One Piece manga RANT chapter 1 (part 2)

Took me more than a year... or should I say yarrr

Continued from http://supersanereviews.blogspot.co.at/2015/11/one-piece-manga-rant-1-chapter-1-part-1.htm

The bandit leader brags to have killed 56 people, substantiating this claim with his 8 million Beli bounty. Let's keep that in mind for later.

Now Luffy is found out to have eaten the extremely expensive "Fruit of Rubber" the pirates apparently took from their "enemy" (let's see whether this enemy really exists or it's just a mistranslation and should say "prey"). The fat pirate guy also conveniently has a drawing of it ready - on a really modern looking spiral-bound notepad. The chest which contained the fruit also has a lock - so why didn't they just lock it. But anyway, Luffy is a rubber man now, allowing him to stretch all of his limbs (and yeah, also his cock). A big thing is made out of the fact devil fruit freaks can't swim - but why? Luffy couldn't swim before! How stupid was it to have stated him not having learned how to swim earlier, when only 5 pages afterwards he permanently is barred from being able to learn it anyway!!! He lost absolutely nothing, since he couldn't swim before! The bad thing was that the pirates just lost millions of "Beli" and certainly not something Luffy wasn't able to do anyway. So fucking stupid. 5 minutes later, Luffy is (quite rightfully so) already over the "horrible thing". Don't these fruits spoil, by the way? How does Luffy have any money for fish, when he has no parents and there is no sign of him e.g. helping out in the tavern? Where does he cook that fish? Does he live in a house, like Naruto (anime-only I think)? Alas, since this is shonen bullshit, we will never know these major facts. Just make it up as you go along, Oda. I'm pretty sure he still does that to this day. The old guy village chef with the glasses has the right idea, though. Pirates are troublemakers, so stay away from them.

So the bandits return and Luffucktard agitates against them all on his own. He's drawn as having lost teeth, but those obviously grow back later, no biggie. Conveniently (remember, this is chapter one - and we already get the same amount of plot convenience the average 21st century Hollywood movie has!) the good pirates return at the last second and the fat fuck pirate shoots (!) a henchman bandit through the head (!), killing (!) him (of course WHILE munching on his fucking cartoon meat. Aiming is overrated.)! That is the weird thing about early Fun Peace, sometimes you DO get realistically brutal moments. The bandits of course ruin the moment, complaining to the pirates that shooting somebody is "dirty". And Calves or whatever his name is goes on how he only gets mad when somebody messes with his friend, but not when somebody abuses him - devaluating all his pirate buddies in the process since clearly he is friends with all of them, and nobody bothered to help HIM in the earlier encounter with the bandits. Thighs' scrub attitude is something that would get a pirate killed, and therefore makes no sense.

Of course one pirate is epic level enough to defeat all the bandits on his own, even putting out his cigarette in a bandit's eye (!) (this is the most violent this entire manga gets - obviously before it turned out to be successful and was retooled to be PG for TV - remember that there was some censorship even in the Japanese Naruto anime - early on, before the manga was tuned down so that the anime wouldn't be too violent for the little kiddies watching it on TV!). The bandit leader escapes (and makes a big thing out of the fact he is escaping on a lifeboat stolen from the pirate vessel - that pretty much proves the bandits WERE living on the same island all that time and there's no reason they wouldn't have met any pirates before) and kicks Luffy into the ocean (though he does not know that Luffy can't swim), only to be suddenly eaten whole by a giant ass fish (kinda doubt we'll gonna see dire animals again later in the game... eh?) and rescued at the last moment by Shanks, whose sudden deus ex machina appearance out of nowhere (in the middle of the ocean!) finally turns this cascade of fuckshit plot development into a total farce! He scares away the fish with his presence like this was fuckin' Toriko! But afterwards, the camera zooms out and we realise the shocking development - it hasn't been an ocean after all, just a shallow lake or something! Cause Shanks sure ain't gonna swim again with that arm bitten off - and he certainly doesn't, hovering in the water vertically. Seriously, whoever drew that picture needed to be fired.

And they didn't even bother to fix it for the anime...

So, Luffy learned from this whole ordeal that losing an arm is "nothing", but that not being able to swim is really really horrible (LOL); that being insulted and fucked up yourself is unimportant, but having your friends encounter the same fate is unforgivable (as long as you can feel really smug about it); simply put: that being a scrub who lives by self-imposed limitations that seem nonsensical to anybody with a brain is A-OK and something you should absolutely try to become yourself. I am very sure we will see Monkey achieve all this and more in the course of this story.

So we get a farewell scene and Luffy shouts out at the pirates/at the world that his shonen goal is to become the biggest pirate ever, reminding us we're reading a shonen manga (well, no shit!). Luffy has caused enough trouble to the pirates by now to be keelhauled several times (round and round he goes), but instead Shanks gifts him his piraty straw hat. What's with both their feet in that picture... they are HUGE. And thus the youth's journey begins there 10 years later... told in one of the worst manga ever to pollute this earth. In true Raruto fashion, everybody and their dog (as in: exactly one dog owned by everybody) is overjoyed when Luffy finally leaves the island on a small boat (00 days Luffy-free, and counting). One would think that at least the tavern owner bitch who fed him for at least 10 years would care a little bit more than NOT AT ALL, but whatever. Luffy conveniently finds the dire fish again (fish don't work like that, they don't stay in the same place for that long), and punches it with his stretchy fist. We're not able to tell whether the fish died... expect this to become the norm. And don't get me started on the in-universe logic of shouting out attack names! Also, it's a good thing his feet were so big 10 years earlier since he's still able to wear the same exact sandals even after the rest of his body grew! Luffy wants to find "10 friends" to form a crew, instead of just saying "I'll have to find a crew first." Why. And his pirate flag is the most generic one possible - one would expect that he had enough time to daydream about a more unique one.

This manga changes after this chapter in many ways. Sure, the target audience will stay the same - people who take the turds they are tossed at face falue - but the little realism this first chapter had will go out of the window, overboard, as we enter full cartoon territory. Even with its intrinsical silliness and lack of realism, shonen manga can work just fine, as exhibited by e.g. Yugioh and Dragonball - but One Piece just doesn't deliver conceptually, right from the start, as it neither feels piraty nor has any grittiness, just like a shark with no teeth but fairy wings. Even with all the plot holes and convenience, this first chapter showed us some promise - but all that will be lost as we are only chapters away from segmented flying biological non sequiturs and treasure chest cyborgs. Oh, it will be a nightmare of a journey...

If this later becomes like Naruto Shippuden, reality will catch up with the parody... in stupidity.