#sabo would not have done that. if he knew. that crocodile was dragons ex.

[lesbiankoby]

crocodile getting honeypotted by sabo is still a top tier joke. this is so humiliating for virtually everyone involved

[moongothic]

On reflection i think Dragon taking in Sabo but leaving Luffy behind could potentially become a huge wrinkle in how Luffy thinks of him once they do actually meet. He could even see it as Dragon breaking up the brothers needlessly, Luffy more loyal to Ace than this essential stranger deciding in his head that Ace would have never stood in the way of the three of them staying together. Or even a 3 way conflict of “sabo would never have wanted his brothers to abandon their dream for him” vs. “luffy and ace would have wanted the opportunity to help Sabo”

Which cooould lubricate the story wheels a little for a more civil crocodile and luffy crocdad reunion, if crocodile expressed some disagreement in Dragon’s judgement or philosophy that could stand to better align with Luffy’s feelings on the topic (probably some form of pragmatism about how its pointless to save the one when you could just as easily take all 3, or that severing Sabo from his brothers made him a weaker fighter than if Dragon had taken all 3, etc.)

Goldfish logic Luffy. He is currently mad at Dragon-dad but Croco-dad is agreeing with him on it so he’s ok with Croco-dad now.

I don't think Dragon lowkey adopting Sabo would do anything to hurt Luffy's relationship with Dragon or sour his view of his father. Like there are genuinely understandable reasons to why Dragon couldn't stay with Luffy, and Sabo ended up with Dragon under unusual, unintended circumstances. Like, if Dragon explained why things turned out the way they did, I think Luffy would understand and wouldn't hold any grudges against him. Dragon had his reasons, he did what he did, what's done is done and it all turned out okay in the end, so knowing Luffy he should be okay with it.

That said, there are things Dragon did absolutely fuck up. Things that could possibly lead to Luffy being a little mad at Dragon and/or take Crocodile's side on something.

Now to be fair, we don't know how the Dragodile Divorce went down, like there are Circumstances that could potentially explain some of these potential fuck ups (on Dragon's behalf) away. But we can't go through all the potential scenarios of what might've gone down here, in the end, what really matters is that:

Dragon didn't tell Crocodile his full name

Dragon didn't tell Crocodile what he named their child

Dragon did not contact Crocodile about their child being a pirate

Dragon knew full fucking well Crocodile was literally World Famous for crushing pirates in Alabasta

Dragon knew Luffy entered the Grand Line and thus there was a genuine possibility he could eventually reach Alabasta

Even if we put what happened with the manufactured rebellion and Vivi aside, if the Strawhats had gone to Alabasta and wrecked any havoc there (even by accident as Luffy tends to do), Crocodile would have gone and killed the crew, just like the thousands of others he had crushed before. And Dragon would have been aware of this. He should have known that could happen. That his ex and child could end up fighting and someone (namely the child) dying

Meaning, even without the Bizarre Circumstances they were in, it is arguably Dragon's fucking fault that Crocodile tried to kill their son three whole times. Because Dragon didn't tell Crocodile anything, and did not even warn him their son could end up in Alabasta.

If Crocodile turned out to be fucking furious at Dragon for this, well, he would be objectively justified in being angry. Because Dragon did fucking drop the ball there, completely. Croc tried to kill his own son, completely unaware, because Dragon couldn't even tell his own full name to his partner. Not even the name of their son. Nothing.

And so if Crocodile was fucking furious at Dragon for it, perhaps even a little upset about what he did to his baby boy because of Dragon's incompetence. Yeah I think Luffy would understand Croc's feelings. He might just take Crocodile's side there.

Especially because we don't know how the Dragodile Divorce went down either, like if shit got even a little transphobic then god knows Dragon Fucked Up Bad and Luffy won't side with that shit either

[chaosverseline]

Imu, Yriaf and whitebeard’s pirates

Backstory:

-Yriaf also regards whitebeard’s other sons and daughters as her own. Her unofficial favorite adoptive sons are Marco, thatch, and jozu.

-imu was more reluctant, but secretly their fav adoptive grand son is actually izo.

-both Yriaf and imu agree Tate is no.1 best girl . They also agree on their least favorite and that goes to teach, they felt something is off about teach and they are proven right after they found out what teach has nearly done to crocodile.

-imu ranted about how blind and dumb Edward Newgate is about the red flags on Blackbeard. It made imu’s view on whitebeard plummet to the underground. Yriaf tries to defend her husband but knew her mother does have a point.

-it was until after teach betrays whitebeard,heavily injured thatch and kidnapped ace , is when both ladies snapped and committed bloody torture homicide.there is wasn’t much left of teach after that incident, legends said that the Blackbeard pirates are still trying to find all the pieces of Blackbeard after marine ford.

- the ladies pulls some strings to get ace in a safer cell, meaning a cell with a whitebeard ally aka jinbei . It was across crocodile’s “cell” where he has it all for himself. ( later ace was moved to share the same cell with crocodile, crocodile has adopted ace and Sabo years ago when he was reunited with luffy.)

-crocodile’s cell is a luxury five star hotel compare to the rest of impel down cells. He got a tv, shelf full of books, a “service” bell, where he can get delivery of takeout food from nearby restaurants, newspapers are delivered to his cell, unlimited visitor hours that he can pick and choice who to talk with and any thing he want.

-And crocodile was embarrassed by the whole thing. Crocodile is very prideful and independent. He is not a nepo baby and definitely won’t go running and crying to mommy,daddy or even granny if trouble comes around. He prefer to deal with his own problems and would get annoyed when his parents and granny interferes.

-The first time yriaf visited crocodile, crocodile got so embarrassed that he wouldn’t show his face for days. How would he look like a tough, formidable and no nonsense ex warlord ,if his mom visited him, in front of the other inmates!

-imu is very willing to make a get-out-of -jail card for their family , but due to yriaf’s stubbornness,crocodile’s pride, and luffy ‘s tendencies to have adventures and not “ cheat” it went unused. Imu still sometimes bails them out (whether the descendants like it or not)when they found themselves in a deeper pickled that requires imu’s inference. (Ex. When luffy punched a celestial dragon)

[kaizokuou-ni-naru]

The Voyage So Far: Paramount War (Part Two)

east blue (1 | 2) || alabasta (1 | 2) || skypiea || water 7 || enies lobby || thriller bark || paramount war (1 | 2) || fishman island || punk hazard || dressrosa (1 | 2) || whole cake island || wano (1 | 2)

ace’s execution is, in a way, the exception that proves the rule when it comes to one piece’s themes of blood and family. ace is set up to die for the crimes of a father he never knew and never wanted, and he does die here, but in the end he dies for the family he did choose, in the form of luffy, rather than the one he didn’t. 

god do i wish we knew more about ms portgas d. rouge. with ace’s storyline pretty much wrapped it looks unlikely that we’re going to be learning more about her than what we got, which in my opinion is an absolute tragedy, because what little we do know about her is amazing and she’s an absolute badass. oda give us more female ds please.

whitebeard’s power is so cool. it might be one of the visually coolest devil fruits we’ve ever seen, in my opinion. he he causes earthquakes and tsunamis while far past his prime; he pulls the sky apart with his bare hands. this whole arc is world-shaking, and whitebeard’s power is perfectly appropriate for it. 

doflamingo’s speech on justice and rightness is one of the most well-remembered quotes from this whole saga, and rightly so. i’ve always found it fascinating, myself, because he’s right. he dead-on hits how the one piece world works- the world government and the marines rule the world not because of any inherent actual goodness or justice or right, but because they won a war a very long time ago. 

in a way, this reminds me of blackbeard’s line of “people’s dreams never die” from jaya. i like how oda isn’t afraid of letting his villains be right about the themes of the story, sometimes even having better awareness of them than the protagonists. 

man, if i had to pick a single favorite spread out of the whole manga, it might be luffy’s marineford entrance. it’s so epic, and so completely unexpected for everyone else there. absolutely nobody was expecting strawhat luffy to drop out of the sky with a posse including two former warlords. it just makes me grin!! so much!! 

it also gets followed up by a solid two pages of just people’s reactions, from smoker’s “what the HELL is he doing with CROCODILE” to moria’s immediate incoherent rage, and i just love that the world and cast of one piece is so well-established and built up that we know exactly how all of those people know luffy and why they react the way they do. 

going back to what i mentioned in the last post about marineford being luffy’s conflict of interest arc, i’d say it’s also the only time where he isn’t the future king first and foremost. in this arc, before anything else, he’s a little brother.

there are a lot of what-if moments in marineford. moments where you kind of have to ask “what if this specific thing hadn’t happened, had gone differently?” would things have turned out differently? squard’s betrayal is one of them. does this change the outcome? would whitebeard have been able to survive if not for this injury? there’s no way to know. marineford is a lot of little tragedies, and they just pile up and up.

marineford has just so many incredibly striking spreads. all of the momentous moments (and there’s a lot of them, in this arc) are done full justice. this is such an image heavy post just because marineford is such an incredibly visually strong arc. 

conqueror’s haki is so cool and i love the way it’s set up and built up throughout this saga, with luffy’s constant inadvertent uses of it, from duval’s bull to marigold and sandersonia to the wolves in impel down, all leading up to this moment. 

i’ve heard people complain about conqueror’s as kind of a deus ex machina, but i honestly love it, it’s very cool and honestly i think it just seems to fit luffy as a power. if there was ever gonna be a character who turned willpower into a weapon, it would be monkey d. luffy. 

i’m gonna take this chance to talk about garp, because this sequence of panels is heavily implied to be garp’s thoughts just before luffy punches him down, and it hurts. garp is a flawed person who makes some bad choices, and there’s no arguing that, but i think it’s very obvious he really, really cares about his grandsons, even if he never could understand them as people and that they never would have been happy as marines. and that’s just tragic, really. 

the moment ace gets freed and the brief span of time where he and luffy can fight together feel so triumphant, and i think it’s one of the reasons the final tragedy of marineford hits so hard and feels so cruel, because luffy succeeds, here. he saves ace. he gives absolutely everything he had and makes it, and saves ace. the ultimate failure isn’t his. there was nothing more he could have done. 

the first time i was reading one piece, i hit this page (which is also the last in the volume) and had to put the book away, take the bus downtown, wander around for a few hours, and buy myself some candy and some new books before i started feeling okay again.

the thing about ace’s death, i think, is that it’s a tragedy, but it also feels so completely essential to the story going forwards and luffy’s character growth specifically that it’s really, really hard to imagine one piece without it. there are a lot of (really excellent!) fix-fics out there for marineford, and although those are often really good and their authors super talented, i think it’s really hard for them to ever hit the same way canon does with regards to this. 

i always think of this scene specifically in contrast to zoro and mihawk’s fight, back on baratie. zoro and mihawk are both people who believe in honor in battle, true victory or death, and that’s reflected in their fight, in zoro’s refusal to turn and run even in the face of imminent death, and mihawk’s respect for that resolve. whitebeard, too, is an honorable man. he refuses to turn to run, even when facing certain death. 

the blackbeard pirates, however, are not. 

i do enjoy how, just like roger’s, ace’s execution backfires tremendously on the marines. this was entirely a predictable outcome, too! this exact thing happened twenty years ago! the marines don’t learn. they don’t change. they’re so assured of their own rightness and power that they make stupid mistakes like holding a massive public execution after the last one blew up in their faces. 

(this is why they need coby so badly, for the record, and why it’s important that he still decides to become a marine after witnessing their corruption firsthand in shells town. the marines are long overdue for a reformation, one that orients them towards real justice.)

i really, really enjoy crocodile in this saga. mostly because he hasn’t been redeemed at all, he’s still pretty much the exact same kinda awful person he was in alabasta, he’s just on luffy’s side this time, and it lets us see him in a better light, when he gets angry at whitebeard for nearly dying or when he helps luffy and jinbe escape to keep the marines from getting their way. few of one piece’s characters are truly so one-dimensional as they can seem, and i really appreciate that. 

i really really love all the interactions between luffy, ace and sabo as kids. they’re so fun and bounce off of each other so well. even though we only see them together for a brief time, they really feel like siblings. (which of course only makes later events hurt so much more.

i’ve always been a little fascinated by the fact that it takes us this long to get luffy’s full backstory. it’s almost a fakeout, because we get part of his backstory in the very first chapter, and we’re kind of led to believe that’s all there is. it’s not until ace’s introduction nearly two hundred chapters in that we’re given any indication there’s more.

but at the same time, it makes sense. marineford is luffy’s focus arc, as arlong park to nami or thriller bark to brook. he hasn’t had a focal arc that’s really about him before this, while all his other crewmates have. it makes sense that this would be when he finally gets his flashback. 

i think it’s cool that dragon and the revolutionaries show up at the grey terminal fire, because it’s one of the only looks we’ve gotten so far into what their actual regular operations are like. and, of course, they’re saving people. i really like this about the revolutionaries, that helping people in trouble is basically their modus operandi, when pretty much everyone else in one piece’s world mostly does saving on an incidental basis if at all. 

i think a lot about how the last line of sabo’s letter to ace is also both of their last words to the strawhats. 

death in one piece always feels much realer and more impactful to me than in most other series, and i think this is part of the reason why: in one piece, we are always shown the mourning. nami at bellemere’s grave, carrot grieving pedro, ace and whitebeard’s funeral. 

there are fewer deaths, comparatively, than most other series, but they’re given so much room to echo. we’re still feeling the impacts of ace’s life and death in the most recent chapters of wano. it ties into the theme of inherited will and all the way back to hiriluk’s final speech, of men not being dead so long as they’re remembered. 

the picture of luffy at marineford always kind of strikes me. he looks so young and so solemn, and yet much more himself than he did when we last saw him losing his mind on amazon lily. i really like it. 

sometimes i just think about the sheer depth of trust and love the strawhats must have in each other to separate for two years, far longer than they were ever together, to solely dedicate themselves to improving for the sake of crew and captain. none of them even hesitate, and none of them ever doubt that the crew will be reformed at the end of it.

after all, luffy keeps his promises.