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!
Today’s chapter continues basically directly on from yesterday’s, forming a clean continuation of the battle between Zolo and the Meowban Brothers, one of whom, Siam, has stolen two of Zolo’s three swords, as Nami so helpfully recaps for us with a zippy one-liner.
I kind of love this line, and to be honest there’s quite a bit of fun dialogue scattered (cattered?) throughout the chapter. I’m not sure how much of it is a faithful conveyance of Oda’s original dialogue and how much of it is the translator having a spot of fun. I suspect it’s a bit of both.
A “pirate-flavored pancake.” That’s poetry, right there.
Siam continues to make me slightly uncomfortable, but Butchie is a decently fun character, “cat-a-pault” shouts and all. Zolo gets some good moments here too, including one where he deliberately takes one of Usopp’s slingshot bullets to the back so that way the cat brothers don’t turn their attention on him and Nami.
Of course, there’s really only so much the guy can do. Django steps in when Nami tries to return Zolo’s swords to him, injuring her what looks to be rather badly.
And not long after that, Captain Kuro arrives, and he’s more than a little angry that the Black Cats have been dragging their feet.
The chapter ends there. Tomorrow, we learn what becomes of Luffy and friends.
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.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Ko Yamori (Gen Satou) is having girl problems. Quite the opposite of the many heartbroken protagonists who litter his genre, Ko has recently turned someone else down, on the grounds that he doesn’t really understand what “love” or wanting to date someone actually are yet. Through a combination of resultant bullying and just plain ol’ feeling bad, this has made him want to stop going to school. So, he does. He skips class by day and walks about town late at night. The city is neon-on-black and blown out around him as he absorbs the relative tranquility of a small playground and rambles to himself.
Scrolling post-sundown social media (never a great idea), he gets it in his head to try drinking, despite being only 14. He finds an alcohol vending machine—did you know those were a thing? I certainly didn’t—and, more than a little paranoid as he does so, slips a few coins in. The machine emits a yellow-amber glow all the while, almost sickly in its illumination of the scenery.
He is then promptly jumpscared.
That is Nazuna Nanakusa (Sora Amamiya), nighttime socialite, owner of a pretty cool cloak, and vampire. The specifics are less important than the broadstroke; Nazuna turns Ko’s life on its head over the course of their single night together, which takes up the entire first episode, with not a single second of concession to the morning after. She chats up drunk salarymen, she teases and prods Ko, she says she likes to help people who can’t sleep at night solve their problems.
She takes him to her apartment.
Sadly, she does not climb up the side of her apartment in lizard fashion.
An aside; Call of the Night is somewhat new territory for this site. Despite being the holder of the seasonal romcom slot like previous Let’s Watch subjects My Dress-Up Darling and Kaguya-sama: Love is War!, Call of the Night is not particularly similar to either, and it would be a mistake to lump them together simply because they’re part of the same genre. Call of the Night‘s pedigree is older, and puts the series itself in a more sensible context. After all, people being attracted to vampires instead of (or in addition to) being afraid of them stretches back to the very dawn of popular vampire fiction. They’re nothing new in anime, either, with more or less popular titles that are about or prominently feature a vampire love interest including, just off the top of my own head, Rosario+Vampire, Vampire Knight, Actually, I Am…. / My Monster Secret, Seifuku no Vampiress Lord, Vampeerz, etc.
These span several different genres, but what all have in common is that the vampire is portrayed, at least initially, and in line with their origins as a creature of the horror genre, as something dangerous. Something that warrants caution. This is true of Call of the Night as well, even as Ko himself throws that caution to the wind not long after discovering Nazuna’s true nature and he decides he wants in on the whole “vampire” thing, the framing never lets her seem too innocent for too long. For every cut that depicts Nazuna like this, where she says something goofy or outright dumb.
There’s another that portrays her like this; a predatorial-in-the-animal-sense midnight stalker. She’s a vampire. Let her bite you.
Now, while danger can certainly be scary, it can also be salacious, and unsurprisingly that’s the angle that most of Call of the Night‘s more intense scenes take. Even less surprisingly, the attempts to play up Nazuna’s conventional sex appeal don’t work nearly as well as those that focus her vampiric features. The former are simply too clean. There’s a shot in here where the camera rotates around her body in an attempt to show off her midriff and it just looks absurd. (What is she, a sports car?) This is without mentioning what looks a lot like airbrushing on parts of her body, it just all looks too silly to take seriously.
The latter though? Well, there’s an old joke in some circles about how you can tell when they get someone who’s “into feet” (or into whatever) to animate a given scene. I think Call of the Night‘s team has someone who’s into teeth.
If they could only nail one, though, it’s actually better for it to be the latter. Ko, after all, is not so much attracted to Nazuna yet as he’s attracted to the idea of becoming a vampire, as is established not long after Nazuna reveals that she is one. We need to see this stuff through his eyes for that desire to make sense on a literal level (and on a less literal one, depicting some kind of temptation only works in any context if you can successfully convey said tempting). Fill in your own vice or vices here; is “vampirism” code for sex? Drugs? Booze? Just the general nightlife experience? There’s no reason it can’t be all of the above, and by keeping the metaphor fairly broad and open to finer interpretation, Call of the Night‘s first episode mostly succeeds in its aims of making Ko’s attraction to Nazuna—or perhaps more, what Nazuna offers—understandable, in spite of some minor flaws.
Call of the Night does also zero in on one particular thing. Nazuna, at one point, asks Ko why he thinks people stay up late in the first place. It’s a rhetorical question, and she provides her own answer.
This is an interesting notion, and certainly one that maps to why a lot of say, millennials like myself stay up too late, but the way Nazuna plays it is even more interesting. Later in the episode, Ko expresses that he knows he shouldn’t be doing “something like this”—that is to say, this whole skipping school and staying out at night bit—in the first place. Nazuna, who seems to have taken an interest in him despite herself, responds to that thought by hovering above the ground, and asking him this.
The question pierces the thematic heart of Call of the Night in general. How does Ko feel about all this? He says to himself, remembering back to the incident at school, that he tried to do the right thing. Nazuna cuts in—literally invading the flashback—to ask why he even cares.
It’s clear that Nazuna, for whatever reason or reasons, wants to bring him over to the very literal dark side. He can be a creature of the night too, if he wants to be. And that is, abstractly, what the show says for anyone; the only requirement for being an outcast, after all, is that you are cast out. Ko, at least in his own mind, already has been. The freaks come out at night, the question for Ko—and more broadly for anyone—is simply whether they feel they fit in more with them, or with the normal folks who thrive while the Sun’s up.
On another level; the extent to which Nazuna is a shamelessly bad influence adds further knots to the already twisty question of how “okay” any of this is. But personally, I’m less interested in the question of if Nazuna’s actions are in some way moral and more in the question of if this resonates both with its intended audience and more generally.
That’s a question that it will take the rest of Call of the Night’s thirteen episodes to answer, so for now, it’s an open one. But! I think this first showing is promising. Toward the end of “Night Flight”, the episode earns its title, as Nazuna gives Ko the thrill of his life whether he wants it or not.
She kicks him off of a roof, and lets him panic mid-freefall for a moment. Of course, she swoops down to save him, picking him up and carrying him away as ED theme kicks in.1 In that moment, Call of the Night is pure black magic. If it keeps figuring out how to do that, it has nothing to worry about; the night is still young.
1: Also called “Call of the Night”, and after which the manga was originally named. I did not know this when I wrote the article and have updated the phrasing here and added this footnote to reflect the reality of the situation.
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!
Right at the top of today’s chapter, Kaya awakes from a nightmare, only to discover another in her living room; her butler, the sheep-man Merry, lying half-dead on the floor. That he’s still alive at all is a bit of a surprise to me, when we saw Kuro fuck him up I really thought he was done done, but I guess the guy’s a survivor.
A man of character—and of being beaten within an inch of his life by a traitorous jerk—he sets Kaya straight pretty quick, informing her of “Klahadore”‘s betrayal and of the impending pirate invasion.
With Merry wounded and the rest of her staff on holiday, Kaya, in spite of her grave (but vague) illness, sets off into town to try warn the townsfolk of the pirate attack that must surely, if Usopp was telling the truth after all, be coming. Who should she run into along the way but Usopp’s “crew”?
Back at the beach, Django calls in the Black Cat Pirates’ ringer; a pair of the most absolutely vile-lookin’, ragged, fucked up catboys you’ve ever seen.
the catboys i signed for my all-catboy pirate crew dont know what piracy is and theyre actively loudly sobbing whenever they miss a swing of their cutlass and whenever they try to load a cannonball they drop it and it bonks them on the head and they go “uweh” and our first mate closes his eyes whenever he fires his flintlock because hes scared and we’re beating every other crew on the Blue Line
The two initially seem to really live up to that horrible caption I just put under the above image, flailing about and crying as they confront Zolo. Only for them to reveal that—gasp!—it’s all a ruse! In the confusion, Siam there is able to jack two of Zolo’s swords.
That’s where the chapter ends, so how Zolo gets his swords back, what happens to Kaya and Usopp’s little buddies, etc., are all tomorrow’s questions.
To raise a question though; do the designs of these two cat-men make anyone else vaguely uncomfortable? Mostly Siam’s? He looks like a grandmother cosplaying Cure Black. There’s something vaguely not-quite-transphobic-but-definitely-in-that-same-general-area about it, to me. Maybe I’m reaching, feel free to tell me if you think so in the comments.
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.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
As we stand in the blistering spring wind, we are resolute, humble, and decorous. We are Pentagrams, and with the pride of flowers, we learn and study hard.
I really must, before saying anything at all about this series, direct even site regulars to the warning in the header. Arsnotoria is the sort of thing I’d recommend going into as blind as possible. (Even saying that much is a bit of a giveaway, but there’s a certain amount of that which can’t be helped.)
But let’s get into it, shall we?
You get them a few times per year; anime whose premieres just make you go “huh?”
Often, they start out as one genre and then take a left turn into another. Or their tone does a total headstand somewhere in the first episode or two. Something like that. By me even mentioning this, you can guess that Smile of The Arsnotoria: The Animation—clunky title and all—is an example of this, but it’s worth explaining why even bringing that up is noteworthy. These days, these kinds of swerves don’t have much impact anymore. Somewhere after Gakkou Gurashi people started to almost expect them, and most modern examples don’t even bother waiting until the premiere to tip their hand, with, for example, one of Arsnotoria‘s contemporaries Lycoris Recoil not even keeping up the facade for all of its preview trailers. So, if nothing else, if the entire rest of the series is a total, out-and-out bomb that drops off the face of the Earth after it finishes airing, it should at least be noted for its restraint.
There are 22 minutes in Arsnotoria‘s first episode. About 20 of them are extremely pleasant, almost iyashikei-esque slice of life coziness. Let’s talk about those minutes first, since they form the bulk of the episode.
Right from the top, we’re dropped to the goings-on in a magical academy of some sort, and into the lives of five schoolgirls. These are Arsnotoria herself (Misaki Kuno), Mell (Miharu Hanai), Ko Alberta (Miyu Tomita), Picatrix (Eri Yukimura), and Abramelin (Eriko Matsui). No, I don’t know why Ko is the only one with a last name either (although there is brief mention of a Grand Alberta, also. Maybe they’re related).
They fall into familiar and broad character archetypes; Arsnotoria is the cutesy and naive one, Mell is rambunctious and michievious, Ko is a sleepyhead who’s more aware than she lets on, Picatrix is an ojou complete with ending most of her sentences with “desu wa”, and Abramelin is the serious, responsible one. These aren’t the most compelling or deep characters, but they work in the sort of easygoing, slice of life mold that most of the episode traffics in.
“Easygoing” might be underselling it, really. Much of the episode is positively languid, and it’s telling that a solid 10 minutes are taken up by the characters discussing tea. This admittedly gets a little boring toward the end, but it’s to Arsnotoria‘s credit that it manages to actually keep this fairly engaging for most of that time. Discussions of what side one butters their scones on recall the (in?)famous chocolate coronet scene in Lucky Star. And at one point, Ko tries to bash a sealed jam jar open with some lavishly-animated and quite powerful looking magic wherein she summons a huge, bandaged hand to punch it.
Aside from this, there are a few setting details. The school this all takes place at, the “academy city” of Ashlam, seems to basically be a furnishing school for young arcanists, which is perfectly fine as a setting and it’s one plenty of other things have done (in anime alone you have everything from Tweeny Witches to Little Witch Academia to Mahou Girls Precure to, perhaps most relevant for this part of the episode, Mysteria Friends). A fair bit of proper terminology gets lobbed at us here. Not quite enough to be a Proper Noun Machine Gun, but maybe a Proper Noun Slingshot.
And mixed in with all this are some interesting bits about London being on “the surface”, which seems to both imply (somewhat surprisingly) that this takes place in a version of our world, and that Ashlam is actually physically above the ground.
All of this may seem irrelevant, given the total tonal 180 that you’re all aware, if you’ve gotten this far in the article, is coming, but there is one other detail that seems significant; the opening of the episode sees our characters return from a “watch” shift. A watch for what is not a question I thought to ask while first viewing the scene, but it’s certainly on my mind at this point.
Because, yes, in its final two minutes or so, Arsnotoria completely tips its hand, in perhaps the most dope slap-blunt way possible. A cut to black, the word “WARNING” inexplicably written across the screen in bright red, and then this.
A scene of total, apocalyptic ruin. (Complete with some very nice billowing fire animation.) Inquisitors patrol streets and slaughter citizens for being “Negatives,” explaining nothing with their cryptic comments as they do so. It does not even look like it’s from the same universe as the entire preceding 20 minutes, and with just that little bit of footage, Arsnotoria goes from being enjoyable if predictable to a total fucking wildcard.
None of this necessarily means that Arsnotoria will be good. It is entirely possible to have an interesting structure but fail on any number of other counts (or even all other counts), but it’s at least a good sign.
The Takeaway: Really, this one is pretty simple. If you enjoy throwing caution to the wind and gambling on something that no one has any real idea as to where it’s going, you want in on this. If not, you can probably skip it.
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.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
The big three-oh. Hello, folks. I’m writing to you mere hours (at most) before this column will go live, because I’ve completely burned through my meager back-catalogue and didn’t have time to get this written yesterday. Life! It’s complicated sometimes. Also, hey, let’s talk about this chapter art for a second, because it has to be some of the weirdest I’ve yet come across while reading this manga. Robot versions of the Straw Hat Pirates? Although I’ll admit my inner Transformers fan is delighted by Zolotron up there.
In any case, the actual chapter makes something super important very clear; if the Black Cat pirates were an MMO party, One-Two Django would be the guy handling buffs and heals. In theory, that’s all well and good. Luffy and Zolo pulverize the entire Black Cat landing force, but Django is able to heal them back up and make them stronger with nothing more than his hypnotism. (How exactly that works is left as an exercise to the reader but hey, it’s a shonen manga, don’t overthink it.)
And that would be fine, were it not for the fact that Django is apparently a bit subpar atdirecting his hypnotic powers. (Or maybe Luffy is just that easy to hypnotize.)
Since Luffy is also healed and strengthened, this turns the entire battle against the Black Cat landing force into a typhoon of rubber fists and “yarr” noises. They really don’t stand a chance. Doubly so when Luffy actually rips the bow off of their ship, which leads to this amusing bit here.
I cannot think of anything I could say that could possibly make this funnier than “shiver me timbers!” already is.
But while Luffy and co. have definitely made a dent in the Black Cat Pirates, they haven’t actually won. Django conks Luffy out with his hypnotism shortly after this, and we get an allusion to two apparently particularly-vicious pirates who are still onboard the ship (perhaps along with some other contingent of crew).
And meanwhile, one of Usopp’s young friends notices the “butler” of the town’s mansion heading to the beach rather early, and decides to trail him. I hope the little buddy stays safe! We’ll learn of his fate tomorrow, one must assume.
As a minor PS for today’s column: I just wanted to note, I know I’ve been a little quiet with replying to comments and such over the past week or two. Hoping to start doing that again this coming week, since I’m finally out of having an absolute ton to do every day for life reasons.
Actually, let me field you a question, Straw Hat Pirates. Have you been reading any manga lately? (Other than One Piece, presumably.) I picked up Chainsaw Man a few days ago, I quite like it.
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.
Hi folks! VERY short PSA here, just wanted to note that tomorrow’s One Piece Every Day column will drop later in the day than usual because I had some stuff come up today. It will still be out tomorrow, just later on than usual.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
In 2005, Tokyo Mew Mew, under the localized title Mew Mew Power, became one of the very, very few non-Sailor Moon magical girl anime to ever make any real inroads in the United States. It wasn’t a runaway hit—in fact, it was one domino among many that eventually lead to downfall of infamous chopjob dub house 4Kids Entertainment—but it’s stuck around in a nebulous, cultural sense. As one of the tiny handful of magical girl anime that’s ever made any kind of dent stateside, it’s at least stuck in peoples’ memories. I was not one of the people who saw its US run, and in fact today marks the first time I’ve watched any Tokyo Mew Mew in any form, but the fact that it has that tiny little toehold in the minds of Anglophone magical girl fans matters, and it makes the series’ return in rebooted form as Tokyo Mew Mew New something of an event (if perhaps only a minor one). I imagine at least a few people will find their way to this article by looking up the new series.
New arrives nearly 20 years to the season that the original Tokyo Mew Mew premiered in its home country, and it returns like no time has passed at all. Almost every element of the series is relentlessly, unapologetically old school, for both good and ill, and it’s hard to imagine something like this being written nowadays were this not an old property for a lot of reasons.
At its core, the story is a simple one. Ordinary high school girl Ichigo Momomiya (Yuuki Tenma), has a crush on her school’s kendo star, Masaya Aoyama (Yuuma Uchida). She gets word from the mysterious Mint Aizawa (Mirai Hinata) that the guy loves his animals and, what a coincidence, she happens to have two tickets to an endangered animals exhibit at a local zoo that she’s willing to part with. Ichigo, being a pink-themed magical girl protagonist, does not think twice about how odd this is, and takes her up on the offer. At the zoo, Ichigo is hit with some kind of magic ray gun by a pair of handsome scientists(?!), which causes her to commune with some kind of cat spirit, and transforms her into a magical girl. Then, of course, she has to fight off a giant rat monster. You know, typical schoolgirl stuff.
You know, normally only Medicine Cats have visions of Star Clan.
Tokyo Mew Mew New arguably doesn’t really need to “separate itself from the pack” or anything of the sort. (There really isn’t much of a “pack” nowadays, with New‘s only direct competitor being the concurrent Delicious Party Precure.) But it does so regardless via two main things; the aforementioned old-school sensibility, which mostly comes through in its heavy focus in the first episode on an idealized sort of teen girl romance, and its concern for the environment.
The former is….a bit of a mixed thing. In a way, it’s charming to see something this straightforward and earnest in 2022. Ichigo’s brain seems to be stuffed with romantic notions of movie dates and love letters, and the show itself is absolutely flooded with classic shoujo tropes, many of which I imagine might be wholly unfamiliar to some younger viewers. Speaking personally, it’s been a long time since I last saw the whole “gaggle of girls fawning over a hot guy doing A School Sport” thing played completely straight. (Emphasis on the “straight”, perhaps.)
Some of this brushes up against uncomfortable implications, but it doesn’t cross that line yet, even as details like Ichigo’s magic power tattoo appearing on her thigh and an actual, honest-to-god, “whoops I fell on top of you and we accidentally kissed” scene make me raise my eyebrow a bit.
This happens. They even show the lip lock in the cut after this, a genuine rarity for any TV anime these days.
It’s too soon to call whether the environmental messaging will be put to good use or not. Certainly, it is a hell of a bit of tonal whiplash to go from Ichigo and Masaya enjoying their date to the latter gravely expositing about the Endangered Species List and how “humanity has committed sins” (that is a paraphrase, but he seriously does put it in roughly those terms). Certainly the climate crisis has not gotten any better since the original Tokyo Mew Mew aired, but there is a thin line between an actual effective thematic core and one that’s confusing, hysterical, or just bizarre. Time will tell which side of that line New falls on.
But in general, New‘s fuck-the-trends attitude helps it a lot more than it hurts. It’s honestly just invigorating to see something this classically magical warrior mahou shoujo, even as it also evokes, as well, sci-fi tropes that are much less common to the genre. (Remember Corrector Yui?) More than anything, I’m just happy to see another magical girl anime airing at all. The genre has seen healthier days, but maybe a bit of mew mew power and mew mew grace can breathe some new life into it.
The Takeaway: Keep a cat’s eye on this one if you’ve got any interest in the genre at all. If not, still check it out to see if the retro shoujo vibe catches your interest.
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!
Today, One Piece returns to its usual forte. Basically, a whole chapter that’s a long action sequence. (In fact, this and the next chapter seem to form a contiguous single action sequence. That in mind, it’s really more like half of one.)
We open on an unenviable situation; Usopp and Nami, easily the least combat-capable of our protagonists, are forced to stand alone against the Black Cat Pirates, who, after some banter, promptly charge.
Surprisingly though, they manage to fend the pirates off, at least for a little while, with a combination of caltrops(!) and Usopp’s slingshot(?!?!). Also, hijinks continue to occur.
“My work here is done.” “But you didn’t do anything!”
And I’d be remiss to not at least briefly touch on Luffy being lost for about half the chapter.
The real centerpiece of the chapter though comes when Usopp gets his head knocked in. He’s clearly hurt pretty bad, but he still doesn’t just let Captain Kuro’s crew walk all over him. It’s a bit of the old burning justice that keeps him hanging on, and it’s nice to see him trying an honest stab at being genuinely heroic.
But, of course, the real capable hands arrive just as Django’s lot push their way past Usopp and Nami. Meaning that the conclusion of this particular fight is a concern for tomorrow.
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!
Today’s One Piece is a comedy of errors.
Something I suppose I should’ve picked up on by now is that there’s usually a little more time before the Big Climactic Battle in a given One Piece arc than you might expect. So today’s chapter is almost entirely setup, but it’s at least decently fun setup.
We open with a bit of half-character development for Usopp (PS: thank you guys for pointing out all the interesting literary references baked in to the character in the comments. To be honest, I’d never have picked up on those on my own).
It’s a start.
Our heroes prepare an ingenious trap wherein they coat the only passage leading from the island’s southern beach to the village with an oil slick. We’ll get back to the flaws in this plan momentarily.
Meanwhile, Captain Kuro lays his cards on the table, or at least he does for the other butler in Kaya’s employ (who I don’t think we’ve ever gotten a name for).
I absolutely love this; he has zero reason to do any of it and it ends with him killing the guy. Was the whole point of the long con here not specifically that he could do all this without having to commit any violence other than killing Kaya? What is the point of the pirate raid itself, actually, now that I think of it and on that note? Is it to create plausible confusion that Kaya might die in?
Whatever the case, that marks the end of Kuro’s nice guy act. Good riddance. In the sort of thing that seems counterintuitive only if you don’t know how stories work, he’s actually more likable as an out-and-out bad guy.
When we cut to the next day, Luffy and co. realize they’ve made a minor mistake. Namely; they’re on the wrong beach.
As the chapter ends, Luffy, Zolo, and Nami are two-for-three on being somehow unable to confront the pirates. Luffy runs off in the wrong direction, and Zolo gets caught in the crew’s own oil trap. (Which Nami accidentally pushes him into.)
Is this girlboss behavior? Vote now in the comments below.
Tomorrow: Can our heroes overcome this comedic series of obstacles to stop the Black Cat Pirates, or will Usopp truly have to fend them off alone?
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Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Entertain this particular dystopian thought for a moment; what if the world ran on Twitter likes? That, more or less, is the backbone of the society envisioned by YUREI DECO, a neon-block dystopia where the Metaverse has grown beyond its Silicon Valley bounds and swallowed the real world whole, such that there is no longer any meaningful distinction between the two. (This isn’t me reaching, it’s literally called “The Hyperverse” in-show.) Social media tokens called “Love” equate one to one with the sum total of your personal value, and seemingly the whole world is overlaid with a second digital layer of reality that there is no meaningful escape from. Dual implants in each eye, the DECOs of one half of the title, ensure that everyone is plugged in at all times. Truly, Yurei Deco‘s world is one where we are all terminally online, and there is no logging off for anybody.
This is the setting we’re dropped into, handy explanation and all, at the start of this series’ first episode, as we sit in on our main character, Berry (Mira Kawakatsu) and the glorified Zoom class that she calls school. Immediately, we get the sense that Berry is someone who plays outside the rules, as she pulls off some minor computer wizardry to be able to talk to two of her classmates without their teacher noticing. Passing notes for the cyberpunk age, perhaps.
(Somewhere in his lecture, which also serves as our introduction to the setting, Berry’s professor calls the city they live in “the purest expression of liberalism ever to have existed.” Subtle!)
We soon learn that a mysterious person—or perhaps a force—called Phantom Zero has been hitting whole neighborhoods at a time and draining their Love accounts, a big deal in a city where Love is both money and social status. Berry is obsessed with Phantom Zero, and it’s through her eyes and ears that most of this first episode takes place. Including when one of her DECO implants starts glitching out, and she finds a strange origami flower stuck to a lamppost.
That flower, we eventually learn, is the doing of our other main character, a slang-tangling hacker-conman who initially seems like they might be behind the whole “Phantom Zero” thing, given that one of the first things we see her do is sucker a random influencer out of most of his Love. This character’s name, incidentally, is actually just is Hack (Anna Nagase), although you’d have to look at supplementary materials to know that at this point, since it’s not said outright in the first episode.
.hack//Cool Visor, Kid
Berry of course becomes fixated on Hack, who she believes to be responsible for the Phantom Zero phenomenon. Without indulging in an overabundance of detail, she turns out to be wrong, and the real culprit is someone even more mysterious.
The show’s actual plot details aside, what do we make of YUREI DECO so far? Personally, I’m happy to have it around. It’s been a bit since we had a show with interesting visuals that tried to tackle Serious Subjects, or at least, one that didn’t flame out disappointingly. (Sorry, Tokyo 24th Ward.) The series definitely reminds me a fair bit of DECA-DENCE, another colorful cyberpunk series with an all-caps title. More distantly, it recalls Kaiba, and while I’ve not seen Dennou Coil I know enough about it for the multiple comparisons I’ve seen between the two on social media to make sense to me.
A lot of lofty expectations tend to get placed upon anime like this, and this one in particular also happens to be its director’s first TV anime (Tomohisa Shimoyama, though it’s worth noting that he has various credits on things going all the way back to some animation work on Chobits. There’s a show you probably haven’t thought about in a while). While this first episode is a pretty good indication that YUREI DECO is up to that challenge, I do hope folks won’t lose the forest for the trees. There’s a lot to love here already, regardless of where it ends up going.
The Takeaway: If you’ve been looking for the next visually interesting Big Ideas show to come along, you should absolutely be watching this. As for anyone else, I think it’s certainly at least worth checking out.
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