Every Time One of These Dorks Gets Seriously Injured

I love Dalton’s weird spade-sword. This attack actually seems to one-shot Wapol, or at least would were it not for swift medical intervention. He must be pretty dang strong, and he’s not even in bison form here!

I wonder how much of this is hair and how much is an actual duck. We see some black hair poking out of the side, so I’m guessing this dude just bought the worst toupee he could find. The person he’s with doesn’t seem to mind.

More importantly, that poor horse is yelling in the background because even though Dalton can run faster than it and has the unbeatable stamina of a human, he decided to saddle and ride this horse for no reason whatsoever. Why did he take a slower and more inefficient route only to abandon it a minute later? What’s going to happen to that poor horse? Is it just going to wander back to town or is it just wild now?

Gyasta sounds like a nice little town. I like that, even though it feels pretty small, Drum has a bunch of named villages. Oda is great at that worldbuilding.

We don’t see Robson in any flashbacks, so I am going to assume that Wapol just murdered a bunch of hippos, tamed the one he liked and named it. He’s exactly the kind of asshole who would talk shit on a poor animal right after killing its family. Wapol likes hippos like Hitler liked dogs: he loves to hang out with and associate with them but will gladly beat the shit out of one if it suits him. What a piece of shit. I love it.

This is the second afro guy following Gaimon, going up another degree because Oda really likes afros. It’s a good hair style, but it’s a bit off to make it this occasional running gag. Like the crossdressing gags and treatment of female fighters, this is the kind of thing where you can tell Oda means well and is a generally progressive guy for a 2000s mangaka, but you can tell this genre has issues with exoticizing foreigners. Kuromarimo and his boyfriend and his boss are all weirdos first and foremost, but in this case his weirdness mostly revolves around having Black hair. It’s still a good design, but I doubt we would see this as a motif in modern One Piece.

I love when Oda justifies the characters being a little nerfed by stuff like the environment. We’ve already seen Sanji kick a huge manta ray through a brick wall and murder some dinosaurs, so this panel is a reassurance that even though the lapins have the advantage of numbers, Sanji is still tougher than them.

Sanji looks so fucking tired of this shit and I’m not even sure how much of it is the stress of Nami’s sickness, how much is dodging giant flying beaver clouds and how much is trying to have a rational conversation with Monkey D. Luffy.

I love Mirror-Ball Island with its FUNKY! Hollywoo sign. The whole place is just super into dancing. What a country.

Under the Wapol regime, health care wasn’t just expensive. It was inaccessible. We’ll see later that even seeking treatment was literally illegal. Kureha’s medical state is barely any better than that, but it’s still better. And she’s taking a percentage of your income instead of some flat rate that will make it so only the rich can see her. Given that this woman is pushing fourteen decades and is the island’s sole source of medicine, things could be a lot worse.

Combine all of those and Kureha is your standard badass queer Lost-Gen outlaw doctor, who for the purposes of this arc is our macguffin and mother figure. I fucking love One Piece.

First off, Tama means ball and is a common name for cats because they curl up all cute-like. Secondly, this dad’s first response to his kid’s crying is to threaten to lock him out in the cold. Holy shit, this is the worst dad in the series so far. Sure, Axe-Hand Morgan let his spoiled kid do whatever and then threatened his large adult son, but at least he didn’t name him fucking Spot and kick him out.

Putting some dregs or butter into your hot cocoa isn’t the best way to get high, but if you’ve got some like used flower or somesuch it can be enough to relax. The whole reason I tried this was of course for this obscure One Piece reference.

I fully expect Luffy to call anything big and white a polar bear. Clouds? The snow they’re currently in? Strong Sad’s face? All polar bears.

Also Sanji, that’s not what translucent means. You don’t want to meet someone with translucent skin.

I know this is meant to make the Lapins look super strong, but since they seem to fit every ecological niche that rodents and (non-hiking) bears do, I’m assuming they’re also beavers. That still makes them very strong and obviously this panel is showing that this beaver bunny missed and hit a tree, but still. They’re beavers.

This reminds me of @opbackgrounds‘s discovery that Sanji doesn’t wear socks, at least in the Arlong arc. I guess he does wear them when it’s cold.