![One Piece Book Club - [Part 8, Dressrosa]](https://img5.saketami.com/storage/4/mc/mm/9a2cd0-019e879d-2f1a-798d-a537-e149ddadcc7b.jpg)
One Piece Book Club - [Part 8, Dressrosa]
Added 2023-09-23 20:51:04 +0000 UTCBook Club is in ten minutes! The first half of Dressrosa is pretty cool. The second half BIG SUCKO, GANG!!!
Comments
All of the SBS talk has me excited for them to get to Wano and rip into the decision to move the resolution of actual plot threads into the SBS
KenofRedLions
2023-10-01 02:42:31 +0000 UTCI have so little to say about the actual Dressrosa story that you didn't already so there's like one thing, I personally am of the belief that the second half of Dressrosa exists because Oda wanted to show off Gear Four and give everyone their boss fight but we could have gotten Gear Four without the birdcage and not everyone needs a boss fight. So fuck those 55 chapters. anyway in order 1.LAW TALK 2.DOFFY TALK 3.REBECCA TALK 4.USOPP TALK 5.HAKI TALK 6.FRANKY & ZORO TALK LAW TALK I fully agree with how Law should have died, and while I knew he wasn't going to and feel like Luffy shouldn't be made immortal Law should have been beaten to near death and then in his last moments used the immortality operation on someone else. Be it Luffy, a character that we could conveniently place in that spot or Doflamingo himself. Like it would have been really cool if Doflamingo actually managed to force Law to give him what he wanted and then he gets beaten or straight up killed because plottwist at this point you could reveal the operation only makes you live forever and not just invincible. But like yeah, if law isn't going to be a character beyond this point then there's no need to keep him alive. Sorry to Law and all his fans but better to die an interesting character with a cool powerset than to join Nico Robin standing in the background for the rest of the series. DOFFY TALK I oh wow just got to how old the original four members of the Doflamingo pirates are. fucked up 9 to 18??? I wish the original four members hadn't just started followed Doflamingo around, I wish they had actually chosen to groom him into giving in to all his worst impulses, and that like the reason he took over Dressrosa and became a warlord and is like actively fucking with the world Government is because those four essentially took his god-complex and just kept feeding it until his ego exploded and that's why he is the way he is, and not just because he's EVIL!!!! Like it would have been so much more interesting if the four OG Doflamingo crewmembers had done that because they thought to themselves "well hey if we feed this kid some bullshit about the divine right of Kings and become his viziers we'll get everything we'll ever want" and Doffy is just a puppet king. REBECCA TALK Rebecca... I think I could have liked Rebecca if she was wearing clothes. But no, Oda has made yet another 16 year old princess and this time she's in stripper gear! Also her arc with her dad ending on the note of "now that I'm back you'll never have to fight again!" sucks, their confrontation against Diamande should have been "Now that I'm back we'll finally be able to fight together!" Rebecca as the daughter of the legendary gladiator who without even realizing it follows in his footsteps is a fun idea! Shame it's written by Oda, and the culmination of her arc being all about how she should give her agency to the nearest man because it's only right for a man to fight for her, SUCKS!!! There's a version of Rebecca that could have worked but Oda could not have written that version. USOPP TALK The entire Scene where Usopp has to snipe Sugar from fucking kilometres away where he literally can't even see his target is great! Up until the in my opinion completely unnecessary Haki awakening, because I hate observation haki and that moment would have been way cooler if he had needed to snipe purely on Viola's advice. Especially because that's basically what that entire scene already is with him literally just asking "okay Viola where do I aim, how big a gap does that window give me, and tell me when I need to fire to get there before Sugar touches Luffy" Also given how long that shot was, I think it would have been fun if Usopp fired his shot, Sugar turned Luffy into a toy while the shot was flying, Usopp and everyone has a moment of "huh why did we fire that again?" and then it hits and everyone's like "OH FUCK! HOLY SHIT! USOPP YOU DID IT!" HAKI TALK Haki is to me something I like less and less as we see more of it, because One Piece definitely needed a way for normal people to stay up to par with devil fruit users and Logia's can't just be allowed to be invicible forever, but also I do like how certain devil fruits simply give people special immunities, like how Luffy is immune to blunt weaponry and lightning. Or how Alvida (who got tragically yassified when she ate it) has the power of the Sube Sube no Mi which makes it so attacks slide harmlessly off of her. And I'm kind of torn between wanting all three forms of Haki to be seriously redesigned to not just be "but I can want it harder so I win" and wanting to throw the concept of Haki as a whole out with the garbage and instead reworking the way that Logia fruit users are immune to all attacks and explicitly standardizing them down to Paramecia levels of being immune to certain types of attack depending on their powerset but explicitly very much vulnerable to direct counters, like Crocodile and water, and Enel with rubber. Because Oda sure gives up on making Logia's anything near a fair fight until Haki rolls around the corner. I do like the idea of armament Haki to be replaced by channeling the power of the ocean as a way of levelling the playing field and directly countering devil fruit users instead of just powering them up even further because as we see with Luffy with Gear Four I guess armament Haki allows a devil fruit user to really start fucking shit up in ways normal people simply can't. Having to creatively beat Logia and also Paramecia fruit users where you have to take into account what their powerset is and then reverse engineering a solution is also just more interesting than using Haki to get to just punch them to death. I've seen the comparison being thrown around of like Hamon Vs Stands. And like yeah, jojo fights while often completely nonsensical are super interesting because they're always a puzzle, and never just who can punch the hardest because the protagonists of jojo can always punch the hardest it's just that they have to figure out how to punch the problem first. And like I've already said my piece on how I think Conquerer's Haki "only one in a million people have this" is stupid. But just wait for my rant on Observation Haki after Whole Cake Island, and how it just like Armaments Haki really cuts the maximum amount of creative solutions to One Piece fights down to near none. FRANKY & ZORO TALK The Franky fight was frankly superfluous and it's awful, like a fight about who is more hard-boiled would be really fun, but this is a fight about who can be more sexist instead. I get not liking the Zoro Vs Pica fight, and not being impressed with how it's resolved but like, him cutting the Pica mountain into pieces fast enough to make sure that he can isolate Pica and kill him before he falls to the ground and run away again is probably the most inventive way Zoro ever gets to cut good, and the reason why that fight is so iconic is because it's literally the only fight that Zoro has gotten since Whiskey Peak where Oda had to put any thought into a Zoro fight. Even if that thought is barely at the point of Zoro has to cut good... quickly! Which you know, you've talked about how people will praise stories for imagining something good. And I think this fight is very much that.
BreadBunny
2023-09-27 15:46:46 +0000 UTCOh, I completely forgot about this on Saturday due to a really messed up sleep schedule. Which is annoying because I was looking forward to it for half that week.
Shortstop
2023-09-26 16:48:45 +0000 UTCAs flawed and messy as the whole Tournament setup is, there is something really endearing about the idea of Luffy entering a tournament only for him to Katamari every single contender into becoming his allies. Like, if you insist on having a tournament arc in One Piece, I think that’s kind of a cool changeup to the formula. Like, it’s common for at least some of the contenders to become allies, a la Yuyu Hakusho, but not literally *everyone*. That being said there are way too many and i fuckin forgot Orlumbos existed literally as i was reading his lines, so while I think its a neat idea a lot of it didnt really need to exist. Like, for this kind of thing to land it would need to happen in an almost comically quick manner, like a little less than 1 volume’s worth of manga at an *absolute* maximum and at least 3 less characters (i like Cavendish too but im sad to say i agree that he should be cut :/), and if theres something One Piece has given up long ago its brevity. Edit: jesus christ i didnt realize how many fucking tournament people there were, 3 was lowballing it so hard
Justice Hainsworth
2023-09-26 07:29:16 +0000 UTCI wanna just defend my point from the end where I mentioned Luffy being out of character: He's always hated cowardice, but not cowards. In previous arcs, his response to cowardice was to do what he could to help the coward overcome what they were afraid of to do the things they wanted to do (helping Koby join the marines, having Usopp/Chopper join his crew, and helping Shirahoshi leave her room for the first time in a decade.) In Dressrosa he picks a fistfight with an 8 year old for being afraid of heights.
Stylish Suidae
2023-09-24 17:16:08 +0000 UTCWithout having seen the stream yet, I thought this arc was... fine. Love everything to do with Usopp and Robin, and some of the arc characters are fine. The biggest issue is that half the characters and half of the entire arc should have been cut. If it had ended when gladiator dude lops Doflamingo's smug head off or Law pulverizes his organs, it would have been a better arc already. Sure, we would have missed out on the people of Dressrosa pushing against the bird cage, fighting to save what's left of their country, but we would have also cut out about 50 chapters of meaningless fighting.
Moff Muppet
2023-09-24 05:20:51 +0000 UTCI can't believe I lost it. I have been waiting since the very beginning to complain about Law and Doflamingo
Cherry
2023-09-24 00:26:51 +0000 UTCI had so many thoughts about this I made my own longass post abt it in Member Posts 'cause I can't be in stream to say some version of them in chat and I couldn't very well put it here when this didn't exist.
Stars In A Jam Jar
2023-09-23 21:05:24 +0000 UTC
