#would it problematic to like me?? which of my flaws are exaggerated?? what characteristics of mine make it into fanfic??

[kitchensinkchronicles]

sometimes i wonder how people would psychoanalyze me if i was a character

[breadstyx]

@hurlumerlu replied to your post “Usopp be like "give me a sec *becomes a Christ figure real quick*”

wow did one piece become good again ?

Well that’s a tough one.

For context, I’ve been watching One Piece for like, a year. But when I was in high school I had caught up with the manga reading scanlations for a while. So when I started the anime, I picked it up at that part of the story, having a working knowledge of what happened up to that point.

It ended up being “I’ve seen Luffy build relationships with and hiring the ppl that end up being the definitive crew of the Sunny”, which kinda feels like Past Me invested the energy and time to read the setup to the actual story so I didn’t have to.

So I can’t tell if someone who started watching One Piece from the beginning of it would feel the same way as I do.

Let’s talk vibes and mood first.

In my opinion: One Piece is good. It can get proper silly sometimes and feel over-the-top, but it embraces it and makes it fully part of its own vibe and style. The universe is consistent, and the story never backs down on choices it’s made before. One Piece may be silly and over-the-top, but it’s unapologetic. Which I’ve been enjoying very much so far.

Now, about the storytelling.

Here again: I’d go with yes, One Piece is good. Eiichiro Oda knows pacing like the back of his hand; some of the best applications of “if you don’t know what to write: what’s the worst thing that could happen to your characters rn? make it happen” I’ve seen are in One Piece.

Also, despite all the silliness, the story feels real for a very simple reason: stuff that happens isn’t forgotten. The eye lost in battle is lost forever. The scar stays. The characters you’ve met in this arc will not disappear at the end of it but might pop up again later. The character motivations stay consistent, even when they evolve.

When it comes to the art style, it’s a bit more nuanced.

I like it. But this one can really be all-or-nothing I feel.

First of all, I gotta address the elephant in the room: The women are basically drawn as stick figures, with boobs twice bigger than their heads and waists smaller than my wrist. Yes. And it only gets worse as time passes.

That ain’t great.

That aside, the art style is very characteristic, especially for a manga, borrowing a lot of elements from cartoons (the main character IS made of rubber after all, so the stretches and squishes of western cartoons feel right at home here). Characters have flashy, colorful designs and it doesn’t shy away from going bonkers with body shapes: round, square, triangular torsos; huge characters and very small ones, pole-thin ones next to balloon-like others (also I’ll take fat characters being balloons in a world where all traits are exaggerated over the countless anime/cartoon/tv shows where they just don’t exist).

To a question like ”That character is important and strong and respected and kinda legendary how can I show that?”, One Piece boldly goes “Well that’s obvious, make them 1.5x bigger than everybody else”. That level of unashamed do-it-like-15yo-you-would’ve-done-it design really appeals to me.

Now, it’s good to keep in mind that One Piece is still a mainstream piece of media and has the flaws we’re used to see in such works — it’s no FMA:B.

There are pervert characters, boob zooms as jokes and stuff like that. There’s a whole ISLAND whose inhabitants are caricatures of trans women.

But also, the women actually have backstories and motivations of their own? They’re fully-fledged characters with their own personality and don’t only exist as men’s sidekick.

And the most transphobic-caricature-like character’s whole point is that “queers are amazing and strong”?? and the ““““romantic”””” main char that gets disgusted by those “men in dresses” actually has an arc where HE starts to wear a dress and makeup and enjoys being a woman?? But it’s still drawn in that hairy, bearded, “ugly man in a dress” caricature-like style ???

Overall, trying to ascertain just how problematic One Piece is is.... confusing. It’s bad in some ways, but keeps surprising me with actually nuanced takes on other stuff. It’s problematic, but it’s not a trash fire, I guess.

So yeah. That’s my opinion on One Piece.

[sparklyjojos]

hey i sent you an ask but internet problematic here so i dunno if it was sent? As someone with no experience with neurodivergent people i was hoping you could elaborate what you have previously said about Kars in JORGE JOESTAR (and other characters maybe) seeming neurodivergent. Like, i'd love to know your headcanons about jojo characters regarding this, as well as reasoning for the headcanon's (optional, but i'd love it)

(wow this one sure took me a long time to answer, sorry!)

oh boy, this would be an extremely long post if I included all other jojo characters I headcanon as nd so I’m just going to focus on Jorge (the Japanese one) and novel Kars for now

this won’t be a “this character definitely has x thing”, but just pointing out traits and dialogue that may interest someone who wants to headcanon/write these characters as nd

am I going to be reaching with some of those? yep! but if the Jorge Joestar novel itself taught me anything, it’s that:

so, you know. I see what I wanna see.

(tw: mental illness, trauma, ptsd, suicide - all in the Kars segment)

Jorge:

 – the sheer difference in introductions is telling: English Jorge talks at length about his family, his classmates, his gay puppy crush, and anything else you’d expect to be major concerns for a kid. Japanese Jorge? social life haha what social life, HOPE YOU’RE READY FOR 10 PAGES OF PUZZLE SOLVING

 – no really if the very first thing someone says after seeing all your memories is that you sure spend a lot of time on puzzles then that’s some deep interest you have, a bit of a stereotypical hobby there but whatevs

 – hyperfocuses a lot??

 – (exasperated Kars who’s been trying to get his attention for a good minute:) “You have a bad habit of not hearing when people speak to you.” (Jorge:) “Yeah, if I’m focused on something else. Sorry. What?”

 – tunes out of one phone conversation with Bruno like 3 times

 – figures out how time-based Stands work specifically because he has experience with his internal sense of time getting royally fucked up whenever he’s deeply focused

 – was inattentive (and hyperactive?) as a young kid to the point it affects how the memories on his disc look like: “I was a fidgety child, and the image rarely focused on [Joseph] for long. I wasn’t interested in his story.”

 – visual thinker, good with patterns, can make complicated mental maps and solve slide puzzles in his mind

 – his memory is really good until it isn’t (as far as he’s concerned Funny Valentine’s Stand is called Dirty Whatever)

 – very particular about meanings of words and names, etymology (his arc starts and ends with him pondering over the kanji of his own name, knows latin names of various species like Hydrangea or Ursus maritimus and what they mean literally, that “sorry that name’s taken” line when Rohan calls something a Beyond, etc)

 – doesn’t like (is distressed by?) clutter and things/details being WRONG. (“If details don’t add up right I get agitated, and start searching for a better way. This trait has lead to my room being very clean, and made me a great detective.”)

 – infodumps to Rohan about polar bears of all things, and there’s a moment when he stops talking almost mid-sentence after mentioning they’re called Ursus maritinus and instead of speaking out loud he just thinks to himself that “The scientific name was given by John Phipps in 1774” as if he just realized that’d be Too Much detail to share, I feel you Jorge

 – (after Erina says he has a characteristic soft smile) “I do? I mean, I guess people do say I look like an idiot.”  <– I feel you Jorge v 2.0

 – gets urges to laugh at very bad times (”Cars’ whispered response had an air of such grim realism that I almost started laughing, but he was watching me suspiciously. Whoops.”)

 – sometimes blurts out things, often fails one-liners, even when he pre-plans what he’s going to say something else may come out (“I’d thought of all kinds of things to say, but what actually popped out in that moment? (…) I have no idea what I meant by that last bit but I said what I said and had to live with it.”)

 – sometimes impulsive, like yeah let’s just get up in the middle of the night and search through a 10 km^2 area on a bike for something unprecised while you have several death threats to your name, this can’t possibly backfire

 – (after Jorge quite literally blows himself up by impulsive carelessness) “Cars was still laughing. “You really don’t think things through.“”

 – small point that’s made moot by paranormal things like that being real in the jojoverse, but his tendency to see signs and messages meant for him everywhere and in every event, and insisting on coincidences not being mere synchronicity gives off a different vibe than intended (at least at the beginning before he knows Stands and Beyonds are a thing)

Kars:

 – honestly I could just slap the definition of “neurodivergent = with their brain functioning differently from what’s seen as ‘normal’ in the population” here and point at his backstory in this book and be done with it

 – remember everything I’m writing is on top of his canon image of an asocial genius scientist with poor affect (or, in the anime, varying between stone face and painfully exaggerated expressions) who has a connection with nature and animals, which I guess can? be seen as some type of autistic coding (unfortunately in this case it dovetails into “a loner with autistic traits = snaps and kills everyone” type of coding sooo maybe let’s not go there)

 – novel Kars talks about how when he was younger he didn’t even know that feeling sympathy and wanting to have emotional attachments with others –was a thing– (apparently his race wasn’t capable of it??), and he had to sorta consciously try to understand and learn it through reading human fiction. It came off to me like he relates better to fictional characters (and maybe animals?) than to his race or humans, too

 - ^^(that backstory’s a bit unclear with how it’s told; either just like his race he doesn’t have the drive for social bonding, empathy etc. and his understanding of others is made purely on the intellectual level - that’s relatable for some nd people - or he DOES have those things in a drastic difference from everyone else of his race, which I guess makes him nd by definition. It’s… complicated.)

– on the topic of “consciously learning how to sympathy” - there’s a few times in the novel when he’s a prick not because he wants to be but because he genuinely doesn’t understand why the other person would be upset (”Cars, sorry, but can you put me back at my old height?” “?…isn’t the view better?”), but if that person explains how the thing is upsetting he then backs off like “oh okay” (when Jorge is disturbed about the women’s heads thing - “Yeah. But I just feel sorry for them. I can’t watch this.” - Kars just goes “I see.” and makes them disappear). He still has to work on the “taking your private memories without asking” issue tho

 – that moment in the backstory where Kars became deeply aware of just how flawed and “not up to own potential” he was which launched him straight into unhealthy perfectionism and desire for control and power as a way of dealing with it? relatable

 – and that thing where him becoming much more chill is preceeded by the realization that he can’t ever - and that he doesn’t have to - become an infinitely perfect being without weaknesses, and that he’d still have worth and meaning even when he’s not performing to some ridiculous self-imposed standards?? GREAT, and I love to see lines like this one coming from him: “Cars smiled. “I have no desire to be the leadingman.””

 – he talks about how traumatic events and your emotional reactions to them (“feeling like you’re dying”) can damage your soul. Since he claims to have experience determining soul damage, and the only souls he worked with before belonged to 36 other Karses, we can assume he’s talking about himself as well. (and it’s kinda obvious that having everyone you love die in <2 days, drifting through space for 50 years and then spending unimaginably long time on an empty planet would leave some marks)

 – ^^^also worth noting that even if Kars knew a lot about brains biology-wise, he missed out on practically all of modern psychology after 1939, so of course the way he relates to trauma and mental illness would be different, and more informed by what he learned having spent most of his life around ancient civilizations in the Americas - the concept of soul loss. And it’s not like the book doesn’t wink towards it in other places (English Jorge dissociating during torture is described as him having learned how to remove his soul from his body)

 – Light Dancer Kars speaks about how he wanted to commit suicide, then in the same paragraph says that he and our Kars feel “the same sadness”, which, wow. Earlier there are scenes where you can interpret Kars’s behaviour as passively suicidal; he doesn’t seek death, but if something (burning upon reentry while saving the humans, fighting Dio) did kill him, he wouldn’t mind that much

 – this one is very subjective because you can interpret these moments as just him being very lost in thought / focusing on healing (Jorge sure does), but: when faced with intense emotional stress - like hearing Light Dancer Kars’s existential speech, or almost getting killed because he chose to shield the humans from harm - Kars has a tendency to go non- or barely verbal, motionless, unresponsive to outside stimuli (including people trying to get his attention by calling his name) and staring at one thing / into space, ignoring even a zombie attack or that they’re pressed on time in alternate!Morioh. When I first read it I assumed he just dissociated really hard (ptsd-related?), or was in a shutdown

 – if you pay attention to what traits Kars seems to be holding in high regards - either through saying that X is a good thing about humanity, or bemoaning that humanity doesn’t have X (that he ofc does) - they’re stuff like creativity, perseverance, attention to details, pattern-based thinking, the desire to “figure stuff out”, and good memory. AKA traits often (though not always) increased in autistic people

 - at one point he says: ”In the end, you’re just another human. You see a mystery and think, ‘How odd!’ and put in on a shelf somewhere.” I’m sorry but even in context it sounds like “apparently people can see an interesting thing without instantly getting fixated and wanting to know and understand everything about it right there and then, what the fuck”

 – he tends to be either very invested in what’s going on or bored, no inbetween, and avoiding that boredom is a high priority (”And it seems I’ve run out of time to eat you all… But I wasn’t bored.”)

um yeah that’s all I can think of rn