ahshim

[ahshim]

I feel like post-canon 40!Zoro would just kind of mellow out, keeping his warrior spirit of course but being less on edge and more cheerful. Sort of like early pre-ts Zoro. Anyways one thing about this swordsman is that he brags about his “wife”. A lot. Every time someone challenges him they leave with not only near-fatal injuries and wounded pride but also an earful of how that supposed “wife” is the most kindhearted, gentle, beautiful, strong, talented at cooking person in the world. So word spreads and now everyone is discussing who this “wife” of Roronoa Zoro’s is.

Then one day a young challenger follows Zoro all the way to the All Blue (took at least 3 months), and just sees Zoro being greeted with a kick to the face by some angry blonde guy, who screams at him about being a “good-for-nothing aquatic plant who only knows how to get lost.” And Zoro equally rips back into him ending in a full-blown duel. The poor young swordsman doesn’t even have time to process this before he gets his ass swiftly handed to him by Zoro.

So now the discourse around Zoro’s wife (husband) has gotten even more intense (“Is Roronoa Zoro a victim of domestic violence?”). But you’ll get pirates who defend the missus saying that he cooks you a meal for free if you lose to Zoro and would even encourage you to “train harder and come back to kill him someday” (“??? Is Roronoa genuinely okay??”)

“Wait no guys does that not sound like Black Leg Sanji?”

“Of course not have you seen the bounty posters? Black Leg is a hideous man. Zoro’s wife is actually so fucking hot.”

[ahshim]

I don't remember if I shared this idea already, but I was reading a fic with a similar idea and wanted to share how I would write it.

Lower rank Marines wouldn't look twice at Sanji as he passed them by. He's just another pirate to them, so he's treated the same as the rest of his crew. It isn't until Whiskey Peak that Igaram notices him, or rather, how his eyebrows swirl and how his face looks familiar in a way he can't quite place. This goes ignored until Alabasta. Specifically, when King Cobra pulls him aside, concern and apprehension twisting the kind king’s face.

“What business do you have with my kingdom, prince of Germa?”

The question stuns Sanji, blood draining from his face as he slowly turns to face the king. Terror is etched into his face, and it’s only that expression that causes Cobra to pause.

“Am I mistaken then?”

Sanji shakily brings a lit cigarette to his lips, a shuddering breath leaving his lungs with the puff of smoke.

“In blood only. I don’t have any ties or connection to that name.”

Cobra nods, understanding the unspoken words, though questions still linger on his tongue. 

“Then I would advise caution, as that kingdom is more well-known to noble families and high ranking marines than you would know. The faces of those nobles are much more easily recognized than you would know. As a friend of my daughter, I would recommend you not draw too much attention to yourself, though that may be difficult as you are a pirate.”

Sanji nods.

“I’ll take that into consideration.”

The next time is during Water 7 on the train to Enies Lobby. Only the higher Cipher Pol members who are more knowledgeable about World Government matters would pay attention to Sanji, how he looks, and how familiar yet different he appears to certain nobility. Lucci is the one who speaks plainly once Sanji approaches them. "Vinsmoke. A fallen prince if you'd stoop so low as to converse with pirates. What are you doing fighting with them? For them? For this woman who is nothing more than a demon in disguise?"

Sanji snaps, though Lucci continues his tirade against Robin and all that she is. As soon as Sanji and Usopp have been separated from the rest of the train, CP9 continues on their way to Enies Lobby.

From there, once Lucci and the rest reach Spandam and before more progress can be made towards taking Robin, Lucci suggests a call to be sent out to a certain kingdom in the North. And caught off guard, Spandam obliges if only because Lucci would never do this unless it was important. This is when Germa learns of Sanji of the Strawhat Pirates. And this is when they request confirmation of the wayward prince. CP9 promises this, and so a much more subtle plot is worked into their goals.

During Sanji's fight with Kalifa, she succeeded in getting proof in the form of a sneaky picture, catching the moment Sanji was serving her tea. When she kicks him off the balcony from the room she's in, she sends the proof off through a DenDen to Germa. They receive it just in time for Enies Lobby to fall, but that doesn’t matter to them.

It's only a matter of time for Germa to get his Only Alive wanted poster made. And from there, Germa starts to move. While they don't reach Sanji at Water 7 or Thriller Bark, Sabaody Archipelago is the perfect battleground for them to make their move. And there, soon after the Pacifista attack and Kizaru approaches the crew, Sanji's siblings join the fray with their only orders being to collect Sanji and bring him home to where he belongs.

They succeed.

[ahshim]

The fact so many fans believe the only difference between animanga Sanji and OPLA Sanji is the lack of the perv gag really exposes how little this fandom actually understands Sanji. It’s to the point where if someone says they prefer original Sanji over the LA one, certain fans will go “HOW???? The LA one isn’t a perv! Why do you want him to be a perv so bad?” as if that’s the only difference that could matter.

Original Sanji is much more hot tempered. He beats up Fullbody for wasting food and it’s made clear that him fighting the customers is a common occurrence. Live action Sanji is much calmer, simply says “we don’t waste food here” and offers Fullbody wine. Yeah he still has moments of being rude (“welcome to the shitty restaurant”) but it’s more subdued even when fighting in the restaurant (I think the “there’s no fighting in the Baratie” comment was meant to be an ironic joke, but still).

Original Sanji doesn’t care about “fancy” or “boring” food. He’ll cook anything and his clashes with Zeff are about holding himself back and his volatile nature. Live Action Sanji is much more pretentious about food, he complains about having to make “boring” food and how he wants to make “fancy” food and part of his beef with Zeff is that he won’t let him. Original Sanji tells Fullbody to just take the bug out of his soup. Live Action Sanji complains about oregano.

These are only a couple examples, and they might seem minor on paper, but they’re really not. Maybe you think these personality changes were for the better, maybe you don’t, but either way, they’re not connected to the perv gag, and they’re significant enough that it’s not that incomprehensible someone could find LA Sanji inferior, perv gag or no.

Bottom line, it is VERY inaccurate to say that OPLA Sanji is “How animanga Sanji would be without the gag” because they are WAY more different besides that.

[ahshim]

Villain Analysis: The Garuda Himself

AKA What turns men into monsters; Is it ideology and propaganda? Projection and insecurity? Class and upbringing? Or perhaps, it is all of these combined.

A not-so-quick analysis of Vinsmoke Judge, what makes him so despicable and hate-able, why he works as a villain, what does this mean for Sanji as a character and WCI as an arc, and how the brains of awful men like his work.

Warning: this is very very long (around 2k words) and talks about topics of abuse and imperialism, obviously. Also, a lot of this hinges on personal subjective interpretation of the narrative and speculation, so please be patient.

For starters, let’s get a quick comparison between Judge as a villain and other antagonists throughout One Piece. There’s, in my opinion, something that quickly separates him from the rest.

While most villains in One Piece are often motivated to do horrible things because of personal pathos and experiences, wants, needs, desires and traumatic memories, Judge –at first glance at least, seems to be motivated by something very different: Ideology. He is an imperialist, a fascist, a eugenicist, a classist, a warmonger, and so on and so on.

He is most similar to a villain like Hody Jones in this regard. There’s no personal big event in their lives (that we know of, at least) leading this type of character to their horrible actions, but rather a worldview. Most other antagonists in One Piece are in my opinion written as “person first, ideology second”. They’re often motivated by their own specific experiences, even if they can be assigned an ideology on top of that. But Judge and Hody seem to be more symbolic of broader ideas at their core, so they’re in a sense the odd ones out. They’re the reverse; “ideology first, person second”, almost feeling like they’re representatives of broader harmful structures, rather than being their own individuals.

I think also it’s worth mentioning why the ideology is here, and what it offers in terms of the narrative of Sanji’s abuse. Some might think it was an unnecessary element that isn’t that thematically connected to Sanji’s struggles. Couldn’t his family simply have been abusive, without all that Germa nonsense? Well for starters, it’s mostly here for the pop-cultural Kamen Rider references, yeah. But getting that out of the way, I think Sanji’s suffering is connected to his father’s terrible worldview pretty directly.

For starters, fascism is all about control. It preaches scapegoatism, demonization of “weakness” and fetishization of strength. Judge is a man that runs his family the same way he runs his state; with an iron fist. Sanji’s abuse IS a direct result of him being unable to meet these horrific standards. It also helps that we know Sanji as a kind person, so juxtaposing him to his comically evil literal-supervillain family, makes it simply easier for us to root for Sanji and hate his relatives, from a narrative building perspective. Ideas around masculinity and what an “able body” is in Judge’s eyes, are both part of Sanji’s backstory of abuse. It is also important that the Vinsmokes are royalty, because the first thing we learn about Sanji in One Piece, is that he suffered through great hunger. These people are wealth itself; they have never experienced that hardship.

However, while I think it’s true to an extent that Judge at first is simply “walking ideology” without being much of an actual individual, the way WCI is written, he starts showing interesting cracks behind the mask that reveal hints of specific personal motivations. In other words, the awful person behind the just as awful ideology starts to subtly show, and can be pieced together by looking intently.

As we experience the arc through Sanji’s eyes, Judge is a man who initially seems like an intimidating “strongman”, an impossible-to-read stoic threat, with no thoughts of his own outside cruelty. He’s a walking stereotype without much depth to be found. But slowly, the faults of his character begin to show; he is hasty, he has emotional outbursts, he is pathetic and hypocritical, he is careless and thoughtless, falling easily into Big Mom’s trap. In other words the imperfection and insecurity that Sanji was never able to spot in his father as a scared kid, starts to reveal itself, as Sanji slowly overcomes his fear of this man. He is not terrifying anymore; he is pathetic. And he is human, the worst kind of evil. The image of a man who is as perfectly mechanical as his genetically augmented sons, is shattered. They have no choice in their cruelty (to an extent, at least, due to Judge’s actions no less), but Judge is perfectly capable of compassion. He simply chooses to disregard it. His evil, unlike his sons, is his own choice.

Judge often laments his own humanity, doing so multiple times throughout the arc. He complains about how he can’t bring himself to take “his own son’s life as a father” to Sanji’s face, or often shows his twisted love for the rest of his children. This is a man who wishes nothing more than to be like his so-called “perfect” cruel sons, these unfeeling warriors, soldiers with no fear or sorrow. He fashions himself after them, in a way. But that is not the truth of who he is, and he very very clearly hates that.

This is where his hypocrisy comes in; he punishes Sanji for the very same things he himself is very capable of. To me, that’s kind of the point of the scene of him crying during the assassination, a highlight of his “rules for thee but not for me” behavior. This might sound absurd at first, but don’t misunderstand what I’m about to say. I think out of the three parental figures Sanji has had in his life (Sora, Judge, Zeff) he is the least like his birth father. He is in every sense, much more like the other two. However, no matter how absurd it feels, out of all his sons, Judge is most similar to Sanji. And he hates every second he is reminded of it. Not in the kindness, of course, but in his emotional nature. This is a man who, I think is not a stretch to say, projected on his eight-year-old son.

But here comes the problem, of course. As I said earlier, I think this is a man whose ideology came first. He doesn’t latch onto it to cover up for his insecurities, but rather, they are comorbid, it’s the reverse. The elements he sees in himself as “weakness” are elements that he hates, precisely because they clash with his worldview, not the other way around. The ideology is a result of upbringing, similar to the Celestial Dragons; taught from birth that as royalty he is superior to others, that he deserves everything by existing, that his kingdom’s horrific nationalism is excused due to whatever scapegoatism the Vinsmokes have been propagandizing for centuries. So when he is reminded that these ideas might be false, when he looks at his own “weak” son and realizes he is more like him than he is like his other “perfect” sons, he lashes out in ways the escalate in cruelty. I think he is at his core, a disastrous mix of entitlement and insecurity. After all, secure and happy men don’t fall for such ideas.

There’s an interesting moment right before he gives his last horrid speech where he lists all of the things he hates about Sanji (that scene where Luffy lovingly responds with “Why did he list all the good things about you?”). Before he starts angrily and pointlessly rambling, there’s a panel where he looks down at Sanji, their faces juxtaposed, with his bandages covering one eye; just like Sanji and his hairstyle, and while making a similar facial expression to him. There’s a pause in that moment. I think the narrative is telling us in a way, and if you want to interpret it as such, about the insecurity and projection hiding behind this man’s “strongman” mask. Literally a mask- Big Mom broke his helmet. He is here without it. And of course, he cannot change. He will not change. He will keep acting out his cruelty; it’s too late for horrible old men like him. But not for someone like Sanji. This is the last moment where we see the two reject each other for good. And it’s a reminder of how that man’s shadow no longer looms over Sanji. Sanji can see through him, he sees the real, pathetic, sad man behind the intimidating persona. Maybe he does see himself a little bit too, but he rejects that. He rejects a future where he grows to be like this man.

The last element I want to talk about however, one that I didn’t touch on so far, probably has to do with Sora. There’s two things that stood out to me in regards to Judge’s relationship to Sora that I never see anyone talk about.

The first is the fact that Judge calls Sanji “his greatest failure”. Think about it for a few seconds. Why would a man so self-absorbed not simply blame Sora for what happened? He could have easily gone “Oh, there’s no failure on my part here, my science was perfect! I didn’t make any mistakes; I was simply sabotaged. Sabotaged by a third party.” But he doesn’t. He doesn’t use Sora as a scapegoat. I mean- it wouldn’t have been inaccurate either. The reason Sanji was born human IS because of Sora’s interference, not because of any mistake in the science.  So why? Why does he not do it? Why is Sanji “his mistake”. I simply couldn’t figure it out at first, but then it dawned on me.

If Sanji is “Judge’s mistake”, than it can’t be “Sora’s success”. He is erasing her. He’d rather present himself as someone who messed up, than include her and acknowledge her actions. It’s about taking agency away from her. If HE is the one that failed when it comes to Sanji, he can make it about himself, and take her out of the picture. He can strip her of her power and decision. This is at his a core a man who is obsessed with control. Everyone else exists to serve him, in his eyes.

We see this even further in one of the most interesting and under-analyzed parts of Reiju’s speech to Sanji in WCI. While trying to figure out her father’s behavior, she makes the suggestion to Sanji that right after Sora died “he blamed you for everything that happened, and started to mistreat you accordingly.”

While Reiju is an unreliable in-universe narrator, she is one of the few people close enough to her father to be able to figure out his behavior. And here, she is suggesting that a big part of Sanji’s mistreatment is because, in his twisted mind, Judge blames Sanji for Sora’s death. This to me reads in a couple of ways. For starters, it’s once again taking agency away from her. It couldn’t have been her own decision; it had to be the fault of something or someone else. In this case… their unborn son…? Wild choice on who to blame. But it works in his head; Sora didn’t CHOOSE to disobey him, it was all that child’s fault. But also, it does beg that question again of what happens when you mix that complex villainous humanity with wretched ideology. Did he love Sora? Or is him mourning her just a feeling of loss of something he owned, a loss of ownership and control? Well, if I had to guess, it’s probably a bit of both. And that’s what makes Oda’s villains much, much more interesting to me, compared to simple walking stereotypes. Twisted abusive love expresses itself this way very often. To people like this, genuine feelings of love and horrific desire to control and hurt are the very same. And I think the same can be said for his “successful” children. I do think he loves them, genuinely, but a man like this experiences that emotion through a sense of ownership, control, and an extension of his own ego. It's not that is isn't love, or that it's performative. It is simply twisted, selfish, abusive, but it is there. But Sanji? He doesn't even get that.

God I hope this man suffers a terrible punishment for everything he’s done. An excellent villain, I need him dead and rotting in hell. Whole Peak Island. Thank you Mr. Oda.

[ahshim]

Clone gossip.

[ahshim]

I’m pretty sure this collaboration with @crimsoncres was for a reason

[ahshim]

Literal Shoulder Angel

[ahshim]

Tweedledum Tweedledummer and Tweedledummest by @takiskun

[ahshim]

i was overthinking about vinsmokes again and... uh... yeah this shi appeared. This man is a combination of all his siblings on his Germa 66 suit. idk but my headcanon is that either of his brother's designed it lol

[ahshim]

LOOK WHAT I GOT!!!

[ahshim]

Finally DONE. Pretty sure I'm gonna repeat a paper but WHO CARE? IM DONE!

This semester is such a drag.

[ahshim]

This semester is such a drag.

[ahshim]

language barrier au of sorts

inspired by the tweets below, although i forgot the prompt and i lost steam halfway but i blame it on it being 5am

Next Post

[ahshim]

A YouTube comment I typed out to try and help someone understand Sanji's character a bit better:

I almost left this comment on your last video, but didn't because I didn't want to be "that guy." I'm only leaving it now because I believe you will genuinely be able enjoy the show more if you understand something about Sanji's character.

Sanji is a closeted character.

Not (necessarily) in the homosexual context, though many have (and will) argue that point. What Sanji is "hiding" is a self perceived flaw in his own character-- a feeling of not being good enough, and particularly of not being masculine enough.

Sanji grew up around a lot of toxic masculinity and was constantly belittled for not being like them. He hates men because of this, but as a result also desires approval. There's a certain amount of self-preservation in it too, an idea that if he tries hard enough to "fake it" he can get by without being "seen" for what he is.

I do NOT think this excuses any of his perverted behavior.

However, what I think you and many others may have missed is how much of Sanji is just a front. He IS the man behind the curtain. He is literally ALL talk.

I cannot say this with 100% certainty as I've been reading the manga over the course of many many years, but I believe that in the comic Sanji has never once touched a woman without her consent. He does not hesitate to go on at length about how beautiful he thinks women are, but he still respects women as people.

Sometimes Toei (the animation company) make him act like more of a perv because they think it's funny. I do not fault you for finding this annoying. It makes the anime basically unwatchable to me personally, but Sanji as Oda writes him genuinely is and wants to be a gentleman.

He genuinely believes that women are better than men, and therefore thinks its only "proper" that he act as their servant. He also believes that all men are inherently dog shit. His issue with Zoro can be boiled down to "he's a masculine guy" and masculine men are threats to Sanji's well being. Zoro mostly fights back because Sanji is annoying about it.

Many people (for multiple reasons) believe Sanji actually genuinely wants to be a woman, and thus view his hatred of men as an extension of his own self-hatred and his admiration for women's bodies as an expression of that desire. Again, IF true this would not excuse his behavior, but in no way is his "perversion" born from a desire to CONTROL.

Sanji would absolutely never ever do what Hogback has done to Cindry. If a woman rejected Sanji, he'd think-

Of course she would reject me, for I am a disgusting pig/man/pervert and she is a lady. This is the natural state of things.

-and continue to fulfill her every desire. And if her desire was for him to jump off a cliff? HE WOULD DO IT.

He doesn't "serve" women because he wants something from them, he genuinely thinks women just deserve to be served.

So please, if you can, look at Sanji's actions and not at his words. Keep in mind who it is he says these things to. This is not a command! You can have whatever opinion of Sanji you like, I just think you'll like the show more if you can keep this idea in mind.

[ahshim]

𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐏𝐢𝐞𝐜𝐞 𝐕𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐦𝐞 𝟏𝟏𝟏 𝐂𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫!!!

[ahshim]

Was rewatching Punk hazard and got me thinking about how funny a role swap with doctor Sanji would be

[ahshim]

OMG JUST UNCOVERED: SHORT SEGMENT OF THE ANIMATION MEME I THOUGHT I HAD LOST FOREVER T O T!!!