruthlessness, but she doesn't think Nami's intercised, because Nami's daemon is literally living beneath her floorboards. (Which she's never told Genzo about, because anyone knowing elevates the risk of someone using Claudius as a hostage, and so she's kept that secret for over a decade.)
LA!Nojiko can be tricky to characterize, since (as Nojiko notes) we're already on Nami's side, and she's explicitly framed as opposition. Here, she's furious over their mother's death (remember, her daemon last shifted right after Bellemere died - she's in some sense emotionally still that kid) and what she views as Nami's complicity by working for Arlong, but there's also an element of being set apart from the rest of the village, by Nami and by the fishmen. She doesn't have to pay tribute in this fic, and Nami keeps sneaking her money, and the inability for her to reject those gestures (derived from Nami's betrayal!) creates a lot of frustration. In a lot of ways, it'd be easier for her if Nami cut her off entirely, but the idea that her sister could be earnestly doing this to help… it's more emotional suffering, not less.
(And of course, that bridge is easier to mend in this AU, because when shit hit the fan Nami still trusted Nojiko with her daemon, even if they weren't talking, and Nojiko managed to keep Claudius safe for close to a decade. Just as Nami cares for Nojiko through her actions, Nojiko still cares for Nami, and probably resents that as well.
And finally, Nami's daemon! Claudius is a turtle, probably a semi-aquatic one like this mud turtle (albeit a bit bigger):
Claudius has actually been a turtle since the first time I started spitballing this idea, which was well before he had the name Claudius. (So long before he had that name. Part of the reason people keep saying "Nami's daemon" was so I could stop using ctrl+F so much. Same thing with Bellemere's Hector.) The daemon abuse has always been a part of the fic, which would compel Nami's daemon to take up a defensive form, and it's such a good metaphor for the way she walls herself off from everyone else.
Chapters: 5/6
Fandom: One Piece (Live Action TV 2023), One Piece
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Mugiwara Kaizoku | Strawhat Pirates & Nami, Arlong & Nami (One Piece)
Characters: Nami (One Piece), Monkey D. Luffy, Roronoa Zoro, Arlong (One Piece), Original Characters, Original Arlong Pirate(s)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Daemon Touching (His Dark Materials), Non Consensual Daemon Touching
Series: Part 2 of Endless Forms Most Beautiful
Summary:
I am afraid to own a Body -
I am afraid to own a Soul -
Profound - precarious Property -
Possession, not optional -
Double Estate - entailed at pleasure
Upon an unsuspecting Heir -
Duke in a moment of Deathlessness
And God, for a Frontier.
-Emily Dickinson
Seven years into the most difficult and most necessary decision of Nami’s life, she meets a boy in a straw hat, whose daemon has a rainbow on its wings.
Chapter 5 up! Arlong Park setup, and where everyone else is a less-than-reliable narrator, for a change
Chapters: 4/6
Fandom: One Piece (Live Action TV 2023), One Piece
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Mugiwara Kaizoku | Strawhat Pirates & Nami, Arlong & Nami (One Piece)
Characters: Nami (One Piece), Monkey D. Luffy, Roronoa Zoro, Arlong (One Piece), Original Characters, Original Arlong Pirate(s)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Daemon Touching (His Dark Materials), Non Consensual Daemon Touching
Series: Part 2 of Endless Forms Most Beautiful
Summary:
I am afraid to own a Body -
I am afraid to own a Soul -
Profound - precarious Property -
Possession, not optional -
Double Estate - entailed at pleasure
Upon an unsuspecting Heir -
Duke in a moment of Deathlessness
And God, for a Frontier.
Seven years into the most difficult and most necessary decision of Nami’s life, she meets a boy in a straw hat, whose daemon has a rainbow on its wings.
Nami takes a turn at the world’s least reliable narrator, and choices are made.
This one's pretty short and sweet! A lot happens this chapter, but most of it is pretty self-explanatory.
Sanji has a turnspit dog! This is an extinct breed of dog trained to run in wheels in order to… turn spits of meat (real creative name there), and is thought to be related to corgis. When writing Reggie, I was specifically picturing a Cardigan corgi.
I knew I wanted Zoro and Sanji's daemons to reflect each other, since Sanji and Zoro have interlinked characterizations, but also be very distinct. Reggie is significantly physically smaller than Takeko, and turspit dogs are bred specifically for purpose, whereas wolves aren't domesticated at all. Turnspit dogs were also known to act as hand- and foot-warmers, and Sanji having a lack animal reflects his tendency to self-sacrifice to serve everyone else.
Reggie, if you listen to Zeff, is short for Oregano. This is not what Reggie was originally short for, but she and Sanji are more than willing for that to be her full name.
Zeff has a great albatross. In many ways, this is a stereotypical pirate daemon; albatrosses are seabirds, and their sheer size gives them a sense of shock and awe (and some advantage in a fight). I was tempted to give Zeff a pelican, another large seabird that is associated with self-sacrifice for one's children (pelicans were originally believed to pluck their chests bare so their young could feast on their blood), but I ultimately went for the sheer size of the albatross, which has one of the largest wingspans of any bird… and also the imagery of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which an old sailor gets stranded while at sea. Albatrosses (as a result of Rime) also invoke the idea of an albatross around someone's neck, a burden they cannot rid themselves of, and I think that imagery slots into the Baratie situation really well.
And Mihawk has a shrike! Also called a butcherbird, shrikes impale their prey on thorns or other sharp objects (like barbed wire) to cache it and attract mates. I love how unassuming a lot of daemons are in His Dark Materials, and I wanted Mihawk to have something small and cute but with undeniable menace.
We have our first Strawhat daemon-touching this chapter, though it's still unintentional. Nami is deep in denial of her feelings this chapter, and with that comes uncharitable assumptions of everyone else's… which, inconveniently, Takeko sets on its head, because she's not angry (and thus, Nami can't dismiss her as simply being another person angry at her for doing what's needed).
For other stuff this chapter, the stories Nami thinks of telling are, in order: any ro-ro ferry accident, Fisher Tiger, the folk song Barrett's privateers, the filk song Dawson's Christian, and D.B. Cooper.
Bellemere's version of the Christienne also brings up some questions about her time as a Marine: notably, she doesn't describe something for the ghost crews to be protecting the civilian vessels from. There's also an inkling that her story about finding the girls has been… massaged somewhat, which will get explored a bit more next chapter.
There's a frequent headcanon that Bellemere went AWOL with the girls and may even be presumed dead by the Marines since Oykot, and to me this has always raised the question of whether the girls are strictly meant to be alive, too. (Especially as, in the town records in the manga, the girls don't exist.) Here, both of these things are true, though Nami was young enough when Oykot happened and Bellemere died that she doesn't have a firm understanding of this (and thus the fic, which has been in her POV up til now, can't linger on it too long, either).
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