#op chess

[masochismustango]

Okay, hear me out

[onepiece-birthdays]

It's July 20th

Happy birthday to Chess of Drum Island! He is 32. Happy birthday to Giovanni of Zou! He is 30. Happy birthday to Pansy of Amazon Lily!

[salteytakesonmanga]

This page - only the second of the chapter - has a really interesting layout.

It jumps between several angels, showing Dalton and Wapol and the Isshi 20, and each jump has more “impact” lines. Meanwhile Hiriluk is frozen in shock, completely still with no impact lines, and with each set of jumps the view zooms in closer on his expressions. Each panel with Hiriluk is also placed in a different orientation on the page, going from the top right corner to the bottom left, the same way your eye moves across the page, which draws you in even more. It’s hard to read exactly how he feels. Surprised? Horrified? Disappointed? Angry? Scared? The final panel is this tight zoom on his face as he starts to cry.

It’s really well constructed to ramp up the tension of this scene instantly, which is important because this chapter needs to deliver a lot of impact. If the readers aren't invested that crucial impact will be lost.

[salteytakesonmanga]

I’m pretty sure these two don’t actually have any idea what the words they’re saying mean. They're just parroting the same sophistry Wapol says.

Dishonorable mention for simplifying some of the key words of this arc out of this scene. Dalton says that Vivi feels for her country, to which Chess replies “Feelings are politics?” and “Politics has no need for heart!” Kuromarimo adds that “What’s important is the system.”

Even though I think the translation as-is did a pretty decent job of communicating the meaning of the words, the story itself puts emphasis on particular words. Specifically the word Chess uses for “heart,” which is the same one Hiriluk uses when he talks about how he was healed by the sakura and how his research will heal this country. Hiriluk is trying to heal a country’s heart, but we can see here the people in charge of the country have no hearts.

All of this has a cumulative impact on Dalton later, but when they take the key words out of this scene it’s harder to understand why.

[salteytakesonmanga]

I said Wapol and his three counselors reminded me of Mean Girls, but really they’re more like stereotypical frat boys.

They have these very black and white ideas about how the world is supposed to work, which conveniently favor themselves. Technically they have jobs, but nobody really expects them to actually do anything. They apparently spend their time drinking and relaxing while also bragging about how important they are and how nothing would get done without them. Most notably, they have a very rigid in-group/out-group structure, and they bully and browbeat anyone who questions this structure.

[salteytakesonmanga]

All four of these men - Dalton, Chess, Kuromarimo, and Wapol - are around the same age, in their late 20s or early 30s. Knowing that gives me a different perspective on what kind of dynamic they must have had. Despite saying they were “equals,” it feels more like a group of school-age bullies led by one rich kid and his sycophants with the token gofer reluctantly trailing behind them. (Just say Mean Girls, Saltey, it’s what you were thinking anyway.)

[salteytakesonmanga]

To Wapol, this is entirely immaterial. Other people’s lives only matter to him as much as he can use them. Essentially, “l’état, c’est moi.” The state is me and I am the state. The nation does not exist for any other purpose but my benefit, and without me this country is nothing.

I think a lot of people tend to get hung up on technicalities in situations like this. Wapol is probably actually correct, according to the laws of the kingdom. Dalton would be the one who is the criminal here. But to Dalton the real crime is Wapol’s selfishness and the way he treated his citizens.

[salteytakesonmanga]

Kuromarimo is another Black character that is well designed but kind of hard to talk about. His design (aside from his costume) is based on Blaxploitation films, which are controversial themselves. On the one hand, they centered Black characters (and therefore Black actors) and talked frankly about racial and political topics. On the other, the films also played up negative stereotypes about Black people and flattened the portrayal into one about drugs, sex, and violence.

Because Blaxpoitation is the (presumed) origin of this character, I feel a little weird about how he draws on those tropes, since they have a fraught history. There are also tropes from Japanese film and TV that I don’t know enough about to comment on, and my own ignorance here makes it hard for me to say what Oda is trying to get across with these references.

A lot of Kuromarimo’s lines are rendered in phonetic English which is one of those things that is sometimes used as a gag about Americans, particularly Black Americans, in Japanese films. A lot of Japanese people do like and admire Black actors and athletes (Mohammed Ali and Apollo Creed probably factor into Kuromarimo’s design) but just because it’s admiring doesn’t mean it’s not a stereotype. I don’t think this was a malicious choice or even a particularly insensitive one. It’s more like a gap in cultural understanding, so it just kind of feels Off to me.