Weekly Thoughts 6/17/23

I saw the Flash this week. For so long, I didn’t think it would be a good movie, because of all the Ezra Miller stuff, my general distaste for the Snyderverse stuff, and the mess of a story it looked like it was going to be. Turns out, it’s pretty good. I would have liked a Flash story that was just the Flash being the Flash instead of time travel multiverse stuff. He runs really fast; time travel isn’t the point of what he does, and it’s always the first well people go to. I want to see him going real fast and doing cool speed stuff. I don’t get why people were mad at the third act, or the CG there. All that worked for me, and looked intentional, because it was. The CG I didn’t like was when he was running fast. When we’re seeing him from our perspective, his feet look like he’s taking normal human steps, but really fast; from his perspective, he looks like his stride is thousands of feet across, and like he’s in a poorly-animated video game where the environment slides underneath him. I want feel every step he takes, really work with the physicality of running that fast, not see the world go smoove and inconsequential.

Anyways, this week, I’m going to talk about the various weaknesses of the Fish-Man Island arc of One Piece, because I’m reading it right now. There are a lot of good things about the story. It has great action, good character work for most people, and some solid intro into the new abilities of the Straw Hats as they enter the New World. Overall, I consider it to be the low point of the series, because it compounds the worst impulses of the series. It’s not the most thematically sound, and way too overblown thematically for the sort of battle they ultimately have. It’s also a low point for Sanji as a character, one he doesn’t recover from until Totto Land.

So, first thing to address is Sanji. He’s not the worst loverboy character in the world, but you wouldn’t know it here. For some background, he’s always generally been taken with any and all women who have appeared in the story, and he’s got that old-fashioned view that a man should never hit a woman, despite being in a profession where powerful women will try to kill him a lot. His tendencies around women are played as a joke, and usually it’s pretty harmless; nothing wrong with laughing at someone for losing their head around a pretty face, or for acting cool and gallant before showing their butt with a gendered double standard.

Starting partway through Water 7, he went on a downward spiral, in my estimation. It began when he refused to hit Kalifa, an assassin and master martial artist, because his chivalry wouldn’t let him. No matter how you defend it, chivalry is just polite sexism. It’s based on the idea that men are big and strong, and that women are small and weak. Even though it’s romanticized, it’s still basically the same as saying women are fragile sexual objects that men must glom onto, keep away from other men (i.e. threats), and eventually have sex with as their reward. So yeah, when I said it was “polite” sexism for ease and clarity, it really depends on your definition of polite, doesn’t it?

Thriller Bark is worse for him. In this story, he fights the invisible man Absalom, who kidnapped and tried to marry Nami after drugging her. Absalom also used his invisibility to peep on, grope, and kiss Nami and Robin. So clearly, there’s enough to be mad at him for. But instead of leaving it there, Eiichiro Oda added a chapter literally called Sanji’s Dream, in which Sanji says he always dreamed of eating the Clear-Clear Fruit and getting invisibility powers so that he could peep on women; Absalom having those powers means he can’t get them. The chapter is three-quarters lampshade, and thus a great example of why I often don’t like lampshading. It’s played off as a joke, with every zombie around them recognizing that both Sanji and Absalom are terrible people. But it’s not so terrible that anyone does anything to reprimand them, beyond calling them names. For as much as peeping has been referred to as a minor offense throughout popular media, it’s a huge violation of people’s autonomy and privacy. Just because it’s written like a joke doesn’t make it a joke; the argument they have and the sex crime dreams Sanji voices are actual serious statements made by the characters in that chapter. They’re not kidding about it.

Next is Sanji’s time in the Kamabaka Queendom, an island of trans and nonconforming people. Of course, that’s not how it’s identified; it’s described as an island of crossdressers, who are all depicted as bigoted stereotypes of trans women. Sanji described his time there as “hell,” and throughout it and into his time on Fish-Man Island, he would continually describe the citizens there as “abominations” and the like. Once again, it’s presented as a joke, but I fail to see what the joke is. The core of the gag is that there are people incorrectly identified as unattractive men who wear women’s clothing, and that Sanji is transphobic. That’s it. And all of this is despite the overall great character work for Mr. 2 Bon Clay and Emporio Ivankov, two prominent queer characters in the story. Bon Clay starts out as a villain, but after his defeat, he stands by his fleeting, momentary friendship with Luffy into the depths of hell, and it’s awesome. Ivankov is an officer in the Revolutionary Army, whose leadership for freedom focuses on freeing people from the shackles of normative gender identity. Oda said Ivankov is based on both Dr. Frank-N-Furter and a drag queen he’s friends with; he says he enjoys and respects the art. And yet, it doesn’t stop him from making Sanji a raging transphobe and including far too many “jokes” that rest on the idea that trans people and drag queens of all genders are bad and defective, fit for ridicule and dehumanization.

All of this comes to a head on Fish-Man Island. For general housekeeping, fish-men and merfolk are kinda the same species but have important differences. Oda once said that fish-men are fish from the waist up, while merfolk are fish from the waist down. Fish-Man Island is where mermaids live, naturally, and so it’s held as a legendary paradise among pirates. The legend of the beautiful mermaid holds in the world of One Piece. Very easily, Oda could have had the legend of a land filled with giant-breasted supermodel mermaids all below the age of 30 be shattered by the reality of a normal kingdom with normal people. But of course, it’s the first thing I described. Sanji is put in mortal danger there because he would get giant nosebleeds upon seeing mermaids after spending two years among queer people. It’s a terrible combination of all the toxic masculinity, sexism, and transphobia in the series into one distilled solution, expressed through Sanji and the depiction of the island. Oda literally said in the question corner that most mermaids over 30, when their tails bifurcate so they can walk, live on land because he wanted only young, hot mermaids. He said that when he was over 30 himself.

Add on top of that how a lot of the story on Fish-Man Island revolves around grown men sexualizing a child, the Mermaid Princess Shirahoshi. She’s about fifteen or sixteen in this story. In world, there’s legend about the Mermaid Princess being the most beautiful woman in the world, and in theory that could be written off as an age-old fantasy of sexist pirates. You know the pattern, it’s not. People regard Shirahoshi as an object of intense sexual attraction. And I do mean it in that way, and not just general beauty. A villain there, Vander Decken, has been violently stalking her for a decade because he “fell in love with her” when she was six, forcing Shirahoshi to stay locked in a bunker. Oh, I’m sorry, it was because Decken wanted control of Shirahoshi’s special powers. But also, he said as an adult that she was a “real beauty” at age six, thinks he can control her powers by marrying her, and constantly says he’s in love with her and will kill her for not loving him back. Sanji looked at her and turned to stone, with the gag being that she cured him of his overpowered nosebleeds. He’s twenty or twenty-one. No one addresses the fact that she’s a child at any point, despite all the grossness directed at her. It’s really annoying having to read through pages of people ogling a teenager’s oversized breasts (all breasts are oversized in One Piece) just to get to a battle for liberation from oppression.

That brings us to the other half of the slump. In short, the main problem with the actual story of Fish-Man Island is that it’s a lot of talk and very little action. The actual battle that happens there is meant to be a simple showcase of where the Straw Hats are after training for two years. In concept, that doesn’t require a big, serious enemy, and in execution, the battle doesn’t last very long and has little tension. Despite that, there is a lot of setup and a lot of thematic weight put into the battle, which feels mismatched. Hody Jones was almost tough enough, but mostly in the water; when even Usopp is facing a main officer of the enemy squad with no fear, you know the battle isn’t worth all the seriousness surrounding it.

And those themes show a real ignorance on Oda’s part. He just doesn’t know how discrimination works. I don’t mean to excuse him for that, but at the same time, I usually don’t expect to see a nuanced, textured perspective on race in manga. Japan is like 95% Japanese; I don’t expect people who’ve never encountered diversity to get it, you know? Kinda seems like you should do a lot of research first and talk to a lot of people, or stick to class struggles instead of race, if you’re as evidently ignorant as Eiichiro Oda. The lack of understanding shows through a lot here. The Fish-Man Island story is centered on the oppression of fish-men and merfolk by humans. In the world of One Piece, fish-men and merfolk have a long history of discrimination by humans, who considered them to be fish and not people until relatively recently. Most of the world doesn’t have an active culture of hatred for them, due to the majority of fish-men not venturing outside of Fish-Man Island, but they do have the whole, “Ah, monsters!” reaction to them when they do see one. There’s even still humans who hold them in slavery, because slavery is still a thing in that world in a couple places. It’s overall real bad, and it’s led to continued distrust of humans among many fish-men and merfolk.

So, big problem number one is that there’s no version of racism that isn’t blatant. Oda doesn’t know that you can’t really tackle the issue of racism without a less visible layer of sentiment or a larger system that propagates it without the direct intention of people. Big problem number two is that there’s no separation between systemic/societal oppression and individual prejudice and abuse. It’s an either/or situation. Everyone in the story is either fully on board with fish-men equality and is ready to take exclusively nonviolent action within the system, or they’re not and want to fight a war to subjugate the other side. The main enemy of the story is Hody Jones, a shark fish-man who’s picking up the ideology of fish-man supremacy laid out by an early antagonist, Arlong. In the story, he starts his uprising on Fish-Man Island, with the goal of taking over the country and killing anyone who’s not on board with his plan. If he were in a better story, he could be used as a vehicle to explore how nationalism cannibalizes itself.

To the story’s credit, it’s not exactly a “Hody’s right” situation. He does correctly identify the problem of historic and continued oppression, but the good guys agree, and they want to bring about a peaceful society the right way. Their conflict is about what constitutes true peace and justice. To its discredit, the story also says the solution is for fish-men to give up their “equally bad” hatred of humans, let past sins go by the wayside, and work for a new era of understanding and coexistence without fighting, through the system. Hody represents their collective hatred of humanity in the big picture. In the final fight, a big reveal is that Hody was never personally abused by a human, which was supposed to prove he’s an empty vessel for anger and hatred. Because everyone knows a Black person can’t complain about racism until they’re called the N-word, right? Like I said, no distinction; because Hody wasn’t a victim of personal physical or verbal abuse by a prejudiced human, he’s not allowed to be angry about historic systems and cultures of discrimination that have disenfranchised fish-men for hundreds of years. I’m sure this isn’t intentional, but as an American, it also feels like a very Fox News framing to me: Either you’re going to take complete personal responsibility for your situation, no matter how you ended up there, and work hard to prove you’re worthy of equality, or you’re a violent supremacist who actually wants to kill all the dominant people. Like, really in poor taste to have the New Fish-Men Pirates going to people’s houses like Klansmen to kill people for helping humans.

The good guys find their endpoint by lamenting that they were ignoring the longstanding hatred of humans building up among fish-men, which can only lead to more violence, and decide they have to give that up and keep working with their petition plan. Like, that’s not what they’ve been ignoring. The oh-so-terrible hatred of humans doesn’t represent the same evil being visited upon fish-men; it’s a natural reaction to the continued assault on their people that has gone unaddressed for so long. If the heroes wanted to end the cycle of violence and expunge their anger towards humanity, then they need to go to the World Government and demand justice for their abuse. An end to fish-man slavery, a fair shot at legal protection against hate crimes, some form of reparations, stuff like that. I can see the argument that starting with emigration to the surface can fit into that plan, but that’s not the plan the royal family lands on; limp noodle Prince Fukaboshi doesn’t give an impassioned speech about how he also wants the humans to pay for what they’ve done, just not in blood.

In the end, this thematically bloated story misses the mark, and leaves the royal family and the people of fish-man island looking like weird apologists for the system that has kept them down for hundreds of years. That may sound harsh, but it really isn’t. A crucial point in the story is that Hody Jones and the rest of the villains grew up in the Fish-Man District, a poor, crime-ridden area that the law can’t touch, filled with violence and desperation looking for an outlet. But like, why was it that way? The story never goes into detail. I don’t get why there would be a place the law can’t get to, since it’s right next to the main island. “The law can’t reach” is usually an excuse by the powers-that-be for why they’re letting a population rot with no outreach. Certainly there was nothing stopping King Neptune from setting up a job program like he announces at the end of the battle at any point before the battle; it’s not even clear why the police can’t get in, for however much that’s worth. It’s also weird that there would be such a stereotypical ghetto called the Fish-Man District on Fish-Man Island, isn’t it? It’s almost like this story convenience looks more literally like the royal family recreating the disenfranchisement of their own people in a more extreme form on a bunch of orphans (yes, it started off as an orphanage), named the place with that idea in mind, all with no self-awareness for how inhumane their actions are. No one takes Neptune to task over that. No wonder he sees working on the World Government’s terms as a reasonable way to move forward; he’s the same way.

So yeah, overall, not a very strong entry for the story. It’s fun to see the crew being so much stronger, and it’s a decent showcase for what’s to come. It just also features a concentrated dose of the series’ toxic masculine nonsense with gender and sexuality, and it’s not structurally sound in its themes due to a basic lack of understanding of racial politics. That part’s not hard to see coming after Skypeia; like hell would an indigenous leader say he’s spilled too much blood to claim his colonized homeland is his homeland after finally getting to live on it after four-hundred years. The sexism and queerphobia is also easy to see coming, though you can’t chalk it up to ignorance.