#characterization!

I think at the end of the day Garp is inherently selfish in the way Luffy's selfish. He wants to go out and do as he pleases--which in his case is be a marine and hunt down pirates--and refuses to make it any more complicated than that. But unlike Luffy his selfish desires clash with the fate of the people he loves. While Luffy brings his found family under his wing as he goes out on grand adventures, Garp's adventures never include his loved ones in a positive way. Garp wants to both care for the people he loves and follow his heart's desires, but he can't do both, and it's one of the reasons his grandson ends up dead

Seriously, fuck off with this pedantic bullshit. It might seem like I’m being ungrateful to a reviewer “who didn’t mean it like that gawd”, but maybe that’s because I did the thing with the words and the expressing of emotions through actions instead of sounds intentionally.

This is something Oda does quite frequently--he sets up a character trait or problem in a way that initially is very funny, only to pull the rug out from under the reader and play it for serious later on.

I can't quite put my finger on why, but Akainu saying pirates don't deserve a happy home truly feels to me like one of the most heinous things he's said or done in the entire series. It's probably because it's this extreme dehumanization of criminals that leads to his more obviously horrific acts of violence, while tolerating the corruption and abuse of the World Government

There's always been an otherness to Blackbeard setting him apart. One of the first things we learn about him in Jaya is that there's something weird and different about him, and here in a couple pages Whitebeard will exclude him from Roger's legacy. He's a man that doesn't sleep. His oddness was marked when he was a member of Whitebeard's crew, and even in a group characterized by inclusiveness and family he set himself apart as different than the rest by killing Thatch. Much later on we'll find out that his family was hunted even more than the average member of the D clan, yet he doesn't fit with what we see in other D carriers. No matter how you slice it, he just doesn't fit.

The whims of fate/luck pop up frequently enough that it adds some extra weight to Ace's death. No matter what happened, he was always destined to die, and no matter how hard he fought against his father's legacy, there was nothing he could do to change it.