Actually….re: the whole we have never gotten a glimpse ever of past crocodile thing….would be SO funny if crocodile’s backstory was just every strawhat’s combined in succession but like the wario bad ending version “a man took me and my brother in when we were extremely small children and THEN sold us out to pirates when he didnt have enough protection money who forced ys to work to buy our way out of slavery THEN my sister pushed me down the stairs and THEN she died and THEN i was taken in by a fishwoman and her apprentice. And THEN she framed me for pirate conspiracy and turned me into the marines—“ etc. etc.
Y'know, I know you're joking, just doing a silly little funny and all
But unironically, on a thematic level this could very well be true
Like One Piece's long running themes include rejection, loss, loneliness, either believing yourself to be unlovable and/or hating yourself while loving others and what all these things can drive a person to do (among many other things)
And these narrative elements come up so often you could make a little bingo card of them and have a fun little game to see how many pop up for each Strawhat and their backstories (Sanji and Robin being the most extreme examples in some ways).
But the thing is that with the Strawhats, most of them manage to find a way to heal through all that trauma either through their mentors, their friends/family, the Strawhats and/or Luffy specifically. They all found a place to call home through Luffy
But Crocodile never did. He doesn't have a place to call home, people to call a family. He's still alone
So like, while Croc's backstory probably isn't all the Strawhats mashed together literally, on that thematic level? Actually, yeah, probably, especially If Crocodad Real. He could just turn out to be an amalgamation of all the Strawhats' trauma combined but with the specific twist he never had anyone come save him from it, what any of the Strawhats could've turned out like had they never met Luffy and went off the deep end
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You know, I think my thing about liking “asshole Megatron” more than “good Megatron” (speaking in terms of IDW1) isn’t just the fact that I find evil Megatron more entertaining and sexy, but that I suppose I don’t like the way good guy/Autobot Megatron’s personality is?
Like mmmm I’m not trying to be one of those people who goes “he’s OOC!” or “he’s such a wimp!” or “he’s evil and doesn’t deserve to be redeemed,” but there was just something slightly grating about the way Megatron is/acts in MTMTE/LL. If I had to pick a word for it, he just seems very... self-pitying? Ratchet said it perfectly while the DJD were attacking and he told Megatron “Oh of course it’s all about you, what a surprise.”
There’s something about Autobot Megatron that makes me hate him as a person, not like in a “haha what a pathetic bastard” way the way I see villain Megatron, but in a way that’s like “god you are so fucking stuck up and annoying” in a non-enjoyable way. Maybe it’s because Autobot Megatron was a last minute plot change and I’m sensing how JRO “forced” Megatron to be part of the narrative last minute? But that would just be a matter of shoddy writing, and MTMTE/LL aren’t shoddily written.
It’s presumptuous to try and assume the motivation of an author, but I guess it kind of feels like JRO was trying so hard to make Megatron a better person that it backfired and made him more unlikeable in my eyes. Like, Megatron’s dialogue about how if he goes back towards violence he’ll never come back out again because the guilt will be too much is poetic yeah, it’s a very cute notion, but the context is that the fucking DJD (who Megatron made) is attacking and killing members of the Lost Light (who Megatron is in charge of) and was it supposed to make me think of Megatron as noble or pitiable or something? Because instead it just pissed me off and made me want to scream “this isn’t fucking about you Megatron, stop being an angsty mope and DO SOMETHING GOOD FOR ONCE instead of crying about how hard it is for you to not enjoy killing people.”
It’s fucking weird because I of course love the concept of redeemable Megatron, and I’m fascinated with the way in which he adopted violence as a coping mechanism for trauma, but the way he’s written in MTMTE/LL just makes him seem more like he’s a self-justifying asshole trying to make pitiable attempts at good deeds than like he’s actually improving as a person. Which of course is a problem caused by the fact that JRO shoved him into the plot last minute and it didn’t actually make sense for Megatron to be on the Lost Light.
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" oh, big hat robib, i seek your wisdom, is murder acceptable to relieve a bit of of stress? i'll do it in any case. "
═══ UNPROMPTED INTERACTIONS ═══
CANON VERSE
"A bit of stress? Mm, no. Perhaps if you were aiming towards the Grand General's head for a death that could cause change, maybe, but knowing you it will be a pointless death lacking any artistry or meaning behind it."
Robin answers easily as he sews the eyes shut on one of the arena's most recent losses, his voice unamused as he ties the last knot and clips the thread. He lifts his face slowly to meet Draven's gaze, his own inscribed with horrors that no human should ever have to bare witness to, and they all lock in on Draven as he sets his scalpel down. His usual playful tone is gone, replaced with something far darker as he turns away once more to clean the blood off of his hands, off of the apron he wore, off of the tools he used;
"You're neither a hired gunman nor a rebel trying to cause change, nor are you an artist trying to put on a spectacle, nor would it have been something you've planned for weeks with meticulous detail. Human life is not something that should be so easily thrown away, I don't remember being told that you were so disrespectful to other lives." The mage slips the apron over his head and tosses it into a nearby sink, the crimson bleeds into the clear water and stains it as Robin turns back with his hands folding over his chest,
"A bit roundabout to ask my advice on such a topic if you're going to perform the act anyway, if you've that many issues witin your head that you can't even find a good reason besides stress to do it, you may want to speak to your brother about receiving some help." Robin makes his way back over to the body and flicks out a measuring tape glancing from the corpse's head to its feet, "Killing should have a macabre respect behind it, but a noble killing others for fun and giggles speaks nothing of that. It's a desecration of human life."
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Look, I like a good allegory as much as the next person, but an allegory still has to function as a *story* first and foremost. If I spend the first 20 minutes of your 25-minute fiction podcast episode feeling like I’m having a fever dream because the “plot” is just a bunch of completely random, out-of-the-blue unrelated events, except it turns out that it’s because this story is actually 40 allegories in a trenchcoat and I didn’t have the key to unlock what the fuck the allegory was about until you dropped a specific phrase halfway through . . . do us both a favor and just release the talk show you obviously wanted to do in the first place
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aw2 gave me perhaps, one of the most important realizations of my life. just now. "how do you run from an idea?"
the world i created when i started writing. i liked it. and i liked my characters. they were real to me. but. i could escape there. but i couldn't live there. with my family and friends and loved ones, the only ones i've had then.
i needed to stay outside and keep writing them. i could never join them. so i kept writing. every day i would write more of it, obsessively. and with that came a realization of the genre of the story it was shaping up to be.
i keep calling it "automatic writing", because i really never felt like i was in control of it. ideas just used me as a conduit. the story was telling itself. and it wasn't. a nice story. not one with hopes or happy endings.
i once told someone a long time ago that i couldn't stand writing anymore because i loved those people. loved their world. but if i made more of it. they'd have to suffer for it. so i quit. i kept meeting new ideas and characters and i only wrote down the barest of outlines. because the narrative would inevitably doom them, there had to be no narrative anymore.
i think what also made me stop it, was meeting Adam. a guy i knew like 10 years ago who suddenly messaged me. he re-sent me my own message to him from 2013. "well what about the fact that perhaps there IS a god, but he just specifically hates you?"
the last couple of years made me accept it. Adam is me. N(adam)ian. The one who made it all. The one who set up the rules. The one they'd be suffering for. And I don't want to be that. So I chose to leave them. They don't let me. But at least I can not write.
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