My name is Markus | Pansexual Trans man, he/him or they/them | Autistic and ADHD Interested in writing criticisms, analysis, and anything to do with editing. Mostly started the blog as a way to talk about fandoms I'm interested in. Currently thinking about Persona 2, One Piece, and Attack on Titan (especially it's shortcomings and how certain parts of the fandom help to remedy that).
What's up with the people portraying Chopper as a little baby. Excuse you my boy is seventeen and he's a great doctor you will treat that stressed furry with respect.
Seriously now, he's a teenager, he's the same age that Luffy was in the start of the series. That boy knows things, he definitely knows what sex is he's a doctor for God's sake. He can and will swear. But people forget that because of his looks. You're acting just like the Marines, who think he's the pet of the strawhats.
Fanfic writers, let that boy swear. Or laugh at stupid teenager sex jokes (that I'm sure at least Usopp Brook and Franky do). Let him realize things. Let him be serious as a doctor, too.
While I agree that Chopper shouldn't be treated like a baby and more like the teen he is, the blame for this treatment can't be placed entirely on the fandom. ODA treats Chopper like he's a child.
Sure, sometimes Chopper is allowed to be a competent doctor, like when he creates a cure for Queen's disease in Wano, but he's still often portrayed as a cutesy little boy in canon who just loves candy! Hell, you don't even have to go further than his character design, which has been gradually chibi-fied instead of making him look more mature, despite him reaching 17 post-timeskip (presumably in terms of physical/mental human maturity and not his literal age?) and very likely being at a point where a human boy would have some level of pubescent physical maturity.
I would argue that Chopper was most mature-acting near the beginning of the series, because it at least felt like he spoke in a more rude and assertive way that more accurately represented the personality of a teen.
Additionally, Oda portrays pretty much everyone with an incredibly purile (largely pre-teen) view of sex despite the majority of the cast being unequivocally "of age", which definitely contributes to Chopper seeming childishly unaware, but it ultimately hampers everyone's maturity. However, that's a discussion for a different post.
It baffles me that we still have people thinking that:
A) trebol groomed Doffy
&
B) Doffy genuinely loved his family.
If you believe either of those two things you are genuinely susceptible to cult leaders and charismatic individuals and I beg you to go reread Doffys backstory with a critical lense analyzing how good Doffy is at manipulating people, especially how he manipulates his "family"
I know I shouldn't take the bait, but here I am with the cheese in my grubby little paws anyway.
If you truly think that people who believe those two things about Doffy are wrong, then the truth is that you have both a flawed moral framework, and bad media literacy.
Let's address them one at a time.
A) trebol groomed Doffy
Firstly, some facts.
One, Doflamingo was barely ten years old when he met Trebol and the other executives.
Two, Trebol was 18 at the time, Diamante was 15, Vergo was 10 and Pica was 9.
Three, textually, canonically, Trebol says on the page that he groomed Doffy to be a king. Groomed in the traditional, non-sexual sense where one 'grooms' a young person for a role that they will fill when they're older. There is literally a speech about it, and to back that speech up we actively see a flashback.
There is no arguing against Trebol grooming Doflamingo because it is literally and without exaggeration the text of the story. Trebol says "I raised him to be an evil king" and then we see flashbacks of how he does that. It's just literally the canon of what happens between them.
The only way you can try to argue that Doffy wasn't groomed by Trebol is is you truly believe that a 10 year old child is both completely morally responsible for their own actions, and also so manipulative that he is completely in control of all of the people around him even as a child.
In other words, it's absurd unless you believe that an actual child can be responsible for adult actions. And if you believe this about children, then you have a flawed moral framework.
B) Doffy genuinely loved his family.
This all depends on what you believe "genuinely loved" means. If you only ever use the term "love" to mean "pure, selfless unconditional love" then sure, I will agree you, Doffy did not love his family in a "pure, selfless and unconditional" way. I would argue that that's a standard of love that most people fail to meet.
However, we see on the page, demonstrated in canon, that Doffy has genuine affection for and attachment to his family, two things that when taken together, can be described as love.
If Doffy doesn't have attachment to and affection for Vergo and Monet, (he does!) then there is no reason for him to secretly leave Dressrosa and flay all the way to Punk Hazard to try to rescue or take revenge for them. (He does this! He goes to Punk Hazard immediately after speaking to Vergo, without even telling Trebol!)
If Doffy doesn't have attachment to and affection for Pica, then there's no reason for him to threaten people over laughing at Pica's voice. You may not like it, but it is an expression of care by Doflamingo that he threatens people on his friend's behalf.
The care and trust between the executives is so important that Law tries (successfully) to use it against Trebol in the big fight. When he says "Doffy doesn't care about you, he's just manipulating you", whether Law actually believes it or not is irrelevant— what he's doing is using the horrifying idea to manipulate and enrage both Trebol and Doflamingo.
Yes, Doflamingo's love comes with strings attached, but unless you are withholding the term "love" for all but the most pure and selfless of emotions, then it's simply impossible to say, simply from what we see in canon, that Doffy didn't love the executives. He did, we see him act on those feelings in the text.
Trebol did groom doffy to be king, yes. BUT trebol didn't groom doffy to be who he is today. The point of my #1 was that I've seen way too many people try and argue that doflamingo only turned out this way because of trebol and that trebol is the true mastermind of everything. And that's just not true and those are the people I'm arguing against.
#2 I think we just have to straight up agree to disagree. He cared for his crew for sure because of all the points you listed above. But caring is not the same as loving. Love is unconditional and that's the whole point of Corazons character. Doffys "love" is conditional on the basis you must be willing to die for him. Doflamingo is a textbook manipulator and he would not hesitate on killing any of his crew if it served to benefit him (like telling monet to kill herself on the chance it would kill law too) at a certain point all of his crew are disposable to him. Everything he does is for self obsessed reasons and not "love"
I definitely agree with you in with regard to disagreeing with the people who blame everything on Trebol, as if no one else was at fault for Doflamingo, and Doffy would have been a perfect little jewel if Trebol hadn't gotten to him! Trebol and the gang definitely made him worse, but they didn't take away his autonomy or his responsibility for his actions either.
As for the question of love, as I suspected, you and I just disagree fundamentally on what counts as "love" -- but even so it sounds like we agree on the way that he treated his executives with affection and attachment. We just disagree on what that should be called.
I will say that I disagree that he "wouldn't hesitate"; I feel like we do see him hesitate every time he kills or orders the death of someone close to him. But ultimately he does make that self-serving choice.
Annoyingly, I can't share this with a header saying "I agree with Sinister", and have to essentially insert myself into the conversation and possibly make any readers misguidedly think I agree with the original post for a bit, but I digress.
Firstly, I believe that there is such a thing as "conditional love", because otherwise we wouldn't have a phrase for it, lol.
Secondly, and more importantly, I hate the assertion that Doflamingo "wouldn't hesitate to kill any of his crew" because we DON'T SEE ANYTHING IN THE TEXT TO SUGGEST THIS. Doflamingo tells Monet to "die for [him]" when she's critically injured and the only other person on his crew who would be hurt by her murder-suicide is Vergo, who accepts that he is going to die, and dies anyway despite Punk Hazard as a whole not exploding. Otherwise, the only member of the crew we see Doflamingo kill is Rocinante after Roci proves in-person that he is a Marine and is betraying Doflamingo and the rest of the crew.
People could point to Bellamy, but he's clearly more of a member of the "fleet" than the crew proper. Doflamingo clearly doesn't have an emotional connection to people outside the "family", which is not unreasonable. I'm not going to just excuse how he treats Bellamy, but I'm arguing that Doflamingo loves his Family, not that he's not still... a villain. 😅
When Law attacks Trebol during the fight against him and Doflamingo, Doflamingo EXPLICITLY PROTECTS TREBOL. I don't know why people seem to ignore this and argue that Doflamingo is purely self-serving. Trebol might be an asset for him, but Doflamingo protects him in a way that's a lot more emotionally reflexive rather than calculated. It reads like he doesn't want Trebol to get HURT, not just that he's protecting him from dying.
It's so strange to me that people could get such a reading of Doflamingo when One Piece is not short on villains who WOULD kill their own crew. For example, Big Mom is willing to... apparently not kill, but remove years of the life from her son, Moscato, for her own selfish benefit, and we see how she manipulates Pudding while actively insulting her. Big Mom is a character who views her crew/family as disposable for her own selfish desires; this is not the case with Doflamingo.
I maintain that the Vinsmoke brothers should have flatter hair when they're just hanging out casually and it should flip up when in their Raid Suits like a magical girl transformation.
As a general rule of Tumblr and other such social media, if someone has a pinned post or line in their bio that says something like "proshippers DNI", it wasn't worth listening to their opinion anyway.
Something I've seen multiple times recently that I don't remotely understand is people writing headcanons and fics or drawing fan art about villains, but also preface it with "I HATE them" or "killing/exploding them in my mind", like... if you hate them, why do you care so much to write about them? If you like them, even just "as characters" and not "as people", why do you say shit like that and not something like "he's such a bastard, but I can't help thinking about him"?
Like, nah guys, I've been into One Piece a lot recently and I don't think that stuff about characters like Doflamingo, or Crocodile, or the Vinsmokes, I think about exploding characters like fucking CARIBOU, who are useless and deserve hatred on an in-universe and meta level for being horrible without even daring to be interesting.
I've been rambling in a discord server about how awful your average One Piece NPC is. About how time and time again we see demonstrated that any random person is likely to be both selfish and wrathful.
One Piece peasants have absolutely zero problem literally tarring and feathering people for crimes they are merely related to by blood.
Compassion and selflessness is really lacking in the general world of One Piece, to the point where it's really genuinely a remarkable quality, reserved only for specifically heroic characters.
We see it in Doflamingo's backstory. In Ace's. In Robin's.
We see an angry mob hunt down and torture a family (the Donquixotes) just due to who they're related to.
We see grown adults talking about hunting down and torturing a small child (Roger's son) just for who he's related to.
And then there's Robin.
It kills me that Crocodile is the nicest, most caring person Robin has run into her whole life at the point that they meet.
Literally every other person she's met has turned her back on her, or sold her down the river.
Crocodile, suspicious, guarded Crocodile doesn't do that, and is working with her legitimately. And Robin is so traumatized she turns on him first, instead of trying to talk him around and communicate and figure out a solution.
And they both validate each others worst fears about people, and it's awful and sad.
And I love Crocodile but he's not a nice person, and it sucks that he's literally the nicest person Robin ever met before she met Luffy.
This Wedding and Assassination Plot Doesn't Make a Whole Lot of Sense
Guess who's back?
Back again?
Markus' back... to complain more about Whole Cake Island.
I've been writing my own fanfiction that's essentially an AU of the events of Whole Cake Island, and unfortunately, this means that I've been looking deeper at the story than even Oda probably did. And I understand that Oda has to struggle with things like strict deadlines and he just... doesn't get to think plots all the way through sometimes because of the nature of the industry, BUT...
WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MARRIAGE PLOT?
Why is Sanji there? What is this assassination attempt against the Vinsmokes for!?
Let me find somewhere to start...
Firstly, we don't know why Judge wants to marry into Big Mom's family. It isn't ridiculous to think that he sees that the World Government is struggling to keep control and he wants to join up with an emperor for some extra protection, but we aren't TOLD this.
Maybe he needs more power to take over the North Blue, but we aren't given any indication that Judge is struggling with this, just that he hasn't done it for some reason.
Then, Judge has Sanji kidnapped because he doesn't want to give up one of his specially-trained and scientifically enhanced kids to get married into the Charlotte family... But later, Judge says that Sanji and Pudding are going to live in GERMA, which means that it doesn't matter who he married off, because they'd be staying in his country anyway! He didn't need Sanji!
(Chapter 849)
It makes FAR more sense if Oda's original plan was for the Vinsmoke marrying into the family to have to live in Totto Land with the Charlottes, and it's honestly shocking, given Big Mom's character, that we have her allowing stuff like Chiffon living with Bege's crew and not them all being forced to live in Totto Land (might help give Bege more of a reason to assassinate Big Mom?).
On Big Mom's side of things, she wants an alliance (or more hostile takeover, rather) because she wants Germa's scientific powers (unspecified) and the cloning technology.
(Chapter 850)
First off all, lady, you have 85 kids and an existing army, I don't know what you think you need clones for.
But regardless of those logistics: Why does she feel the need to kill the Vinsmokes for this? Because of this marriage, they're going to be her ALLY, and Judge never expresses reservations about having to share things with Big Mom; he may well EXPECT that she'll ask for things like clones and weapons!
The plan to assassinate the Vinsmokes makes no sense because I GUESS Big Mom is just going to take all the scientific... stuff in Germa after killing the head scientist in charge of it? Why? Perhaps try asking him for things first, considering that you're ALLIES NOW? Then you don't have to figure it out on your own or with your own scientists, Judge might just... give you what you want?
(Chapter 846)
Additionally, I can't imagine that Big Mom needs more firepower, but if she does, surely part of the alliance is that if she asks, Germa 66 can just go fight someone for her, no?
She talks to Pudding about killing the Vinsmokes so that "Germa will belong to her" (Chapter 854) but that's making a lot of assumptions about the army or scientists there changing loyalties so easily. You can say that Big Mom is "obviously insane" or something, but Oda really doesn't acknowledge that in the text if it's meant to be true. She's just... evil. And that doesn't mean you have to be cruel when it's more beneficial not to be.
Possibly my favourite gag in One Piece after the time-skip is that Oda suggests that to put on their Raid Suits, Germa 66 have to manually remove their clothes. It's just one panel of clothes being thrown in the air, but normally in media like Super Sentai where there's a transformation sequence, the heroes are just suddenly naked or suddenly in their suits, so I think it's an intentional joke—And it's a good one that I don't see people mention!
EDIT: As crepes-suzette mentioned in the replies, it seems that the clothes fly off when using the Raid Suit... cans? Anyway, it's still a very similar joke with the same premise of "they actually have to get naked, it's not just magical nudity".
It's a shame he didn't get to do more parody like that with the Vinsmokes...
I am skipping your ads as fast as I can. I'm skipping past your sponsor read. I'm muting the tv. I'm muting the tab. If they get too annoying I will simply stop trying to watch.
If advertisers can use every manipulative trick in the book to get me to buy their product, I am fully within my rights to do everything I can on my end to make their job impossible
Don't take this as totally serious, but when I re-read WCI and got to this part, I thought "Judge wanted his kids to be free of empathy and obedient, but he just made them autistic" because I know how "the texture is gross, I don't want to eat it" feels, I'm just not entitled royalty. 😆
HOWEVER, I do genuinely get some autistic vibes from Judge, especially because, emotionally, he seems to stay stoic and "logical" or he is feeling things incredibly strongly.
The Gum-Gum fruit secretly being the ultra special god fruit of heroic destiny all along.
I LIKED it when our hero was an underdog using a goofy power in inventive ways to make himself stronger.
The only way I will come around and like the Nika stuff is if Oda turns around and actually does something with the fact that it's a zoan fruit and actively trying to take over Luffy's personality. If he makes it a point of conflict where Luffy's will has to win out over Nika's then I'll say it's good.
But for now it's just magical destiny bullshit.
Oh and also the villain of the world Imu seeming to be an actual demon with demonic powers who turns people into demons sucks also.
the thing about being an incurable pedant is that i cannot turn it off. i can stop saying it out loud because i’m not a prick, but it’s always happening in my brain. even as i laugh at the joke i’m thinking “well, technically,”
Just finished re-watching the Alabasta arc, and honestly in hindsight the ending feels so sad.
Crocodile is the underdog in that fight. He's lost before, and lost *everything*, and Luffy's a god who he has no hope of beating. He kills him twice and he just keeps coming.
No wonder when Miss Goldenweek comes to rescue him from prison he just tells her to leave him to die.
Many in the One Piece fandom complain that Oda sexualizes his female characters too much and that this objectifies them in some way, but in reality All the sexy women in One Piece are very strong and independent women
Unfortunately, anon, I don't agree with you.
First of all, Oda's women ARE overly sexualized. Oda has literally said as much in interviews and editors notes. He's not ashamed of it. As he says, it's his comic and he wants to draw sexy women. Which is why the only mermaids that exist are under thirty and he has gone on record saying his method for drawing women was "three circles and an X".
But I wouldn't care about that if he did give his female characters the same kind of independence he gives his male characters. He does not. He constantly creates woman and girl characters who are conceptually powerful, and then refuses to let them use that power.
Nami and Robin, the ladies in the Straw Hats, are constantly sidelined.
Tashigi, the lady marine, is constantly belittled, called "cute" and "captain-chan" by her inferiors in the navy, is totally clumsy and never allowed to win fights or look cool.
Rebecca, the female gladiator, is literally told by the men in her life that she never has to fight again.
Baby 5, a cool assassin girl, gets married to the first man who is nice to her and is never seen again afterward.
Vivi is forced into a purely political role.
Alvida (an ugly joke character) after being hit by the magic sexifier beam, is never given a speaking role again, only appearing in the background of Buggy panels.
Giolla, while being a powerful fighter and a cool antagonist isn't taken seriously and is constantly made fun of for being an older woman who dares to consider herself a sexually appealing person.
Koala never gets to fight anyone despite being an expert in fishman karate and is only ever seen in a support role.
The female members of Baroque Works all retire from fighting to work at a restaurant.
Big Mom is treated by the narrative as a kaiju instead of a human being.
Pudding is the center of a marriage plot, and then acts as a kidnapped princess character.
Boa Hancock is constantly ridiculed by the narrative for being a female character that shows love and affection despite being strong. In fact her love and affection literally cripple her strength (love sickness.)
Reiju Vinsmoke is the only member of the Vinsmoke family to be nice to Sanji, because she's a girl.
Then there's all the saintly tragic dead moms.
Sure, Oda creates "strong" female characters, but he constantly strips them of their dignity, competence, agency, and relevance in the narrative.
Women are purely "support" and eye candy in One Piece. (or a funny joke if they're ugly/old.)
This works as a sort of addendum to my longer post about the Vinsmoke family, but I wanted to lay out a complaint that I have about Sora, which goes along with how Oda is more... generally bad at portraying mothers. In particular, he seems to have many mothers die, and those who die tend to be saintly.
It is strange that we get so little information about Sora. We don't even know how she met Judge and if she was ever in love with him and just disagreed on how to treat their children, or if she never really had feelings for him and the marriage was perhaps, political. But I digress...
My main point is that the moment between Sanji and Sora in canon made me feel... very unsatisfied. It felt like Oda was writing a perfect mother figure who SACRIFICES for her child. He's very concerned with parental figures making sacrifices, but not so many... acting like parents.
Instead of eating the gross food and almost certainly lying to make Sanji feel better, what if they had a moment where she says something like "That's okay, we can make something together!" and even though she's sick, she spends time with Sanji and teaches him something he's interested in, and this is something that "energizes" her and is what she wants to spend her limited time doing.
I'm not sure if Oda intended Sanji to get his interest in cooking from his mother, but it would've been more emotionally and narratively satisfying to me if Sora introduced Sanji to cooking and taught him behind Judge's back. It would've emphasized her bravery in the face of Judge trying to control her and her children's lives, and allowed her to be seen as an active parent.
This devolved as I was thinking about it, because I also got to thinking that Sanji is at the age of (generously estimating) 6-8, and if he wants to be a chef so bad, I figure that he would know that bananas don't go with eggs and fish? Like, I knew that as a child who didn't cook anything...
I wrote this fanfic not too long ago. It's the first fanfic I've ever published, so I'm not sure that it's great, but it's FINISHED, and I was pleased enough with it that I wasn't too embarrassed to share it.
I just thought I should share it here since what I wrote about the Vinsmokes got a little attention.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
I recently re-read Whole Cake Island, and despite my myriad complaints about the pacing and some of the storytelling, I’ve fallen more in love with the Vinsmokes. (I have more to say about WCI in general, but I’ll save that for another post.)
But don’t get me wrong, I like them because of the potential that they have, and I think that Oda failed to reach that. As a whole, all of the siblings are very underdeveloped characters, and I could not tell you why Oda didn’t give them even a little more attention besides “disinterest” or “not wanting to devote time to complex villains again” (it feels like after Doflamingo, Oda decided to not spend so much time on this sort of villain, which is a shame because that’s the part of Dressrosa that everyone liked and commended him for). But I can’t think of a good reason, narratively, to not spend more time with the Vinsmokes or develop them further as individual characters. They’re directly related to Sanji, a member of the Straw Hats! (And not even one of the many that Oda likes to ignore most of the time!)
This is a large collection of my thoughts on the Vinsmokes and their portrayal in the series, so excuse me if some of the points are less organized than others. I probably should've broken this up into separate posts but... screw it, I wrote it this way, so it probably reads better this way.
Reiju actually starts the arc well, but severely and suddenly degrades into a caricature. Initially, she seems realistic, if a little cynical about the situation with Sanji. She tries to make him feel better, but doesn’t try to talk Sanji out of going through with the wedding. This kind of positivity in the face of something that she believes cannot be changed or confronted seems natural for someone in her situation. Reiju doesn’t appear to be treated poorly in Germa; her brothers all seem to respect her as an equal, but she, understandably, doesn’t feel all that interested in just being part of Judge’s war machine, she simply doesn’t have any other options at this point in her life. This is all great characterization, and fairly subtly conveyed instead of just outright told to us. This will change dramatically after her confrontation with Pudding.
[Chapter 832]
Later, she becomes almost a sort of self-hating martyr figure. It starts when she is talking to Sanji about what happened with Pudding. Maybe Oda planned for this all along, but it wasn’t evident until just before the wedding where he lays it on so thick. It would be one thing to write her as feeling trapped where she is, but the self-hatred and overwrought praise she heaps onto Sanji is insane and genuinely made me feel a little sick. I also really dislike how she labels her other brothers as monsters, which reminds me of how Rocinante referred to Doflamingo—In both cases, I’m still unsure if Oda wants us to uncritically agree with either Reiju or Rocinante, but when Reiju talks about her siblings as “evil”, it feels so much like narrative exposition, that I think that it’s just Oda laying out how we’re supposed to think of them? We are given some moments of the brothers interacting with other people, including Reiju, that show their humanity, but we don’t get a good, definitive moment of, say, Reiju realizing she judged them too harshly, or having Sanji acknowledge his brothers as people.
Honestly, I think that Reiju shouldn't be judging them in such a black-and-white way in the first place, considering how they interact with each other. She might be angry about how they treated Sanji, but it's notable that her brothers never show her any disrespect. When she first shows up, she even kicks Yonji into the ocean for being too interested in starting a fight, and he doesn't even get annoyed at her. Reiju was also cruel to Sanji in her own way, having to pretend to go along with degrading Sanji in public. Did she not consider that maybe her brothers felt similarly? That they were so mean to Sanji because that's what Judge wanted? But I digress. I'll talk about this later.
Reiju feels like a victim of Oda’s inability to write women as, ESPECIALLY after the time-skip, he has the habit of making very victimized female characters. Rebecca, during Dressrosa, was highly sexualized (and for no given in-universe reason. It would’ve been so simple to say that it was intentionally humiliating and while that wouldn’t forgive Oda including the design, it would at least make more sense than suggesting that she chose that outfit!) and instead of being able to fight Diamante herself, or even help Kyros fight him, she is simply protected by her father. That sentiment can be sweet, but wouldn’t it be a lot more satisfying if he realized that he doesn’t have to protect Rebecca, because he already taught her how to protect herself?
In the second half of Whole Cake Island, Reiju is characterized as more of a reflection of her mother to Sanji—a “good woman” of the family to contrast its “evil men”—instead of being a separate person with her own feelings and desires. It would be interesting if this was simply how Sanji saw her, and part of his development is being able to recognize her as a whole person, but because of her inner monologue, it’s evident that this is also how Oda sees her. I know some people probably really like this characterization, yet I can't help but think it felt very "flat"; like Reiju isn't allowed to have edges, and that she's an innocent controlled by Judge while her brothers are not given the same concessions.
[Chapter 852]
[Chapter 865] [GIRL, you do not know him this well.]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Oda literally drew the Vinsmoke brothers as evil babies, and that’s fucking crazy. You’re not even going to allow them to be seen as babies without also characterizing them as monsters?
[Chapter 852]
I don’t think that Sanji had to do anything so dramatic as forgive his brothers in this arc, but it would’ve been really effective, since Oda was so insistent on hammering in how good and nice of a person Sanji is, if he could understand them. I think that Sanji's character arc would've been a lot stronger if, instead of just saving his brothers because they are literally human, and Sanji doesn't want any humans to die, his empathy would extend to seeing that his brothers are also victims of Judge's abuse. The narrative doesn't have to redeem them, just acknowledge and explore this, have a deeper engagement with the ideas of toxic family dynamics and the cycle of violence.
You might say “well, Sanji didn’t have the opportunity to engage with his brothers more because just beat him up or fought him all the time” but that’s not something that inherently has to happen. Oda wrote that happening. There’s no reason why Sanji couldn’t have talked more with any of them without it ending in a horrible fight. And a big reason I say this is because the Vinsmoke brothers do not seem to actually hate Sanji. They deride him because that’s what Judge does, what he wants them to do. They have no reason to dislike Sanji beyond something like “making the family look bad”, but it’s not something very personal (nor has it actually been relevant in-universe, since the greater world didn't seem to know about Sanji's relationship to Germa). Sanji would have an impression of them from when they were all children, but now he can understand why they are (and were) the way they are, because he's an adult who has had enough experience and time away from the family itself that he can reflect on the context that this abuse was happening in.
Through what characters like Reiju and Judge say, Oda gives the impression that the Vinsmoke brothers don't have "emotions"—something obviously untrue, given how... they do have emotions; we can just see this— but they at least don't seem to have a sense of empathy. Honestly, even this gets a little uncertain, considering how Niji and Yonji react to there being people in Big Mom's library menagerie, and how during the wedding party, we see Yonji help a little bear person get a fruit (candy?) to eat (the fact that Yonji is doing that is harder to determine in the manga, but this is what he does in the anime, and I assume that Oda would've told them if this was wrong?). This suggests to me that they do feel something like empathy or sympathy, even if it's suppressed.
[Chapter 847]
[Chapter 861]
On a different note regarding the brothers: I just think they're fun. Each of them has a distinct personality, even though Oda doesn't really want to do much with them.
Ichiji is ostensibly the leader, and the one who appears to take things more seriously than his brothers. It's interesting that he was similar to Niji as a kid, being more openly cruel, but he has grown up to instead be cold and stoic. None of the other Vinsmoke siblings have an implied arc like this.
Niji is the most obviously mean and sadistic of the brothers. Honestly, I don't have a lot to say about him that doesn't start delving into headcanons, but he's just generally kind of a jerk in a way that I find amusing. Also, he respects women's privacy more than Sanji. Sorry guys, I didn't write it, Oda did.
[Chapter 860]
Yonji is fun because he actually seems kind of... naturally nice? He has a lot of himbo energy, and I think it's really endearing.
[Chapter 862]
This isn’t so much of a “storytelling” comment as most of these have been, but Germa 66 helps the Straw Hats and their allies escape from dangerous situations twice during Whole Cake Island, yet the moments are strangely brief and we barely actually get to see them fight, which is especially strange for an action-focused manga. I can fully believe Oda not getting too deep into some emotional issues because of his typical audience of young boys (which he’s long stuck to, but I think is a real detriment to his storytelling and comedy; it’s not like kids never like deep or challenging media), but skipping out on fight scenes with cool powers!? Bizarre.
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I don’t have so many criticisms of Judge himself, though there are a few things that I find strange about his placement in the story. Namely, Oda doesn’t seem to understand what he’s made Judge accomplish. The man has given his children what are essentially Devil Fruit powers without the weaknesses of Devil Fruits. Sure, it’s likely that these enhancements need to be made before birth, so short-sighted people might be disappointed that they can’t gain powers using this method, but that’s still one hell of a technology. Are we thinking that the World Government wouldn’t want that!? Are we really going to say that Vegapunk is a great scientist but we’re just going to treat Judge like he’s “that guy who does wars” because he learned how to adjust lineage factors, but didn't discover them?
The only canon moment where Judge really bothered me was at the end of Whole Cake Island, where he yells at Luffy to agree with him that Sanji sucks. I think it’s RIDICULOUS. The moment would be so much more effective if we just saw Judge helping the Straw Hats escape, he looked at Sanji, scowling, Sanji looking back, and they both turning away from each other, with little or no dialogue. I know that Judge is petty and blinded by his own ego, but I don't think this was an effective point to end on, writing-wise. It almost feels like exposition that we don't need; we already know that Judge considers Sanji a failure and why. And I don’t believe that the man that intentionally tried to remove emotions from his sons isn’t aware of people who have different, more emotion-driven perspectives of value. I understand that this point is very subjective criticism, but it really didn't work for me, especially in the mess that was the ending of the Whole Cake Island arc.
[Chapter 899]
Since we usually experience flashbacks through a character’s perspective in One Piece, I think it would’ve been a good idea to have a proper flashback about Judge and Sora, because so much of that relationship is left in the dark apart from the fact that Sora didn’t want to have her boys augmented, at least with emotional suppression. We really only see Sora and Judge talking in this one panel where they're yelling at each other about this.
[Chapter 852]
This doesn’t need to be an extended flashback, but it would be effective for the storytelling to give a little context on the dynamics within Germa. I have talked to people who would likely think this is “unnecessary” because it does not explicitly deal with Sanji’s experience, but… Fuck off, I guess? I don’t really have an excuse, but I know that I’d rather have heard more about Sora than like half the folks in Wano, and they often had less to do with any main character. It's not interesting having another dead mom who isn't really characterized as anything but "good mother".
Did Sora ever love Judge, or was she more like a prisoner of war, or perhaps the way that a kingdom paid for Germa’s help? I tend to lean towards the headcanon that she was forced into the relationship somehow, as she doesn’t strike me as someone who would normally fall in love with Judge, due to how they differ ethically. However, it’s also possible that she could’ve been a scientist herself, and Judge was not nearly as openly despotic or warmongering when they met.
I believe that Judge finds her attractive, and may “love” her in some possessive regard, but does not respect her. She’s more useful to him than anything, but he’s also just a man, with feelings. I take the fact that we see him hug his children (apart from Sanji) to indicate that he has a certain amount of longing for human contact and affection despite everything. Too bad for him that he self-sabotaged those relationships.
[Chapter 841]
Altogether, I really would've loved to have seen more of the Vinsmokes because there are a lot of unexplored aspects of their unique family dynamics and the differences in the characters themselves. The manga reads as though they were going to be a bigger part of the Whole Cake Island arc, but partway through, Oda downsized their role into being essentially the bare minimum to get Sanji's "arc" across. I have more to say about how Sanji doesn't really have what would accurately be called a "character arc" in Whole Cake Island, but that will have to wait for my post about the Whole Cake Island arc itself.
Thank you for reading!
