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!
Chapter 42 is what you might call an interstitial. If One Piece were a piece of prose, chapter 42 is a “and then” clause, serving primarily to link the previous and the next story arc, without doing too much of its own. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be some interesting or fun ideas in it. For instance; here’s Luffy’s shot at a pirate flag.
Usopp ends up giving it a shot a short while later and, well, he does a much better job.
This chapter has a bit of a “Usopp shows off some skillz” thing going on, actually, because just after this, we learn that he’s a crack shot with a cannon. I’m not sure I buy his slingshot skills transferring, but what matters much more is that the random rock he uses for target practice was occupied.
By two people Zolo knows.
Because coincidence is for suckers.
The pair, after some initial swords-first confusion, establish themselves as Johnny and Yosaku, old colleagues in the pirate-hunting biz of Zolo’s. (Johnny actually uses the term ‘brother’ but I’m not clear on how literal he’s being. I think it’s being used in a colloquial sort of way, but if I turn out to be wrong then, well, throw me overboard.) Yosaku is basically dying on the deck of the Merry Go at first, before some quick thinking from Nami makes it clear that his problem is that old pirate’s ailment; simple scurvy.
Grateful, and taking note of a conversation about how the Merry Go could really use a cook, the pair point our heroes toward an ocean-going restaurant, and in doing so, presumably set up the Straw Hats’ next adventure.
Personally, I’m interested to see where this goes. I assume “ocean-going restaurant” means that it’s literally a restaurant on a ship? But maybe it’s something more exotic. We’ll see in the days to come.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
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!
Did you think we were done with our big emotional climax after last chapter? Well, we mostly are, but not quite yet.
Two things happen in this chapter; for one, Kaya gifts Luffy’s crew a caravel, which I and any other former Civilization III players reading this will recognize as a mid-sized vessel common in the 16th century. It’s hardly the Queen Anne’s Revenge, but this ship, the Merry Go, is the first proper vessel our heroes have ever had. 41 chapters in, we’ve already covered a lot of ground (even if we’re still very early on in the greater scope of things), so it’s nice to see them tangibly upgrading to something bigger and better.
Secondly, Usopp says his last goodbyes to Kaya. Granted, not before overpacking to the extent that his comically large backpack causes him to topple over and role down a hill in true slapstick fashion.
Other than a few other jokes (including a great bit where Luffy has to be told not to eat the entire bones of a fish), the main takeaway here is that Kaya will be just fine, and that Usopp’s chronic lying actually has a reason behind it. A pretty sad one! Although you could probably guess that much.
To be honest, this strikes me as a little unnecessary? The simple fact that Usopp’s mom isn’t around kind of makes it obvious from the start that something’s happened to her. That said; the target audience for this manga is, or at least was at the time, kids, so maybe being a little obvious is fine.
As the chapter ends, Kaya talks to Merry—her actually loyal butler—about her dreams for the future, while Usopp’s former “crew” gallavant through the town, continuing his, ahem, sacred work.
Usopp himself and the rest of Luffy’s crew? They’re gone, back on the deep blue sea.
Tomorrow: new adventures.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
Before I begin today, I want to clarify that I tried to do something a little different with this writeup. Since its premiere, the main opinion I’ve expressed on this blog about Lycoris Recoil is that I think it’s really cool. I stand by that. It’s hard on a fundamental, entertainment level, to fuck up “girls with guns.” This is a style of story that, in anime, dates back to at least Dirty Pair. 2000s-era cult studio Bee Train also built their entire reputation on that kind of thing, and that legacy went on to inform the present day school of what I call battle girl anime, a tradition that Lycoris Recoil is very much part of. (It stands off in the comparatively more ‘realistic’—heavy scare quotes there—quadrant with other ‘spy girl’ anime like Princess Principal, RELEASE THE SPYCE, and so on.)
But today I want to get into the weeds just a bit, to the question of what Lycoris Recoil is actually about on a level beyond its literal plot. What it is trying to say, what assumptions it’s working off of, etc. As I say all this, I want to remain perfectly clear; I do really like this show quite a lot, and it would have to fuck up pretty badly for that opinion to change. Nothing I am about to say is meant to disparage the show, just to explore it in a slightly different way.
We’ll come back to that; for now, let’s start with the obvious, no-qualifiers positives. For the third week in a row, Lycoris Recoil delivers a knockout showcase of style. Throughout “More Haste, Less Speed” it is consistently entertaining as hell, and the production values are top-shelf in a way that is very hard to come by this consistently these days. Even scenes where characters are doing little more than talking to each other are absolutely chockablock with little physical tics—what the Sakurabooru crowd generally call character acting—and the action scenes toward the end of the episode remain, really, without much competition.
The actual plot is decent fun, too. The episode’s core premise is fairly simple; Chisato has to return to DA headquarters to get a physical exam so she can continue operating as a Lycoris, Takina tags along under the misguided belief that, since she’s been performing well, if she can get the commander’s ear she might be able to convince her to let her rejoin the force.
This does not happen, obviously, since then there would be no more show. Instead, we learn a few more interesting things about the incident that lead to her suspension; talk of radio interference and a possible hacking of Radiata, the DA’s ‘AI’ system that also handles its communications, absolves Takina of some actual responsibility in said incident. (Not that the DA commander knows, or, indeed, would care, as Chisato points out. That the higher-ups absolutely would feign ignorance in this kind of situation is one of the better observations LycoReco pulls out, here.)
Much of the actual conflict of this episode is more interpersonal though. It’s clear that however well she has or hasn’t been getting along with Chisato, Takina has been treating her assignment to the cafe’ group as a temporary thing, very much under the impression that she will be allowed back into what seems to be the main force of Lycorii, who are based out of the dorms in DA headquarters, eventually. Her hardnosed, by-the-book nature again comes into conflict with Chisato’s here. (There’s a fun bit early on where she refuses an offer of candy from Chisato. When the episode ends, after all that happens here, she accepts it instead, a cute visual metaphor for their increased trust in each other.)
Takina’s notion that she’ll be allowed back is, as she discovers here, itself wrong. The DA commander tells her to her face that she has no intention of bringing her back, and the other Lycorii, including her own former partner Fuki, are openly antagonistic toward her. (Honestly, Fuki is quite the baby authoritarian in general.)
This starts with verbal sparring, and by the episode’s end, culminates in a mock gunfight between Chisato and Takina’s team and Fuki, alongside her new partner Sakura.
Here, though, we should circle back around to that question of what Lycoris Recoil is actually trying to say. Because this is the first episode that’s really gone into any detail about how all this Lycoris stuff actually works, and what it shows us—and what it does not show us—is illuminating.
There is a lot of talk of “independence” and “leaving things behind” and such in this episode. To me, this is a strange bit of framing on Lycoris Recoil‘s part. Most of its important characters are orphans drafted into some kind of shadowy supersoldier program that, the more we learn about it, the less ethical it seems (and keep in mind we started with “orphan child cops”). The various Lycorii—for instance, Fuki, Takina’s former partner—talking about the DA as their “parents” is weird. It’s probably supposed to be weird, but I’m not totally clear on why Lycoris Recoil thinks it’s weird.
I will not disparage Fuki in the regard of her obvious crush on Mika, though. He’s a handsome guy if you’re into olderdudes.
To me, that notion reeks of straight-up brainwashing, and the obvious best conclusion for this series is for Chisato, Takina, and ideally everyone else, to simply break away from this system entirely. (If they can dismantle it in the process, hey, bonus points.) Lycoris Recoil‘s actual qualms with this system, though, are hard to identify, seeming to equate them as it does to overprotective parents in a way that belies a paternal-authoritarian worldview. (Pro tip: if you’re equating anything to parents that’s not like a close friend or mentor, something has gone terribly wrong. The state is not your parents. Some kind of secret supercop department of the government is definitely not your parents.) If that’s so, it’s a disappointing failure of imagination. There is no reason a TV series for adults should be lapped in the “protagonist entirely rejects abusive system” department by, say, Fresh Precure.
But on the other hand, that is me making a lot of assumptions, and there is plenty of sign that Lycoris Recoil might have more ambitious plans in mind. As Takina continues to struggle with being so thoroughly rejected by the DA and by her former peers, Chisato says this, hugging Takina tight in a delightfully queer public display of affection. (Shortly after this she straight up lifts her off the ground and twirls her around in order to mock some homophobic onlookers. This is all very great.)
The question that springs from Chisato’s comment is a natural one; what kind of things can you gain by losing something? What can Takina gain from losing her membership in the DA? I would say all sorts of things. There’s what LycoReco itself implies; Chisato’s friendship1, her other friends at the cafe’ which she will perhaps come to regard as a found family, a sense of purpose, etc. But I would also add to that, freedom in the truest sense, a true unshackling from the system that is still very much invisibly stepping on both her neck and Chisato’s. It’s a fool’s game to try to predict where a piece of serial fiction will eventually end up thematically, but I want Lycoris Recoil to go there. That would take it from a very good show to a great one.
But as it is, we must look at the show we have and not the one we build up in our minds. LycoReco isn’t there yet, and it may never get there. Indeed, there are any number of minor nitpicks I could add on to this; why is Fuki’s new partner, the openly antagonistic Sakura, the one with the shortest hair and the somewhat boyish voice? Strange choice for a series with a massive periphery gay fanbase. Why does the DA commander (whose name I’ve not written down, because she’s awful and doesn’t deserve one) suddenly act all proud behind the scenes after Chisato and Takina leave? Of course, even as I write these things I’m cognizant that they are, again, nitpicks. One could easily wave them off as a byproduct of the many-hands approach that almost all modern serial television is made with, and I am largely inclined to do so.
So, do any of these, not even faults exactly, but potential future faults ruin the episode or make it bad or anything like that? No. Lycoris Recoil remains a masterclass of stylish and engaging animation and direction. The question for me is more whether or not the themes will prove themselves worthy of that style. To put it in an admittedly very dumb way; Lycoris Recoil probably has a spot on my end-of-year writeups on its looks and fun-to-untangle twisty-turny plot alone. And there are lots of little bits about this episode that I didn’t even get the chance to mention, alongside the aforementioned nitpicks; a few hints about Chisato’s past as “the hero of the radio tower,” the daily board game tournaments that apparently go on at the cafe’, etc.
Whether it comes out the other side of these twelve weeks saying something meaningful or interesting is what will decide if it ranks high on that list or ends up in the honorable mentions next to, say, Princess Connect Re:Dive. Neither is anything to remotely be ashamed of, and I would find it hard to actually slam Lycoris for the aforementioned potential failures of imagination unless it colossally dropped the ball in a downright offensive way—I don’t get my politics from cartoons and you shouldn’t either, go read Capitalist Realism or something—it’s just a question of its placement on the proverbial podium.
Put plain; I still really like Lycoris Recoil, but I am interested to see if it can raise the ceiling even more.
1: As strong and well-worn as my shipping goggles are, I don’t think you can really argue the two are actually going out, based on what we see. Yet. We’ll see what the rest of the show looks like. (And, hey, I’m not going to tell fanartists they can’t mine that little pick-up-and-spin-around bit for weeks. Are you? What are you, some kind of killjoy?)
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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!
In today’s chapter: farewells and castings-off.
The defeated Captain Kuro is batted out of the series with one final panel of Luffy piledriving his head into the ground. I actually particularly like this because we also see his glasses bounce away, crushed. It’s fun to see a character’s personal symbol of sorts destroyed as a visual metaphor for their defeat.
And Luffy manages to get off one last bit of “I’m gonna be king of the pirates” chest-puffing before promptly collapsing from exhaustion and/or blood loss. (Don’t worry, he’s fine. You know how shonen protagonists are.)
But for the most part, this chapter is about Usopp, who decides to swear his “crew”—as well as everyone else—to secrecy, so that the people of his town don’t worry about the pirate raid that they only just avoided being caught up in.
I remain rather averse to the “boy who cried wolf” trope, but I like Usopp basically twisting it inside-out here, relying on his own bad reputation to protect the townsfolk’s peace of mind. One can understand where he’s coming from in a very immediate way, that’s a nice thing in a story like this that more or less lives and dies on the readership being able to connect to the characters in an immediate, intuitive way.
At the end of the chapter, he strikes off on his own, now dead-set on becoming a real pirate, rather than simply a teller of tall tales. Of course, in order to do that, there’s a group of people he has to bid farewell to.
As he leaves his “pirate crew” behind, Usopp makes the boys swear to keep pursuing their own dreams. It’s genuinely really sweet.
All this to say; Usopp is a good lad, my initial impression of the character wasn’t terribly favorable, but hey, that happens sometimes.
Now then, before I bid you all farewell for the day, I’ve decided that fielding y’all a question every ten chapters or so will be a fun way to keep things fresh.
Last time I asked you what manga you were reading other than One Piece itself (and hey, if you’ve picked up something in the interim, feel free to share). Today I’ll ask what anime you’re watching this season, if any. Y’all can reasonably intuit from my anime columns that I’m watching Lycoris Recoil, Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer (the recap for which I’m slightly putting off by writing this first, in fact….), and Call of the Night. In addition to that I’ve been keeping up with Smile of the Arsnotoria, Teppen (although it actually skipped its second episode for absolutely wild reasons I won’t go into here), YUREI DECO, Tokyo Mew Mew New, the RWBY anime Ice Queendom, and carrying over from last season, Summertime Render (don’t tell Disney). What about you?
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
Special Notice: As I established in the very first entry of this particular Let’s Watch column, I maintain a belief that this anime is very bad. I strongly encourage you to read the Lucifer & The Biscuit Hammermanga instead.
This week, we see an arguable improvement from Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer‘s slipshod anime adaption, in that it is mostly bad in ways that are simply unflattering as opposed to ways that are out-and-out depressing.
The story of this episode is basically a miniature training arc, but I’m not going to condescend to anyone reading this by pretending you need me to recap that. Yuuhi gets it in his head that he should be more manueverable. Sure. The real question is whether or not Biscuit Hammer has meaningfully picked up at all from last week. The answer is just barely “yes,” but not in a way that inspires terribly much confidence going forward.
The truly maddening thing is that there are moments where it mostly works. But they’re so fleeting and scattershot that their presence more highlights how woefully deficient every other part of this adaption is than it does say anything truly positive. Unsurprisingly, most of these pinpricks of light revolve again around Samidare.
Near the front end of the episode, she works out as part of her apparent training regiment by doing pushups while Yuuhi sits on her back. It’s cute. Granted, it was cute in the manga, but it’s worth pointing out when something actually manages to come through mostly-unscathed. (Strap in, that’s what a lot of this column—both today’s entry in particular and in general—are going to be going forward.)
I tried to come up with some pun about how this is a visual metaphor for Samidare carrying the whole show on her back, but I couldn’t quite get there. Maybe you can.
Another instance comes when Yuuhi asks her a very reasonable question: why does she want to destroy the world? That is, after all, a ferociously violent thing, if you really think about it. Her response here—as in the source material—is cryptic, but illuminating, painting her as selfish and egomaniacal to a rare degree. (Do remember, this is our heroine, here.)
But that selfishness is exactly what makes her so interesting as a character. Again, this largely being a writing-side decision, it’s something the anime can’t entirely squash, even if this entire scene is a lot flatter and less impressive than in the manga. A lot of these shots actually look better as stills than in motion. (Which is saying a lot, because they’re not exactly painterly in this format either.) As with last episode—and I imagine, many to come—there are a few moments like this where you can squint and see the echoes of a much better version of this story in there. But that one has to work so hard to do so speaks to the problem.
I want to highlight this shot in particular. Whoever keeps deciding to juxtapose Samidare and Yuuhi against the vast, ominous shadow of the Biscuit Hammer itself should be working somewhere else, because they at least have an idea of what they’re doing. Even with the somewhat “starfield on the side of a van”-y quality to the backdrop, it’s way more visually striking than anything else in the show.
Samidare also gets probably the only half-decent bit of action in the show so far, where she chucks a fucking car at this week’s golem. (Yes, there’s one in this episode too, get used to them.) It’s not choreographed terribly well but, hey, it’s hard to completely mess up someone tossing a car.
Elsewhere, the series’ decisions are sometimes simply confusing. For instance, in the image below, Yuuhi is contemplating his grandfather’s ill health, and also on his own weakness. We can deduce from what we already know that Yuuhi’s grandpa is not a great guy, and we get the details not long after this scene, so he’s probably pretty conflicted in this shot. Why, then, is the soundtrack a full battery of chuga-chuga-chaw heavy metal guitars? Was the audio editor just taking the piss?
The annoying thing is that the last leg of this episode largely works pretty well. The dread Yuuhi feels toward his grandfather is explained as largely the result of said grandfather being a genuine abusive shithead. Those chains we keep seeing as imagery aren’t metaphorical, they’re trauma flashbacks literally intruding into the reality of the show, as Yuuhi was once literally chained up and locked in a closet for a few days by his grandfather. It’s really no wonder that when he gets news of his grandpa’s bad health here he’s very reluctant to go see him.
The impact of that abuse is something Biscuit Hammer handles with a surprising amount of nuance, given even more detail here as Yuuhi himself falls sick from trying to leap across the local river (it’s complicated), and has to have Samidare tend to him. But the entire time I watched this, even feeling as I do that it’s the part of the episode that works best, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of that feeling is holdover from the manga.
I largely think the print pacing works better here, because cramming both Samidare’s little speech a bit farther up this page and this whole thing about Yuuhi’s grandfather into the same 22 minute space just feels unpleasantly jumbled. I obviously cannot say this for certain, but I feel like this episode probably does not hit nearly as convincingly for someone who isn’t already familiar with these characters.
Thus we settle into what I think will be the story of the Biscuit Hammer anime’s entire run (which might well be two cours, going by the BD listings). Moments of brightness left over from the manga’s original structure intercut with an awful lot of unimpressive-to-outright-awful visual production.
I am, then, judging Biscuit Hammer as much on what it represents as what it actually is. I remain unconvinced that there is any reason for this anime to exist beyond someone trying to do a quick IP flip to raise some money. The open question is whether it will eventually succeed even as something that nakedly unambitious, whether it will at least be a competent obvious cash grab. So far, the answer to that question feels like a flat “no.” Even the scenes in this episode that mostly work only do so by inheriting the manga’s existing strengths. There is not a single thing here that enhances or even meaningfully changes the source material. In the weeks to come, we will see if it remains so thoroughly pointless.
Biscuit Hammer Scorecard for This Week:
Times Samidare Literally Carried the Show: 2 Bad Perv Jokes I Didn’t Bring Up in The Main Body of The Text Because There’s Already So Much to Complain About: 1 Scenes that Actually Kind of Work for a Period of More Than a Few Seconds: 1 Lizard Moments: 3 Samidare Cuteness: 10/10
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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!
I like the way today’s chapter is put together. Functionally, you’ve got two fights; one between Luffy and Kuro and another between Kaya, Usopp’s ‘crew’, and Django (which later gets two extra participants as the chapter comes to a close). The chapter keeps up the tension with the fairly simple trick of swapping between them, so there are no real “dead moments” at any point.
One Piece is good about this in general, but I find chapter 39 fairly exceptional in this regard. Basically everybody—at least, all the ‘good guys’, excepting Nami—get a solid badass moment. In something this long, you cannot expect every single chapter to have major story revelations or anything like that, but it’s good one when can make an exceptional showing on the Cool Points front, if nothing else.
It’s Luffy who gets the bulk of them, as despite Kuro’s techniques, he’s not much of a match for the rubberband pirate (assuming he doesn’t have some other secret trick up his sleeve anyhow), and Luffy is able to lay him flat without too much trouble over the course of the chapter.
Kuro of course panics about this, and we get one of those huge open-mouthed hollers that Oda seems to love drawing.
Meanwhile, Kaya is willing to sign the will without being mind-controlled, if Django will just leave Usopp’s little friends alone. The hitman hypnotist is having none of it, though, and Kaya actually has to threaten to hurt herself in order to get him to even consider it.
And Usopp’s crew promptly get their moment a few pages later when they charge him from behind and knock him on his ass. Which buys all involved just enough time for Zolo and Usopp to show up.
It’s actually Usopp himself who gets the final blow on Django, hitting him with some sort of exploding projectile via his slingshot.
And meanwhile, back at the beach, Luffy seems to put Captain Kuro down for good. Look at that neck; I don’t know if he’s coming back from that one.
Tomorrow: Is the battle over, or just beginning?
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
Last week, while covering Call of the Night‘s debut episode, I made mention that Nazuna is, in a way dangerous. Or at least, representative of dangerous things, in a way that’s fairly inherent to her being a vampire. I stand by that, because last episode still, you know, happened. But what was also evident even then, and is far moreso this week, is that she’s also a bit of a doofus.
What this episode really cements is that Nazuna and Ko have a great dynamic. They’re a pair of verbal pinball flippers. It’s always hard to convey banter as a positive quality in writing, but the fact that the back-and-forth of sex jokes and general endearing dumbassery doesn’t get old mostly speaks for itself. For instance, there is Ko’s attempt to get Nazuna to give him her phone number, which runs into some of the usual problems one might expect when trying to hook up with a vampire.
Using this specific term places Nazuna in the same realm of dorkdom as Pearl from Steven Universe. Truly, no mean feat.
Perhaps more relevant to the show’s actual plot, Ko here reaffirms that, yes, he is actively trying to fall in love with Nazuna so that when she bites him he will become a vampire. Given that he’s a teenager one would think this would be easy, but hey, some hearts are pickier than others. On the third hand, though, it’s not like Call of the Night is shy about pairing these two up pretty hard already. They spend the first third or so of the episode looking for each other (which eventually leads to the phone exchange above, since neither of them have any easy way to contact the other).
When they do eventually meet up, Nazuna again invites Ko over, and the framing is still less than subtle.
The episode’s second plot revolves around the two trying to find some way to keep in touch, given Nazuna’s lack of anything that can use a modern cellular network. Ko eventually hits on the idea of using….toy “transceiver” watches with walky-talkies in them.
This odd little detour has more underlying implication than one might expect. Sure, they spend a while fiddling with them—playing hide and seek, basically, an apt display that they’re both immature in their own ways—but then Ko reveals that when he bought them as a kid he hid one away as part of a longwinded ploy to be able to talk to someone new, only for one of them to simply go missing. That’s honestly kinda depressing! Which Nazuna actually points out (with a signature lack of tact).
Perhaps the most revealing moment though comes when the two take a short flight to Ko’s school, where Ko manages to do some pretty amazing deduction about his new friend. Noticing that she makes a ton of sex jokes but gets flustered at discussion of actual romance, he has this thought.
It’s a little too early to say if he’s right (although, I think so), but if he is; that’s a pretty impressive target to hit considering his own lack of experience. It’s also maybe a smidgen unrealistic, although, then again, teenagers can be awfully perceptive in their own way.
As the episode ends, Ko heads home, and shockingly, his toy watch goes off. Before he can fully process the question of who could possibly have the missing watch and why, someone who seems to know him spooks him from behind. (Not unlike what Nazuna did last week.)
The introduction of another person into the show’s core dynamic this early is an interesting thing. But, really, you could see it coming even if there weren’t other people asides from Ko and Nazuna in the OP animation. The Sun always comes up eventually.
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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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!
Rule 1 of a shonen manga – Any time someone says something like “oh no, the ultimate technique!” you need to get out of where you are as fast as possible.
A few other things happen in this chapter, but for the most part, Chapter 38 is Kuro and Luffy going at it again, and Kuro threatening the ever-living hell out of his old crew.
You might think disclosing your intent to kill a bunch of people ahead of time would be unwise, but if it is, the Black Cats are even less wise, since they mostly take the route of pleading with him rather than, say, running away. Even later in the chapter when he starts saying things like this.
It is worth noting that given the makeshift-democratic character of most pirate charters, this could be argued to be almost the exact opposite of a “real pirate’s” attitude.
As the chapter closes, he unleashes his—seriously—“Out the Bag” technique, which seems to consist of moving so quickly that he’s invisible to the naked eye and slashing everything in the area to ribbons. Pretty standard shonen manga stuff, but still not something you’d want to get caught in, for certain. We very briefly catch up with Nami here, too, although only just long enough for her to have this reaction to the attack.
Meanwhile in the woods, Django tries to force Kaya to open her eyes so he can hypnotize her, and the pirate kids try to attack him while he’s distracted. This goes….badly, and their ultimate fate here is again left uncertain.
Tomorrow: These two stories sail on.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
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!
Before we get to today’s actual chapter, let’s take a moment to acknowledge that chapter art. For the second time now, it depicts a, I guess you’d say, chibi-Buggy? Getting into antics after his battle with Luffy’s crew. I wonder if this is canon and the clown-pirate will show up again sometime soon.
Regardless, the chapter itself is much more in line with the punch pop boom wow sort of feeling the last several have been. Really, the fact that so many chapters in a row have basically been straight action feels like it should wear on me, but it really hasn’t. (Although it does make coming up with novel things to say about each a little challenging, but, well, that’s baked in to this entire “One Piece Every Day” endeavor to begin with.)
I like this moment here, where Kuro gets one up on Luffy by predicting where he’s going to toss a punch, and then…stands on his arm as he does so.
Kuro’s version of the cover for Stillmatic was firmly rejected by Nas’ people.
Indeed, I think Kuro giving Luffy a serious challenge is in a lot of ways more impressive than Buggy doing it. Buggy was also a Devil Fruit….user? Eater? He also had powers, is what I’m getting at. Kuro just seems to be That Good at whatever this weird fighting style of his is.
He also gets rather testy when his crew cheers him on, specifically because they’re cheering “Captain Kuro” on. He even hollers at them for doing so.
Sorry man, but it’s fewer letters than “Klahadore.”
He launches into a flashback here, and through this medium his motive becomes, in a sideways sort of way, understandable, even as his methods remain dubious as ever.
Kuro of the Thousand Plans is tired. Tired of the planning, the pillaging, and the inevitable squads of navymen, marines, and bounty hunters that pursue him. Wanting out is understandable.
He uses one of those very same marine attacks as a pretext, boarding their ship on his own and killing everyone aboard except two.
He has Django hypnotize those two; one is given his own name—Captain Kuro—and the other becomes the brave lone soldier who managed to take him in.
There’s something to be said about how we might admire a pirate, but find fault in one for trying to leave the life if his methods are unsavory. Hypocritical? Maybe, but maybe what makes it easiest to loathe Kuro is his lack of commitment to anything but buying his way to peace of mind.
In the end what matters more is that his monologue gives Luffy ample time to regain his strength. So when he makes a swing at a fatal lunge, Luffy blocks it with a massive chunk of rock.
Which he promptly bashes Kuro over the head with.
Tomorrow: The battle continues…?
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a newly-available-in-English manga.
This column contains spoilers for Part 1 of Chainsaw Man.
Content Warning: The material covered here contains depictions of extreme violence.
Two weeks ago, I had no working relationship with Chainsaw Man whatsoever. But sometimes, the stars align, and something grips you like it’s trying to choke you out and just doesn’t let go. Sometimes too, that happens just before a long-awaited follow-up is about to start. They say timing is everything because it is, and sometimes that timing works out in your favor. Hence this going up mere hours after the opening chapter of Part 2 drops on MangaPlus.
Suffice it to say we’re bending the rules here, too, since Chainsaw Man Part 2 is only a “new” manga with a fair bit of definitional stretching. (MangaPlus doesn’t even count it as a different series than Part 1.) So if you’re not caught up with the first Chainsaw Man arc, if you’re in the position I was in barely a week ago, I recommend closing this column now and go giving it a read, because I’m about to spoil the hell out of it.
It’s lurid, violent, bleak, coarse, and profane. The medium; a world where humanity’s fears materialize into living beings called devils, and of course, where humans called devil hunters must stop them. A story about bad people dying in worse ways that is not afraid to kill off even major characters sometimes suddenly and without warning, but never feels like it’s doing so for simple wanton shock value. It’s pretty fucking fantastic, easily a best-in-genre for the new decade without much in the way of competition. Part 2 has much to live up to.
The end of Part 1 marked also the end of the so-called “Public Safety Arc.” Denji surviving, nearly totally alone, after a wave of death and disillusionment that saw him shed whatever naivety he may still have had. But he’s come out the other side a better person regardless, even as he was one of just three named characters (four if you count Pochi) to survive the often-brutal first part of the manga.
It’s clear that some amount of time has passed, although perhaps not much. The main point to note here is the continued lionization of Chainsaw Man himself, Denji’s hellish heroic alter ego who now serves as both a source of inspiration to the general public and, going by the Curry Man buns we see in this chapter, marketing revenue. (That’s capitalism, babey.)
But anyone who’s main draw to the manga is Denji himself may be disappointed with the opening of Part 2. Instead, we follow a new character entirely, whose comparative mundanity is almost certainly a deliberate contrast to Denji’s dire circumstances at the start of his own story. Perhaps more importantly, like all of the best Chainsaw Man chapters, the opener for Part 2 begins with some off-the-wall crazy shit.
The logic behind this devil being weak is that no one is really scared of chickens. I feel like enough people have read Fourteen for there to be at least something there? Maybe not. It’s not like I’ve read it.
Our real POV character here is Asa Mitaka. An antisocial, and thus, profoundly normal, high school girl. The only real wrinkle here is that her parents were killed by devils, but that’s not particularly unusual within the context of Chainsaw Man. So the notion of the ordinary high school girl remains.
Don’t worry, she doesn’t stay ordinary for very long.
Mitaka seems to spend most of her days being vaguely annoyed at her classmates and, it’s pretty obvious even before it’s said out loud, jealous of their normal, healthy friendships with each other and, eventually, with Bucky, whose absolutely god-awful chicken puns inevitably endear him to the rest of the class. Meanwhile, the class president tries to get Mitaka to socialize a bit more and open up to the rest of her schoolmates.
Now, anyone familiar with Chainsaw Man would be easily able to tell that something was going to go south here, but I think a lot of people will mistakenly pin the suspicion on Bucky himself. Deliberate misdirection? Maybe. But maybe we’ve just been conditioned to be suspicious of devils over the course of the series’ run so far. Either way, he’s actually a genuinely affable sort by the look of it, and for a brief, split second, you can, if you want to, squint and pretend this is a happy manga where people are allowed to have personal realizations about themselves without an accompanying wallop of massive pain and loss.
Moments after this, she trips and falls, crushing the weak little devil to smithereens. It’s all rather nasty.
The fallout is immediate and predictable, and Mitaka takes this about as well as you’d expect.
The class president, as well as the two’s teacher, Mr. Tanaka, get the idea to visit the poor little hell-chicken’s grave. Tanaka is perhaps under the notion that this will make Mitaka feel better, but the class president quite quickly reveals herself to have a rather different motive, and things promptly get all sorts of gnarly.
In the fractions of a second Mitaka has before this monster—the Justice Devil, per the class president’s own admission—slashes her head in half, she feels relieved, because the president brags that she tripped Mitaka, so Bucky’s death wasn’t really her fault. Implicitly, she’s also relieved that she won’t be hurt anymore. That’s the kind of weapons-grade depressing you can expect from Chainsaw Man.
But it also wouldn’t be Chainsaw Man without some bolt-from-the-blue insane twist, and wouldn’t you know it, even with her head doing its best impression of a rotting pumpkin, Mitaka has just enough presence of mind to witness—and hear—a devilish owl perching on a nearby stoplight.
We don’t hear Mitaka think ‘yes’, but what happens next implies that either she did or the owl even asking was a formality. Not a page later, Mitaka—or at least, something in Mitaka’s body—rises back to her feet, only a truly wicked scar where her head was previously carved in half.
The natural questions follow; “Didn’t you just die?” “What the hell are you?” etc.
Reborn, “Mitaka” replies by doing this.
And introduces herself as The War Devil. What follows is, of course, an absolute show-stopper. Hyperviolence on a level that is hard to even describe with words; somewhere in there between the spinal cord longsword and the hand grenade reconstituted from the Justice Devil’s own actual arm, is the kind of bloody poetry that you really just can’t get outside of comic books. It all ends in an explosion and a shower of gore, because obviously it does, this is Chainsaw Man, remember? This kind of casual “I’m back, bitch” flexing is, if anything, hugely welcome in a medium that is only very rarely kind to even its superstars. This is mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto in a braggart mode he’s earned every right to be in.
The chapter’s last page establishes that everything we’ve just seen, if it weren’t already obvious, is an origin story. It’s never a safe bet to call any character’s longevity in Chainsaw Man, but Mitaka (or the War Devil? Or both? It’s a bit hard to say) seems like she’ll stick around for a long while. In the very closing moments here, she makes a comment about nuclear weapons that should be tossing up all kinds of red flags for any long-time Chainsaw Man readers; it’s been established before that those were among the concepts “removed” from reality by Makima’s makimachinations. (On that note; Makima is probably my favorite character in the whole manga, and I think about the only thing this chapter was missing was an appearance by her reincarnated self in the form of Nayuta. But! That will come in time.)
Trying to forecast almost anything about Chainsaw Man is a fool’s game, so I won’t pretend I’ve got anything sussed out. For me, the wait between the old and new Chainsaw Man was only a few days, and even I’m mostly just super happy to have it back. I find it difficult to imagine enduring the whole year-ish hiatus, so I know for sure I’m far from the only person who’s glad to see it again.
Chainsaw Man may well appear here on Magic Planet Anime again in the, ultimately, not-too-distant future, but until then, manga fans.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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