#ch543

This is easily the most interesting aspect surrounding the idea of Impel Down, and it's Hannyabal's true belief that he's protecting ordinary citizens that allows him to keep getting up even as Luffy beats the shit out of him

I can be sympathetic to an extent, because Hannyabal is a victim of the World Government's propaganda machine. He is a small cog in a very big wheel and is either unaware of or does not care about the countless others that wheel crushes on a daily basis.

All he knows about Luffy is that he's a pirate, and in fairness, the vast majority of pirates throughout the series are into the whole pillage and murder thing. He has no reason to think of Luffy as the good-natured goofball we know and love. In their careers, Ace and Luffy have killed people. They are thieves, and they don't really exist within any lawful framework. I'm reminded of Ace's fight with Blackbeard, when together they end up wrecking an entire town, ruining who knows how many lives without a second thought, because they're a pair of people with supernatural abilities who happen to have beef with one another.

Is that the sort of thing that should be allowed to go on unpunished? What punitive measures are appropriate for a man like Crocodile, who upturned literally millions of lives in a bid for power, or Shiryu, who kills for the sake of killing?

These are interesting questions, but it all falls apart when you consider that no pirate in the series, from Alvida to Kaido, has institutionalized and perfected the art of pain, suffering, and death on the scale that we see in Impel Down. Hannyabal himself calls the prison a warehouse. That's not the sort of language you use when talking about people, because to the World Government and the people who work within it pirates and other criminals are less than human, the ultimate other who exist only to be punished.

That's a dangerous mindset to take, because it justifies every atrocity in the name of protecting the few who are worthy of protection. If Roger is an inhuman monster then of course his child is just as dangerous, and if his child is dangerous then it's better to target all the pregnant women just in case, and if that fails you might as well try to hunt down the baby, and when that baby who's been hated by the world since the moment he was born grows up to become a pirate it just proves that they were right from the start and you might as well torture and kill him, too.

This interaction gestures towards Doffy's future speech on justice during Marineford. All throughout Impel Down, Luffy's entire focus has been on saving Ace. He's never cared whether he's innocent or guilty and has been largely apathetic to the idea of Impel Down itself. Luffy has always been a character unconcerned with the ideas of morality. In part I feel like this is because he's a character who lives so entirely in the present that the past and future don't interest him, and also because of his unique form of selfishness. Is Arlong a big bad evil dude who's done a lot of terrible things? Yeah, but Luffy mostly cares because he made Nami cry. Would he have let Robin end her own life if it's what she truly wanted? Yes, so long as it was with them. The morality surrounding these actions don't matter as much as whether or not he and the people he care about are free to do what they want.

Blackbeard is different. This interaction makes it seem like he's contemplated the idea of evil and justice and rejected them both after finding it impossible to resolve these two competing ideas. It’s a subtle but important difference between the two characters that I think will be important during their ultimate confrontation.