#and deranged

It just seems so obvious to me that Bubble was always supposed to be an NPC created by Caine that serves as the comedic relief, and when he berates Caine in episode eight it’s because he’s acting as his “thought bubble”; he’s just echoing Caine’s thoughts as he spirals. I mean, he literally reassures Caine at first. He only starts the deprecating comments when Caine starts to doubt himself. How was that lost in all the noise of “Bubble was messing with him to regain power” stuff? How did everybody disregard that?

I think this fandom’s desperation to find secret hidden meanings in every skit or background or merch ad puts me off from engaging in the theorising a little bit, especially when so many people seem to deliberately ignore the subtext in the show itself in favour of becoming some code-cracker who “solved it all!”

This is a gripe I mostly have with TikTok (because everybody on that app is eager to be smarter than everybody else) but the fandom as a whole kind of does this. I’ve seen theories that the blue orb actually represents Caine. I’ve seen theories that all the humans are recycled abstractions. I’ve seen people confidently say that a character is addressing somebody completely different in a scene where it was very clear who they were talking to.

It’s like fans of this show get so antsy and restless between episodes that they start making random shit up just so they can get on TikTok and brag about their big discovery. Somebody invented some secret morse code that was in episode five, just pulled it straight out of their ass, and I still see that shit spread all over theory posts. And it was never even there! They made it up and none of these hundreds of people ever thought to fact-check!

I know bad theories are just how fandoms go, especially when new content comes far apart, but it makes it hard to engage in productive discussions when everything just feels like various levels of fan fiction. And it’s not like I’m not guilty of this; there was a period of time when I was almost positive episode eight would magically bring back all the abstractions as NPCs. I’m content-starved just like everybody else! I get desperate too! I want to see Ribbit just as much as you guys do I promise I am just as crazy over that!! But sometimes I feel like a majority of people who theorise about this show aren’t capable of sifting through their desires as a fan and the actual realistic expectations of the show. It took me like two days until I realised that uh, no, that won’t happen, because why in the world would that happen? How would that aid any of these characters’ arcs whatsoever? And I came back down to Earth and approached my expectations more rationally, and came to the conclusion that any old character appearances would be via short flashbacks. And that was correct! And it’s just frustrating sometimes to get online and feel like nobody else cares to do that.

Charlotte Katakuri is the hottest man in one piece (based on looks)