#one piece chapter review

[gregmikaels]

One Piece Chapter 1130 | Loki Appears In One Piece! The World’s Destroyer?! And A Sun God?!

[discjude]

guess my favourite sge chapter challenge (impossible edition). yes i think aric shouldve had long hair he was in that cave for nine whole ass years leave me alone

[every-sanji]

[strawhatdyke]

Chapter 1103

Kuma finally showing up at egghead now his backstory is complete is sick, can't wait to see him go hard at Saturn.

Kizaru definitely the one who got food to Luffy. Which means we could see all 3 go against Saturn but I feel Kizaru may just help from the background for a while longer.

Dragon showing up and meeting luffy could be on the cards too but I think if he did show up its likely they wouldn't get the reunion and he would play a part in helping the Straw Hats escape and finishing off whoever is left - maybe alongside Kizaru?

Last panel of chapter is great, really hoping 1104 kicks off with Saturn getting Charlos'd into oblivion.

[anonymoussong]

The Warrior Cats are like the One Piece of children's books

1) Longer than should be allowed (affectionate)

2) Most people don't get the hype but those who are into it are INTO it

3) The character names are fuckin bonkers in the best ways

4) Has been going for like 20-25 years with no ending in sight (OP started in '97, WC in '03)

5) Has over a million words (OP at around 1.7, WC at like 3.9+)

6) Will rewire your brain

[choppersbongreviews]

One Piece Chapter 1100 Thoughts!

I wanted to start making things that aren't shitposts (and I don't have anyone to talk about them with) so I'm gonna start posting my thoughts and what I like about the new chapter each week! Obviously, chapter 1100 spoilers below...

I don't think I'll ever get over how damn silly Vegapunk looks before he sets up his brain antenna. I giggle every time i see him, it's so goofy. Also, Kuma's bounty here being about the same as Luffy's when they fatefully meet is interesting to me. I love how bounties in OP don't care about powerscaling. And Kizaru needs to lose the fedora. He looks greasy.

Chapter after chapter Kuma is only becoming more likeable to me. Like obviously he would only care about Bonney being cured, but seeing it is still very moving.

Man, Saint Saturn better have a serious ass-kicking coming his way. As good as this flashback is, I can't wait to get back to the present to see what happens (and to probably get emotionally devastated considering Kuma's current day actions).

Lmao get fucked Senomaru.

Seeing these five enjoying their time together while Kuma and Bonney go through their treatments is super interesting to me. We've already seen Sentomaru siding with Vegapunk against the WG and this helps us see why. Now I'm wondering if Kizaru will have a change of heart... idk!

👀 Kizaru, you better hope the bosses don't see this.

Damn you Oda.

Its cool to see everyone's reaction to Kuma becoming a Warlord, but I'm just thinking of how much I miss the cowboy hat...

Wait...

HIS FLAG IS HER DRAWING????? COME ON! 😭

I would've never guessed that we'd end up here this chapter ngl. I can't wait to see what Kuma does at Foosha Village. Does he know about Luffy eating the Nika fruit? Is it a coincidence? I guess we'll find out in next week's chapter!

[luckyrave]

One Piece Chapters 1104-1105 Livestream Discussion/Review: Thank You Daddy & The Height of Folly!!

A buster call has been ordered upon Egghead Island as Luffy, Nami, and The Straw Hats attempt to escape off to Elbaf while Kuma has stepped into the picture to take on Saint Jay Garcia after saving Bonney and Vegapunk. Now it's only a matter of time before we discover what shocking incident occurs that will leave the whole world in total shock.

[originaljiraiyan]

One Piece Episode 1095 Review: The Shocking Truth About Egghead Island!

[heatherbooks]

A very very brief overview of Romance Dawn (spoilers, liked it)

Romance Dawn is the first arc of One Piece, consisting of chapters 1-7. It’s fairly simple, compared to the later arcs within East Blue (and beyond) but really does not suffer from that. 

The first chapter is by far one of the strongest. But, again, that’s not really surprising because it has twice as many pages as your regular chapter. It’s also where the overarching plot and several important characters are introduced (though, we don’t actually see Shanks again until the end of the saga). 

All in all, gotta say that it’s one of the strongest first arc of manga that I’ve read, beating out the Black Swordsman of Berserk and whatever the bit before L is introduced is called in Death Note. Expanding beyond manga, I’d compare it to the first volume of Sandman, where Dream is being introduced. 

What I’m saying is, if you have the time, check it out. If you aren’t sold, you won’t find what’s coming next interesting. If you are, you’ll enjoy East Blue. If you like East Blue, you’ll like One Piece. 

[therealsoulking]

One Piece Chapter 1089

It's Been Two Weeks, and Everything's Fucked!

I'm so glad to see the construction of a new Enies Lobby Branch out here in the New World!

And glad to see Oda incorporating current events into the story 😬

Also, time to add Dragon to the list of potential fathers of Makino's baby

Anyways, we're getting a well-needed recap of what's going on on the Future Island, culminating in a call from York to the Gorosei Room of Autority™️, outlining York's betrayal and plot to trade control of the mysterious Mother Flame

Despite York's haughtiness and the battle raging outside, the Straw Hats, Bonney and Vegapunk have a slight advantage over the Gorosei.

Ah. Things have happened while we were looking at the rest of the Grand Line. Welp, I guess that's what we'll see next chapter, from the crew split up fighting Seraphim, to everyone reunited and holding York prisoner.

[gregmikaels]

"Sorry, Joyboy..." What does the giant armor mean by that?

[cutepuppiespizza]

One Piece chapter 1122 video review part 2 part 1 seemed to have been CBLDF complained for some reason.

[every-sanji]

[mollyrolls]

i hope everyone who was hating on eggy reads this and feels bad!

DRUNK WALK HOME

intermission (cont.): names

masterlist

"mom, i'm tired" -class of 2013 by mitski

cw: suicidal ideation, isolation, parental neglect (u can skip this one if u want)

She doesn't remember a lot from her childhood.

She remembers the night that her father left. She was pressing her ear up against the cold wood of her bedroom door, listening as muffled screams made their way to her. His voice was raw and rough. She held her breath but her eyes still watered. It smelled like cigarettes and a lavender candle. Her window was opened, and she wore Princess Peach pajamas. She remembers the sound of a door slamming, and of her mother wailing.

She remembers sitting alone at the kitchen counter, eating cold leftovers alone in the dark, her feet dangling above the kitchen floor. She remembers getting locked out of her house once and sitting on the cold ground for hours, too tired to cry. She remembers a lot of strange men coming in and out, staying and leaving.

Not their names, though. She could never remember their names. She just called them all 'dad.' It was all the same to her, anyways.

She remembers going hungry in the mornings and finding holes in her coat pockets. She remembers stealing snacks from convenience stores and she remembers how much it hurt when the store attendant caught her and gripped at her wrist. She remembers being good at school because it was the only thing for her to do. She remembers fighting with her friends a lot. She remembers being angry all the time. She doesn't remember ever knowing why.

She remembers on the night of her middle school graduation, she was supposed to die.

It was dark, and she stood at that bridge for hours, staring out beyond it, eyes blurring the ground and the sky, like she was waiting for some kind of sign. She kept checking her phone but no one ever texted her. No one ever called. She sat there until two in the morning, unbothered, untouched.

She remembers feeling disappointed, because there on that bridge, she realized that she didn’t even really want to do it. She just wanted to see if there would be someone to stop her. And there wasn’t.

She remembers that. She remembers going home because it was starting to get cold, and she was too afraid of feeling pain. She went home, and at two-thirty-seven in the morning, she poured herself her first drink.

She remembers that.

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[the-music-keeper]

Objectives #11, #13, and #18 are all done! I didn't finish everything I wanted to while I was at work and right afterwards, but to be fair I did finish a lot of it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/940944/000092189514002031/ex991dfan14a06297125_091114.pdf

Everyone loved this story. As David Dayen wrote for Salon, it let readers "mock that silly chain restaurant they remember from their childhoods in the suburbs" and laugh at "the silly hedge fund that took the time to write the world’s worst review":

https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/

But – as Dayen wrote at the time, the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, Starboard Value, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks. They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company. They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden's real-estate holdings and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars, while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden, converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises.

They wanted to asset-strip the company, in other words ("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

Starboard didn't have enough money to force the sale, but they had recently engineered the CEO's ouster. The giant slide-deck making fun of Olive Garden's food was just a PR campaign to help it sell the bust-out by creating a narrative that they were being activists* to save this badly managed disaster of a restaurant chain.

*assholes

Starboard was bent on eviscerating Darden like a couple of entrail-maddened dogs in an elk carcass:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051220005944/http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/

They had forced Darden to sell off another of its holdings, Red Lobster, to a hedge-fund called Golden Gate Capital. Golden Gate flogged all of Red Lobster's real estate holdings for $2.1 billion the same day, then pissed it all away on dividends to its shareholders, including Starboard. The new landlords, a Real Estate Investment Trust, proceeded to charge so much for rent on those buildings Red Lobster just flogged that the company's net earnings immediately dropped by half.

Dayen ends his piece with these prophetic words:

Olive Garden and Red Lobster may not be destinations for hipster Internet journalists, and they have seen revenue declines amid stagnant middle-class wages and increased competition. But they are still profitable businesses. Thousands of Americans work there. Why should they be bled dry by predatory investors in the name of “shareholder value”? What of the value of worker productivity instead of the financial engineers?

Flash forward a decade. Today, Dayen is editor-in-chief of The American Prospect, one of the best sources of news about private equity looting in the world. Writing for the Prospect, Luke Goldstein picks up Dayen's story, ten years on:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-22-raiding-red-lobster/

It's not pretty. Ten years of being bled out on rents and flipped from one hedge fund to another has killed Red Lobster. It just shuttered 50 restaurants and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ten years hasn't changed much; the same kind of snark that was deployed at the news of Olive Garden's imminent demise is now being hurled at Red Lobster.

Instead of dunking on free bread-sticks, Red Lobster's grave-dancers are jeering at "Endless Shrimp," a promotional deal that works exactly how it sounds like it would work. Endless Shrimp cost the chain $11m.

Which raises a question: why did Red Lobster make this money-losing offer? Are they just good-hearted slobs? Can't they do math?

Or, you know, was it another hedge-fund, bust-out scam?

Here's a hint. The supplier who provided Red Lobster with all that shrimp is Thai Union. Thai Union also owns Red Lobster. They bought the chain from Golden Gate Capital, last seen in 2014, holding a flash-sale on all of Red Lobster's buildings, pocketing billions, and cutting Red Lobster's earnings in half.

Red Lobster rose to success – 700 restaurants nationwide at its peak – by combining no-frills dining with powerful buying power, which it used to force discounts from seafood suppliers. In response, the seafood industry consolidated through a wave of mergers, turning into a cozy cartel that could resist the buyer power of Red Lobster and other major customers.

This was facilitated by conservation efforts that limited the total volume of biomass that fishers were allowed to extract, and allocated quotas to existing companies and individual fishermen. The costs of complying with this "catch management" system were high, punishingly so for small independents, bearably so for large conglomerates.

Competition from overseas fisheries drove consolidation further, as countries in the global south were blocked from implementing their own conservation efforts. US fisheries merged further, seeking economies of scale that would let them compete, largely by shafting fishermen and other suppliers. Today's Alaskan crab fishery is dominated by a four-company cartel; in the Pacific Northwest, most fish goes through a single intermediary, Pacific Seafood.

These dominant actors entered into illegal collusive arrangements with one another to rig their markets and further immiserate their suppliers, who filed antitrust suits accusing the companies of operating a monopsony (a market with a powerful buyer, akin to a monopoly, which is a market with a powerful seller):

https://www.classaction.org/news/pacific-seafood-under-fire-for-allegedly-fixing-prices-paid-to-dungeness-crabbers-in-pacific-northwest

Golden Gate bought Red Lobster in the midst of these fish wars, promising to right its ship. As Goldstein points out, that's the same promise they made when they bought Payless shoes, just before they destroyed the company and flogged it off to Alden Capital, the hedge fund that bought and destroyed dozens of America's most beloved newspapers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Under Golden Gate's management, Red Lobster saw its staffing levels slashed, so diners endured longer wait times to be seated and served. Then, in 2020, they sold the company to Thai Union, the company's largest supplier (a transaction Goldstein likens to a Walmart buyout of Procter and Gamble).

Thai Union continued to bleed Red Lobster, imposing more cuts and loading it up with more debts financed by yet another private equity giant, Fortress Investment Group. That brings us to today, with Thai Union having moved a gigantic amount of its own product through a failing, debt-loaded subsidiary, even as it lobbies for deregulation of American fisheries, which would let it and its lobbying partners drain American waters of the last of its depleted fish stocks.

Dayen's 2020 must-read book Monopolized describes the way that monopolies proliferate, using the US health care industry as a case-study:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

After deregulation allowed the pharma sector to consolidate, it acquired pricing power of hospitals, who found themselves gouged to the edge of bankruptcy on drug prices. Hospitals then merged into regional monopolies, which allowed them to resist pharma pricing power – and gouge health insurance companies, who saw the price of routine care explode. So the insurance companies gobbled each other up, too, leaving most of us with two or fewer choices for health insurance – even as insurance prices skyrocketed, and our benefits shrank.

Today, Americans pay more for worse healthcare, which is delivered by health workers who get paid less and work under worse conditions. That's because, lacking a regulator to consolidate patients' interests, and strong unions to consolidate workers' interests, patients and workers are easy pickings for those consolidated links in the health supply-chain.

That's a pretty good model for understanding what's happened to Red Lobster: monopoly power and monopsony power begat more monopolies and monoposonies in the supply chain. Everything that hasn't consolidated is defenseless: diners, restaurant workers, fishermen, and the environment. We're all fucked.

Decent, no-frills family restaurant are good. Great, even. I'm not the world's greatest fan of chain restaurants, but I'm also comfortably middle-class and not struggling to afford to give my family a nice night out at a place with good food, friendly staff and reasonable prices. These places are easy pickings for looters because the people who patronize them have little power in our society – and because those of us with more power are easily tricked into sneering at these places' failures as a kind of comeuppance that's all that's due to tacky joints that serve the working class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates