Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 13

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!

A theory I’m putting forward to you all; Mohji is the worst character in One Piece so far.

I know! It’s probably controversial, but bear with me here. What kind of heartless motherfucker picks a fight with a dog? Not a big scary threatening dog that is in your way, just a random dog guarding a random building that you have no interest in and your pet lion only kind of does. What kind of person does that? Mohji, apparently. I hate Mohji. Fuck him.

But pick a fight with Chou-Chou is exactly what Mohji does, and as such the first third or so of today’s chapter is a fight sequence where Chou-Chou and Mohji’s lion Richie duke it out. Through sheer moxie, and the loving memory of his owner, Chou-Chou manages to not just survive but to actually hold Richie off for a time. And I know that love for his owner is what’s motivating Chou-Chou here, because of the technique here used where the panels are aligned into strips that seem to “fade in and out” by getting narrower and wider, representative of the memories coursing through Chou-Chou’s mind as he fights.

But even though Chou-Chou is a very good dog, he’s still going to struggle against a lion (much less a jacked anime lion), so at some point, off-panel, Mohji burns the store to the ground.

Worst character in One Piece so far, I rest my case.

Unfortunately, Mohji fails to account for Luffy, who is A) very much still alive and B) very, very upset at Mohji for taking Chou-Chou’s “treasure” from him. In a display of karma so quick it’d give you whiplash, Luffy piledrives Mohji’s lion into the dirt, and doesn’t take much longer to deal with Mohji himself.

You wouldn’t like Luffy when he’s angry.

Mohji joins his pet lion face-down in the dirt soon after.

All of this is small consolation to Chou-Chou, though, who after all, cannot get the building—or his master—back.

Nami, in particular, is not impressed by all this.

But it is worth pointing out her inching toward pirate-acceptance here. Pivoting from the above, and a whole lot of “fight me, bro”-isms flung in Luffy’s direction, to this….

….just a few pages later. Again, I like to call out clever technique like this when I see it. By slipping this bit in here, Oda prevents any “dead pages”—stuffing, essentially. Devoid of meaningful narrative or visual content—just to reach a page count, a thing that many mangaka seem to struggle with.

In general, I think the saga of Chou-Chou the dog—who departs toward the end of the chapter here, possibly toward the refugee shelter Boodle mentioned in the last chapter—is my favorite of the small story arcs we’ve seen so far. I’m sure it will eventually be dethroned, but I’m a sucker for tales of animal loyalty, so it may be a bit before that happens.

Back on his ship, Buggy the Clown learns of Mohji’s demise, and is not pleased.

I DO NOT WANT TO READY THE BUGGY BALLS.

Tomorrow: No more clowning around!

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 Directory to 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.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 11 – Stella

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Last week’s dodgeball plan out the window, Anya Forger needs to find a new way to earn Stella stars if Operation Strix has any chance of succeeding in the long term. In this week’s episode of Spy x Family, she finds a way, although not intentionally, and not without a fair bit of harrowing suspense beforehand.

The episode opens simply, with Loid again struggling with Anya as the latter’s grades continue to sink, although with a more understanding approach than we’ve previously seen. (Also, at one point Loid mentally refers to Anya as his daughter with no further clarifiers, which I think is sweet.) Even from the point of view of a mundane parent, Anya’s scores would be a problem; we see at least three F’s, and there may be several more, so clearly, he’s got to do something. Anya’s academic woes aren’t solved in this episode. Even as she has a fun internal monologue about how she can totally just read other peoples’ minds to cheat, and makes an attempt to sound like Loid while she does so, it’s clear that things need to change for Anya to have any hope of getting a Stella.

All of this vexes Twilight. And indeed, Anya’s ESP means that since she can read his mind, his worries become hers in a very real and immediate sense; a literalization of the idea that children tend to inherit their parents’ anxieties.

He does hit upon one possible solution though, a father-daughter “ooting” to a local hospital. There, he hopes that perhaps Anya acquiring a taste for volunteer work might eventually lead to her getting a Stella for being an exceptional community member. If not any time soon, at least eventually.

Loid gets far more than he bargained for. Initially, this is played for comedy. Anya, being a girl of recall, only five or so, is terrible at helping out around the hospital, first breaking a vase and then shirking her task to reorganize the hospital library by reading their comics section. (Presumably, something they keep around to entertain young patients, which Anya definitely falls in that bracket.)

Just when this gets bad enough that the Forgers are practically kicked out, though, something much more serious occurs. A young boy named Ken, attending a physical therapy session in the hospital’s pool room, idles around near the adults’ pool. Not paying much attention (do kids ever?) he falls in, and almost immediately “Stella” takes a turn for the significantly darker.

Ken cannot swim, and being unable to even thrash or make noise, he simply sinks to the bottom of the pool like a rock. The direction of the episode takes a sharp detour into the visually harrowing here, with the underwater shots especially composed like something out of a tragic drama. The boy is saved only by his own thoughts; mental pleas for help that happen to be picked up by our resident psychic.

In a visible panic of her own, Anya rushes off to the pool with a flimsy excuse to help. Thankfully, Loid gives chase, because even though her bravery is admirable and her desire to help equally so, Anya can’t swim either, and it’s only the fact that Loid hurries after Anya into the pool room that saves both her and Ken. A mission well done, if ever there was one.

Her role in Ken’s rescue is enough to earn Anya the titular Stella, her very first. She gets something vaguely akin to a henshin or other kind of visual power-up sequence as it’s put on her uniform, and it puts a sweet cap on what is otherwise a rather harrowing story. Perhaps more important than the Stella is the other thing Anya has earned: some self-confidence. For the first time, she considers that her powers might be able to actually help people. (And, of course, that this might make people like her. Something she’s also still not entirely accustomed to.)

The remainder of the episode focuses on the aftereffects of all this. Anya briefly gets a bit of a big head, in fact.

But unfortunately her hopes that having earned a Stella in a genuinely heroic fashion might endear her to her classmates are quickly dashed. Some nameless girls in class are straight-up mean about it, and even suggest she might’ve faked it somehow. Only for Damian (!) to, roundaboutly at least, stick up for her by telling the gossips that if they think Eden is such a cut-rate school that they’d hand out a Stella by accident, they should transfer. (He leaves out the part where the main reason he cares about Anya’s Stella being authentic is that it hurts his pride that she got one before him. And it would hurt even more if it weren’t genuinely earned.)

Anya’s little friend Becky also suggests, running on pure spoiled-little-princess logic, that since Anya did something good she should ask for a reward. Eventually, she hits on the idea of a dog (because, you see, Damian has a dog. And if Damian has a dog and Anya also has a dog they’ll have something to talk about. And that will lead to world peace. The mind of a first-grader is incredible. The mind of a telepathic first-grader, all the more so). Anya’s able to talk Loid and Yor into it fairly easily—though not without them respectively wondering about a dog’s utility as a house guard and threat level respectively—and the episode ends there, with the promise of Dog Shenanigans next week for the last episode of the first cour.

Except, there’s a little bit more. Somewhere in a mad laboratory-turned-hellish dog pound, a group of canines who’ve had something done to them—it’s not clear what—waste away in tiny, dirty cages. A pair of villains, obvious by their poor treatment of the animals, talk about their client, who they speculate will use the animals as “bomb dogs.” What the broader implications of any of this may be are presently unclear, but the camera focuses on one dog in particular as the episode fades out, and I do suspect we’ll be seeing him again soon.

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 Directory to 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.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 11

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

We knew this day would come. There’s been a fire burning in Miyuki Shirogane’s heart since we first learned that he’d be transferring abroad for college, probably since before then. Hourglasses wait for no one, and Miyuki and Kaguya’s dynamic has shifted fairly drastically since the first season, or really even, the earlier parts of this season.

Episode 11 is, top to bottom, filled with the actions of a man who knows he’s running out of time, and running out of time fast. We learn at the very end of this episode that the transfer to Stanford is not some far-off thing, he’s been accepted. And will be skipping his last year of high school. Shooting for the moon is no longer an option; it’s a necessity.

But as much as this episode does to pour the powder in and light the fuse, the long-awaited confessionary gun does not fire just yet. That’s for next week’s episode, a double-length finale. This week, there’s a lot of tension, a lot of buildup, and, thankfully, still quite a lot of jokes. A ton of great visual tricks here, too, most of which I don’t have the space to discuss individually.

We begin with what I’m fairly sure is a deliberate throwback to the back-and-forth antics of season one. Kaguya visits a balloon tying table, which ‘just so happens’ to be staffed by Shirogane. Obviously, she wants him to make her a balloon heart, but in her own mind she still can’t just say that, leading to her giving out an increasingly ridiculous list of things that the balloon can’t be, culminating with her arguing that flowers are animals. (It’s complicated.)

Notably, in this and a few other nods to the first season’s structure, Kaguya and Shirogane’s roles are reversed. It is now Kaguya who is at a distinct “disadvantage” when it comes to playing these little games. Notice, for instance, how things turn when she finally gets her heart balloon, and finds out that you don’t pay for them with money like you do any of the other designs.

Whoops!

Flustered, she slaps far too much money down and flees. It’s funny, but it does also show that Kaguya and Shirogane are really no longer even doing the same thing. When they both thought they had all the time in the world to work this out, the stakes were relatively low. Now that Shirogane, at least, knows that that’s not the case, he has much less to lose. (Arguably, he never had anything to lose in the first place other than perhaps a misplaced sense of pride, but you know how teenagers are.)

Eventually, Kaguya encounters Tsubame, who is having a tough time figuring out how to respond to Ishigami’s unintentional confession. Specifically, figuring out how to turn him down. She’s used to turning down playboy types who think they’re entitled to her, but Ishigami’s confession was (from her point of view, see last episode’s recap for how this whole mixup happened), sincere and straightforward, and that’s not something she knows how to deal with.

It’s not even, really, that she doesn’t like Ishigami. She just doesn’t know him very well, and is concerned that being in a serious relationship would damage other areas of her life.

Kaguya, always with a minor in villainy, initially assumes that the person she’s talking about must be someone else—and thus one of Ishigami’s rivals—and in the process she very nearly convinces Tsubame to shut him down in perhaps the worst way possible.

Thankfully things eventually clear themselves up. Kaguya and Tsubame eventually find themselves spying on Chika, who deals with the out-of-the-blue confession that she gets by challenging her would-be beaux to a quiz and then spouting koans at him.

There’s also a short scene where Iino very nearly gets sweet-talked by a pair of random incidental characters. Girl really needs to be more careful (thankfully Ishigami is there to bonk her on the head).

The remainder of the episode sees Kaguya run into Shirogane again. He promptly invites her to walk around the festival, and once again, Kaguya does not entirely know how to deal with Shirogane’s suddenly much more blunt personality. When she asks him if people won’t get the idea that they’re on a date, to which he promptly responds….

….again, he knows he’s running short on time. All of this is fairly interesting in that outside of the context of Kaguya-sama as a series itself, it wouldn’t be that notable. But within that context, knowing what we do about both of these people, Shirogane’s sudden comparative boldness is pretty striking.

This includes, for example, taking her to a fortune telling booth manned by a girl known for asking questions that border on the lascivious. Meet Yume Atenbo (Ai Kakuma). She’s what some sorts of people, a long time ago, would’ve called a one-scene wonder. She gets in, does her thing, and gets out. She’s kind of amazing, an opinion I definitely don’t hold in part because she’s dressed up as a witch and my Twitter account is called “Jane the Anime Witch.”

She needles the two to the point of, frankly, harassment. (As always, romcoms are not a good place to get your notions of proper romance or just behavior in general from, kids.) But she does also drop this particularly interesting bombshell in between all the quips about how Kaguya will make a great wife.

Is she just messing with them? Is she playing cupid? Does she have actual supernatural insight somehow? Who knows, but no matter the method, she is actually right, as we’ll come to see. She also compares Kaguya to pure water; someone whose very nature changes depending on who she surrounds herself with. (I would argue this is true of all people to some extent, but that it’s truer of Kaguya than most would not necessarily be wrong.)

The both of them flustered (but definitely happy), Kaguya and Shirogane spend much of the remaining day together, after a hilarious sequence where the two narrowly avoid having their date ruined by random interference from their friends. (My favorite of these involves Iino, who is hungry, and gets abruptly drafted into a soba-eating contest out of nowhere before she can even talk to the two of them.)

Near the end of the episode, Kaguya has this absolutely adorable thought.

The only thing putting a damper on this happy ending is what I mentioned back up there in the very first paragraph. Shirogane needs to talk about something serious, and it’s not what Kaguya would’ve wanted to hear.

Can they make it work out somehow? Will Shirogane actually find the nerve to confess his love? Will the mysterious phantom thief stealing up all the heart balloons ever be caught? (Yeah, that whole plot runs throughout the background of this episode, too. It’s why Chika’s in her Love Detective uniform up in the banner.) All of these questions and more will be answered next week in the finale. See you then, Love is War fans!

Bonus Hayasaka Screencap, which I have been shamefully forgetting to do: Here’s Hayasaka giving a full-on idol performance during the school festival.

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 Directory to 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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 12

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, we’re introduced to three new characters; a villainous lion-tamer, the mayor of the city Buggy and his lackeys have ransacked, and a dog. Working out which of these three has the most impact to the plot is left as an exercise to the reader. But I’ll give you a hint; it somehow isn’t this guy.

That’s not to say that Mohji isn’t important. Nor to say that Boodle—the mayor—isn’t, either. But the real star of this chapter is that dog, Chou-Chou.

This is a bit of an odd thing that I’ve noticed One Piece likes to do, introduce several characters at once, sometimes dropping their backstory on us like a sack of wrenches, and then resuming the current main plot either in the back half of the chapter’s page count or in the next one entirely. It’s not an approach I dislike, but it’s one I don’t see in much else—if this isn’t abundantly clear by now, I don’t read a ton of other shonen—so I’ve had to get a bit used to it. (And who’s to say if it’ll even still apply, a hundred chapters from now?)

You may remember that yesterday ended with Zolo in pretty bad shape, bleeding out as he hauled Luffy off to flee from Buggy’s crew. Luffy himself is still stuck in the cage he’s been imprisoned in as the chapter starts, and Nami seems a bit exasperated with the both of them.

All’s well that ends well, though, because she stole the key to the cage, so Luffy can break out with no issues. Problem solved, right?

Well, no. Remember that dog?

Munch squad.

Boodle shows up not long after, explaining that Chou-Chou has been fighting off Buggy’s crew all on his own. Why? To protect the pet food store owned by his late master, who passed away a few months before the events of this arc of an unspecified illness. I’m super underselling this here, but it’s actually pretty touching, considering how brief it all is. (Or maybe I’m just a sap.)

One Piece also floats an interesting theme here that I suppose it has actually brought up before, but I just haven’t been paying a ton of attention to. The notion of what “treasure” itself actually is. Luffy’s greatest treasure, after all, is the hat given to him by Red-Hair Shanks. Chou-Chou the dog, Mayor Boodle puts forward, sees his late master’s pet food store as a treasure in that it is all that remains of the man. A memento of sorts.

Perhaps I’m just reading too much into it, but I think this is an interesting idea and it’s one I think we should be on the lookout for as we move forward.

In any case, Mohji does eventually make his way to where Luffy and friends are “hiding.” He brags that he can control any animal—a statement initially backed up by the presence of his riding-lion, Richie—but when he tries to take command of Chou-Chou, this happens.

And Luffy continues his unbroken streak of flipping switches on every new villain he meets.

But Mohji doesn’t have much more success against Luffy than he does against Chou-Chou. He orders Richie to maul him, but all the lion succeeds in doing is breaking Luffy out of his cage.

The lion tosses Luffy into a collapsing building, which is enough for Mohji to declare that ‘no one could survive that.’ (He does not have a good command of what manga he’s in, I think.)

When the lion makes a move on the pet food store (presumably hungry for the shelves upon shelves of Meow Mix that lurk within), Chou-Chou growls fearlessly. The chapter ends on this shot of Luffy, ready to bounce back into action, and I’m quite excited to see how all this shakes out tomorrow.

Tomorrow: The Dog, The Monkey, and the Lion!

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 Directory to 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.

Posted on in Uncategorized

New Manga First Impressions Archive

You know my Seasonal Impressions Archive? This is that, but for Manga. Enjoy!

2022

Wanna 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 Directory to browse the Archives.

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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 11

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!

The introduction art for today’s One Piece is a curious one, which appears to depict Luffy racing against a….I think that’s a cheetah. Is Luffy a Speed Force user? We may never know.

In any case, today’s chapter opens with what was pretty obvious at the tail end of yesterday’s. No, Buggy the Clown is not dead. He survived being cut to bits just fine, a fact that catches Zolo enough off-guard that Buggy’s able to get a nasty stab in with his cutlass. Why don’t I let Buggy himself elucidate?

There are many good things about these three panels, but I think Luffy’s Extremely Look Who’s Talking reaction is my favorite.

Buggy genuinely seems to have our heroes on the ropes. But in the nick of time, Luffy resorts to the most powerful weapon in his arsenal; unintentionally pushing somebody’s buttons.

This is enough to make Buggy so furious that he chucks his hand—he’s still cut to pieces, remember, he’s just not hurt by it—and at Luffy, who then catches Buggy’s cutlass—attached arm and all—between his teeth, because manga is the highest form of art.

Buggy isn’t impressed, and, totally distracted from Zolo and Nami, takes the time to taunt his captive.

Right.

This distraction is enough for Zolo and Nami to turn the tables. Almost literally, since the real issue for Buggy’s crew is that Zolo flips their ship’s cannon around, still loaded with one of the—ahem—‘Buggy Balls’, and Nami does the honors of lighting it and wrecking their ship. The three escape in the confusion, while Nami deals with some confusion of her own; after all, why would a pirate risk their own life and limb to save somebody else?

The turnabout is enough to set Buggy, already a pretty angry guy, absolutely seething. And the chapter closes on Zolo, Luffy—still in a cage, mind you—and Nami fleeing into the city as Buggy makes his full intent known.

Tomorrow: Clownwar!

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 Directory to 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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 10

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 opening art—that’s it up there in the banner—depicts Nami walking side by side with a very cute pig. It’s quite charming, if I do say so.

The chapter itself adds a new dimension to Buggy the Clown’s personality. Yesterday in his proper introduction, he was mostly pretty angry, and it had the effect of making him simultaneously intimidating and more than a little silly. Here, we get another side of his personality; boisterous, as most good pirate captains are.

There’s a pretty good sequence right near the top of the chapter where Nami drinks several of Buggy’s crewmembers under the table. (Because I am, at heart, kind of a mom, I was only able to admire her feat after an initial reaction of “wait a minute, isn’t she too young to drink?” Then I remembered that I was reading an adventure manga about pirates. Moving swiftly along….)

The good times don’t last, though. Buggy’s plan to punish Luffy for “stealing” his map of the Grand Line is to blow him to smithereens. to this end, he orders his crew to do something distinctly unpleasant-sounding.

I Do Not Want To Load The Buggy Balls

We quickly learn what ‘Buggy Balls’ actually are, as Buggy shows them off by firing one from his ship’s cannon, and absolutely wrecking an entire neighborhood of the town in the process. It’s a really impressive looking sequence. There is a certain sheer kinetic energy to the cannonball knocking a hole through a dozen buildings in a row, making them crumple like towers of matchsticks.

Buggy then tells Nami that actually, he’d rather have her light the cannon fuse that blasts Luffy into oblivion. As a test of loyalty, sure—I doubt Buggy is as easy to fool as Nami’s assumed—but also just because he can. If the fact that he gets kicks out of this kind of thing wasn’t obvious already, it’s made so when he doubles down on the order, with a panel that—and I say this with love—I am genuinely shocked never became a meme.

The visuals assume a panicky quality here, as Nami tries to stall for time while trying to figure out what she should do as Buggy and his crew heckle her and her hands shake.

The egging-on, both from Buggy’s crew and from Luffy himself (who tells her she can’t expect to tangle with pirates without putting her life on the line, probably true), eventually wears her to the breaking point. She impressively flips over the crewman trying to show her out to light the cannon, and yells this.

Which is a really nice, economical slice of character-building, only slightly undercut by Luffy explaining the barely-subtext in the immediately following panel.

Live Luffy reaction.

She doesn’t have to fight alone for long, Zolo makes his grand return just moments later. Buggy takes an immediate interest in the ex-pirate hunter, which Zolo does not return, to say the least.

I really love the “DOOOOOM” sound effect in the background there.

The clown pirate doesn’t initially appear to put up much of a fight. Almost as soon as Zolo engages with Buggy, he cuts him to ribbons. Is this the end of Buggy the Clown….?

I somehow doubt it. We’ll find out together tomorrow, pirates.

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 Directory to 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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 9

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!

The other day, I settled in to read brand-new Jump serialization Ruri Dragon. I happened to see the magazine’s cover for the issue where the series made its debut, and noticed that, right there in the upper-right corner, looming over Ruri’s titular dragon girl protagonist, is Monkey D. Luffy. Rendered, admittedly, in a mildly frightening style.

I bring this up not just to plug my column on the first Ruri chapter (although you should read that, if you like these columns), but because it’s a serious testament to One Piece‘s longevity. A real reminder of just what, exactly, we’re all in for here. There it is, getting second billing on the cover of the same magazine it debuted in 25 years earlier. It’s kind of astonishing, in a way! Just something to keep in the back of your head as we start the second volume today. The second volume of 102 and counting.

I’m going to take a moment to discuss the chapter-opening splash art from this point onward, because regular commenter Robinhood recently informed me that they are actually canon to the manga itself, and sometimes cross into its main events. This one, for our chapter today, is on the chill side, depicting Zolo and Luffy hanging out with a cow. I’m curious about when exactly this is supposed to have happened—maybe after the two defeated Captain Morgan but before they left town?—but it’s a nice scene nonetheless.

The chapter proper is another matter entirely. Quite a bit happens here, but the first thing that gets established is the obvious. We’re introduced to the man after whom this volume is named, Captain Buggy.

I absolutely love his introductory sequence. In just a few pages, we get the sense that he’s powerful but temperamental. Already angered about his stolen map, Buggy uses his devil fruit powers to force-choke a crewman for a completely imagined insult about his nose. Not content to simply suffocate the man, Buggy floats him over in front of his ship’s cannon and, has the rest of his crew fire on the poor sap. That is how you introduce a villain.

He cuts a simultaneously ridiculous and intimidating figure. On the one hand; he’s a pirate clown. On the other hand, the sheer amount of anger he unloads for something so petty actually makes him seem more scary, not less. The heavy shadowing he’s depicted with helps too (a part of me just imagines how much of a pain in the ass getting something to ink like that must be, but it is quite a nice technique).

It becomes clear over the course of the chapter that Buggy and his crew have all but run the townsfolk out of this particular port. People are just that scared of him.

One person who isn’t, though? Nami, who, throughout the 15 or so pages dedicated to her and Luffy’s part of the story here, hatches a scheme to infiltrate Buggy’s crew and make off with his treasure. That’s a bold play, and it comes only at the very end of the chapter. But we get a good sense of who Nami is here, in general. She’s willing to camp out in some abandoned house not far from the tavern where Buggy and co. are making their base, while having stolen from him. That’s pretty gutsy!

Also, perhaps predictably, she and the rather blunt Luffy do not initially get on super well. Especially when Luffy reveals himself as a pirate and Nami makes known her strong distaste of the profession. She also takes offense to the notion that she’s just stealing stuff (or, y’know, houses) that Buggy’s crew have left lying around.

We don’t learn exactly what the deal is with her anti-pirate grudge here, although I suspect we will before too long. (This is ignoring that it’s not like it’s unreasonable to dislike pirates if you’re living during your world’s golden age of piracy. This is a genre manga, there’ll usually be some single, concrete explanation for such things.)

Nami does also reveal the motive behind her double-piracy here. Or at least, she kind of does. Because this is a sort of bonkers thing to say sans context, and she doesn’t really give us that context. It’s a great bit of plotwork, actually, because something this off-beat is pretty much guaranteed to stick in your head until we get an “ohhhh”-inducing explanation some number of chapters or volumes down the line.

Assuming a “berry” is roughly about a yen, a hundred million of them is about $743,000 USD. If it’s actually closer in value to a US dollar, then it’s about $100,000,000 USD.

In general, Nami gets off some pretty great dialogue here. Luffy is almost able to convince her to sign up for his crew by appealing to her skill as a navigator, but she simply can’t ally herself with pirates. (….For now, anyway. I’m sure that will eventually change.)

Also, she says this?

“100,000,000 Berries can buy many tangerines.”

“Explain how.”

“Money can be exchanged for goods and services.”

But in any case, she pretends to eventually acquiesce to Luffy’s need for a navigator, if only he’ll take her to see Buggy the Clown, first. Luffy, somewhat incredibly, agrees to do this. Nami promptly ties him up and offers him to the clown captain as collateral to join his crew.

Spare a thought for the teenagers who read this when it was new and promptly discovered something about themselves.

And on this note, the chapter pretty much ends!

But, don’t worry too much about Luffy. A certain someone is coming to the rescue.

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 Directory to 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.

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions

New Manga First Impressions: RURI DRAGON

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.

Yes, we’re doing this now. In addition to my first impressions articles about new anime, I will also be occasionally dropping articles about new manga serials, since keeping up with brand-new manga is actually a thing one can reasonably do nowadays. (This was not so when I was younger, but that’s a conversation for another day.)

Ruri Dragon, the proper serial debut from the mangaka Shindou Masaoki, marks the first of these. It’s a manga with a dead-simple premise that I’m more than a little shocked I haven’t seen done before; high school girl is a dragon. Specifically, she’s a dragon-person. Think Tohru from Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid minus the tail (so far) and you’ve got a decent broad idea of where we’re going here.

In addition to that manga, the series opens with a sequence that actually reminds me a little of The Demon Girl Next Door (Machikado Mazoku to most of its readers). Previously-ordinary high school girl wakes up one morning to find out that she’s sprouted horns from her head. A surprisingly snarky sense of humor ensues, which immediately endeared me to Ruri, and which I think will serve it well over the long run. (And it makes the titular Ruri herself feel authentically “teenager-y.”)

Almost immediately, we get a good sense of both the titular Ruri’s personality and that of her mother. The latter in particular has an interesting devil-may-care attitude that could easily be mined for comedy, drama, or both. The woman didn’t even tell her own daughter that her father’s a ryu! That’s a pretty wild thing to just not tell your kid! To her credit, though, Ruri demonstrates an admirable ability to roll with it all, and mostly seems to find the subject awkward, at least initially.

She even insists on going to school, despite her mother offering to let her stay home. (Direct quote from the English translation; “They’re just horns. Not a huge deal.”)

Over the course of her day, we meet her friend Yuka and see how Ruri tries to adapt her daily routine to this unexpected intrusion. Right away, people—starting with Yuka herself—don’t entirely buy the whole “half-dragon on her dad’s side” story. The reactions of those around Ruri, which range from skepticism to finding her horns freaky-cool to her teacher initially assuming they were some kind of fashion statement, certainly seem like the groundwork for some kind of subtext, but it’s too early to make hard calls on this sort of thing. (Although there’s almost certainly a puberty metaphor running through here, as we’ll get to momentarily.)

In particular, the class boys take an immediate interest in her newfound noggin-knobs. Which is enough to make me ponder a similarity between the horns and a certain other part of the body that grows in pairs and gets AFAB girls unwanted reactions in high school, but perhaps I’m leaning too Freudian here. (Also; a serious shout out to translator Caleb Cook for the page on the right here, where he decided to translate something as “gurl.” Love it.)

Even the girls want a piece of Ruri.

And on that day, Background Student A discovered something new about herself.

This all culminates in a scene where basically Ruri’s entire class is congregating around her to take a picture. It’s pretty cute, though in her position I’d be extremely uncomfortable, myself. (And she doesn’t entirely seem comfortable either, to be honest, given that she mentions to Yuka a few pages later that she’s not really “into chatting.”)

“Hey girl, you a demihuman?” may go down as one of the all-time great pieces of translation work for Shonen Jump.

She eventually mentions surprise that she only has horns, and not any other “dragon-y” features. Ruri, it would seem, has a talent for jinxing herself, because barely a page later, she sneezes in class and lets out a truly impressive gout of fire, singing the hair off of one of the boys who was harassing her earlier. (That’s called karma, children.)

But things are not all fun and games. In a surprising turn of pseudo-realism, Ruri being able to breathe fire doesn’t automatically mean that her throat insulates her from her own flames, so the immediate fallout of that sneeze is a sudden and shocking amount of blood loss, which promptly causes her to conk out on the classroom floor.

Thankfully, her injuries aren’t life-threatening, and when her mother arrives to the school nurse’s office a few pages later she sees Ruri swapping usernames with the nurse in some mobage, in a sweet and humanizing minor detail.

It’s her conversation with her mom after she leaves that’s the most revealing though, and it’s here where I feel Ruri Dragon displays most of its potential.

Ruri is pretty obviously confused and at least a little hurt that her mom never told her about any of this. She directly says as much.

And it’s worth noting how her mother seems to unintentionally reinforce that loneliness, talking primarily about her own feelings, how “freaked out” she was, making excuses for herself while also trying to reassure Ruri that she’s an expert on dragons now, having apparently met up with Ruri’s father while Ruri was at school. (This raises even more questions; you’ve had contact with this guy the whole time and you still didn’t tell her about any of this? Maybe dragons do things differently, but in a vacuum, Ruri’s mother comes off pretty bad here.)

But if any of this is followed up on in a serious way remains to be seen. Perhaps more important than any of this is Yuka, who sends Ruri a group selfie that Ruri was squeezed into sometime during the school day. Upon receiving it, Ruri laughs, remarking that the picture has nothing to do with her horns at all. So, while the final shots of this first chapter are Ruri and her mother preparing to have a talk about her draconic heritage, it is the image of the photo that sticks with me most strongly as the chapter closes. After all, at her core and horns or not, Ruri is just a girl.

The Takeaway: With its future direction a total question mark, down to basic facts like even its genre still up in the air, Ruri Dragon is a total wildcard. But! The first chapter is roaring with potential; excellent art and writing abound, and the series has a fun, droll sense of humor. For these reasons, it’s worth keeping an eye on. The second chapter serializes on June 19th, 2022. If you’d like to keep up to date with the manga, I recommend doing so via MangaPlus, where it is available legally, for free, in English.

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 Directory to 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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 8

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!

We open today on a familiar scene; Luffy and a single companion aimlessly adrift at sea. Zolo complains that they really need to get a navigator. He’s got a point, I’d say.

It’s not long before shenanigans ensue; Luffy tries to turn a passing giant bird into dinner. Instead, it ends up carrying him away, separating him from Zolo. Not that the former pirate-hunter has much time to ruminate on loneliness or anything of the sort. As he’s trying to catch up to Luffy, he runs into a trio of pirates adrift at sea. He rescues them. Or maybe it’s more correct to say that he….doesn’t stop them from rescuing themselves?

Of course, the rescued pirates are far from grateful, and we hear for the first time a name that I suspect we’re going to become pretty familiar with.

Of course, Zolo is not one to just roll over because he’s outnumbered.

Subdued, the pirates explain how they got stranded in the middle of the ocean in the first place. Their story, told here through a few flashback pages, introduces us to a new character. This one I know we’ll be seeing a lot of. And if you’re vaguely familiar with One Piece at all, you probably recognize her.

Yes, that’s Nami, one of the handful of other One Piece characters I knew by name before starting this project. I didn’t really know anything about her, though. I certainly didn’t know she was introduced to the comic by swindling a trio of pirates out of their ship with a fake treasure chest.

I think I have a favorite character.

Back in the present, Zolo muses that being able to predict the weather that well would make her one hell of a navigator. I suspect we’ll be circling back around on that notion before too long.

The pirate trio say they work for one Buggy the Clown, who apparently “ate the fruit of the devil” and is the fiercest pirate in the area. (The mention of devil fruit all but confirms my thoughts from a few columns ago. Although, like I said there, it’s kind of obvious when one thinks about it.) They need to get back the map of the Grand Line that Nami stole, or their vicious captain will have their heads. We don’t meet Buggy himself, here, but (small spoiler for the next column, here), the volume that begins with the chapter after this one is named after him. So I’m quite sure we’ll meet him soon.

We do see his ship here, in a bit of very blunt foreshadowing.

Sometimes as a critic you see things that induce a loss for words. “Pirate ship that’s also a circus tent” is one of those things.

Naturally, we link back up with Nami basically immediately.

Her escape from, presumably, more of Buggy’s crew is interrupted when Luffy falls out of the sky, causing a huge commotion.

Nami, in her second defining character moment in the span of 20 pages, immediately takes advantage of the situation by pretending Luffy is her “boss” who’s come to rescue her. (Sidenote: I really love how Oda’s panels tumble in to a jumble of diagonals on this page, it really emphasizes the frantic pace of the scene.)

Fans of 18th century German folk theater may recognize the term “Hanswurst.”

They don’t actually “have” Luffy “right there”, of course. One of them makes the mistake of swatting his hat, and gets laid flat for his troubles.

Nami, perhaps sensing opportunity, introduces herself shortly after, in the chapter’s last page. Although she can’t know it, she may have not picked the best opening line.

Does that make her some kind of meta-pirate? A double pirate? A pirate pirate? A piratesite? A buccane’er-do-well? A thief of the thieves of the sea?

All in all, I really quite like Nami’s first chapter! Roguish characters who live and die by their wits are always great fun in a story like this, and it gives her a nice contrast with Luffy, whose main approach to problem solving is “punch first, ask questions later.” I wonder how long it’ll take before she joins the main crew?

Regardless, this actually marks the end of the first volume! I was a little surprised by that to be honest, since it seems a bit brief to me, but with 8 chapters each, one of them double length, under our belt, we are already over 200 pages into this story. There are many more to go, of course, many of which will also involve Nami. Personally, I can’t wait.

But what about you? I’m particularly interested in asking my other first-timers here. What do you think of Nami’s introduction?

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 Directory to 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.