You. . I don’t care if you are a god now !!! I won’t let you bother Koby !!!!
He isn’t feeling good right now and you’re just making it worse !! Leave him alone this instant !
And you are NOT his best friend , he may think highly of you and really appreciate you and your friendship , but you aren’t he one who was been every single day for him working their ass off to make sure he’s okay . You call yourself his best friend but did you even stop to consider how he feels and what we wants ??? A best friend wouldn’t do that .
You’re simply being selfish . So give Koby back and let him rest !!!!
HMMMNNNN........ YOU SOUND LIKE THAT ONE LADY WITH ORANGE HAIR!!..... WHAT WAS HER NAME? NNNNAAA.......HHH......NAHHHHNNNHHH...... NAMI? NAMI! YOU SOUND LIKE NAMI, SHIEHEHHE! SHE KEPT GETTING SO MAD AT ME FOR "BOTHERING" LUFFY, EVEN THOUGH ME AND LUFFY ARE BEST FRIENDS!
KOBY IS ALSO MY BEST FRIEND! HE'D NEVER EVER HATE ME!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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@landhozine combines two of my all time favorite things, which is location focus and strict wordcount limits. so i had an absolute blast writing for it!
here are my pieces, newly released from zine jail:
Continuous Cities
Water 7, built seven times, breathes, anchored and shuddering, with the tides.
There is an inflow to her, and an outflow: her mouths are many; she swallows shipwrecks and whales, spits up children’s toys, rusted-over bolts, sailcloth and scales. Water 7 balances, unstable, on a foundation of bones.
water 7 haunted!!!
And so on
Clapp, dutiful pastor, pillar of the community, husband to a wife and father to a son, presses his grandfather’s grandmother’s amulet between the broom-handle and his palm and sweeps out the corners of his lie.
do you ever think about kuma's dad. i do. i sure do
hairline
Once upon a time, there was a kingdom made of mirrors.
so germa kingdom, huh
Holy Mariejois is made small by the sun.
(collab with @oriigami for the Land Ho! add-on, We Go!)
The wall is red. Higher.
Upwards. The sky is blue.
character study and formatting fuckery for the duo of fisher tiger and queen otohime. one of the best things i've ever written, also
As a Stormlight fan with a dissociative disorder, I feel I need to address some misconceptions. While Brandon is not trying to portray Shallan with an accurate dissociative disorder, as someone with OSDD, I see myself in her, as do my alters. Regardless of intent or attempt to do so, Shallan is a realistic portrayal of OSDD-1b, which boils down to “distinct people without memory loss between them.”
Which brings us to memes like this:
While we know that the intent of the meme was not to mischaracterize dissociative disorders, it rubbed us the wrong way. Let’s break this down real quick:
1. The meme implies Shallan is being chosen to be “sacrificed” for the soulcasting persona, which is not how things (at least in our experience) work. Implying that systems can just...choose to get rid of people to make way for new ones is misleading; although alters can go dormant, be suppressed, or be “absorbed” into one another, they do not ever disappear entirely, especially not to open a spot for another. In addition, at least from experience, there is not a “cap” on the number of alters one can have.
2. “Soulcasting Persona” implies that it is not a full person, which, while technically debatable, is not something we are going to debate, because doing so implies that we are willing to debate whether or not any one of us is a full person.
(There is likely more we’re missing, and we might be wrong on some things. We are not professionals, but we still had to chip in our opinions on this, which are formed from our research and experiences.)
*There's a man in front of you (us?). He has dark skin with long, messy hair that goes past his shoulders. He's also wearing a straw hat, but it casts a shadow over his eyes.
He's familiar. A part of you (us?) knows him.*
...Well, it's been a long time, huh, Nika?
*His voice is pensive with a light tone.*
...What happened, old friend? No... what did you do?
@official-joyboy
.......ITS YOU! its you, you, YOU! ITS REALLY YOU! do you remember me? remember the way i made your heart race?
SHIHEHEHE! hi!! you really recognize me? me!? i only did what i was asked to do, shihehehe...
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This is the first of a series of posts about Nika & associated religious practice in the One Piece world. As I write and post the rest of the series, I’ll add links to this header.
Pt 2: Symbology & Syncretism | Pt 3: Joyboy was Shandian | Pt 4: Sun God Tropes
Enormous credit to @oriigami for being my discussion partner through all of this and having a substantial influence on the final product. Check out our ao3 series Joyful for a narrative rather than analytical take on the Nika tradition, and definitely go read her OP blog @kaizokuou-ni-naru for meta and translation fun facts.
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The Nika Cult is a Crypto-Religion
Terminology note: I will be using cult in these posts in the sense of “cult of worship,” rather than in the modern pejorative sense. Additionally, I tend to use “tradition” rather than “religion” as a general term, because “religion” is a messy and difficult to define concept, while “tradition” is much more inclusive of traditional practices, folk beliefs, and cults of worship that may not be considered religions by Western scholarship.
Raise your hand if you saw Kuma’s church and Bible, concluded “oh, the Nika stuff is basically One Piece Christianity,” and moved on with your life.
It’s an easy assumption to make, and for all I know authorial intent may well stop there. I’m not Oda. I’ll never be able to guess what goes on behind those fish eyes of his. But a second look at the worldbuilding around both Nika and Christianity in One Piece brought me to a very different conclusion: that the Nika cult is a crypto-religion and is, in Kuma’s case, using the outward appearance of Christianity as camouflage.
First of all: We have ample evidence that Christianity (or some variation of it- I’m fascinated by the implied existence of such things as One Piece Jerusalem and the One Piece Council of Nicea) does exist in the One Piece world, and is both fairly widespread and quite legal. Flevance was pretty explicitly Catholic (Law went to church as a kid), Miss Monday and Mother Carmel masqueraded as nuns to imply harmlessness, many if not most of the graves shown in the series are crosses, whatever Usopp was on about with that exorcism equipment, and, yes, Kuma’s church and Bible.
Even mentioning the Nika cult, on the other hand, is grounds for the government to assassinate you with extreme prejudice.
A crypto-religion is what happens when a religion is suppressed to the point that its practice is grounds for exile, torture, and/or execution: Some people will convert. Some people will flee into exile. Some people will die. And some people will outwardly adopt the dominant religion, but will continue to practice their own traditions in secret; ie, they’ll create a crypto-religion.
One of the more famous examples of this is the post-Spanish Inquisition crypto-Jews of Spain and Portugal, who converted to Christianity in public but kept what Jewish traditions and rituals they could in private. To this day, descendants of these conversos whose families have been Catholic for centuries are discovering that their family tradition of lighting two candles on Friday or not eating pork on Saturday are in fact the legacy of a violently suppressed heritage. There are countless other examples of crypto-religions throughout history, both among Jews (my own personal field of knowledge) and among other traditions (for an example that would be known to Oda, the crypto-Christians of Japan).
There’s no way the Nika cult could have survived except in cryptic form. If it ever had physical infrastructure in the form of temples or pilgrimage sites, the government would have sought them out and demolished them long ago if they were not adequately disguised, especially in World Government member states like the Sorbet Kingdom. Likewise, anyone foolish enough to speak publicly about Nika will be summarily assassinated.
In fact, I have doubts that the Nika cult ever existed outside cryptic form, at least in a significant or long-lasting manner. It was specifically introduced as a slave tradition, likely nigh-exclusively oral, practiced in secret either from its inception—if Nika was a figure created by slaves, including the buccaneers—or for a very long time—if it was the cultural or ethnic tradition of the buccaneers, which spread from enslaved buccaneers to non-buccaneer slaves because Nika was a figure that resonated with them. I tend the favor the second option, but either has merit.
As @oriigami said when we were talking about this, Kuma has a church. Kuma has a bible. Kuma worships a god about whom absolutely nothing is written except in the oldest texts.
Additionally, I’ll expand on this more in pt 2 of this series, but the pendant Kuma leaves for Bonney, a large circular sapphire surrounded by eight smaller circular sapphires, matches the circular symbol inset into the crosses of his church. Bonney immediately identifies the pendant as a sun even though it really doesn’t look like one, and it can be surmised therefore that it’s a Nika amulet, and the sun with disconnected rays a Nika symbol. Following this read, and especially because this symbol occurs across the world in other contexts (see pt 2 for my thoughts on that), its presence in the church is a very careful bit of architectural sleight of hand on the part of whichever of Kuma’s ancestors built the place- echoing a very common practice of real-world crypto-religion adherents to mark the true nature of their allegiances and houses of worship in ways only those in the know might recognize.
And on a storytelling level, Kuma’s entire presence in the narrative and in the world has been a tragic saga of appearing to be one way until he’s revealed, again and again, to be the opposite. It makes thematic sense for him to be fooling the world about his faith as well!
nika. If you don't let Luffy speak, I'm gonna bonk you again.
🏏
NONONONO NO BONKING!!!!! ITS MEAN!!!!!!! I CANT LET LUFFY SPEAK!!! HE'LL RUIN THE VIBES!!! HE CAN BE SUUUUCH A BUZZKILL SOMETIMES WHEN HE GETS ALL GRUMPY ABOUT HOW IM MAKING THINGS SOUND BAD.....
NO BONKING!!! LUFFY WILL COME BACK EVENTUALLY!!!!!! PROMISE!!!! I CANT STAY UP FRONT ALWAYS SHIHAHAHAHAH!!!! I GOTTA TAKE BREAKS TOO!
