Fandom Vent(ing)

(possible Elbaf spoilers 🚨 )

I’m feeling very petty right now.

With everything happening in Elbaf lately, both in the anime and manga, my strongest hope for Usopp payoff is Yasopp. And no, before anyone starts, I am not saying Usopp only matters if his dad enters the picture. That is not what I mean. Usopp is valuable on his own. Usopp deserves the world on his own.

But I need some return on investment here.

He has so many styles 💛

Giving pre timeskip Usopp more love 😚 (finally an excuse to use the first 2 poses, it's been months) trying more the anime style

merry is broken, luffy makes the hard decision to - on some level - abandon her.

Usopp 1 - knows merry is sentient and is/thinks he is the only one who knows this. 2 - views merry's death as his own failure 3 - sees this as luffy be willing to throw away 'useless' crew members. He says as much. Usopps wants to leave before he gets abandoned.

This triggers LUFFYS abandonment issues and luffy reacts with anger. He does some pretty pour captaining and usopp leaves the crew

At this point robin is missing. Luffy and the rest do a lot of panicking trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. This is 2nd 'abandonment' luffy experiences this arc.

over the course of the arc luffy is able to determine the robin wants to be safe and he is able to save her - therefore shes not REALLY abandoning him. As far as he is concerned usopp is still gone. He does not recognise sogeking as usopp.

He briefly sees usopp maskless. Usopp encourages luffy to stand up and keep fighting. Luffy briefly think his friend might return. Then usopp 'disappears' again.

They return to W7. Sanji informs Luffy that he thinks Usopp wants to return. Bc he 'saw him practicing' but also because sanji has been actively working to help usopp see that they want him.

LUFFY IS THRILLED HE HAS BEEN UNABANDONED BY BOTH FRIENDS.

and THEN. Zoro decides to throw a fit. Threatens to leave [so luffy must give up either him or usopp, abandonment is inevitable] yell at luffy for not being authoritative enough [hello?? hypocrisy?? ???huh????] and gets very physically aggressive with him.

also if im not mistaken about the timeline the crew has JUST found out about garp and luffys history of abuse.

Luffy again is triggered and reacts be rolling over and giving zoro what he wants.

This is going to be a proper breakdown of my feelings from this post about my frustration with this fandom's obsession with Usopp dying before EOS. I need to put into clear & understandable words why this is completely contradictory to what Oda has done this entire story & why it would be the worse ending imaginable for our sniper. Why I'm 99% sure it will never, ever happen. Let's begin.

Lilith calls these 万能吸収変換炉 with the furigana オムニドレインコンバーター (omuni dorein conbaataa) or Omni-Drain Converter. 万能 (ban'nou) means all-purpose or universal, 吸収 (kyuushuu) means absorption, 変換 (henkan) means conversion or transformation, and 炉 (ro) means like furnace or reactor, so something like Universal Absorption Converter Reactor, which is just another way of saying Omni-Drain Converter. Energy is energy, so the meaning is probably that this thing absorbs or drains any kind of energy (like the heat generated from a fire) and stores it as something else (in this case, liquid that can be used as fuel). When it's dispatched at the fires, I assume it sucked up all of the energy from its surroundings, so the water that Zeus had dropped on the buildings lost enough heat to freeze

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Funny how Usopp (I assume this is him talking since he's still talking on the next panel) manages to not even lie when he's exaggerating, since they are technically surrounded by literal nightmare creatures. That part about the end of the world reminds me of the Harley text talking about the Sun God guiding the world to its end. Maybe it's just me because I'm not that into it at this point, but I just don't feel like the tension is high enough to explain why Usopp is calling it the end of the world, I'm pretty sure they've been in worse situations before

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Saul calls it a 蛇龍 with the furigana リンドヴルム (rindovurumu). 蛇 (hebi) means snake and 龍 (ryuu) is another way of writting dragon, which makes sense since a lindworm is usually considered a dragon that sometimes has wings and/or limbs, depending on the legend or folklore. While I have a feeling that we've been thinking way too deeply about these creatures, it's still fun for me so I'll keep at it lol

There are tales about the lindworm swallowing its own tail to form a wheel and roll away, which reminds me of Jörmungandr. There are also stories in which whatever the lindworm lies down on will grow along with it

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(chapters 1176 and 1154)

I'm not sure if calling it a "natural" disaster is quite right, since this was very much a man-made fire, but that's just nitpicking on my part. Lilith says 災害 (saigai), which means calamity, disaster or misfortune, and it's the same word used to describe the disasters that happened in Elbaf when Loki was born, which did get me thinking about maelstroms of energy at that time. We never really got an explanation for those, and of course it could have been just a coincidence, but it just happened to be a terrible year and the prince with the snake-like eyes happened to be born at the same time? Seems suspicious. Not that I think that Loki himself is to blame, obviously, and it could still just be a story about people's tendency to mistake correlation with causation. But we also still haven't gotten an explanation for why his eyes are like that. Is it just a genetic coincidence?

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This reminds me of Sanji talking about how his passion is what makes him invulnerable to his own flames. They actually use the same word, 情熱 (jounetsu), only Lilith uses it with the furigana パッション (passhon). It means passion but not in the romantic sense, more like an enthusiasm, having strong feelings or being fired up about something

(chapter 1023)

It's also different from the word Sommers uses, which is 感動 (kandou). Both words can mean passion, but kandou means more like a deep and moving emotion, being deeply affected by something, etc.

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Well that's an interesting thing to say, isn't it? The word he uses is 断ち切る (tachikiru), which means to sever or break off (ties), cut (relations), etc. So he's saying that in order for a new world to be born, you need to completely give up on and forget the world you had before. And while staying stuck in the past is definitely a road block to progress, erasing history is almost a guarantee that you're going to make the same mistakes of the past. It's especially ironic coming from someone who is subordinate to people who are very much stuck in time due to their un-aging bodies

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(chapters 1176 and 627)

This was a nice show of how much they've all bonded as a crew, and how far Sanji has come from his initial feelings about Jinbei in Fishman Island. By the way, what Sanji told Jinbei was 腹を切れ (hara wo kire) wich means to commit seppuku or harakiri. It's a specific ritual of atonement and to take responsibility for one's failure. He's holding Jinbei responsible for what Arlong did to Nami and her village, which is unfair of him, but it sounds less... callous, I think, than straight up telling him to kill himself like the translation implies. Or at least the connotation is a little different. During their fight with Captain Morgan, Zoro also told Luffy that he would make Luffy commit seppuku if Luffy ever got in the way of Zoro's dream

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Franky's attack name is 右 (migi) with the furigana デクスター (dekusutaa), with migi just meaning right or right hand

Jinbei's attack is 武頼貫 (buraikan), with 武 (bu) meaning martial arts, military force or bravery, 頼 (rai) meaning trust or request. 貫 (kan) by itself is a counter word for pieces of sushi, but the verb 貫く (tsuranuku) means to pierce, to run through, or to stick with (your opinions), to persist, to keep (faith). I'm not really sure how to read all that together, maybe Piercing Martial Order? Brave Unwavering Trust? Who knows. The name Vagabond Drill is probably because the word 無頼漢 (buraikan) means ruffian or scoundrel

Sanji's attack is 粗砕 with the furigana コンカッセ (konkasse). 粗 (ara) means the bony parts of a fish that remain after filleting, but it can also mean (a person's) flaw or fault. Concasser apparently means to crush in French, and so does the verb 砕く (kudaku), though kudaku can also mean to shatter in the sense of shattering hopes, confidence, etc. So not only Crushing Fish Bones but also Shattering Flaws? lol

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As a sidenote, someone pointed out to me in another post about how Franky's personality changed when Chopper gave him different things to drink in Enies Lobby. I wonder if he seems the same now because it's still technically cola? Or maybe Oda forgot that he'd made a gag about why Franky needs cola specifically, which is fine, it's been *checks notes* ... twenty years since then

(chapter 404)

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Maybe I've just been reading One Piece for far too long, but even if you discount the fact that they didn't stay dead for a single page, there was just no doubt in my mind that they wouldn't actually die? Like, there was no build up, no momentum, no grit to this sacrifice. And even after that, we get one shot of everyone's surprise, one shot of them yelling (in grief? in anger? in outrage? who can say) that doesn't even show their faces, and then it's... over. This has got to be one of the most anticlimactic sacrifices I've ever seen lol

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I'm not going to lie, this was so disappointing. So the solution is just to kill them? You just need to be strong, is that it? If you just have enough *grits teeth* power, then you can reverse it??? That's all it takes??? Then what, pray tell, was the point???? Why make it look like a game with clearly defined rules and sides? Why allow the black team to change normal people but not the other way around? If you have to play wack-a-mole with them to change them back, then the rules are different for each "color", which makes no sense. Why play up the black vs white dynamic? Why ignore that you have two conveniently white themed people who can do wacky reality-bending hijinks right there? Why go through all that trouble when you're not going to use it in any way? Was it just to give Imu an out so they wouldn't have to Domi Reversi a bunch of different giants? Was it an idea that got scrapped for lack of time? Oda didn't even use the game imagery during God Valley, so I assumed he had a reason for using it in Elbaf, but no???? You just have to hit them really really hard?? Come on, man

Speaking of, does this mean there's a chance there are other Davy Clan members that could have survived God Valley? Were they not Domi Reversi'd back then? Imu didn't use the game motif for Rocks, at least, so does it still count? Are there different rules?

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Credit where credit is due, this shot of them all smiling and going "oh noooo I can't believe I'm being forced to beat my friends and comrades to death, what a shaaaaame really" is really funny

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All in all, I was very underwhelmed by this chapter (and the last few too, if I'm being honest). It just doesn't feel like the emotional beats are landing, you know? Not always, I liked the part where the parents/guardians chose to die with the kids, but the rest? Very meh. The opponents each side is facing, it feels like they're fighting just because that's where everyone just happened to be at the time, so why not. There's no tension in any of them. Sommers has been a thorn (haha) in everyone's side, yapping about emotion and sacrifice and being a sadistic bastard that traumatizes all those kids, but the one who beat him is Luffy, who just showed up out of nowhere and has no emotional skin in this game. Sanji gets a pass for fighting Killingham because of the whole Jinbei thing, but Killingham's thing is burning the library and bringing the kids' nightmares to life, why aren't Robin, Nami and Usopp in this fight? Why isn't Usopp there to help his heroes with the Domi Reversi? I don't know, I hope it gets more interesting, but for now everything just feels kind of shallow

A lot of the panels that people use to show her defining character seem to be very she’s white so it’s fine?

Am I reading too much into it?

Completely fine if you don’t wanna answer this, I understand it’s critical and I know people can be harsh….

I'd say that's a fair observation, anon. Like I've said a couple of times in other posts: white privilege is very much baked into Steph's character, and a lot of the ways she's talked about and handled -- both in fandom and in canon -- have a lot of White Feminist baggage.

Not just in the sense that she's "given a pass on things because she's white," which is admittedly very subjective, but in things like...

How her pregnancy sub-plot gets talked about way more than the much better teen pregnancy sub-plot from the (Black-led, Black-created) Icon series that ran two years before (and that I would still put good money down on Chuck Dixon ripping off/"responding" to).

How War Games discussions are exclusively about how unfair everything was to poor Stephanie even though she undeniably got much better removal-from-the-narrative treatment in it than Orpheus (a Black man), Onyx (a woman of color) or Leslie Tompkins (a white woman, but an elderly one).

The subtle racism baked into the treatment of the tiny handful of POC women in her Batgirl run, even compared to the shitty way all of the non-Steph white women are treated.

The blatant queerphobia still present in how so many of her fans and defenders still talk about Tim Drake now that he's canonically queer.

The subtle racism baked into the way a shitload of people talk about and write her relationship with Cassandra Cain.

And the rampant appalling racism her standom displayed while openly harassing the creators of Young Justice 2019 to demand the inclusion of their white-blonde fav at the expense of not one, but two young Black girl characters (and a white lesbian) even though Steph had never been either affiliated with the team or advertised as part of the series.

Just to name a few off the top of my head.