Tag: sanji

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ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 58

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 Cover Issue: It seems like Buggy’s former crew are still slugging things out. I’m still rooting for the acrobat.

In middle and high school English classes, they sometimes teach you to try to search for the “main idea” of a story. Usually, they use purpose-built short stories for this, or a carefully-curated selection of classics that you can more or less fit into that mold if you squint. But this practice neglects the multitudes that even very brief bits of fiction can contain. Chapter 58 of One Piece is, of course, just one tiny part of a much larger whole. But on its own, it’s also a riveting 18 pages of oceanic desperation. Sure, this is Sanji and Zeff’s backstory, but it’s also just a damn compelling piece of life-at-its-limits storytelling. In this chapter we learn how Sanji and Zeff survived for 80 days—nearly three whole months—with nothing but a single sack of food on a deserted sea stack.

Initially, Sanji is optimistic about their situation, dividing his rations into 20 portions so he can stretch out nearly a month’s worth of food, even if he’s only getting the bare minimum. That initial optimism turns to grim, do-anything-to-survive desperation as the weeks wear on. We get to see it happen, mostly within the span of a single page, in what is probably One Piece‘s greatest feat of storytelling economy up ’til this point.

Eventually, he gets desperate enough to try attacking Zeff, to steal his food. Only to learn that the old pirate doesn’t actually have any food with him; he’s been sitting there, slowly starving, for months. The only bag he had was filled with gold and jewels, not a morsel of actual food. When he cut his leg off last issue? That was because it was hurt, sure, but he was also preparing to eat it. All that to keep Sanji alive.

That all leads up to this page, a genuinely poetic lament from the very much dying Zeff, as he confides in Sanji that he too seeks the All Blue, and also shares with him his new dream; to open an ocean-going restaurant.

Thankfully, for both Zeff and for us, a ship comes by not many days later, and the starving pirate and equally-starving Sanji are saved.

We then, of course, cut back to present.

Tomorrow: Sanji vs. Pearl.

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 56

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 Cover Issue: A context-free but pleasant scene of Sanji and Luffy wrangling some buffaloes. One of whom is smoking!

This is quite an information-dense issue, but we can basically break down what happens into three main parts.

One: Gin threatens to kill Zeff, offering to spare his life if and only if Sanji and the rest of the cooks get off the ship ASAP. Sanji refuses, cryptically stating that he’s already taken so much from Zeff that he can’t allow him to lose anything else.

(In general, this is a rather intense chapter, and the art is more dynamic and impressive than normal, which is saying something, because One Piece already looks pretty good most of the time.)

Two: Uh-oh, Pearl is not actually dead. He kicks the shit out of Sanji, threatening his life by clapping the cook’s head between two of his shields. He also lights the ship on fire again (or maybe it just never went out from last issue), threatening the lives of everyone on board, including his own. Again.

Three: Sanji’s being knocked out is used as a transitional into a flashback, where we meet him at the young age of just 9, when he was an apprentice aboard a ship called the Orbit. He learns—and for the first time, we learn—about the legend of the ocean “All Blue”, a place where all the world’s oceans meet. It’s of keen interest to the other cooks aboard the Orbit, since anywhere where all the seas meet would have all of the world’s fish in it as well—at least, that’s their logic—and thus be a veritable seafood buffet. Of course, they don’t really believe in the thing, unlike Sanji, who very much does.

But that’s interrupted by the Orbit’s peaceful voyage being disrupted by a pirate raid, led by a very familiar captain.

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 55

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 Cover Issue: We catch up with some of Buggy’s other crew here, who are apparently under the impression that he’s dead. I love the little funeral portrait they’ve made out of the ship’s timber, that’s a cute touch.

Here’s a fact to ponder; fire is actually super dangerous at sea. It was even moreso during the era of wooden ships. It would spread quickly, and it was difficult to get under control partly because there just isn’t really anywhere else to go, so it’s hard to manage on top of that.

This fact is relevant in today’s One Piece. Can you guess why?

Honestly, I got nothin’. This is a manga where we’ve already seen a guy destroy an entire ship with a single sword stroke, and somehow this is the first thing that just leaves me totally speechless. It just feels really random? Like sure, he can somehow make fire with his shield and he does it just as a reflex because he has jungle PTSD. It’s not even a bad development really, it’s just perplexing.

Out-of-nowhere-ness aside, his outburst does result in the predictable.

Although not for long. Pearl is actually defeated in this chapter, too, in a pretty solid battle mostly between him and Sanji but also featuring an assist from Luffy, who deflects one of Krieg’s huge spike ball things as a crucial moment when Krieg decides that Pearl’s causing more trouble than he’s worth. (Also in here; Zeff deflecting some of Pearl’s fireballs with nothing but the wind force generated by his kicks. Have I said “because manga is the only valid form of art” enough times in this column for it to count as a catchphrase yet?)

In any case, Krieg doesn’t seem to have the highest opinion of his second-in-command.

But there is at least one pirate who can pull his weight in Krieg’s crew.

Random question; do you remember Gin?

Tomorrow: Chef Zeff at gunpoint!

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 54

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 Cover Issue: In today’s Chapter cover (not the volume cover! Those are outside the scope of this, uh, sub-column?) Buggy and his lady-friend confirm their mutual hatred of Luffy and have dinner and wine while they’re at it. “PIRATE ALLIANCE”, the chapter text helpfully tells us.

The image of Buggy just going absolutely beast mode on an entire fish is going to haunt me for a long time.

So this chapter is mainly about two things. One; holy shit, Sanji is really good at kicking. (The unspoken implication being of course that Sanji studied under Zeff not just as a cook but as a fighter as well.) He also gets off a pretty great samurai vibes line about how knives are the soul of a chef.

Two; we meet a person named Pearl. (Also in the background of much of this issue, Luffy and Krieg are fighting elsewhere. Keep that in mind, it’s important.)

When I saw this chapter was called “Pearl”, I did indeed assume it’d introduce a character named that. But in my experience, Pearl is usually a girl’s name (think Steven Universe, Splatoon 2, I think that whale from Spongebob, etc.), and given one of the things One Piece is—ahem—known for, I sort of assumed Don Krieg would turn out to have a femme fatale pirate woman in his ranks.

Well, Pearl does work for Krieg, but he is….not that.

Yes, this is Don Krieg’s second-in-command, a walking dartboard made out of garbage can lids with a ponder-worthy orb for a hat. He is obsessed with his own handsomeness and also with not getting hurt in combat; he brags that he’s never lost “even one drop” of his own blood while fighting. He brags that he wouldn’t even get hurt if he were shot with a cannonball; you know how it goes.

Unfortunately, he’s also great at tempting fate, and you can probably guess that I wouldn’t be mentioning this if it weren’t relevant. Yes, as Luffy and Krieg are fighting on the next deck over, Krieg accidentally hurls Luffy in Pearl’s general direction, and this happens.

The reactions that follow are, shall we say, interesting, and imply some crazy shit is about to go down. That’s for tomorrow’s chapter, of course, because that’s where today’s ends.

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 46

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!

AHOY!

Yes, after a long time being—ahem—lost at sea, we’ll say, the column is back. In the grand scheme of how long this is going to take us, a week-ish off is not that much time to be away from One Piece, but I did miss the series while I was gone, and I’m excited to see where this whole thing with the Dread Pirate Don Krieg is gonna go. So, without further do, we return to the ocean-going restaurant ship, Baratie.

As we do, we open on a fight between Sanji and the head cook / captain. The chef wants him gone; Sanji’s a lousy cook, flirts with women, and gets into fights. He has no reason to want Sanji on his boat, and because of that actively tries to get him to leave with Luffy. Sanji, of course, refuses. Although, even as he goes back to work, he spends a fair amount of time flirting with Nami (who is entirely willing to take advantage of his weakness for women).

I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen the noun “digestive” in a comic of any kind. Also isn’t it actually “digestif”? Whatever.

In any case, Luffy must spend quite a while washing dishes here, because shortly after this scene, he’s hauled off to do more chore boy work, and we promptly get perhaps my favorite transition panel in this entire manga so far.

This is how I feel whenever I get a letter from the government.

You can probably, and properly, guess that the thing that comes “out of nowhere” is Don Krieg and his flagship, flying a jolly roger flanked by hourglasses (which a pair of randos helpfully point out symbolizes that his enemies’ “time is up.” Thanks lads). However, not all is as it appears, because Krieg’s ship is in bizarrely bad shape.

Sanji (correctly?) guesses they were caught in a typhoon, and soon, Gin returns, quite literally propping his captain, who is on the brink of death, up on his shoulder.

The restaurant’s other patrons—and for that matter, the cooks themselves—are pretty unwilling to feed and house a notorious pirate. Over the course of a brief page of exposition, we get a sense of why. This dude is bad news!

It’s almost like he’s a pirate or something.

Sanji is more than willing to feed him, though. And surprise surprise, as soon as the dread pirate is finished chowing down on some white rice that Sanji whipped up, he decks the cook right in the face and says this to close out the chapter.

It’s good to be back.

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE EVERY DAY – Chapter 45

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 another more setup-y chapter, we open with Luffy and Sanji still on the deck. How will Luffy try to entice Sanji to join his growing crew of vagabonds and pillagers and oh who are we kidding here? He just asks him. Sanji says no.

The reason, as given a bit farther in, is that Sanji wants to make head chef someday despite not getting on with the current head chef. (The head chef actually tries to get him to go with Luffy at one point. Simply blowing him off or something more?) This is fair enough, but it makes Luffy’s ambition of getting him aboard the Merry Go difficult. How he might eventually change Sanji’s mind isn’t really addressed here. In fact, a pretty big chunk of the chapter is dedicated to Hijinks. Since Luffy’s been drafted as a choreboy, the restaurant employs him to undertake various tasks, almost all of which he fails comically at. (Favorite bit for me here; when one of the chefs asks how many plates he’s busted and he admits that he’s lost count.)

Elsewhere, conversation turns to the dreaded Don Krieg, the pirate who is apparently the “most ferocious” in the local waters, and I imagine will be this arc’s actual, eventual antagonist.

You see, Gin—the pirate Sanji rescued by giving him some rice—doesn’t take a directly antagonistic role here, and he’s even very friendly to both Sanji and Luffy, showing genuine gratitude to the former and being yet another in the growing list of more veteran sailors trying to wave Luffy away from the Grand Line. But he does take an indirectly antagonistic role, because when he heads back to Krieg’s ship, he finds the don pirate’s vessel in what looks to possibly be disarray. And there, he promptly, and conveniently, forgets all that kindness he showed to Luffy and especially Sanji earlier, promising to take his boss right to the oceangoing restaurant.

Such is the way of pirates! Perhaps a clash of crews here is inevitable. I look forward to finding out tomorrow. I have to admit that the stuff with Kuro and Kaya was solid but it took a while to really grab me. With this arc I’m invested straightaway. I hope this Krieg fellow is as fearsome as his name (literally just German for “war”!) and reputation suggest.

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 44

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 immediately after the conclusion of yesterday’s chapter, on Luffy and the floating diner’s head chef arguing over whether our boy will work for the chef for a week, a year, or if he’s willing to pay a different sort of price.

I am reasonably sure that this is not how that works.

This actually isn’t the main plot of the chapter though—it’s more a humorous B-side, as the whole thing is played pretty goofy—instead, the real Point A to Point B here comes from a conflict between Sanji and a new character, a surly cook with a….Brooklyn accent? I think that’s what they’re going for? Named Patty. Patty is not a very good cook apparently, and he frequently minces common customer service sayings (there’s even a ‘monsieur’ -> ‘mon-sewer’ bit straight out of Looney Tunes). But he does very strongly believe that the customer is king, which puts him into conflict with Sanji who, you’ll recall, is beating the shit out of that Fullbody fellow because he didn’t like Sanji’s soup. There’s some pretty great dialogue here and, honestly, all throughout the chapter. Lots of little bits of wordplay and double meanings and stuff like that, it’s fun.

This continues even after the chapter socks you with its main twist; one of the captive pirates from Fullbody’s ship has escaped and, oh no, he’s on the restaurant boat.

Despite this colorful introduction, the fellow isn’t actually much of a threat. Patty, who is apparently crazy strong because of manga reasons, knocks him in the head and tosses him out onto the deck. Here we get the chapter’s actual twist, which is that Sanji, despite absolutely ripping Fullbody earlier, is the kind of guy who’ll give some rice to a starving man even if that man might not necessarily “deserve” it. (Everyone deserves food whenever they need it, in my world view, but Patty does not seem to agree.)

The chapter—and the volume!—end here, with Luffy observing Sanji’s act of kindness and thinking that just perhaps, he’s found his cook.

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 43

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 on One Piece; a lesson in not wasting your food.

It starts off simple enough; our heroes pull up to the oceanbound restaurant mentioned last chapter, a magnificently goofy thing that is shaped like a fish.

But we’re introduced in short order to the guy who I was pretty sure was going to be this arc’s antagonist, but I’m actually not so certain at the moment for reasons I’ll get to in a bit. In any case, he’s quite the character.

Yes. A Navy Lieutenant. Named Ironfist Fullbody. I imagine in the dub they had someone do a really gruff and low voice for him for maximum impact. Again, I think this is a slight bit of misdirection, but he does make quite the first impression here. Almost immediately after this, he orders one of his cannoneers to sink the Merry Go.

Now, our heroes’ ship is fine, because Luffy blocks the cannonball with his, ahem, ‘gum gum balloon.’ The restaurant on the other hand, is not, because it turns out that Luffy doesn’t have great finesse as to where the things he deflects with that little trick end up.

Cut to the inside of the restaurant—the main body of the ship has thankfully not been hit by the deflected cannonball, evidently—and we get to see Fullbody trying to impress his, one assumes, fiancé, by dazzling her with his knowledge of wine.

Yes, Ol’ Ironfist here is a sommelier. But it’s actually worse than that, because as we soon learn, he’s a wannabe sommelier, as shown when he asks the restaurant’s ‘waiter’ if he’s right about the wine.

Sanji here—one of those rare few One Piece characters I knew by sight before reading this—basically clowns Fullbody’s entire existence. He denies his attempt at coming off as a Cool Wine Guy, and when Fullbody finds (or, I think, plants) a bug in his own soup, Sanji tells him to just pick it out. Which hey, fair thing to Fullbody here; that’s fucking gross. But on the other hand, you’re in the middle of the ocean. Perhaps you don’t get to be picky, navy boy.

Things keep escalating like this, but eventually Sanji’s had enough, simply because he can’t stand to see good food wasted, and the end result is that the big invincible monster heel we’ve been building up all chapter ends it looking like this.

That’s not quite the end of the story, though. While all this is happening, Luffy is taken aboard the restaurant. This leads to some further, ah, interesting conversations.

Thankfully Luffy is misunderstanding this whole scene and he did not actually blow off a guy’s leg. But still, you can see why he’d think that. Luffy is here drafted to work aboard the ship without pay for a year to make up for the damages incurred by his, you know, blowing a hole in it, and the chapter properly ends there, leaving the whole rest of this to be resolved tomorrow.

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this slightly-longer-than-normal column, pirates. I’m hoping it makes up for my absence yesterday. See you all 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 Directory to browse by category.