One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

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Oh boy.

Meet Usopp, the village idiot.

Every single day, Usopp runs around his village screaming his head off about an impending pirate invasion. Every single day, he is lying. Is he a mythomaniac and can’t help it? Is he just a dick, as teenagers sometimes are? Who knows. More pertinent to my personal experience is that this entire opening sequence made me want to go crawl in a cave and hibernate for three months. “Boy who cried wolf” situations just rouse some sort of deep, visceral nails-on-chalkboard feeling within me.

More to the point, what is this village anyway? It’s some place that Nami suggested the crew look for a larger ship, since going the Grand Line unprepared is likely to get them all killed. Fair enough, I say. That is the situation; they’re here on this island searching for a ship, and they have to deal with This Fucking Guy.

Who of course claims to be a pirate when he meets Luffy and friends. Nami does not really buy it. And no one buys it when Usopp tries to slide into their crew in a later scene.

I’m sure the character’s voluminous bravado will eventually get more endearing than embarrassing but—and maybe this is just because I’m rather sleepy as I’m typing this—in this moment, I am just a bit annoyed by him. Probably this will change, but that is how I feel in the immediacy of the now. (“The immediacy of the now” is one of my favorite overblown pretentious turns of phrase. I highly recommend trying to slip it into casual conversation sometime just to see what happens.)

More interesting than Usopp’s bloviating is the mysterious mansion, complete with an ill heiress, that he informs Luffy’s crew lies on the outskirts of town. The chapter ends on this note, a cut to said heiress (although honestly, she kind of looks like Nami. I suspect this will be a recurring pattern).

Tomorrow: We find out whatever’s going on here and hopefully I feel a bit more awake when I’m writing my next one of these.

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