Trafalgar Law Character Study, Part 16/? (Dressrosa, Part 6)
So. It’s been…just over eight years. But I’ve had some requests to continue the analysis posts I’d been doing way back when and since I’m finally caught up with the manga again it seemed like as good a time as any to start doing that!
[Part One] // [Part Two] // [Part Three] // [Part Four] // [Part Five] // [Part Six] // [Part Seven] // [Part Eight] // [Part Nine] // [Part Ten] // [Part Eleven] // [Part Twelve] // [Part Thirteen] // [Part Fourteen] // [Part Fifteen]
The first thing I want to say is that I haven’t gone back and read all of the previous posts in this series so just a general warning that there might be questions/speculation within those that we actually have concrete answers to almost ten years later so if something doesn’t quite match up with canon that’s probably why! Most of the actual character-related things about Law should still be accurate, though…
Oh boy I picked a good group of chapters to come back to, huh? Let me just say that reading these in real time was…an experience…a very stressful experience…so back then the last thing I was worried about was character analysis but looking at it years later there’s actually a lot of important things that happen!
The first of which is that obviously we know by now that this isn’t what Cora wanted at all, but Law’s spent so many years convincing himself that it is that this…specter of Doflamingo that’s been haunting him is almost more powerful than the real thing and that’s caused him to combine Cora’s wish for him to be free with Doflamingo being defeated to the point that he can’t separate the two any longer.
This whole section is to set up Law’s reveal that he also carries the Will of D but it’s still kind of amusing to have him asking these seemingly random questions about Luffy during the middle of a literal life-and-death battle. There’s also this running theme with Law where despite the fact that this is something both he and Luffy share, he always seems to place more importance on Luffy than himself. Obviously we know that he has no idea what the Will of D actually is so I think this is more just based on his own personality, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Somehow I still see people discussing whether Law’s any good with Armament Haki when he’s using it right here and certainly not at full strength but it’s very interesting that Doflamingo becomes one of the few characters in the entire series to know this about Law. Law’s never really flaunted the D initial like a lot of others that have it but that seems to mostly be due to his family wanting to keep it a secret and not based on his own feelings, though this scene in particular I think is meant to mirror the reveal of Doflamingo being a Celestial Dragon because that was something Law could never have accounted for but now he’s got an equally pertinent piece of information to catch Doflamingo off-guard.
And while it doesn’t exactly work as intended, Law was trying to distract him enough to get Doflamingo to make a mistake and that’s exactly what happened so if nothing else he gets a good hit in. Still, for all of Doflamingo’s denial that the whole ‘fated enemies’ idea isn’t true, he’s getting very defensive about it so it makes you wonder…
So Law’s not…wrong about this, since Cora overhearing his full name was what seemingly first got him interested in this whole quest to save Law so in that way it could certainly be looked at as a catalyst of sorts. And it’s also true that Cora probably wouldn’t have been able to kill Doflamingo despite going so far as to point a gun at him, but I do genuinely believe that—in a different series where the narrative would allow such a thing—Law would have killed Doflamingo here.
I really like this group of panels because Doflamingo is seeing Law as he was the first time they met: as someone so angry and disenchanted with the entire world and so resigned to their fate that the only thing that registers is this compulsive need to cause destruction. At the time Doflamingo had said he saw himself in Law because of that, but now that it’s being directed solely at him I’m sure the impact of that is quite different. It’s also a bit of a sign for us as readers to connect the two since Law’s grown and changed a lot from that time and he attributes it mostly to being ‘saved’ because of Cora but this shows that side of him that was created out of losing everything and everyone he loved all at once is still something he can bring out under the right circumstances.
Doflamingo actually says a lot of things in this part that are kind of an insight into what Law’s thinking, and this is one of them. Law’s usually a lot more calculated and careful with his plans, but because of Bellamy deciding to distract Luffy he’s completely alone and has pretty much no tricks left so the only thing he can do is throw whatever he’s got at Doflamingo and hope something works.
This, however, isn’t exactly accurate. I do believe that if all of Law’s initial plans had come to fruition that he would have been content with Kaido taking care of Doflamingo in his place (since, in the end, he’s at least accepting of the fact that Luffy’s the one to do it) but for a variety of reasons that…didn’t happen, and with him being by himself in this position and being so close I think he does let his emotions get the better of him in the end.
Law’s still so calm and rational here and I think it’s because he’s resigned to whatever’s going to happen, but this is an interesting comment because Doflamingo loves trying to make people feel guilty for things that weren’t their fault and he’s attempting to blame everything that happened in Dressrosa completely on Law giving that letter to Vergo instead of any other Marine. But this is the first time that Doflamingo acknowledges that what he did to the Riku family and the country as a whole was a ‘tragedy’ and you can tell from his reaction that he didn’t even realize he’d done so until Law pointed it out.
Looking back at this now it holds a bit of a different connotation but in this moment Law was fully prepared to die and content with that in terms of him feeling as though he’d achieved Cora’s goal (even though he really hadn’t). However, it also still holds true in the present because while his own goals have changed drastically, everything is still being done with Cora in mind…though now it feels far more like a tribute as opposed to the pure revenge it became up until the end of Dressrosa.
Doflamingo’s fully capable of using his ability to kill but he prefers a gun instead and once again we get the mention of lead bullets so between those (twice in this arc now) and amber lead Law’s having a bad time with that particular element. I won’t get too much into how Doflamingo considers the executions he’s done as mercy killings and the only way for people to ‘atone’ for the sin of having the audacity to stand up to him, but I’m still amazed that Law was already almost running on empty and got his arm chopped off and he’s somehow conscious and coherent at this moment.
I have no idea how Law managed to get a tourniquet for his arm with everything going on but in this instance Doflamingo’s completely right: Law hasn’t been living for himself for a long time and everything he’s done has been with this singular goal in mind to the point where he really can’t pull himself away from it.
Considering the repetition that Law has some higher power looking out for him that happened throughout his flashback, I’m inclined to think this is actually foreshadowing that Law’s going to get out of this somehow even though reading it week by week it…didn’t exactly seem like it at the time… Doflamingo’s got some real guts still trying to get Law to make him immortal after everything, though.
Look, Law flips him off in the very next panel, but this is as blatant a ‘go fuck yourself’ as he could have ever given. Earlier in the arc he claimed to not care about the people of Dressrosa but now that Doflamingo’s been trying to guilt him into feeling responsible for their plight he’s using that as part of his way of firing back at Doflamingo for things that were done entirely by his own hand. At the very least, it’s good to know Law isn’t blaming himself for any of it.
Besides the callback to him doing this when we first met him, what’s really important here is that even facing certain death (and at this point I’m inclined to believe he did think it was certain, but I’ll get into that more in the future…) he’s trusting not only in Luffy but in all of the Strawhats to see the plan through and succeed. That’s a lot of faith to have in people he hasn’t known for very long and speaks to how he truly views them and what he thinks they’re capable of.
Doflamingo gets careless when he’s angry and I think this was Law’s final Hail Mary in the sense that if anything was going to save him it was Doflamingo’s rage making his aim unsteady. It’s also somewhat ironic that Doflamingo is listing all of these things that were born from Cora’s love for Law and Law’s desire to acknowledge and remember that as if they’re something he has ownership over and is solely responsible for when that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
This has nothing to do with Law himself but let me tell you that this image of Luffy only noticing the state Law’s in because there’s so much blood on the roof that he literally slips on it has stuck with me since the chapter came out and it’s so visceral and such a visual indication of how intense Doflamingo’s rage was in that moment.
‘He really seemed to trust you’ just hits me in the gut because once again Doflamingo’s up to his old ‘make someone else feel guilty’ tricks (and for Luffy it would hit especially hard given what happened with Ace and how he feels about not being able to save the people he cares about) but also it’s just…true. Law trusts Luffy so much and even at this point some of the fandom was convinced he was going to betray the Strawhats when that shouldn’t have even been a consideration any longer.
And again we get the idea of the Strawhats being able to work ‘miracles’, though in this case it’s simply Doflamingo mocking Law’s words and not putting any belief in it himself, but this was…probably one of the worst chapters to have to wait a week for the continuation. The one bit of hope we get is Law’s single speech bubble at the end telling Luffy to listen to him but that was…very little to go off of…
Well, that seems like a great and happy place to end this part! I hope you enjoyed (?) and please do feel free to like and reblog; especially after so long I’m not sure how many people are still around who want to read something like this so it helps inspire me to keep going!
