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d e v o n
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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@my-dearest-dear
Anyone else fuck with individual songs? Who is the artist? I dunno. What album is it from? Shut up. What year was it released? *tim allen grunt* What's the title of the track? Fuck you. But it goes like this: *poorly memorized chorus*
I love that song. Do not ask me anything about it.
All throughout the arc Oda has portrayed Impel Down as both a literal and metaphorical hell. Yes the guards dress like Satan and the levels correlate with Dante's Inferno, but it's also the ultimate expression of the World Government's oppression. If piracy is how freedom is symbolized within the series, Impel Down is the place that those pirates go to have all their rights and freedoms systematically stripped away. It isn't enough for the World Government to kill them, they have to crush their spirit and kill their dreams, with the very worst offenders being erased from history altogether.
Level 5.5 is Impel Down's antithesis, the Garden of Eden hidden amongst the flames of hell. It's here that certain prisoners are able to claw back their freedom, and I think it's significant that Iva says that that they have to "travel down paths that don't exist" to manage it. It's Luffy's journey in microcosm, as he literally is searching for an uncharted treasure in order to become the freest man in the world.
I also think it's significant that the guards of Impel Down themselves are confused. They think that because the prisoners have escaped their control they have been spirited away to some deeper hell, when it's only after leaving the influence of the World Government's power that the Newkamas are truly able to find their freedom.
An interesting idea that sort of floats around in the back of One Piece's themes is that people make their own miracles. Willpower is a literal superhuman ability in the One Piece world, and later on Iva will say that their hormone treatment with Luffy is useless if he doesn't have the will to stay alive.
Constantly throughout the series people are expected to try before they can be saved. Luffy fights Alvida after Coby insults her. The Straw Hats help save Usopp's village from Kuro after he displays his own willingness to put his life on the line. The people of Skypiea pray for salvation after rejecting Enel's rule and attempting to flee, and the Revolutionaries only fight for civilians who are first willing to fight for themselves.
This isn't to say that people are expected to do things alone. Luffy would have absolutely been murderkilled if not for the actions of Bon-chan and Ivankov. But he absolutely has to fight with everything he has to stay alive, and in doing so makes the miracle of his own survival come to pass.
It's an interesting balance the series has maintained, dancing between the collective need for people to depend on each other to achieve their dreams and the individualistic push to start dreaming in the first place, and one that I think works quite well.
Also interesting to note that despite Iva's incredible power, he's only able to move the needle of Luffy's survival by the tiniest margins. The hormones give Luffy the tools he needs to survive, but at the end of the day it's up to him and his desire to live.
This sentiment is the logical extreme of what Bellemere said back in Arlong Park: That if you make it through the bad days, the good will surely come. For such an optimistic series, One Piece doesn't shy away from the horrors that people can experience, but by striving and clinging on to life it presents a world where happy endings are possible. Brook literally died, and yet he's still happy and thankful that he kept on existing to the point where he had a chance to meet Luffy and the Straw Hat Pirates. The shittiest life imaginable is still life, and that's something that's worth clinging to.
A lot of what Iva says during this chapter adds to Oda's theme of romanticizing life, as best seen in Thriller Bark with Brook. If Brook exemplifies the joy of life itself, Iva focuses on the need to fight and scrap and get dirty for the chance to keep living in a world that likes to kick you while you’re down
Oda is so good at making his baddies looking like imposing menaces, Luffy ends so small in comparison. Magellan is technically 16'1" to Luffy's 5'7", so approximately three times taller, but Oda's tweaked his proportions to look even bigger while framing him as a literal looming presence.
Magellan has always been the tallest of the human Impel Down staff, but he's never seemed this monstrous without the aid of his devil fruit. This doesn't look like a dude who spends 16 hours a day on the shitter, or who hides in little boxes because he doesn't like to be out in the open. This is Magellan, Head Warden of the most secure and dangerous prison in the world, and he's about ready to show Luffy how he earned that title.
This is the second time Magellan's done this poison gas sigh thing, and while the first can be seen as a genuine accident, the second can't. This is something Oda does quite often--playing something originally as a joke only to use it in a serious situation later on. So not only do we have reckless use of Magellan's devil fruit when he doesn't let his jailers have time to get out of the way of his poison when he uses it on prisoners, he's using the threat of poison to ensure his orders are performed to his satisfaction. Sadie and Hannyabal are not prisoners. In the eyes of the law they've committed no crime, but the same system that allows abuses against the condemned hurts them as well. This is how it usually works in authoritarian systems.
I repeat: Whatever moral superiority Magellan is presented with when compared to Shiryu is a mirage.
Whereas Level One was straight nightmare fuel, the monster designs for Level Two manages to ride that line between goofy and intimidating. I do also like the focus on monsters that show up a lot in medieval European mythology. It fits aesthetically with the Divine Comedy inspiration.
yes, and this is the closest Zoro has actually gotten to actually killing Sanji how he always threatens to
Chopper is sick of them, anyone would be too @kin-moon
Between the lines
(I originally optimized the screentones for viewing on twitter, so I hope it looks well here too.)
BROKE MY FUCKIN HEART CHAT WTF
For those who might of missed parts or even the whole thing, here's a master list of the entire Romanticism of One Piece essay with a few grammatical and spelling errors cleaned up for good measure
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII
It's hard to emphasize how Oda builds up this moment without posting entire blocks of manga panels, but he draws out the danger placed to Zoro for three whole pages. Every Straw Hat gets a moment to react or try to help while Zoro lays motionless, and it's all completely useless. The sense of dread that's been going on for the past few chapters reaches its breaking point, and then, bam!
Perfect way to end the chapter, wonderfully drawn and executed. 10/10, no notes
A cool thing Oda does this fight is have the Dark King constantly drawn in deep shadow when going against light man Kizaru
Man, it's hard to look badass in front of your peers when your power up shrinks you to two feet tall
i think all quiet on the western front and the lord of the rings are in direct conversation with each other, as in theyre the retelling of the same war with one saying here’s what happened, we all died, and it did not matter at all and another going hush little boy, of course we won, of course your friends came back
someone should remake lord of the rings as a grandfather telling a fantasy story to his grand child with flashbacks to world war one showing the dead boys and men the characters were based on. grandpa why didn’t they just fly. because they didn’t. they didn’t.
i’m fine
I will never get over how Tolkien & Lewis took the horrors of war and spun them into fantasy.
Shivering in the trenches dreaming of cozy hobbit holes, shaking as bombs pockmark a forest and imagining each shallow mud-filled crater contains a new world—that maybe there are still as many beautiful things in the universe as there are bombs—that maybe the world is bigger than this moment and this ugliness and one day this will be a peaceful forest again full of small ponds.
I mean look at these photos of the shell craters in Sanctuary Woods, near Ypres Belgium and tell me it’s not the Wood Between The Worlds:
…oh.
