#op ch134

[salteytakesonmanga]

I love this story Luffy shares. This whole sequence of the casual conversation while the baby Lapin is attacking is great, but the dialogue is especially fun because of how mundane it is. This is the sort of conversation I imagine the crew has when everyone is just hanging out.

[salteytakesonmanga]

Dishonorable mention for completely erasing Kureha’s signature line, and with it a lot of the meaning from this scene. But apparently it was also confusing in Japanese because Oda got an SBS question about it. Still, the translators completely changed her words to mean something entirely different so I’m leaving the dishonorable mention.

Kureha uses the word “happy” a lot, and says it in English. Her greeting is “are you happy?” and she sprinkles it throughout her conversation. I assume they took it out because it’s weird, but sometimes you have to let things be weird! It’s weird in the original, too. Get confused, think about stuff, it’s good for you.

I think it’s also unfortunate because it flattens Kureha’s character. When she asks, “Are you happy?” people react with fear, which contrasts with her cheerful smile and the fact that she’s here to help. It adds to her image as a fairytale witch, one who asks questions with hidden meanings and offers you what you want but with a secret price. Taking this out removes one of the ways that this arc contends with various dualities - Kureha is 140 139 but dresses like a teenager, Chopper is an animal and a "monster" but has more humanity than Wapol, healing comes in many forms and some of them are painful…

Here she says “That feeling, don’t ever forget it.” She’s not talking about what she did, but the illness itself. In the original the line is “that HAPPYness, don’t ever forget it,” and “happy” is the phonetic reading given to the kanji for “illness.” So her repeated question, “are you happy?” may actually be her way of asking “are you sick?” She has a reputation for being a nasty old lady, but in her own way she's trying to take care of people.

[salteytakesonmanga]

Now that we’ve had a few adventures with Vivi we’ve gotten to see how carefully she controls her emotions, but here she’s enraged. I like how Oda drew her eyes here, it shows how close she is to losing control.

At this point in the story all we know about Vivi’s father is that he’s “powerless” to stop this, but it hasn’t been made clear if that’s because of his own actions. It would make sense to think that Vivi felt resentment or something towards her father the king for putting her in this situation, but I like even more the fact that Vivi has no personal stake in this conversation. This is simply something she’s fiercely passionate about.

Leaders and rulers failing to actually take care of the people they lead is a HUUUUUGE theme. It starts with captains - both pirate and marine - and continues to kings and gods (or “gods”) and brings us all the way to the world government and the celestial dragons.

[salteytakesonmanga]

Kaya! She looks like she’s doing so well, even if she also seems a little dismayed by her escort. This town looks way bigger than Syrup Village, but is also apparently close enough to there that the Usopp Pirates can be following her around her regularly.

I also like these glimpses of what “normal life” is like in the world of One Piece. A lot of the story is about protecting these peaceful and safe scenes, in one way or another, so it’s nice to see how regular citizens experience that.

[salteytakesonmanga]

It’s not often Luffy gets to call someone else stupid.

Another thing I really enjoyed about this entire conversation is the little window into the way Luffy thinks. He’s fun when he’s being zany but there’s something even funnier about how seriously he says the weirdest shit.

[salteytakesonmanga]

HI CHOPPER! With this introduction we were deliberately led to believe that he was just a pet, like Richie or ChouChou. The only hint that he might not be a normal animal was that he got his own little narrator box.

And HI KUREHA. I love her, may we all age into such terrifying menaces. Something interesting about Kureha is that her name is one of the few in One Piece that is written in hiragana. Kuina is only other character I can think of off the top of my head whose name is also in hiragana, at least until we start meeting people from Wano.

[salteytakesonmanga]

Medicine and medical science - or at least the fantasy world version of them - are a pretty big recurring theme in One Piece. I get a little frustrated with the simplistic version of it Oda presents, but then I enjoy medical drama mangas like Iryuu so it’s not exactly a fair comparison. This level of detail for a subplot is probably about right for the intended audience, which could be as young as 8.

[salteytakesonmanga]

Dalton must have been hearing from travelers about Wapol this whole time. The fact that Wapol had to search for Drum Island again raises some question. Chief among them, how does a king not have an eternal pose for his own country? Plus Wapol demanded the log post from the Straw Hats when he met them, so was he out there without a log pose either?

I was thinking that eternal poses must be exceptionally rare if even the king doesn’t have one, but maybe Wapol is just an idiot.