chromatic-lamina

I feel with most Netflix adaptations, the writers know how to hit story beats, but not character beats. If you don't have the same character beats, the story doesn't feel the same.

I can put up with a bad story, if I love the characterisation and world building. If a story premise is really cool, but the characters are flat, I'll drop it.

I suppose Arlong Park is the part that everyone loves the most so they had to get to Arlong Park to hook people.....

And since the current trend with Netflix is to make easily digestible content, they had to spell everything out and fit the story and characters into established models and remove as much complexity as possible

We have to make clear that Luffy is a Good Pirate(tm) so the audience doesn't get confused by the fact that the mc is a criminal, and we can't have him being mean to people who aren't villains and his whole thing just becomes dreams and supporting everybody's dreams all the time like it's his activation word or his hyperfixation

And of course his story ends up becoming all about proving himself to his grandpa, who just sorta let's him become a pirate I guess???? Because he laughed kinda like Roger or something???? What the fuck

Either way why does Luffy need Garp's blessing for pirating, what's the point of that plotline? Okay I know what the point is, the point is that they wanted to include Garp and give Koby and Helmeppo extra screentime but they couldn't just have the marines be an unrelated sideplot, because that's Bad Writing(tm), so they had to force them into the main plot.

Because Netflix shows are not tv shows, they're eight-hour movies. Instead of just embracing the format of an episodic adventure with a serialised plot developing in the background, they have to force it into a model where there is a clear main plot and everything has to build on that main plot and we can't just have independent episodes

And that's why the marines kinda end up becoming the Main Plot, because they're the thing that's always there... except the conclusion to that plot falls so flat and undermines the finale and muddles all the messages and all the characters' stories

Season 2 is less bad because they actually gave themselves more time and actually did something with the side characters, but it also ends up having an even less satisfying finale because they still tried so hard to turn it into an overly long movie and there just isn't conclusion to it because the conclusion doesn't happen until Alabasta. So the big conclusion ends up just being that Vivi finally accepts the Straw Hats' help and tells them the true identity of Mr. 0 which is... a guy who has never been mentioned before.

I just don't think One Piece (or A:tLA for that matter) fits into that format of an overly long movie. It's a story that's about the journey and the characters and the themes more so than the plot.

It's not that the format is fundamentally bad or anything, it's just not the right format for One Piece (or A:tLA). It's not that you can't make a One Piece movie, but it pretty much has to be a self-contained adventure. But these days nothing is allowed to just be a self-contained adventure, especially not if there's a popular IP to exploit.

And they could have used the 8 episodes differently, it's actually not a bad amount of screentime, if they had just spent it on focusing on the Straw Hats (and the actual cast of the East Blue so the Straw Hats could make some actual personal connections to the people they meet and the places they visit instead to the entire East Blue feeling like just a backdrop to pirates and marines running around fighting each other). And if they had cut out the pointless marine subplot entirely.

But I guess they couldn't justify the budget they would need for all this without making it more epic and cinematic and more like one big movie... because episodic stories are unpopular nowadays

And I mean I guess it did succeed regardless, although I truly don't understand why. I still don't know why people liked OPLA, it baffles me

... sorry about the incoherent rant, I just can't get over it because I keep hearing people praise OPLA and I keep hearing people talk about how it "improved" things... and I don't get it. For the most part at least, I guess there are a handful of things that I did like better about OPLA (like actual variation in skintones for example), but they aren't enough to save it for me, and constantly hearing about it and needing to be polite about it is driving me insane

I have too many friends who like it and this blog is basically my only outlet for expressing my OPLA hatred orz

Source: Gangsta / ギャングスタ 

Brook and jinbei join the cuddle pile !! <33

Equiping an armor tutorial