#characterization!

[opbackgrounds]

This outburst is the most emotion we see out of Garp this war. Since visiting Ace in Impel Down we've seen little of his boisterous nature, and I think in addition to being sad, he was emotionally preparing himself for Ace to be executed. A flip was switched when he threw the fight with Luffy where he for the first time chose his family over the marines, and like the rest of us I think he expected Ace to be home free after being released from his cuffs.

I think at the end of the day Garp is inherently selfish in the way Luffy's selfish. He wants to go out and do as he pleases--which in his case is be a marine and hunt down pirates--and refuses to make it any more complicated than that. But unlike Luffy his selfish desires clash with the fate of the people he loves. While Luffy brings his found family under his wing as he goes out on grand adventures, Garp's adventures never include his loved ones in a positive way. Garp wants to both care for the people he loves and follow his heart's desires, but he can't do both, and it's one of the reasons his grandson ends up dead

[thatstargazingaquarius]

Have I mentioned how wonderful of a day it is to be a Knights of Ren fan?

[ladyofsnark]

“But he never said “I love you” back”

Hold the phone, cancel the subscriptions, burn the pages! It’s all for naught! You’re right one reviewer!

In House Calls, Kakashi never says “I love you” with his vocals chordings in word and tongue flaps! OBVIOUSLY EVERYTHING ELSE HE DID AND ALL OF HIS ACTIONS MEANT TO CONVEY THESE THINGS BY OTHER MEANS WERE DIRTY, DIRTY LIIIIIIIIIEEEEESSS!

Seriously, fuck off with this pedantic bullshit. It might seem like I’m being ungrateful to a reviewer “who didn’t mean it like that gawd”, but maybe that’s because I did the thing with the words and the expressing of emotions through actions instead of sounds intentionally.

[opbackgrounds]

There's an interesting parallel between Luffy's second visit to Amazon Lily and his first. When he wakes up after the war Luffy very understandably is quite self-destructive. There's a part of him that's in denial even as he realizes that his brother is dead

It was much the same way after Sabaody. Luffy never thought his crew was dead, but he was reckless to the point of self-harm even as he berated himself for not being strong enough to save his friends. The post-Sabaody chapters are much more humorous, with Luffy getting high on laughing mushrooms and being on the receiving end of an accidental hand job, but Oda set up a pattern of behavior for how Luffy deals with loss and grief.

This is something Oda does quite frequently--he sets up a character trait or problem in a way that initially is very funny, only to pull the rug out from under the reader and play it for serious later on.

[opbackgrounds]

I can't quite put my finger on why, but Akainu saying pirates don't deserve a happy home truly feels to me like one of the most heinous things he's said or done in the entire series. It's probably because it's this extreme dehumanization of criminals that leads to his more obviously horrific acts of violence, while tolerating the corruption and abuse of the World Government

[opbackgrounds]

This is one of Blackbeard's most important moments of characterization. Everyone with a D initial has smiled when they died (or thought they were going to die) while he's left begging for his life like a coward.

There's always been an otherness to Blackbeard setting him apart. One of the first things we learn about him in Jaya is that there's something weird and different about him, and here in a couple pages Whitebeard will exclude him from Roger's legacy. He's a man that doesn't sleep. His oddness was marked when he was a member of Whitebeard's crew, and even in a group characterized by inclusiveness and family he set himself apart as different than the rest by killing Thatch. Much later on we'll find out that his family was hunted even more than the average member of the D clan, yet he doesn't fit with what we see in other D carriers. No matter how you slice it, he just doesn't fit.

[opbackgrounds]

During Ace's flashback, Garp will explain how Ace's refusal to run is similar to Roger's.

While my preference would have been to get Ace's whole backstory before he died, this is the one aspect that I really think should have been more firmly established. We've seen a few times Ace's hotheaded nature, but it's this similarity to Roger--the man he tried so hard to reject--that amplifies the tragedy. The only real difference between the two in this regard is that Roger got lucky and Ace didn't.

The whims of fate/luck pop up frequently enough that it adds some extra weight to Ace's death. No matter what happened, he was always destined to die, and no matter how hard he fought against his father's legacy, there was nothing he could do to change it.