#it is so important to me personally that star wars has an excess of stained glass windows. ok. i will put them everywhere. this is a threat

[phereshift]

Your husband at war, and you in finery.

[darth-flex-performance]

Chapter 1

Why should I care about my health and fitness? Why should I care? Why am I doing this? Those are both excellent question when approaching your personal health.  This is putting appearance aside, that will be covered in another chapter.  Im sure there are many things we all strive to live for, like I personally want be alive to see as many new Star Wars movies as I can. So the question should be: how do I improve my quality of life? We can’t all be some mythological creature that lives centuries, but what we can do is improve our health through exercise and nutrition. Oh, and let me tell you that exercise comes at the amazing price of…… FREE! Nutrition itself, contrary to popular belief, is quite inexpensive if properly applied.  I can tell you right now, from personal experience, if you’re sitting on your ass playing immersive RPGs you are not improving your quality of life. No matter how ripped or well endowed you make your character to be, that character running and swinging 20 pound swords is not you.  Now unlike most fitness professionals, I’m not going to tell you to put the controller down and go run, the point is to balance life and still do the geeky crap we all like to do. I know I myself have been dragged into a particular MMORPG for 8 hours and still kept my heart from committing ritualist suicide. Again, I will never stop playing video games, but I also want to be alive to keep enjoying these games that help me escape from an otherwise powerless reality. I wouldn’t recommend reading stuff out of a magazine or self proclaimed fitness models online to get your information from. As a matter a fact, stay away from all that bullshit! There are plenty of credible sources for you to get peer reviewed studies to answer most legitimate questions online, just try looking outside off facebook and instagram.  I am always cautious when viewing these females with yoga pants and big t.… uh… egos with the hash tag FitFam or some Fit anything, even more so all the Bros out there spitting out there venomous “bro science”. The best way I can term it is, that it is easily to be fooled or dragged into false claims when one is not very educated on the matter. I of course am not calling anyone dumb here, I have had to correct many M.D.s in the science that  practice, and most of them probably aren’t dumb. No, what I mean is when something interests you and you know little about it, it is easy to follow the word of someone you think has the appearance you wish to achieve. Now don’t get me wrong, there are some people out there who will give you the proper knowledge needed, but whether or not you know it be true is the question. Maybe some of the knowledge in here may help you determine whether or not you continue on following that person. With all the being said, I won’t dive deep into why you should take care of your meat vessel, but I will give it to you straight. One of the factors I find most important is the regulation of body fat. Whether or not your goal is to look like a mountain troll, it isn’t about appearance that I speak about, but overall risk factors of excess fat. I think personal appearance is self explanatory and is relative to one’s personal values. You don’t need to have a six pack that rival’s that of Thor, but keeping a lower body fat percentage has its benefits. Higher body fat percentages may put one at risk for many ailments affecting the cardiovascular system, as well as some metabolic diseases like diabetes, or more commonly seen in memes as DIABEEEETUS. Again, this isn’t fat shaming of any sort, because to low of a body fat percentage brings its own demons and is not sustainable for a healthy human. But please understand while it isn’t ok to judge one on appearance, there are certain risks that comes with excess amounts of body fat. If you’re like me and spend hours in front of an Xbox with orange cheese snack powder stained fingers and a liter of cola and rum, thats fine, enjoy the little things in life. With that being said, I want to continue indulging on gratuitous amounts of snacks and rum with out dying prematurely, remember we don’t really respawn in this life.

[creative-type]

The Justice of One Piece

So I was working on my next post in my ongoing analysis of Nico Robin and was reminded that this human stain existed, and it got me thinking about how justice is portrayed in One Piece

Justice is an abstract enough term that it can mean just about anything. There are connotations of fairness, righteousness, law, and goodness within the definition, but at the end of the day justice is giving someone what they deserve.

Since justice - especially Absolute Justice - is so important when analyzing Robin’s backstory I thought it would be good to do a write up on some of the various ways justice is interpreted and implemented within the world of One Piece. 

This isn’t meant to be exhaustive, because justice as an ideal is deeply personal and varies greatly from character to character. I will, however, try to hit some of the high points.

The Rise of Absolute Justice

Ideologies do not spring up in a vacuum. Most people don’t wake up in the morning murdering deserters and blowing up evacuation ships for fun (more on Sakazuki later) - certain events have to unfold before extreme measures are considered normative. In this case, the line of thinking that leads to Absolute Justice can be traced back to Gold Roger. Specifically, the Pirate Era that he kicked off

Just as there’s a difference between New Age and Old Age pirates, so also can there be a difference seen between the marines of Roger’s era and those who came after. 

While is some overlap between the two and the events at Ohara/Ace’s birth suggest that the root of Absolute Justice go far beyond Roger’s death, Sengoku, Garp, and Tsuru all are portrayed as more moderate than Sakazuki and his followers. The seas were different then. The Grand Line had yet to be fully explored, the technological advances brought on by Vagapunk hadn’t been developed, and there were fewer pirates.

This shift in mindset can be seen in Franky’s flashback when we learn that Tom’s trail was somewhat unusual in that shipwrights aren’t normally prosecuted for building ships for pirates.

In addition, while Sengoku ordered the Oharan Buster Call we can assume that he was also provided order for evacuation as well. The bombardment was extreme, yes, but it was ostensibly targeting guilty.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the attack on Ohara was meant to be a warning to the rest of the world. The so-called enemy were civilians and academics, a group hardly known for their fighting prowess. A ground attack would have done the job just as easily without any of the collateral damage. In fact, Spandine’s Cipher Pol agents were able to subdue all the archaeologists by themselves and the only one who fought back was Olvia.

The Elder Stars respected Professor Clover and the scholars of the Tree of Knowledge. They - not Sengoku - gave the order to attack only after Professor Clover wouldn’t shut up about the Void Century, and they didn’t look too happy about the outcome.

Roger’s death and the destruction of Ohara take place in the same year. That’s an incredible amount of turmoil in a short amount of time. In the wake of so much uncertainty it’s little wonder that the rigid, unyielding ideal of Absolute Justice rose to the top. 

Sakazuki was already an extremist during the Ohara incident. What we don’t see is any change in ideology in the twenty year interim. If anything, he gets worse. When facing a deserter during the Marineford War, he kills him on the spot. There is no remorse or mercy, only the meting of punishment with himself acting as judge, jury, and executor. 

Aristotle postulated that any virtue in excess becomes vice. We see in Absolute Justice a justice devoid of mercy or compassion, where there is only the most severe punishment no matter the crime. It is justice without fairness, goodness, or even regard to the law (deserters are generally tried and dishonorably discharged/imprisoned. Battlefield executions are a no-no). It cannot be called righteous, as it targets innocents and ignores the greater moral issues of slavery and the cruel rule of the Celestial Dragons. Absolute Justice brooks no compromise and cannot be argued with, for to question it is to question the World Government itself.

And just like the events surrounding Roger’s death encouraged Absolute Justice, the popularity of Absolute Justice in turn encourages greater extremes in order to keep the peace, which brings me back to Spandam

CP9 and Dark Justice

The Dark Justice of CP9 is the logical evolution of Absolute Justice. It takes everything we’ve already seen and adds an emphasis on military might, with a hefty dose of pragmatism mixed in to boot.

Spandam is an utterly reprehensible piece of garbage, but I find him fascinating because for all his faults - of which there are many - he’s not stupid, nor is he incompetent. It’s easily forgotten, but it was Spandam who convinced the World Government to go after the Ancient Weapons in the first place

Where Absolute Justice seeks to squash criminals with the heel of their boot, Dark Justice fights fire with fire. It’s hard to say how much of this Spandam actually believes and how much of it is him angling for a promotion, but there’s no doubt that he thinks Robin’s first and greatest crime is simply existing. Absolute Justice says she must die, but that doesn’t stop Spandam from wanting to use her for his own ends first.

Spandam was going to keep Robin alive for exactly the amount of time it took him to extract all her “useful knowledge”, and we know that he wasn’t above torturing her to get what he wanted. After accidentally calling for a Buster Call against Enies Lobby he justified himself by saying if ten thousand marines had to die to cover up his mistake protect the world, then those ten thousand should die without question. 

So Dark Justice is all about using the end to justify the means, but it doesn’t end there. It’s not good enough to simply not be evil, you have to be strong enough not to let evil overcome. We see this a little with Spandam’s obsession to revive the Ancient Weapons, but Lucci displays it better in the form of his backstory.

Because of pacing issues, Oda only put a truncated version of Lucci’s backstory in the manga, although it was expanded upon in the anime. To make a long story short, when he was a teenager Lucci killed five hundred soldiers that were being held hostage by a group of pirates. Their weakness that led them to being captured was their crime, and they paid in blood for their mistake.

Dark and Absolute Justice meet at the Marineford War, where Ace is punished for the crime of being Roger’s son. Chapter 550 is very clear in this regard. Ace isn’t being publicly executed for his own actions as a pirate, the property he has destroyed, or the people he’s undoubtedly killed with his Devil Fruit, but for who his father is. By the World Government’s logic, it’s a case of nature over nurture - Ace was destined for villainy no matter what, so you might as well kill him for his original sin. 

Their logic is undone when the war continues well after Ace and Whitebeard’s deaths.

Here the marines have obtained their objectives and have bigger things to worry about than an insignificant rookie like Luffy. Their bloodlust doesn’t stop until the corrupt, twisted justice of the marines is tempered with a bit of sense, kindly provided by Coby.

Of course Sakazuki almost kills him for it, but, hey, it’s the thought that counts

This is one of the few times we see Absolute and/or Dark Justice challenged from within the marines, and one of, if not the only, time we see a more moderate position “win”. It marks the beginning of a “third wave” of justice ideology. 

Coby, Smoker, and Fujitora represent the counter-movement against the likes of Sakazuki and Spandam, and it will be interesting to see how they fit into the series going forward. I think I’ll cover these more moderate views of justice in another post. 

Until then, thanks for reading. I’ll try to get back to Robin next time, specifically the parallels between her backstory and the events of the Enies Lobby arc.