the seraphim make me Sick. not because of they the characters themselves, but how the narrative and the fandom treats them and their role in the story.
the seraphim are essentially Child Soldiers. they are Child Soldiers. Living Weapons. they’re different from the pacifistas; the seraphim can Feel. s-snake has displayed Free Will. they aren’t mindless robots, they’re living beings with the own consciousness. and yet, no one talks about this? no one acknowledges this? the seraphim are rarely given grace in the fandom, and in the story despite displaying sentience and humanity, they aren’t treated as such. the seraphim are essentially opponents for the strawhats that oda didn’t have to spend time developing.
the seraphim are Genetically Engineered Child Slaves. Living Sentient Experiments.
the seraphim have displayed Sentience, Humanity, Personality, Feelings and Free Will to varying degrees. they have next to nothing common with the pacifista. also they’re Children. yet they’ve been programmed to listen to orders. War Machines, is what they were created for. for a story about Freedom, how can any of the strawhats be okay with this? this is so firmly against everything they stand for. luffy, who is Freedom, Warrior of Liberation; nami, who believes in the protection and innocence of children; chopper, who is firmly against medical and scientific malpractice; jimbei, who spent most of his life fighting against slavery; sanji, who suffered at the hands of his father who DID PRETTY MUCH THE EXACT SAME THING TO HIS SIBLINGS and failed with him, resulting in a childhood of pain and suffering. how can any of them just fight the seraphim without questioning the morality of the creation of the seraphim in the first place?
the seraphim are not only victims, but are also a massive violation of the warlords. none of them, no matter how evil they are, deserve to be bastardised in this way. the seraphim have the warlords’ DNA, a distorted version of them, made slaves to the world government. just imagine a child version/clone of you, being made to do whatever the government commands, used as weapons, war machines. not only to the seraphim have the warlords’ DNA, but they also have their genetic memory, fragmented pieces of identity of the warlords.
why is none of this acknowledged in the story? the seraphim are Tragic. and they all deserve better than this fate, this role they’ve been dealt. even if oda addresses this further down the line, the damage has already been done.
and most of the fandom just. don’t care? most only see the seraphim as weapons, a way to powerscale other characters. even those who can see how Fucked Up the seraphim situation is, they use the existence of the seraphim to create angst of other characters. i’ve seen seraphim ace, seraphim cora, seraphim luffy, but they neglect the canon seraphims. the actual Child Slaves that we have in the story? people only seem to care about the existence of the seraphim when there’s angst potential for other characters, not focusing on the actual seraphims. why do fans have more empathy for hypothetical characters that don’t canonically exist, rather than the ones who are actually stuck in this situation.
i swear if oda makes s flamingo evil/malicious just because he is doffy’s clone i’m gonna telepathically set him on fire.