Catching up on "One Piece," Part II

Mild spoilers ahead.

Well, it's been another few months and I've watched another five arcs of the anime, from Punk Hazard up to the beginning of the Wano Country Arc in 2019.  I'll probably take a break here, because Wano is notoriously long, having taken four years and over 200 episodes to finally finish airing.  That's nearly twice as long as any other arc in One Piece.  But, let's get to the episodes I actually watched - Punk Hazard, Dressrosa, Zou, Whole Cake Island, and the Reverie (Levely).

I think taking a fifteen year break from "One Piece" was the smartest thing I could have done as a "One Piece" fan.  There's absolutely no way I would have had the patience to watch some of these stories week to week.  The big, 100+ episode arcs, Dressrosa and Whole Cake Island, had tons of minor characters to keep straight, endless fights, and often dragged on interminably.  I know there were issues with the anime catching up to the manga repeatedly, resulting in lots of padding and filler.  I swear I fast-forwarded through the same flashback in the Dressrosa arc a dozen times.  I occasionally wished I was watching the live action series tackling these arcs, which could have easily reduced a hundred episodes into four or five, hour-long installments.  Just dropping the tournament from Dressrosa and the wedding cake rampage from Whole Cake Island would have probably saved a dozen hours apiece.  

And yet, Dressrosa has one of the best villains in "One Piece" so far, the sadistic Donquixote Doflamingo, who has a fascinating history and a great sense of style.  It has a super satisfying Usopp subplot and made Trafalgar Law everyone's new favorite character.  Whole Cake Island is built around Sanji, who is currently the only character besides Luffy to get a second chapter to his backstory, and it's a doozy.  He and Luffy also get into a full-blown fight, the first instance of real inter-crew conflict since Luffy and Usopp butted heads in the Water 7 Arc, 500 episodes earlier.  Both arcs, and several of the earlier ones, follow the same pattern of liberating the inhabitants of an island or kingdom from an evil oppressor, but the worldbuilding is good enough that they all feel significantly different.  Punk Hazard has a dystopian sci-fi mood, Dressrosa features gladiator games and a Spanish-influenced setting, and Whole Cake Island is made up of "Alice in Wonderland" and rubber hose cartoon imagery.  Looking ahead, Wano is a whole lot of jidaigeki and samurai tropes.  I love spotting the weird little references to everything from historical pirates, to a recently introduced character modeled after Eugene Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People."       

"One Piece" still has a lot of bad habits , especially when it comes to pacing and repetitiveness.  We're essentially getting variations on the same plots and character types over and over again - tragic heroes, self-sacrificing mentors, cute kids in peril, misguided or ill-fated villains, and a couple of true bad apples.  However, the endless creativity in those variations has kept my interest.  And "One Piece" has been very good at balancing its silliness with a gigantic heart and entertaining action.  It's a universe where everyone is essentially an overgrown or overpowered kid, reflecting its young adult audience (all the romances are one-sided and played for laughs).   Yet it also touches on darker subjects - child trafficking and drug addiction in Punk Hazard, abusive families in Whole Cake Island, and so many examples of terrible leaders oppressing their populations.  As "One Piece" inches closer and closer to Luffy finding the One Piece and becoming Pirate King, it's also setting up a massive revolutionary uprising against the corrupt World Government.  The too-brief Reverie Arc is clearly its prologue.

I like the way that future storylines have been laid out.  The Wano Country Arc will pay off character arcs and plot arcs that started hundreds of chapters ago.  Key players include the samurai Kinemon and his son Momotaro, who first showed up in Punk Hazard.  We'll also see the final confrontation with Big Mom, who was the major antagonist of Whole Cake Island, and introduced way back in Fishman Island.  Despite mangaka Eiichiro Oda's claims that "One Piece" will be ending in the next few years, I'm doubtful.  He's set up enough for another decade of stories at the rate he's been going.  I, however, won't be taking a break from "One Piece" that long again.

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