Were-Ah's Art Blog

Curling up in his arms, finally safe

Also @4digitan here's that blanket stealing I said I wanted to draw lmao

Shoutout to the people whose parents support lgbt rights but never told their kids until they were in their teens or twenties because they said it was “difficult to explain to children”.

Shoutout to the people whose religious communities came out in support just a little too late.

Shoutout to everyone afraid to come out just because they know they’ll be safe physically but they don’t know how everything will change socially.

Shoutout to everyone whose internalized homophobia that they’re trying to overcome came from subtle cues and not explicit statements.

*lays this at your feet*

In the story of Don Quixote he rides a tired, somewhat clumsy horse by the name of Rocinante. In the story, Don Quixote envisions himself as a shining knight, thus transforming Rosinante (at least in his mind) into a noble steed.

In the story, Rocinante is Don Quixote’s almost constant companion. He spends four whole days deciding on a name for his horse prior to settling on Rocinante and very clearly cares for him(although he basically makes his name a pun, lol).

First and foremost however, is their dynamic as rider and horse (weird sentence, but stick with me here). In One Piece, Doffy loves his little brother and cherishes him to the point of threatening death should anyone harm him. Despite this, Doffy still sees him as a servant of sorts. He makes Rosinante his second in command but not his equal. He sees his little brother as both that, his little brother, and as a tool to be used to achieve his goals.

(Want to put a lil disclaimer here that I don’t speak Spanish, and the closest thing I have to a second language is some broken German)

What’s important about his actual name however, is what it translates to in Spanish. Rocin means, from what I can tell, a low quality work horse, one usually past its prime and worn out or literally Nag, old nag, or nagging. It’s important to note too, that this (apparently) can also be interpreted to mean a man who is a grunt, or generally poorly educated.

This KILLS me bc this is basically how the entire Donquixote family saw him, and how Rosinante presented himself them as part of his cover. Outside of his cover though, where it’s shown that he is far from the mindless grunt we first think he is, we can see that some of these traits remain. Even as himself, Rosinante is a klutz, tripping over himself and out of his depth as he tries to navigate the moral and political ramifications of what he is doing to save Law, a boy he barely knows.

From Donquixote Homing to Doffy, the entire Donquixote family is comprised of visionarys and dreamers. I’m my opinion, Rosinante serves as the middle ground between Doflamingo and their fathers very different forms of trying to bring their dreams into reality.

Even the nameless mother (who I internally have dubbed Dulcinea, lol) shared her husband’s lofty dreams, and worked to try and bring them to life though they would ultimately come at the cost of her own.

Homing clung to the foolish idea that the act of renouncing his heritage as a celestial dragon would be enough to satisfy any vendettas against him and had dreamed pointlessly of a world were him and his family could live peacefully, doing no harm as much as receiving none. By all means the naive wishes of a man whose entire life was spent out of touch. Undeniably a man of lofty ambitions.

His eldest son however, worked to achieve different dreams. Doflamingo is by nature a schemer- always plotting and spinning lies, always revealing the next step of his grand solution. While as (if not more) ambitious as his father’s dreams, Doflamingo hoped to mold a new world with himself at the top and those who rebelled against his plan crushed at the bottom. Unlike his father, these ambitions and dreams at least had the power of pragmatic thinking behind them, hence their very near fruition.

Rosinante, as I had claimed before, stands as the medium between the two extremes that are his brother and father. Stronger and more cynical than his father, kinder and gentler than his brother, Rosinante held his own ambitions. Whereas his father had dreamed of a world without blame and his brother a world of nothing but that, Rosinante dreamed of a world capable of improvement. He expresses the sentiment fairly often, that he wants to make the world better. That he wants to leave the world a better place than he had found it, no matter how small an improvement. And Rosinante finds this small, strange, incredibly rude little way to make the world better in the form of a dying little boy and takes the action needed.

Now, the only real reason that I’m talking about this -the Donquixote family’s habit of spinning lofty dreams and ambitions into the world, that is- is because of the character they take their family name from. The crux of Don Quixote’s character is that he is a man who has grown disillusioned by the dreary, cynical nature of the modern world, and falls into one of his own, rife with damsels in distress and dashing knights.

Don Quixote holds perhaps the highest ambition of all (its very much a delusion, but so is Homing’s quest for peace and Doffy’s hope of basically burning down the world) which is to return the current world to one of chivalry. He charges about on an old horse (Rip Cora) and calls it his noble steed. He fights windmills which he perceives as giants. He dares to dream.