One Piece Backgrounds

Who are you?

I go by Sarcasticles but most people call me Sarc. I’m a woman so she/her pronouns are fine, and also write fanfic and have a twitter under that name. My main is @creative-type and I post my half-assed art at @sarcs-art. No, I haven’t taken any literature classes since high school. Yes, I’m making this up as I go.

How did you get into One Piece

To be honest I almost didn’t. I remember watching the 4kids! dub of the Pearl fight, and even as a wee babu thought the idea of a man spontaneously setting himself on fire was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. I wrote the series off and only watched because it was on the Toonami block with Naruto, and even then thought that every Devil Fruit user had a unique weakness and only Luffy was unlucky enough not to be able to swim. 

That changed when I happened to see the episode Croc said Robin’s name for the first time. From there I was hooked but didn’t know how to access it after it was taken off the air. I caught up with the manga in high school, and have been reading weekly since about the time of the Duval identity reveal

Favorite character? 

Robin, 100%. If not for her, I never would have gotten into the series. She’s one of my favorites in all media, not just One Piece

Where do you get your manga caps?

I use mangasee for opbackgrounds—which uses the official English translation, at least for the early chapters—and read weekly using the Viz app

How do you make your posts?/How do you notice all this stuff?

Repetition, mostly. You read a thing once to enjoy it, twice to ponder it, and three times to understand it. I’ve read all pre-timeskip material at least twice and there are some sections I have gone over dozens of times while doing research for fanfic. 

I firmly believe anyone can do what I am doing here, but like everything else it’s a learned skill that needs to be practiced. There’s a reason why your high school English teacher wanted you to analyze the use of the color green in the Great Gatsby. Meta posts are nothing but literary analysis after an aggressive rebranding campaign. 

What’s Your Opinion on (fill in the blank)?

While I love getting questions and writing meta, before sending a question like this I ask that you please keep in mind the following: 

1) My focus for this blog is to comb through manga sequentially. I’m not going to analyze or speculate on current events because, to me, that isn’t fun. We’ll get there when we get there (I say while acknowledging the fact it might take us awhile to get there)

2) Please check the archive before sending an ask. I use the #sarc talks for all asks and have a pretty robust tagging system overall. I’ve hit just about every major talking point within the fandom, and chances are my opinions haven’t changed

3) No spoilers, please. I follow the official English release for the manga, but this also includes other media like movies or the live action series. Also, I don’t follow the anime at all, so if an ask is regarding something adaptation-wise I probably haven’t seen it

4) My policy is ship and let ship, and I have a very Luffyarian view on romance overall--I’m only here for the adventure, so please don’t ask me about specific pairings because I could not care less

5) Please make sure your question is meant for me and not @kaizokuou-ni-naru. While she has some pretty great meta posts and can probably answer any questions sent to her that are meant for me, I know absolutely nothing about Japanese and will only be able to shrug helplessly in your general direction

6) While I enjoy doing analysis and answering questions, it’s not my job to understand the manga for you. If the answer to your question is plainly found in the text I’m probably going to ignore it