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officialstrawhat · 5 months

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The Rose Of Dressrosa- Chapter 5

Chapter List

Hello! Wow, it's been forever. But on the bright side, I am completely caught up with One Piece! :D Please enjoy this Chapter!

Trafalgar D. Law x Fem!Reader

Summary:

After King Riku is dethroned, Doflamingo takes you under his wing and asks you to follow only one strict rule, "do not leave the palace alone". However, your sense of adventure is too great.

Law had only one thing in mind... Revenge. And you seemed like the best way to do that.

Trigger Warnings!: Please be advised there will be some allusions to grooming, non-con touching, and manipulation.

Word Count: 1.7k

Note: Gif is not mine. Not Edited.

Chapter 5

You hummed happily as you sat in the courtyard of the palace. You sat back against the trunk of the large tree rereading your favorite parts of your adventure book. This was a great chapter:

In the South Blue, there are descendants of wayward giants from Elbath. According to legend, centuries ago, these seafaring giants were shipwrecked on a tiny island in the South Blue. In an attempt to return to Elbath without a ship, they tried to build a stone bridge to reach their homeland. Eventually, the island ran out of stones, and the giants soon realized they would never see their homeland again. Now, every year, their descendants walk across the stone bridge to honor their ancestors...

“You're chipper,” Dellinger came up from behind you.

“So? Am I not allowed that as well?” You bite back at his comment, rolling your eyes.

So what if you were happy? Was that so bad? Whenever you left the palace you felt a euphoric bliss that only satiated until the next time you could sneak out again. Anytime you would go out it was all very secretive. At least you hoped so, you tried not to ever talk to anyone unless it was necessary. Which only made it all so lonely.

That was until you met him. Law. He was new and told you all about his adventures sailing from island to island. It captivated you.

He captivated you…

You began to blush furiously at the thought. He was attractive, that was easy to admit. But to act like this it was a feeling you had never felt like this.

“Hellooo?!” Dellinger began to snap his fingers in front of your face.

Oh shit. Was he talking to you? “Hmmm…”

“I said, Doffy wants to see you.”

Your heart sank, “Did he say why?”

“Oh yes we had a great big chat all about it over tea,” the Sharkboy said mockingly.

Rolling your eyes again, you rise from your grassy spot.

“Have fun,” he laughed as he sank to lay down on his back the brim of his cap hiding his eyes. “Hopefully he doesn’t kill you”

“Asshole.” you tossed out as you walked off.

Shit. Shit. Shit. you curse.

Did he know? Did someone see you while you were out? With some strange man no less. You weren't stupid this could be bad. You had heard rumors of how Doffy would kill if he felt like his family was put in jeopardy. Maybe if you explained…

Taking a deep breath you knocked on his massive office doors.

“Young Master?” You say as you enter cautiously.

When you fully entered his office it was empty. It had been a long time since you had stepped into his room. You looked over to his desk and there were the flowers that were browned and dead in an expensive crystal vase. You waved your hand over the petals, reviving them back to life. The act caused a memory to revive as well.

Seven years ago…

Doflamingo sits in his desk chair reading a newspaper

“Doffy!”

He looks up, “Aww there's my Rose.”

“I made you something!” You tell him excitedly

“Did you?”

You nod and reveal a wildflower from behind your back lifting it up to him.

“Watch what I can do!” You turn the one into several different colors.

“My that is something,” he smiled and placed an invisible string to the flowers and tied it together before placing the bouquet in a crystal vase, “I think it works well there.”

“Mhmm.” You agree as he places you on top of his lap. “Doffy? How many strings can you make?”

He chuckled, “How many stars are in the sky?”

“You hung all those stars,” you gaped.

“Let me tell you a secret,” The Young Master leaned in close to your ear, “Only for you”

“Y/N,” you heard causing you to spin towards the entryway.

“I was told you wanted to see me,” you said hesitantly as you watched Doffy walk over to his large chair next to the window.

“Yes. Come sit,” he said once he placed himself in his large chair, you moved to the opposite chair in front of him. Before you could sit he stopped you by grabbing hold of your wrist.

“No, right here.” he patted his lap. You felt your stomach turn. Gulping you moved and sat on top of him, causing the grin on his face to widen at your obedience.

“I am proud of you, you know,” he says pulling you closer to him, “for keeping up with your training. In no time you will be able to unleash the full potential of your power.” He ran a hand through your hair brushing a strand behind your ear.

“Will it always be Monet training me?” you ask trying to focus on your breathing as your heart beats faster against the cage of your chest.

“Yes. As difficult as it may be,” he spoke, his words trailing off before speaking again this time his voice dangerously low and slow, rubbing your thigh. “Unless you want me to step in and teach you. I am a very good teacher.”

You watched his hand inch closer and closer to the most intimate part of yourself. Immediately you jumped out of his lap, “Was that all you wanted to speak with me about?”

“No,” He chuckled, seemingly amused at your jumpiness, “I wanted to speak with you before I leave for The Reverie.”

He’s leaving? This was news to you. You had heard of the meeting before. He had gone before, four years ago.

“I also wanted to warn you that while I’m away-”

“Don’t leave, I know.” You finish.

He stared at you with a grin on his face, “I know my rules may seem rigid but I do so because I care.” He rose from his seat and walked toward you. “You are naive my dear and I would hate to see you taken advantage of. I've only ever wanted to take care of you. Let me take care of you.”

He towered behind you, “Perhaps the next reverie I’ll let you attend with me” he spoke lowly again but this time he snaked his large hand down the length of your back eventually resting and firmly grasping the curve of your backside causing you to take a sharp intake of breath, “On the condition you continue to be a good girl of course.”

He moved too quickly for you to even understand what was going on. His hand wrapped your loose hair pulling your hair roughly, exposing your neck to him. Frozen in place you watched him smirk and lean down to the crook of your neck. He inhaled your scent deeply before rapidly running his tongue from the base to the top of your neck to the point where you could feel the tip of his wet tongue lash against your ear.

Before you could push back he let you go. Dismissing you back to your room. Quickly you scurried out the door as Doffys laughter echoed in the room.

Four hours later you met Law just like you had planned and tried to block out the events earlier today. As you walked through the alleyways you were at war with yourself. You kept thinking about Doffy and how he held you. How he touched you. It felt- not good. But Doffy had looked out for you your whole life.

He wouldn’t hurt you.

But he just did…

Maybe this was always meant to happen?

What was it that Doffy said? “Let me take care of you..”

Maybe it wasn't a big deal. He was very clear. All you had to do was play by his rules and in four years possibly get a taste of freedom. Do what he says, stay on his good side? Allow him to touch you and-

“Are you hungry?” Law asks as they walk down the dark street pulling you out of your head.

“No,” You say flatly arms crossed against your chest.

“Ya sure? I found this great little booth down this way” Law replied. He could sense something was off you weren’t your normal cheerful self.

“It's nothing.” You push back suddenly changing your mood into one of fake enthusiasm. “Food sounds great. Let's go.”

You two walked in silence for a considerable amount of time before he brought you to a small cart parked on the sidewalk of a market street. There were so many people and Toy people that it brought a certain warmth you always loved about the city.

You knew this place although it looked different in some aspects. Your attention immediately went to the two-story building the stucco roof was a different color and bicycles as well as their seller could be seen from the new glass windows but you could only imagine a woman who looked a lot like you did now helping customers in the quaint shop.

Law passed you the food and drink he purchased and led you away from the area until he found an empty alleyway.

You both slid down the building and remained quiet until Law finally spoke. “We don't have to talk about it.”

“Hmm?”

“Whatever it is that's wrong,” he told you, “We don't have to talk about it. Frankly, I’d rather just eat my empanada.”

“I used to live there,” you aren’t sure what made you say it, “Above the bike shop. Well It used to be my mother's flower shop”

He remained silent. Allowing you to continue if you wish.

So you did. “She died. I was ten.” You felt the tears but managed to push them back. “It sucked.”

Law nodded. “To your mom” You raised your glass of bottle letting it clink to his.

You both continued to eat in silence. Law wished he could say he was pretending to care about your sad story. But he did. It made him think of his mother. He was ten too. Or maybe it was because he knew something was up the moment he saw her walking over to him. He wondered what could have- No. he shook the thoughts from his head. He had to stay focused. He couldn't afford to start caring about some spoiled girl's sob story. She was just a key to his plot and it was high time to start putting it in motion.

@rebeccawinters @mj-airlines @awkwardspontaneity @cresent-z

#one piece x reader #romance #angst #donquixote doflamingo x reader #trafalgar law x reader #fem!reader

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sabo-has-my-heart · 1 year

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Hi. I’m completely obsessed with your stories and writing style. I haven’t read anything from you I haven’t enjoyed. Can I please have a Law x Doflamingo daughter reader (fluffy angst or angsty fluff)? She was closer to Corazon (she learned Corazon’s secret but never told her father). Her and Law grew up together. When Corazon takes Law to find a cure, both of them promise to come back for her. But we know what happens with that whole thing (I’m 100% crying over that still). Then with Dressrosa, they reunite (remember their mutual feelings for each other that haven’t seemed to go away) and she helps them take down her father. Thank you!

I'm so glad you like my writing! I hope you like this one as much as my others!

Warnings: angst, hurt/comfort, Dressrosa spoilers, Doffy being... Doffy

Word Count: 1500

How many years had it been since your uncle had left? You missed him. You vaguely knew what had happened to him. Your father had killed him for being a traitor. When you’d ‘learned’ about the truth behind his death, you’d pretended to be surprised, even though you’d known what he was a long time ago. He’d been more like a father to you than your actual father, kind, caring, nurturing. For all of your father’s talk about family, he was a shit father. Giolla had taken care of Baby 5, Dellinger, and Buffalo, but your father had insisted on ‘raising you himself’. As if by taking care of you, you’d turn out like him. But in a way, he himself was proof that that wasn’t always true, being nothing like his own mother and father. You missed Law as well, having gotten along quite well with the angry little boy. Even before he got to know Corazon well, you’d gotten along with him. Something in him just clicked with you. What was worse was that they’d promised to come back, promised to save you from this hell. Family this, family that, acting as if he was a kind and nurturing man. But he was just as much of a monster with his own family as he was with others. Those who didn’t obey him were… punished. In that moment of hope, in the split second where you thought that you would finally be free of him, you were brought crashing back down to the reality that you would never be free. As if you were a bird, a bird trapped in his cage. So you learned to obey him, you learned to do as he wished, to hide your true thoughts and feelings, to bury your morals, and to be the ruthless killer he desired. It wasn’t what you wanted, it wasn’t what you desired to do, but for the sake of not suffering the same fate as your beloved uncle, you did what you had to. In the depths of your heart and on the anniversary of your uncle’s death, you clung desperately to the same desire to be free as the day that they left. That one day, through some miracle, you might have a chance to escape.

Standing in the throne room with your father, you felt your heart skip a beat. He’d mentioned Law coming to Dressrosa, about what he would do to Law and the boy he was with, Luffy. It was a slim hope, little more than a tiny sliver, but it was something. You didn’t need much, just an opening, just enough to contact and reach Sengoku. He might not have raised your father, but having raised your uncle, you considered him as close to a grandfather as you might ever have. Corazon had told you about growing up with the man, about how kind he was. Sengoku could keep you safe, hide you from your father, it wasn’t the most ideal situation, but anything to get away from your father. All you needed was an opportunity, a lull in your father’s guard, just a second to slip away. If you could, if it was possible, you’d leave with Law, if you had the chance, he’d keep his promise and come for you, but you hadn’t had that kind of hope in years, your father was powerful, strong enough that few people could match him. While you yearned for an end to your father, you couldn’t bring yourself to pray for it like you did for your freedom. Freedom was an attainable goal, your father’s end seemed impossible by all but the yonkos.

Glancing at Law, chained to the throne of heart, you couldn’t stop the pounding of your heart. You’d been so close, leaving the boy as many tiny breadcrumbs as possible, little things to help him, things that would give you a chance. Had he simply not noticed them? Or had he outright ignored them? Either way, your sliver, your chance, was once again beginning to diminish and you weren’t sure you could handle that without breaking. Should this chance pass, should your liberation be once more out of reach, you may just fall into despair. It wasn’t long until things turned chaotic, until you were facing your father, your weapon out as you blocked a hit aimed for Law.

“How many times must I be betrayed by my family? How much must I endure?” your father asked, seething with anger as you pushed against him. You knew you were no match for him, but you didn’t have to be. You could tell that Luffy and Law could do this, you just needed to provide them with an opening.

“You and I were never family. Your blood may run through my veins, but only my uncle Rosinante and Law were ever my family. I’ve only ever sought your downfall, ever since I was a child, I’ve wanted nothing more than your death!” you shouted, pushing him back momentarily. You and Law traded, the boy surging forward to attack, repeatedly defended from Doflamino’s attacks by your weapon, allowing him to focus on wounding the man. Again and again, Law would attack, you would defend. Finally, the both of you kneeled before your father, his gun aimed at your heads. Law’s arm lay, severed on the ground as you faced your execution.

“I’m… I’m sorry Y/n. I’m sorry I didn’t return sooner. I regret forcing you to endure this long.” he said softly, holding his arm where it had been removed.

“You promised to come back, you never promised when. I suppose… I suppose if I had to die, I’m glad it was by your side.” you said with a small smile at him, “Just… before that, I want you to know… I always loved you.” you said, tears starting to fall down your cheeks, Law’s eyes widening while your father’s eyes narrowed behind his sunglasses. Blood dripped from his arm faster as he let go of it, taking your hand in his, giving a small smile. It wasn’t much, but you knew what he was telling you. Closing your eyes, you awaited your death.

Wrapping Law’s arm, you smiled softly. Through some miracle, your father was now in chains, your deepest wish had been granted. Not only were you free, but your father had been taken down in the process. Law’s arm had been healed, he would have full use of it again, but you insisted on bandaging it in the off chance it started bleeding again or began hurting. At least, that was your excuse, in truth, you simply wanted to feel his skin beneath your fingertips, as if to prove that this was all real, that this wasn’t another dream.

“Y/n.” Law called, drawing your attention back to the man, “I may not have said it up there, but I love you as well. I have since we were young, I wanted to return to you sooner, but had no way of freeing you.” he said, making you smile.

“You still returned for me, that’s all I could ever ask for.” you said, gently tying his bandage, your eyes remaining on his as you gave his bandaged arm a small kiss. Law couldn’t help the blush that spread across his cheeks, looking away, making you giggle.

“Then I’d like to ask you something.” Law said, still blushing as you tilted your head in confusion, “I’d like you to join the Heart Pirates, to sail with me. I’m sure you’re sick of pirates after… everything, but I’d like to… you’ve gotten strong, you’d make a great addition.” he said, his cheeks turning an even brighter pink. He’d just told you he loved you, why couldn’t he bring himself to tell you that he wanted you by his side?

“You have no idea how much I’d like that. It was something I never dared dream for, but desired all the same.” you said, giving him a kiss on the cheek. His cheeks were brighter than ever, the young man beyond flustered as he pulled his hat over his eyes, trying to hide his face.

“Th-then once we reach the rest of the crew, I’ll introduce you and you can become an official part of the crew and…” Law swallowed hard, pulling his hat even lower, his voice barely a whisper, “And perhaps… we could…” Law found himself unable to finish his sentence, freezing in place as you gave him a quick peck on the lips.

“I’d really like that, all of that. Even the parts that you can’t say.” you said, caressing the stunned man’s cheek. He could still feel your lips on his as his heart pounded. All you’d wanted as a child was freedom from your father, all he’d wanted as a child was to live long enough to tell you how he felt. It seemed as if today was a day of hope and dreams.

#one piece #one piece law #op Law #trafalgar law x reader #trafalgar one piece #one piece trafalgar law #trafalgar law #trafalgar d law #trafalgar d water law x reader #trafalgar d law x reader #trafalgar d water law #hurt/comfort #angst

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sahesha · 3 years

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~30 days challenge~

Day 2: Favorite Male Character

I have a few favorite male characters, and I'll be happy to share my liking, lmao. This list is not a top because I love them all equally. I just decided to dedicate this blog to the pink bird.

Law

His tragic past, his character, his appearance in combination are just something incredible. I admire how he was able to survive such severe psychological traumas. I have some suggestions about how he handled this emotional pain, but I'll share them another time. However, as someone who loves stories like this one, I would be interested to know what he did in his teenage years and early twenties. I want to learn more about how he gathered his crew, how they designed their submarine, why it's yellow. Oda, give me more information, please!

Zoro

From the moment Zoro appeared, he had my attention riveted on him. Do you remember that guitar riff that came out the first time he appeared on the screen? His indomitable will inspires me not to give up. Energy and determination are the words that I associate with him, and I want to take an example from him (but I won't cut off my limbs, lol.) His wild recklessness is both frightening and fascinating. It's also necessary to note his dedication and selflessness when it's about his crew. I consider it something beyond the limit. Also, I think he's someone I'll feel safe around because he looks chill, haha.

Katakuri

How can he be so harsh and so sweet at the same time? The giant man with sharp fangs, dressed in biker style and loving donuts, is something. I respect that he's fair in battle, even if it's dangerous for his life. The ability to put his ideas about fairness above his own life is worth respect, and his love for his family, too. And honestly, I don't understand why Flampe made fun of his appearance. It's like Perospero is the standard of beauty since he doesn't need to hide his long witch's nose, while Katakuri hides such a wonderful mouth in his scarf. It's a weird moment.

Gladius

He is one of the three most stylish members of the Donquixote family, along with Senor Pink (before the tragedy) and Doflamingo. I think Gladius loves steampunk, haha. I find his devotion to Doflamingo quite touching. He doesn't allow the thought that his Young Master is doing wrong, and even if he looks strange (it was Kinemon,) it's still a person he believes. Gladius knows etiquette, and the fact that before a fight, he always asks what his opponents' names are, and introduces himself to them, is a sign of good manners. Problems with controlling anger make him more living character than if he were constantly calm. Oda, I want to know more!!!

Dellinger

He looks like an unstable teenager who can chew off your ribs, and he is! Maybe there's something wrong with me, but I think he is a sweetie pie. I want to put my arms around him, stroke his thick blond curls, and squeeze his cheeks. Seriously, he looks like an alternate angel with horns, fangs, and a shark fin. Of course, the pink flamingo god cult can only have such the cupid doll, haha! In sum, here we're talking about the fact that children are often dependent on the environment in which they grew up. Strange people like the Donuixote family could only raise such a person. It seems to me logical. And... Is that too much to ask??? Oda, I'm looking at you with my eyes narrowed.

Doflamingo

I can talk about this character for hours. Let's put aside the apparent features like appearance, style, charisma, and intelligence. I like Doflamingo's ambiguity, his ambivalence. I love the fact that he encourages me to think about many things.

Is it possible to justify the actions of a person by his tragic past?

(No, but you can understand why he did some things.)

Is it allowed to sympathize and empathize with a villain?

(Yes. It's okay when it's a fictive character. Sometimes you can empathize with real people who have committed serious offenses. Yet humankind is about humanity, not hate. Where would our civilization be if we didn't know how to empathize?)

In general, I consider him an ideal model for deep reflection on morality, on justice, on relationships, on the experience of psychological trauma, on how strange the twists of the human psyche can be. I call it "Doflamingo's paradox." All of this is significant to me.

I hope you found it all interesting to read!

#one piece #30 days challenge #trafalgar law #roronoa zoro #charlotte katakuri #gladius #dellinger #donquixote doflamingo #doflamingo #donquixote family #schizo bird talks #villain issue

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kaizokuou-ni-naru · 4 years

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The Voyage So Far: Dressrosa (Part One)

east blue (1 | 2) || alabasta (1 | 2) || skypiea || water 7 || enies lobby || thriller bark || paramount war (1 | 2) || fishman island || punk hazard || dressrosa (1 | 2) || whole cake island || wano (1 | 2)

fujitora’s introduction is so memorable. we don’t even know he’s an admiral until a little while after this, but the way he’s introduced makes him both immediately intriguing and tentatively likable, and also shows he’s terrifyingly powerful. similar to wano, dressrosa is a very twisty arc with a lot of hidden identities and things and people that are not what they seem, and fujitora’s introduction establishes that right off the bat.

it’s no secret i really like law, and i think his relationships and dynamics with the strawhats are some of the reasons why. it’s very good. the way he usually interacts with them (read: suffering) contrasts against the very real respect and faith he develops for them, and for luffy in particular. he refuses to call luffy his subordinate, here, even though it would be basically a get-out-of-jail free card when it comes to dealing with fujitora, and it comes up again more than once later in this arc too (though never to the strawhats themselves).

genuinely the tournament subplot is one of my favorite parts of this entire arc, especially because it happens while the action in the rest of dressrosa is mostly still setting up. it’s so fun to watch luffy go completely ham with minimal consequences, especially because we know more or less from the beginning that he’s not really likely to face a challenge from anyone here.

it allows the supporting cast to be built out as a pretty entertaining group in their own right, too, especially bartolomeo and cavendish, and sets up most of the future grand fleet without being too obvious about it.

i may as well say now, because i’m sure i’ll be talking about it a lot: kyros is one of my favorite one piece parents, and his and rebecca’s relationship hits me in the fucking chest. i’m consistently upset that they got so much stolen from them, and very very glad that they got the happy ending they dearly deserved.

i really like rebecca. and i like her story, too. i know there are people who want her to be more of a fighter, more violent, but i think that’s missing the point. rebecca is someone who has been victimized and commodified and put on display to die in front of a country that hates her again and again and again, and she still stays gentle and good, and i think that makes her one of the strongest characters in this arc.

obviously in isolation ‘damsel in distress’ is not really a good trope (and i’ve complained about it before with regards to tashigi in punk hazard), but i also don’t think it’s really at play here. rebecca is someone who deserves to finally lay down her sword and rest and be happy and safe, and her father deserves the chance to give her the protection he hasn’t been able to.

i really like when oda does things like this with paneling, i think it’s tremendously cool. there’s some similar examples with law’s powers in this arc and punk hazard as well, and it’s cool as hell every time.

this is one of my favorite panels in all of dressrosa.

kyros has a line a lot later on about ‘restoring the true dressrosa,’ and that’s what this scene makes me think of. this is the true dressrosa- the broken and forgotten and lost, down in the darkness beneath the city. and no matter what he may think of himself, riku is still their king.

this panel also reminds me of the similar scene in udon in wano, where the prisoners kneel before momonosuke. which is, incidentally, another favorite of mine. i really like whenever one piece deals in themes of loyalty, i feel like it always hits very hard.

[spoilers for recent wano chapters]

i think some parts of dressrosa line up very nicely with the recent reveal in wano that law’s new goal is uncovering the mystery of the will of d. it’s something that feels very natural and fitting for him, and i think this is one of the reasons why.

of the Ds we’ve seen, law is the only one who’s been really shown to be actively aware of the name and the weight it holds (and thus, the only one to bother to keep it secret), and he even weaponizes it against doflamingo throughout dressrosa in order to throw him off balance, and succeeds. it feels like a very natural progression from that awareness to trying to understand its mystery, at least to me.

barto is a great character because he’s introduced as being a completely unlikable shithead, and like, that’s not inaccurate, he totally is, but he also somehow winds up being likable anyways. part of that is his idolization of the strawhats (because, let’s be real, all of us can relate), but part of it is also that he’s kind of honorable in his own way, and i think him saving bellamy from dellinger despite having no stake in the situation just because they fought together is probably the best example of that.

i really like how the sabo reveal is handled. all the focus is placed on luffy and his reaction, and then we get our actual introduction to sabo as an adult slowly over the course of the next few chapters in how he acts and interacts with other characters throughout the tournament, culminating in his proper introduction after it’s over.

the actual explanation of what happened to him, how he survived and the entirety of his reunion with luffy is saved for the end of the arc, and i think it’s good that it happens there, in a quiet time after the dust is settled, rather than being smacked in the middle of the rising action.

of all the many many devil fruits that have appeared in one piece, i think sugar’s is the scariest, and also one of the ones i’ve probably thought the most about, if only in terms of its sheer inherent horror. the moment her spell is broken is, in my opinion, one of the most satisfying in the entire story. doflamingo’s hold over the entire country snaps, just like that.

the entire sequence of dressrosa’s great panic is one of my favorites in the whole series. i’m a really big fan of moments where the tides are all at once turned, and this is so very much one of those- sugar is knocked out; all the toys revert to human all at once, including kyros, who promptly decapitates (unfortunately not the real) doflamingo; sabo wins the tournament, eats the mera mera no mi, and obliterates the colosseum; and usopp becomes god.

it’s really really good.

even though this is a fake doflamingo it is very satisfying to see him get wrecked, and even though i love the outcome of the luffy and law versus mingo and trebol fight i do think kyros deserved to decapitate the real thing also.

usopp’s role and development in dressrosa is really great. it’s the most focus he’s gotten since water seven/enies lobby, and it comes at a time right when he’d been in the background for a rather long time. in dressrosa, he gets to be a proper hero- he indisputably saves the entire day not once but twice, and even doflamingo recognizes him as by far the biggest wrench in his plans- and more importantly, he gets to do it for the first time as himself, instead of having to hide behind a mask, as he did at both thriller bark and enies lobby.

the way a lot of the fight panels with doflamingo specifically are drawn is very cool, i think. there’s a real sense of speed and danger to a lot of them, which makes sense, as doflamingo is a very dangerous opponent fully capable of slicing off limbs and heads with ease if his enemies make a wrong move, something both the characters and the audience are fully aware of by this point.

to be continued in the next post with the rest of dressrosa!

#the voyage so far #one piece #opmeta #arc: dressrosa #long post #not japanese

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ask-donquixote-family1 · 4 years

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Hello Donquixote family! Since almost all of you are Spanish people, what‘s your favourite thing about Spain?

Doffy: fufufu, now that’s a good question , España is the greatest country indeed , many things I absolutely love about my country, the literature , the art , the music , the dancing, I’m a man of high taste after all.

Law: by the looks of you it’s really difficult to tell

Vergo: be polite you damn brat*smack law on the back of his head*

Diamanté: Doffy is right there is many things it’s hard to choose, but if I had to choose I will say the cuisine and sports , people often tell me I’m the most talented bullfighter they ‘ve ever seen and coincidentally the best cook too

Law: said literally no one ever

Buffalo: hmm yess food is the best , now I’m hungry dasyuan.

Dellinger: kyahaha , my favorite must be the festivals , El carnival, all filled with colors , glitter and glamour , giolla bought me the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen , more beautiful than viola’s , I’m so excited to wear it to the next carnival!

Giolla: and you would be the prettiest one there too ,my sweet delli, as for me I would have to agree with doffy , art ! we have the best in the whole world , I could never get enough of it !

Trebol: behehe -

Sugar: eww I have a bad felling about this.

Trebol: there is nothing like spanish women , neh neh am I right doffy neh neh

Sugar :I knew it .

Doffy: fufufu , you are right, and tou remindedme delli I wanted to buy a new coat for the carnival, one more colourfull than mine.

Corazon: don’t worry brother I bought us matching ones.

Diamanté: but I bought doffy and I matching outfits!

Trebol:Bah diamanté I thought we were going together I bought us matching headdresses

Doffy: I think I’m sticking with my old coat this year.

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u-iona · 4 years

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After seeing the last episode on the YouTube channel GrandLineReview, I wanted to comment about a thing I hate about One Piece, but it was too long (as all my writtings tend to be), so I’m posting it here.

I apologise for all gramatical mistakes that will inevitabely appear.

I hate how female characters either don’t appear as much as males or are left as background characters while the males duke it out.

Marines: I can remember about three female characters from the top of my head (Tashigi, Tsuru and Hina) and even though there are more (Tsuru’s crew) there is nowhere near enough to counter the males. Additionally, we know of two former Fleet Admirals (Sengoku and Kong), one current (Sakazuki), and five Admirals (Akainu [former], Aokiji [former], Kizaru, Fujitora and Ryokugyu). Notice a trend? All males.

Cipher Pol: While writting about the Marines, I thought that maybe the reason for the lack of females was that the society at large expected women to not fight and simply take care of the house. With that being the case, it would make sense for Marines to promote the idea, since it would fit with the world at large. It would also make sense for the lack of female characters in CP1-8, since those are known to public (maybe even CP0, since they work mainly for the World Nobles and need to keep up the appearances). But it would not explain CP9, which is an allegedly assassination organisation unknown to the world. In that case a female would be more inconspicuous and thus better at assassination. So, either my idea is wrong and the Marines and CP0-8 have no real explanation for their lack of females or CP9 has no good explanation for only having Kalifa out of at least 8 known characters.

Pirates: Even if theory of misogyny mentioned above is true, pirates, who rebel against the World Government should have a better track record.

Shichibukai (including former, but not Blackbeard, since he’ll be a bit down with the Yonko): Admitedly, Shichibukai work for the World Government, but they’re more of independant contractors than actual employees. So, from all the know Shichibukai Mihawk, Kuma and Weevil get a pass, since they don’t have a crew. Boa Hancock gets one as well, since she does have an all female crew, but her whole crew (present, past and future, since Kija Pirates just seem to pass from generation to generation) is made of Kuja women only and doesn’t seem inclined to recruit out of her island. Which kind of makes sense, but is also discriminatory of every non-Kuja woman. Now to the rest. Crocodile had a bounty hunter organisation that employed both males and females, most notably current Straw Hat Nico Robin, who, once they got up high enough on the ladder worked in male-female duos. That sounds good, but (while I am not going to go back to manga/anime) I remember that, when explaining the structure of Baroque Works to Straw Hats, Vivi said that the number agents are the strongest men in the organisation, who then get a female partner with complementary skill set. Enough said. Next, Moria. But, there’s not much to say, since he basically had 3 living crew members and with that number it’s either man-man-woman or man-woman-woman, so it’s good enough that he didn’t have three men. Jinbei and honestly Fisher Tiger (who I still love and cry when I see him die) did a terrible job at gender equality, since there are no fishwomen or mermaids on the crew of Sun Pirates (there’s Praline, but she’s Aladins wife and joins during time-skip as a part of alliance with Big Mom, so I’m not really counting her). And we have no evidence that fishwomen or mermaids would be any worse at fighting than mermen or fishmen. Trafalgar Law does a bit better, but with one woman out of 20 crew members it’s still not much. Buggy (a guy I totally forgot was a part of this group, sorry Buggy fans) has a huge crew, but out of the well known ones, I’m pretty sure that only Alvida is female, but I cannot be certain that he doesn’t have more. And lastly, Doflamingo. Here I only count the Donquixote Family, since counting every minion would take too long. Out of his Elite Officers (the guys that stood for heart, club, diamond and spade) there were five (Roscinante and Vergo both standing for heart) and all male. Each of them could have subordinates which were: Giolla, Sugar, Violet, Lao G, Senor Pink, Dellinger, Machvise, Gladius, Buffalo, Baby 5. Then there was Monet, who was part of the family, but neither as an elite officer or an official subordinate of one. In total, out of 16 there are 5 females. Like with Moria, it is roughly one third, but better than some other and Doflamingo could have had more females. My main concern nere were the Elite Officers, but they were in general much harder to defeat than the other. Those that jump out would be Sugar (as being hard to defeat, but we need to take into consideration that she was being actively protected by Trebol), Vergo (being easier to defeat than other Elite Officers [in my oppinion], but that took Laws genuinly OP Devil Fruit] and Roscinante (since he didn’t seem to do much and his Devil Fruit was kind of useless, so he either had hidden skill we didn’t see or nepotism).

Yonko: Since this is much lower on the list, I actually thought through the order of writting (from most women inclusive to least) and am not winging it like the rest. Firstly, Big Mom (Charlotte Linlin). She is a female and her crew is greatly inclusive to both genders and all races (species?), though the higher ups (Sweet Commanders, Ministers) seem to be ONLY her children. That means that unless a blood relative of hers a character has little to no chance of mattering. But that could be due to both her and her children, in general, being stronger than at least humans, as well as most of her crew being made up of Homies (if I remember correctly). Out of her three (formerly four) Sweet Commanders one, Smoothie, is female and, while she is weaker than Katakuri (like most of her family), her bounty is higher than Crackers, so she presents a bigger threat according to the World Government. Taking her and Crackers Devil Fruits into consideration, it is likely that Smoothie is more powerful than Cracker (without Devil Fruit), since Cracker can use his whenever he feels like but Smoothie seems to need to get close up, making her fruit harder to use against many enemies at once and thus needing to rely on other abilities. Like Big Mom, Kaido does employ many females, but not as much where it counts. For me, the characters from the Beast Pirates that I remember are Kaido, the All Stars and the Tobiroppo and from those 9, 2 are female (only Ulti and Black Maria). Not to say that those two aren’t awsome, I love both, especially Ulti, but I don’t think that it’s enough. On top of that, the All Stars (which are basically the Beast Pirates version of the Sweet Comanders) are all male, so not even the one third. Then we get onto Blackbeard, from who’s crew we know only the 10 Titanic Captains, where only one (Catarina Devon) is female. That could certainly be better and I will not comment much further, since the 10 Captains themselves show that Blackbeard has a gigant crew, most of who we don’t know, but having a few more females there would be better, since any Blackbeard female shown from now on will most likely be weaker than any of the captains. Next is Whitebeard, whose crew I genuinely hate. I honestly think that Whitebeard is cool and I support the idea of blood not making a family, but any and all females on his crew are nurses. No fighters, let alone a female being one of the 16 Divison Commanders (I checked and Haruta is male. I also heard some people mention Whity Bay, but she’s an ally and a captain of her own crew, not a Whitebeard pirate). So, while there are females, it showes them as damsels in distres rather than foghters. Nothing more to say. Lastly, the worst offender, Shanks. No females. That’s it. There is not a single female character that would be a known member of the Red Haired pirates, not even as a nurse. Grantes, we still don’t know much about Shanks or the Red Haired pirates, but we’ve seen them at Marinefort and I think that if at least one female from the crew was an important fighter, she would be there. So, there could be some, but either not strong or not a fighter at all.

Straw Hats: Let’s be honest, we all love Straw Hats, but they’ve got problems. There are females, but it’s still only two out of then, neither of the two is part of the three strongest (until the time skip Nami was actually seen as one of the weaker members and before Alabasta she didn’t even fight) and even their fighting styles show a problem. This is something I wanted to also point out (before this rant became longer than some of my essays [and I didn’t even research here, just checked to make sure some of the things I wrote were actually true and to check the names]), but another thing I don’t like is how even when female characters are shown, they are not fighters, not GOOD fighters (or in general tend to be weaker than men) or are long distance fighters. Nami and Robin are a great mple of the last. Both of them attack from a distance, which makes sense with their weapon/Devil Fruit, but all the other Straw Hats (excluding Usopp) fight at close or mid distance. That makes the Straw Hats balances, but it doesn’t make sense that neither of them are close combat (at least statistically), especially since Nami DIDN’T FIGHT until Alabasta (and even there her combat with Miss Doublefinger was pretty close range) so her fighting style could have been thought of for a long time. And Robin DOES have some close ranged attacks (shown in Alabasta and Skypiea arcs) but just doesn’t use them (especially post time-skip). And that’s not even talking about Haki. Logicaly speaking, it would make all sense in the world for Robin to have at least Arnament, since it would give her already OP (if used correctly) Devil Fruit a way to more effectively attack other Devil Fruit users and even normal enemies (since Arnament also seems to make attacks stronger, not only allow Devil Fruit users to be hurt) and, unlike basicaly all the other Straw Hats, who didn’t learn Haki during the time-skip, Robin was surrounded by people who knew Haki and could have taught her.

Thank you, for reading my rant. I hope you enjoyed. Additionally, I suck at tagging, so please let me know, if you can think of any.

#one piece #grandlinereview

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purplehairedwonder · 3 years

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Hearts With(out) Chains Chapter 14

Fandom: One Piece Rating: PG-13 Pairings: Gen (eventual Lawlu) Words: 5213 Characters: Trafalgar Law, Doflamingo, Violet, Baby 5, Trebol, Diamante, Monkey D. Luffy, Robin, Sanji, Usopp, Franky Notes: I’m taking my turn at the Corazon!Law AU because my brain won’t leave me alone until this is written down. Tags will be updated as the chapters come out.

Summary: Law is reclaimed by the Family when he's 17 and, with Doflamingo holding the lives of his crew as collateral for his good behavior, eventually becomes the third Corazon. Years later, trapped by his impossible situation, Law finds a strange connection to Monkey D. Luffy, which offers a glimpse of something he's repeatedly had ripped away from him: hope.

Previous chapters: Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

Read also at AO3 / FF.N

Two Days Ago

Law stood at the helm of the Thousand Sunny, one hand light on the wheel as he watched Dressrosa come into focus. Though Law’s own ship was a submarine, he’d learned how to sail other vessels well enough and directed the Sunny toward the port. The sea, as expected, was calm, so there was little maneuvering he needed to do. With the weather warming up as the ship approached Dressrosa, Law had discarded his coat and rolled up the sleeves of his hoodie, though he was still warm beneath his hat. The ship was eerily quiet, considering whose home she was.

Law glanced down at the hat in his other hand; he could have put it down on the deck alongside his coat and Kikoku, but he hadn’t been able to when the feeling of the worn straw under his fingers was such a stark reminder of those weeks on Amazon Lily two years earlier—where the whole mess Law now found himself had begun.

As Law steered the Sunny into the familiar docks and dropped anchor, the only people greeting him were dock workers, already unwinding ropes in preparation for securing the ship to the dock. Curious. And fortuitous. The last person Law wanted to run into before seeing Doffy was Violet; the less she knew about what Law had gotten into on Punk Hazard, the better for them both. Though she’d obfuscated for him more than once in the past, she’d never outright lied to Doffy for him—and he wouldn’t ask her to, knowing what she was risking. He’d take the small victories where he could find them.

Straw hat still in hand, though with his heavy coat now draped over it, and Kikoku resting in her usual place against his shoulder, Law pocketed his log pose and hopped down from the ship. He peered down the docks to see the Polar Tang shining brightly in the late-afternoon sun. His chest gave a twinge at the thought of the ship that had been home for the last decade. Would she be able to take the Hearts to freedom? Or would she be stuck docked in the Dressrosan harbor without a crew to sail her after today?

He shook his head and glanced back at the Thousand Sunny once more, looking for anything out of place. When he saw nothing, he took a breath and turned back toward the city. He raised an eyebrow when he noticed the harbor master hurrying toward him.

“Corazon, sir!” he huffed once he reached Law. “My apologies for not greeting you immediately.”

“It’s fine,” Law said, waving him off.

He really wasn’t in the mood for this, but the harbor master’s mood could be a good indicator of how he would be received in the city; if news from Punk Hazard had reached Dressrosa and Law was walking headfirst into a trap, Doffy likely would have had the harbor master and his workers watching for Law’s arrival and trying to detain him until Doffy himself could arrive. The harbor master, however, like most Dressrosans, was too terrified of the executives to lie to their faces—even on order of the king. That he didn’t seem to be hiding any ulterior motives was a positive sign.

“Shall I call a carriage to bring you back to the palace?”

“I’ll walk,” Law said, talking a few steps up the dock.

“Are you sure?” the harbor master asked, falling in step with him. “It’s no trouble and would be faster.”

Law leveled a stare at the man, and he quavered. “O-of course, I didn’t mean to challenge you, sir.” He swallowed before nodding at the Sunny. “And this ship?”

Law forced his lips into a smirk. “A trophy from a defeated pirate crew. Keep it in good shape until the king can inspect it.”

Doffy loved keeping trophies, from plundered goods and hijacked ships to defeated crews themselves—many of whom turned into merchandise—from his many victories, so the harbor master didn’t so much as blink at the explanation.

“Of course, Corazon.”

They’d reached the end of the docks, and the harbor master bowed Law out into the city before turning back to the dock workers and yelling orders at them.

Law strode the familiar streets of the city toward the palace, ignoring the eyes and murmured whispers of his title by the Dressrosan citizens and the toys as he passed; Law always drew a fair amount of attention when he was out, considering his status as second to the king. Being watched didn’t mean Doffy knew what had happened. He forced his tense shoulders down as he walked. He was returning from a straight-forward mission, as he had hundreds of times before. There was nothing different about today.

Pushing aside his paranoia, Law trekked the familiar streets until he reached the palace. The grounds were quiet as he stepped through the gates, and he licked his lips. He was used to the palace being busy, members of the Family and servants alike scurrying around the grounds at all hours of the day. In the late afternoon, he’d expect to see preparations being made for dinner, but, as he walked toward the courtyard, he only saw a few figures moving about in the distance.

“Ah, Corazon!”

Law started as Rosalie, Doffy’s personal aide, came hurrying out of a side hallway. Forcing his expression neutral, he nodded at her.

“The Young Master asked me to find you once you arrived. He’s waiting in his office.”

Law nodded for Rosalie to lead the way, and she turned on her heel to head back into the palace. As they walked, Law considered whether he was more or less likely to be ambushed in Doffy’s office. On the one hand, it held fewer people, which meant fewer enemies for Law to fend off in the case of an attack. On the other hand, it was more isolated from the rest of the palace, meaning fewer people would know what was happening—not that Law would find himself with many allies in the palace if he was outed as a traitor to the Family.

He shook his head; there was no point in catastrophizing until he assessed what information Doffy had. Instead, he addressed Rosalie. As Doffy’s personal aide, she was aware of more goings on in the palace than most, as she was regularly required to track down Family members on short notice for the king.

“The grounds are quiet. Where is everyone?”

She looked back at him to acknowledge that he’d spoken before returning her gaze forward as she strode forward with purpose. “I believe Trebol is with Sugar. Diamante is at the Colosseum, making preparations for the upcoming tournament. I believe Machvise is with him. Pica is at the training grounds, drilling soldiers,” she said, ticking off executives with her fingers. “Dellinger is at the beach with Jora and Lao G. Señor Pink and Gladius left for a mission this morning. Buffalo and Baby 5 went to the market an hour ago. Violet retired to the library after lunch.”

Law nodded, the tension in his shoulders easing a bit. None of that seemed unusual and explained why the grounds were as quiet as they were.

Once they reached Doffy’s office, Rosalie knocked on the door and waited for the king’s call to enter. She ducked inside to inform him of Law’s arrival. A few moments later, she stepped back into the hallway and gestured Law inside.

Law took a steadying breath then strode past Rosalie into the office, suppressing a flinch as the door shut behind him. Doffy sat at his desk, papers spread out in front of him and a pen in hand. Law stepped forward but remained just outside of Doffy’s wingspan—not that it really mattered with his strings. He could have Law trapped with no more than a thought. Law’s fingers itched to activate a Room, but he knew that would only give him away. Instead, he did his best to wrap himself in the cloak that was Corazon, second in command to a Warlord and a king.

Even Corazon, however, knew to wait until Doffy was ready (having learned that lesson the hard way), so he waited. Once Doffy finished signing a document, he put his pen down and looked up at Law. He crossed his arms and tilted his head.

“Welcome back, Corazon.”

Law was unable to read anything in his expression or vocal tone so pressed forward. “Thank you, Young Master.”

“I trust you ran into no further complications?”

Law quirked his lips into one of his trademark smirks. “Of course not. I even brought presents. One is in the harbor.”

Doffy chuckled, a deep, pleased sound that rumbled lightly throughout the small room. “I heard.” Of course he had. “Very impressive. What else?”

Law pulled the straw hat out from under his coat and tossed it onto Doffy’s desk. Doffy froze as he realized what had landed in front of him.

“A trophy,” Law said. “From the head of one of the Worst Generation.”

“Take it, Torao. If it’ll make Mingo believe I’m dead, then take it.”

“Straw Hat-ya, I can’t take this.”

“Shishishi, I know you’ll give it back. I trust you!”

“This hat—” Doffy murmured, turning the worn thing over in his hands, the straw crinkling in the quiet between the two pirates. Doffy looked up sharply at Law. “Do you know who this hat belonged to?” At Law’s frown, Doffy shook his head. “Never mind,” he said, voice gentling. “This is quite the prize.”

Law blinked and caught the hat on instinct when Doffy tossed it back to him.

“You defeated its wearer, my Corazon. It is your trophy.” His lips twitched. “Though I think your own hat suits you better.”

Law snorted. “Not a lot of use for a straw hat in the North.” And Law was, at his core, a child of the North Blue—of winter islands and warfare.

“Indeed.”

“Was there anything else?” Law asked, raising an eyebrow. Impertinence was one of his defining traits, after all.

Doffy waved him off, already looking back toward the paperwork in front of him. “Dinner’s in an hour. Get yourself cleaned up.”

Law gave a shallow bow then turned to leave. Presenting his back to Doffy was one of the hardest things he’d done in a long time, but he forced himself to offer that vulnerability, since, if nothing were wrong, Doffy at his back would be no threat. Breath caught in his throat, Law headed out of Doffy’s office, part of him waiting to be impaled with an onslaught of strings…

But it never came.

He let out the breath he’d been holding when the door shut behind him and very nearly slumped against the wall. But the walls had eyes in the palace, so Law instead straightened his spine and headed to his chambers. He wanted nothing more than to make a direct line to the Hearts’ wing of the palace to check in with his crew, but with the distance he’d kept from them in the previous years, doing so would look out of character.

He encountered only a few servants as he headed for his room. Once he shut the door behind him, he leaned back against it tiredly and ran a hand over his face. He hadn’t been locked up in Seastone and thrown in the dungeon yet, so that was a good sign. Maybe, just maybe, he could get his crew out after all. They’d be on the run, but that would be better than the prison they found themselves in now—and they had allies.

Law dropped his coat on his bed and rested Kikoku on top of it. He placed the straw hat on his desk and pulled his Den Den Mushi from his coat pocket. He put the snail on the desk next to the hat then went into the bathroom, as if to wash up; instead, he activated a Room. He Scanned for the surveillance snail in the vents that kept an eye on his room and, with a quick Shambles, switched it with a snail he’d set up years earlier to broadcast a recorded feed of his empty room. Now it would simply appear that Law was in the shower. He’d found the surveillance snail immediately after he’d moved into the palace at seventeen, though he had no idea how often Doffy checked the feed nearly a decade later. The snail had never been removed, though, so Law worked under the assumption that the Warlord regularly monitored it to be safe.

Law then stepped back into the bedroom and went over to his desk. He pulled out a scrap of paper and scribbled a note: After dinner. Crew meeting. He folded it and pushed his Room in the direction of the Hearts’ quarters until he found Bepo’s room. The bear wasn’t in the room at the moment, but that was not unusual at this time of day. Law switched his note with pen on Bepo’s desk then retracted his Room once more.

That done, he turned to his Den Den Mushi and dialed. He only had to wait two rings before the other side picked up.

“Torao, it’s about time!”

“I told you to give me until nightfall to check in, Straw Hat-ya,” Law snapped, glancing out the window at the late afternoon sun. “I’m early.”

“But it’s boooooring on your ship,” Luffy whined.

Law rolled his eyes. Before arriving in Dressrosa, he’d come up with a plan to sneak the Straw Hats in without them being noticed. Because Doffy had eyes on all the ships coming into and going out of the harbor, it was imperative the Straw Hats stay out of sight as the ship approached. They would stay below deck as Law steered the Thousand Sunny into the harbor.

Then, while Law then checked in with Doflamingo at the palace, pretending the Sunny was a conquest of their fight, the Straw Hats would use their submersible to make their way to the Polar Tang; Doffy would undoubtedly have his men examining the Sunny to see what Law had brought him, so it would be a poor hiding place. The Tang, however, was generally left alone except for some basic maintenance, meaning she would be safe for the Straw Hats to hide out in until Law could contact them with an update and to decide their next move. He’d left them with a hand-drawn map of the palace as well as a rough map of the city itself for them to study while they waited.

Luffy had protested, wanting to see the city and, naturally, try the local cuisine, but his crew had reminded him that they were all supposed to be dead; being recognized would put Law and his nakama in danger, and—after his suggestion that they go into the city in disguises was thoroughly shot down—that had quieted his complaints.

Mostly.

“Boring?” Franky called, affronted, from somewhere in the background. “This ship is super! I want to know everything about her, Tra-bro!”

Law sighed. “Please tell Robo-ya to refrain from destroying my ship before we leave Dressrosa.”

“We’ll rein him in, Torao-kun,” Robin promised, though there was humor in her voice. “What happened with Doflamingo?”

“Mm, yeah. What happened with Mingo?” Luffy echoed. It sounded like he was moving around the Den Den Mushi, likely bursting with pent up energy. Law only hoped his ship would survive the Straw Hats’ cyborg and its bored captain.

“He seemed to take my report at face value,” Law said. “But there’s no telling when he’ll hear from his sources in the Marines about what happened. We’ll still need to move quickly.”

“When do I get to kick his ass?” Luffy asked. Several of the Straw Hats groaned in the background.

“That’s not the point of this, Luffy,” Robin reminded him, not unkindly. “The goal is to get Torao-kun and his nakama out of Dressrosa unnoticed.”

“We’re trying to avoid a fight with a Warlord, Luffy!” Usopp added, a tinge of panic in his voice.

“Fine,” Luffy grumbled.

“I’m expected at dinner with the Family this evening,” Law said, breaking in. “If I skip it, it’ll raise suspicions.”

Luffy whooped in excitement at the thought of food, and Sanji snapped that he’d brought food from the Sunny, which only made the younger captain more excited.

Law grimaced, wondering not for the first time why the mysterious pull in his chest had brought him to these people. He knew the Family was its own type of ridiculous, but the Straw Hats took that to a whole other level. Why did he think he could entrust something as important as his nakama’s lives to them?

“I’ll see my nakama after dinner and contact you then,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Good luck,” Robin said over her chaotic crewmates.

“Same to you,” Law replied then hung up.

For a moment, he stared at the snail then at the hat on the desk next to it. This was a terrible idea, but Law was already in too deep to turn back now.

After a quick shower to wash off the travel and battle from the last two days, Law changed into a clean pair of jeans and a t-shirt then switched the surveillance snail back to the one with live feed and dropped his Room. Pulling his hat on, he glanced at Kikoku but decided not to bring her to dinner; he didn’t usually walk around the palace grounds with the nodachi in hand. His head was starting to ache—the concussion symptoms, while improving, were still bothering him—so he took some painkillers before heading to the dining room.

Though Law was on edge, dinner was a standard Family affair. The only executives not present were Señor Pink and Gladius, who were off the island. Law easily fell into his typical standoffish self, meandering into the dining room a couple of minutes late and sliding into his seat with an insincere smirk. Doffy, who was in the middle of a discussion with Trebol, merely raised an eyebrow at him, and Law shrugged. Doffy huffed once before turning back to Trebol.

Law rarely invited conversation at meals, though Baby 5 wanted to tell anyone who would listen—and for some reason, she thought Law was listening—about the wares she’d found at the market. Law ignored her, picking at his plate without much enthusiasm. The food, as always, was excellent—Doffy had high expectations of those who worked for him; Law’s stomach was simply tied in knots. It was a good thing Law rarely finished his meals, so his lack of appetite tonight didn’t appear unusual.

More than once, Law looked up to see Violet trying to catch his eye from several seats down the table. Law shook his head minutely and looked back down at his plate. He didn’t need to get her involved in this.

Law started when he felt a smack on his arm. He rubbed it with a frown at Baby 5. “What was that for?”

“Are you even listening to me, Corazon?”

Law snorted. “Of course not.”

Baby narrowed her eyes. “You’re such a jerk,” she muttered.

“Don’t act so surprised, Baby,” Law replied, lips twitching. It was easy enough to fall into this familiar pattern of banter with her.

She sighed dramatically. “You have been a jerk since you were ten.”

Law rested his chin on his hand, angling himself toward her slightly. “You want me to hear about your day, but you didn’t even ask me how my mission went.”

She scrunched up her nose then sighed resignedly. “How did your mission go, Corazon?”

Law shrugged, turning back to the table. “Fine.”

“You asshole!” she squawked, whacking him in the arm again. “Did you get rid of all your manners with your spots?”

Law gaped at her a moment before laughing in surprise. He would miss this; Baby was one of the only members of the Family he cared about. She’d been one of the few things that made his return to the Family tolerable.

“Just my people skills.” He picked up a piece of silverware from the table. “I still know a salad fork from a dessert fork.”

The rest of their conversation was cut short as Doffy pushed back from the table and rose. He nodded at the members of the Family gathered around the table.

“The rest of the night is yours. I have work to attend to.” He glanced to the side. “Pica, Machvise, a word in my office.”

As the summoned executives stood to follow Doffy from the dining room, Law pushed himself away from the table and headed for the hallway. He had a few things he needed from his room before meeting with his crew so headed that way; he could have just opened a Room and summoned them, but something told him to reserve his stamina for now.

He was about halfway to his chambers when he stopped. “What do you want, Violet?” He turned to see her turning a corner to face him.

She crossed her arms. “Why were you ignoring me at dinner?”

Law suppressed a sigh. “Because I’m an asshole.”

“True, but that’s not it. Try again.”

“I have a lot on my mind. Now, if you’ll excuse me—” Law started to turn back toward his room. He knew he was being unfair to her, but he didn’t want her reading him. Not today.

“Corazon, stop. Something is going on with you.”

Law turned back to her, jaw clenched. “Violet, don’t.”

“I can just read you to find out,” she threatened, lifting her hands.

Law grabbed her wrists before her hands could reach her face. “Don’t.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Let go.”

“Don’t try to read me, Violet,” Law practically growled. “I mean it. Not this time.”

She let out a huff then nodded. “Fine. Now let go.”

He released her wrists, and she rubbed her left wrist absently. “Something happened on your mission.”

Law chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment before agreeing, “Yes.”

“What can I do?”

He blinked at her in surprise. “What?”

“If you’re in trouble, let me help.”

Law shook his head. She’d been trying to help him almost since he arrived in Dressrosa, and now the only way he could repay her was to keep her out of this mess. She had her father and niece to think about.

“Not for this one.”

“But—”

“Let it go, Violet.” Then he did open a Room and Shamble himself into his chambers, leaving a pen in his place in the hallway.

Years of practice with his powers allowed him to avoid landing awkwardly on his desk, and he dropped to the floor. He opened a drawer in his desk and pushed aside the items inside. He pressed on the right spot, and the false bottom opened. He reached in and grabbed the papers inside then replaced the false bottom and shut the drawer. He spread the papers out on his desk: blueprints of the castle. Violet had once mentioned that there was a secret passageway in the castle that only the Riku family knew about. She hadn’t revealed its location, though, and Law hadn’t asked.

If he could find that on the blueprints now, perhaps he could use it to get his crew out without being detected. He leaned over the paper with a frown, looking for anything that looked out of place or that he didn’t recognize. He could have asked her in the hallway just now, but he didn’t want what he was looking for getting back to Doflamingo—not before he and his nakama were gone, anyway.

He was so focused on the blueprints that he was taken by surprise when his door slammed open, rattling on its hinges. Law jerked upright but didn’t have a chance to react before a wave of mucus slammed him into the far wall. Law’s head slammed back against the wall. His vision darkened, and his body went slack, air leaving his lungs in a sharp exhale.

Goddamn concussion, he thought blearily as the world slowly started coming back into focus in front of him. His doctor side was distantly outraged at the battering his brain was taking, but the rest of him—the part in the here and now—was just trying to breathe.

As he came back to his senses, the first thing he recognized was that he was being held upright against the wall by Trebol’s mucus. Gross.

The shapes in front of him slowly materialized into Trebol and Diamante standing in his doorway.

“What the fuck, Trebol?” Law growled, though his voice lacked the power he wanted to put behind it.

“That’s what we should be asking you, Corazon.”

Law’s stomach dropped as Doffy entered the room behind his two executives. Law could feel the anger radiating off him.

He knows, Law realized. I wasn’t fast enough, and he knows. Fuck.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Law said, glancing around to assess his options. Though the mucus was holding him to the wall, his lower arms were free, so he could still form a Room. Kikoku was on the bed, but he could summon her with a Room.

He just had to do it at the right moment.

Doffy paused at Law’s desk and looked down at the papers. “Blueprints of the castle?” He turned back to Law. “And how did you get your hands on these?” Then he shook his head. “Never mind. I know how resourceful you are. And why would you need blueprints of the castle? Looking for an escape route?”

“Escape? Because that’s gone so well for me in the past,” Law scoffed, though he knew it wasn’t lost on Doffy that he’d side-stepped the question.

“I just heard from some sources in the Marines,” Doffy said, resuming his approach into Law’s space. “You’ll never believe who they have in custody.”

“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

Law winced as a string sliced through his cheek. It was a shallow cut, but blood dripped down the side of his face. A warning.

“Monet and Caesar,” Doffy said, tilting his head as he looked down at Law. “And I can’t imagine how that could be when you told me you saw them this morning, Corazon.”

Law licked his lips, hating the way he had to look up at the Warlord. “I did see them this morning.” That wasn’t a lie. He’d just… withheld the condition he’d seen them in. “If they were careless enough to get arrested after I left, that’s not on me.”

Another string sliced through Law’s cheek, this one a bit deeper, just below the first cut.

Doffy leaned over to whisper in Law’s ear, “I’d be very careful of what you say next.” The temperature dropping with Doffy’s icy words.

Law swallowed but remained silent. Doffy could probably feel the racing of his heart at this proximity.

“I’m only going to ask once. Did you see Vergo on Punk Hazard?”

“I thought Vergo was here.” Which was true—he had thought that, until Vergo had shown his face on the Straw Hats’ ship the day before.

Doffy straightened and, eyes never leaving Law’s, pulled a Den Den Mushi from his coat. He dialed a number from memory.

The discarded coat on Law’s bed started to ring.

Law cursed silently. He’d completely forgotten to get rid of Vergo’s Den Den Mushi. He’d planned to look it over on the trip from Punk Hazard, but he’d gotten distracted by making plans to get the Straw Hats into Dressrosa, and the snail had remained untouched in his pocket.

Doffy finally tore his gaze from Law and went over to the bed. He grabbed Law’s coat and dug around until he found the buzzing snail. Law’s own Den Den Mushi was on his desk and silent, cutting off that potential excuse.

“This is Vergo’s Den Den Mushi.”

“I…”

“Vergo’s dead,” Doffy said, the snail still ringing in his hand. Doffy’s voice remained low, and Law had, from his childhood, found Doffy’s restrained fury far more terrifying than when the man lost his cool. “His heart had been removed from his chest and squeezed.”

Law was well and truly fucked.

Deciding he had nothing to lose, he flexed his fingers ever-so-slightly in preparation to open a Room—

Then cried out as a blade impaled itself through the palm of his right hand.

It took a moment for his abused brain to register why, other than the pain, this was such a problem.

It was his dominant hand.

The one he used to wield Kikoku.

The one he used to control his Fruit.

The one he led with in surgery.

Oh.

“Nuh uh,” Diamante said from the other end of his waving blade. “No tricks, boy.”

“Nene, Corazon. Don’t surgeons need their hands?” Trebol chuckled.

Law made a choked sound as Diamante pulled the blade out. His thoughts spun as his hand dripped blood to the carpet beneath him. He’d felt worse pain than this—nothing he’d experienced had been worse than the final stages of Amber Lead Disease—but this was his hand.

“I can do the other one, Doffy. Make sure he can’t pull anything,” Diamante offered.

“No,” Doffy said, eyeing Law. “He’s no good to me if he can’t use his Fruit.”

Trebol’s mucus retreated, and Law fell forward. Without thinking, he reached out with his hands to catch himself then crumpled into a heap with a cry, hand coming to his chest as an electric shock jolted from his hand through his entire arm. The breath caught in his throat and the room around him fuzzed.

He’d failed.

He’d failed as an executive.

He’d failed as an ally.

He’d failed as a surgeon.

He’d failed as a captain.

He’d failed as a friend.

He’d failed Cora-san.

He barely registered the snapping of Seastone restraints around his wrists, the little strength he had left draining from his body as he went limp on the floor.

From somewhere above him, Doffy spoke, though Law couldn’t make out the words. He winced but didn’t struggle as Trebol and Diamante each grabbed one of his arms. The two executives dragged him bodily down the hallways of the palace, his feet trailing limply behind him. In his peripheral vision, he caught Violet’s shocked expression as the procession passed.

Law grimaced as they reached the stairs to the dungeon but didn’t have the strength to try to get his feet under him, so his legs thumped against each stone step as he was taken down. At the bottom, Trebol and Diamante exchanged a few words with the guard then followed him to what Law assumed was one of the Seastone cells. The guard opened the door, and Law was pulled into the cell and shoved against the wall, forcing the breath from his lungs. The chain between his wrist shackles was hooked above Law’s head before all the figures retreated.

Law slumped forward in defeat.

But he jerked upright at a familiar voice.

“Captain?”

Next chapter

#This kind of exploded on me #trafalgar law #Donquixote Doflamingo #Caitlin's fic #One Piece fanfic #One Piece fanfiction

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eddie-redmayne-italian-blog · 4 years

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photos by Frank Ockenfels

The Long Journey and Intense Urgency of Aaron Sorkin's 'The Trial of the Chicago 7'

by Rebecca Keegan September 23, 2020, 6:00 am PDT

The director of the Netflix film, which stars Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, Eddie Redmayne and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, reveals why it took nearly 20 years to get the project about the politically motivated prosecution of protestors made and why it couldn't be more timely: "I never imagined today would go so much like 1968."

In October 2019, hundreds of protesters marched down Chicago’s Michigan Avenue toward the Hilton, chanting phrases like "No justice, no peace!" and "A people united will never be defeated!" as police in riot gear descended on the crowd with billy clubs and tear gas. Earnest and energized, clad in 1960s period costumes and flanked by vintage police vehicles, this group thought they were acting out the past, staging a scene from Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. As it turned out, they were performing the future, too.

Sorkin’s film, which opens in select theaters Sept. 25 and hits Netflix on Oct.  16, tells the story of the riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention and the circus-like trial of political activists that followed the next year. Thanks to Hollywood development hell, the movie is arriving 14  years after Steven Spielberg first mentioned the idea to Sorkin but just as its themes and plot points — civil unrest, a self-proclaimed "law and order" president’s vilification of protesters (Nixon then, Trump now), the police’s excessive use of force, tensions within the Democratic Party over how far left to move — have become bracingly current."I never wanted the film to be about 1968," Sorkin says in an interview over Zoom from his house in the Hollywood Hills on Labor Day weekend. "I never wanted it to be an exercise in nostalgia or a history lesson. I wanted it to be about today. But I never imagined that today would get so much like 1968."For only the second time in a career spanning nine films as a screenwriter, Sorkin serves as director with Chicago 7, helming a sprawling ensemble cast that includes Eddie Redmayne as anti-war activist Tom Hayden, Sacha Baron Cohen as Youth International Party (Yippie) provocateur Abbie Hoffman, Succession’s Jeremy Strong as counterculture figure Jerry Rubin and Watchmen’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Black Panther party co-founder Bobby Seale. There are undeniable parallels not only between the film and the present political moment but also between the performance-art activism of the actors and the men they’re playing, most vividly Cohen, who, like Hoffman, has made a career of political self-expression through comedic stunts, including crashing a far-right rally in Olympia, Washington, this summer while pretending to be a racist country singer. (Cohen, who shoots most of his satirical projects incognito, impishly calls reports of his appearance at the rally "fake news.")Eight months after Sorkin filmed the protest scenes in Chicago, Abdul-Mateen was marching in Black Lives Matter protests in West Hollywood, as was Strong in Brooklyn. "There’s power when a lot of people come together to protest out of anger, out of frustration," Abdul-Mateen says. "Everybody has a role in the revolution; this film shows that.

"Though the movie feels crafted for this political moment, it was born of another. At Sorkin’s first meeting with Spielberg, "I remember him saying, 'It would be great if we could have this out before the election,'" Sorkin says. The election Spielberg was talking about was 2008’s, when Barack Obama and Joe Biden faced John McCain and Sarah Palin.The film hit multiple roadblocks, beginning with the 2007-08 writers strike and continuing as financing faltered repeatedly, a fate illustrated by the more than 30 producers who can claim some sort of credit on Chicago 7. It took another unscheduled detour this summer after Sorkin finished it as the pandemic worsened, and the odds of original distributor Paramount mounting a successful theatrical release before the Nov. 3 election seemed increasingly slim. For some involved with the film, there is a question about the ethics of Hollywood inviting audiences to return to theaters before a COVID-19 vaccine is widely available. "

There’s a moral quandary that we, the motion picture business, have to be careful that we don’t become the tobacco industry, where we’re encouraging people to do something we know is potentially lethal," says Cohen.Before his visit to Spielberg’s Pacific Palisades home to discuss the project on a Saturday afternoon in 2006, Sorkin knew next to nothing about the Chicago 7. The federal government had charged seven defendants — Hoffman, Rubin, Hayden, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines and Lee Weiner — with conspiracy for their participation in the protests against the Vietnam War outside the Democratic National Convention. (Originally the men were known as the Chicago 8 and included Seale, who asked to have his trial separated from that of the others and postponed so that he could be represented by his preferred lawyer, who was ill; that trial never took place.)

When Spielberg proposed a movie about the riots and the trial that followed, Sorkin, who was 7 in 1968, said, "'You know, that sounds great. Count me in.' As soon as I left his house, I called my father and said, 'Dad, do you know anything about a riot that happened in 1968 or a crazy conspiracy trial that followed?' I was just saying yes to Steven."Despite his ignorance, Sorkin was a logical choice to write the project: Having penned Broadway’s A Few Good Men and its 1992 film adaptation as well as the long-running NBC series West Wing, he’d shown a flair for dramatizing courtroom procedures and liberal politics, and he turned in his first draft of the Chicago 7 script in 2007. Originally, Spielberg planned to direct the project himself, but by the time the writers strike was over, he had moved on and a number of other potential directors circled, including Paul Greengrass, Ben Stiller, Peter Berg and Gary Ross, though none was able to get it off the ground. "There was just a feeling that, 'Look, this isn’t an Avengers film,'" Sorkin says of the studios' move away from midbudget dramas and toward action tentpoles in the 2010s. "This isn’t an easy sell at the box office. And there are big scenes, riots, crowd scenes. How can this movie be done for the budget that makes sense for what the expectation is at the box office?"As the project languished, Sorkin tried writing it as a play, ultimately spending 18 months on a fruitless effort to fashion a stage treatment. "What I didn’t like was having a script in my drawer," he says. "I was just thinking, 'Jeez, this is a good movie and it feels like it’s stillborn.'"It was the confluence of two events that ultimately revived the film with Sorkin in the director’s chair in 2018 — the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the 2017 release of Sorkin’s well-received directorial debut, Molly’s Game, which doubled its production budget at the box office. "This is before George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and police protests or confrontations," Sorkin says. "This is just when Donald Trump was musing nostalgically about the old days when they used to carry that guy [a protester] out of here on a stretcher and punch the crap out of him."With Trump’s throwback rhetoric lending the subject matter a new timeliness and Sorkin’s directing chops confirmed in Spielberg’s eyes, the movie moved forward with its screenwriter at the helm.

Cross Creek Pictures came in to finance, and Paramount bought the domestic rights. But all those years in development had left an expensive imprint on the project — a jaw-dropping $11  million had been spent on casting costs, producing fees and the optioning of Brett Morgen’s 2007 documentary about the event, Chicago 10, leaving just $24  million for the actual 36-day production.

One way Sorkin attempts to achieve a sense  of scope despite that budget is by intercutting real black-and-white news footage with his dramatized protests. He rounded out his large cast with a deep bench of experienced and award-winning actors including Oscar winner Mark Rylance as defense attorney William Kunstler, Oscar nominee Frank Langella as Judge Julius Hoffman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as prosecutor Richard Schultzand, Oscar nominee Michael Keaton as former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark — with the filmmaker and many of his actors working for scale. (Abdul-Mateen and Strong both became first-time Emmy winners Sept.  20.)Sorkin shot the protest scenes on location in Chicago and built a courtroom set in an old church sanctuary in Paterson, New Jersey, because none of the available courtroom locations in the Garden State conveyed the scope he wanted. "If we’re saying the whole world is watching, I want a packed courtroom for six months full of press and spectators," Sorkin says. "I wanted the big, cavernous feeling of the federal government and its power coming down on these people."

Julian Wasser/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images "The movie is tribute to the bravery of the protesters of 1968 [pictured] and today in Belarus, on the streets of America, in Portland," says Cohen.

Among the vestiges of Spielberg’s original plan was the casting of Cohen as Hoffman, which required the London native to affect a Boston accent and return to a subject he had studied as an undergraduate at Christ’s College in Cambridge, where he wrote a thesis paper about Jewish activists during the civil rights movement. At 19, Cohen had interviewed Bob Moses, the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which Hoffman was involved in before he founded the anti-war Yippie movement. "Honestly, I was very proud of the fact that Jews were involved in the Black civil rights movement in the '60s, and there wasn’t much written about it," Cohen says, explaining his youthful scholarship.

There’s a clear line to draw between Hoffman’s 1960s theatrics — which included throwing fistfuls of money into the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and vowing to levitate the Pentagon — and Cohen’s contemporary TV and film pranks. Perhaps among Cohen’s most memorable and pointed gags was getting Vice President Dick Cheney to gleefully autograph a waterboard kit, which the comic did while posing as an admiring Israeli anti-terror expert for a 2018 episode of Who Is America?, his Showtime series. “What I wanted to do was to show that he was proud of torturing," Cohen says. "I could not believe how happy Cheney was to be sitting next to an uber-fan. So, yes. Ultimately in the shows and the movies that I do, I’m trying to be funny, but yeah, I’m trying to get out the anger that I have within me."

Cohen sees Hoffman’s unorthodox protest methods as pragmatic. "The Yippies were underfunded, and he was using theatricality to gain attention for his aims," Cohen says. "He wanted to stop the war. And how do you do that? You use stunts and absurdist humor to try to effect change." The actor estimates that, after researching Hoffman, he pitched Sorkin hundreds of lines the activist had really delivered. "As an annoying person with a lot of chutzpah, I was emailing Aaron every other night until morning, 'What about this line? What about this line?'" Cohen says. The writer-director, known for his exacting prose, politely tolerated the suggestions while largely sticking to his own script.

As Rubin, Strong is playing Hoffman’s conscientious jester sidekick, a role wildly different from the tragic, wealthy approval seeker he portrays on Succession. Strong added some of his own dramatic flourishes, including painting words on his chest for one courtroom scene and bringing a remote-controlled fart machine to disrupt Langella’s imperious judge. "I wanted to channel as much as possible that spirit of the merry prankster and of joyous dissent," Strong says. Hoffman and Rubin’s real-life personae were so large that Sorkin at times asked his actors to dial down their faithful portrayals, requesting, after one particularly jubilant take, "less cowbell."

Sorkin’s script draws a sharp contrast between Hoffman and Rubin’s campy methods and Hayden’s more reserved approach to the anti-war movement, with the tensions between Hoffman and Hayden supplying the film’s key relationship in a kind of begrudging brotherhood of the peace movement. To learn more about Hayden, Redmayne studied remarks that Jane Fonda, who was married to the activist and politician from 1973 to 1990, made upon his death in 2016. In his own life, Redmayne is cautious when it comes to discussing the role that he, as an actor at the center of a huge studio franchise (Warner Bros.’ Fantastic Beasts) might have in political life. "I find it endlessly challenging," Redmayne says of navigating his public activism. "There’s the elitist thing. It’s speaking up on climate change but being conscious that you’re traveling a lot. One has to be aware of one’s own hypocrisies, because they can be detrimental to something you believe in. So sometimes I find that I have to live my life and speak to my advocacy in a way in that it’s around friends, family and people I know rather than making something public."

Abdul-Mateen has begun his acting career largely associated with fantastical roles, like Dr. Manhattan on HBO’s Watchmen, Black Manta in Aquaman and Candyman in the upcoming Jordan Peele-produced remake of the slasher film. Playing Seale represented a chance to do more grounded work and to depict a man who had loomed large during Abdul-Mateen’s childhood in Oakland, where Seale co-founded the Black Panthers in 1966 and later ran for mayor. Seale’s inclusion in the original Chicago riots indictment was controversial and strange — prosecutors accused him of conspiring with men he’d never met after visiting Chicago that week for only a few hours to deliver a speech. For the prosecution, Seale functioned largely as a prop to tap into the fears of white jurors and white Americans watching the news coverage, and during the trial he had no attorney. "I wanted to key in on, how did Bobby Seale survive this trial?" Abdul-Mateen says. "How did he survive the gross mistreatment by the United States government, and how did he go through that with his head high and not be broken? It was an exercise in finding my pride, finding my dignity."

In one scene, Seale is brought into the courtroom bound and gagged, and throughout the trial he is kept separate from the white defendants. "Although it was meant to be a humiliating act, I walked out with my chest high, with my head high. Bound and gagged and everything else. It would be very dangerous for a Black man in that time, even sometimes today, to show the proof of the wear and tear that oppression can take on a person, because that can be seen as a sign of weakness, and a sign of weakness is an open door that it’s working." For the moments of lightness that Cohen and Strong bring to the movie, Abdul-Mateen supplies ballast. "It’s important for the right reasons and at the right time to make art that makes people uncomfortable," he says.

Niko Tavernise/NETFLIX. On the set, from left, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Mark Rylance, Ben Shenkman, Aaron Sorkin and Eddie Redmayne

Spielberg has remained involved in the film "in an emeritus role," Sorkin says, "from giving me good script notes to casting to notes on early cuts of the film." He also showed up to the New Jersey courtroom set. "When you have to direct a scene in front of Steven Spielberg, you’re not at your most relaxed necessarily," Sorkin says. Spielberg did not, however, take an executive producing credit on the film and declined to be interviewed about it.

The decision to switch to a streaming release came after an early summer marketing strategy call between Sorkin, Paramount chief Jim Gianopulos, other Paramount execs and some of the film’s producers. "At the end of the call, Jim said, 'Listen, we don’t know what the theater business is going to look like in the fall. We have troubling data telling us that the first people back in movie theaters are going to be the people who think that the coronavirus is a hoax,'" Sorkin says. This was clearly not the intended audience for a movie whose heroes are liberal activists. "I said, 'I don’t think the Idaho militia are going to be the first people coming to this movie,'" Sorkin says.

The group agreed to explore alternatives and gave Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Hulu 24 hours to watch the film. After a bidding war, Chicago 7 landed at Netflix in a $56  million deal against its $35  million production budget, with a robust marketing campaign and promise of a theatrical release. "We knew we didn’t have the option of 'Let’s wait a year,'" Sorkin says. "This is what we’re thinking about and what we’re talking about right now, and it just would have been a real shame to not release it now."

After Chicago 7 opens in limited release, Netflix will add more theaters in the U.S. and abroad throughout October, expanding upon the film’s premiere on the service, a strategy akin to what it provided Oscar best picture nominees The Irishman and Roma, albeit in a wildly different theatrical environment.

As Hollywood opens up to more production, Sorkin, and many of the Chicago 7 actors, have begun returning to work. Abdul-Mateen has been in Berlin for The Matrix 4 and Redmayne in London for Fantastic Beasts 3, while Sorkin is shooting a West Wing reunion special at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown L.A. that will premiere on HBO Max in October as a fundraiser for When We All Vote and include video appearances by Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton and Lin-Manuel Miranda

For the real-life Chicago 7, the denouement consisted of ultimately being acquitted of conspiracy. Judge Hoffman sentenced Seale to four years in prison for contempt of court, one of the longest sentences ever handed down for that offense in the U.S., but those charges were overturned on appeal. Just three of the original eight defendants — Seale, Froines and Weiner — are still alive, but the legacy of the case lives on in contemporary protest movements. "The movie is tribute to the bravery of the protesters of 1968 and the protesters of today in Belarus, on the streets of America, in Portland," Cohen says. "These people now are risking their lives, and they’ll continue risking them."

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/the-trial-of-the-chicago-7-aaron-sorkin-and-stars-on-films-timeliness-to-election-and-why-everybody-has-a-role-in-the-revolution

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cienie-isengardu · 4 years

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The development of Law’s relationship with Zoro - Part 4: Dressrosa, The Breaking Point (Protecting Law)

<<Part I: Before Meeting>> <<Part II: Sabaody Archipelago, The First Meeting>> <<Part III: Punk Hazard, The Alliance (A)>> <<Part III: Punk Hazard, The Alliance (B)>> <<Part IV: Dressrosa, The Breaking Point (The Plan Failed)__ (Saving Law)__(Protecting Law)__ (Birdcage, Pica and Doflamingo)__ (Aftermath)>>

While Doflamingo was addressing people of Dressrosa and explaining the rules of “game” to punish 12 enemies of his (chapter 746), Luffy was talking with Zoro, most likely explaining what happened in Throne Room. We can only wonder what exactly Luffy told him, did he mention anything related to Law. At the same time, Zoro held Law’s sword that he had to find somewhere around. Interestingly, according to SBS vol. 71, Trafalgar’s nodachi - Kikoku (Demon��s Cry) is in fact a cursed blade and Zoro is sensitive to such “evil” nature of swords what was seen with his own Sandai Kitetsu. As a swordsman himself, of course he took care of the sword while Law couldn’t do it personally. At the same time, we don’t see Zoro returning Kikoku to the owner, just that he had it while talking with Luffy. Another worth to mention detail is the cover of volume 75 (in which the discussed panel comes from) that adds to the impression that Zoro passed Kikoku to Luffy instead of Law. What supports the feeling of keeping distance between those two.

Using Den Den Mushi, Zoro contacted Robin to check in the situation:

For the upcoming chapters, the visual setting of three Supernovas shown together in the same panels will reflect this scene - Luffy as the central figure in this trio…. except a specific kind of situation but about that in a moment.

Like always, Luffy wasn’t bothered much by the whole enemy’s game, while Zoro did not show emotions at all. Law simply watched the whole situation (while his sword lied close to him). At least until Luffy declared to Rebecca he is going to kick Doflamingo’s ass because that went against the main goal of Law’s plan.

Zoro did not take part in the argument between two captains. Yet his reaction (holding and squeezing tighter his katana) seems to be quite ambiguous. For sure it was a sign of support for his captain’s decision - as in, ready to fight everyone and everything, no doubts about what should be done (read: kicking Doffy’s ass regardless of Law's objection). But at the same time it looks as, well, threatening Law is too big a word, because Zoro wouldn’t cut a defenseless man, but there is something (passive) aggressive about such a gesture. Law’s silent reaction (to Luffy’s words? To Zoro’s lack of reasoning with Luffy?) makes me think there was more going on in this scene than just Law’s angry(?) surprise/shock. This probably was another moment for Law to see who the fellow Supernovas were at the core.

Whatever Law’s impression was at that moment about Luffy and Zoro’s determination to save Dressrosa instead of thinking just of their own survival, the next few hours(?) gave him a better understanding of the dynamic between Zoro and his captain. In all fairness, the experience was gained by his own misery thanks to dealing with the insanity of Straw Hat with only Pirate Hunter for some sort of mental support. Starting with such treatment in chapter 746:

Without asking for permission or any warning, Luffy simply grabbed Zoro and Law and straight up jumped from a high place… only to land into the middle of an enemy group.

Law wasn’t happy about that - even threatened (again) Luffy that once he is free from handcuffs, he’ll kill Luffy. Usually Zoro reacts strongly to threats against his nakama, yet here he totally ignored Law’s words. Maybe he knew there was no time to worry about that or maybe he simply understood Law’s fury because really, that was a natural response to Luffy’s impatience. Unlike Law, Zoro had a lot of experiences with Luffy’s crazy ideas of “fast transport” and even many Straw Hats well familiar with their captain’s antics still weren’t comfy with it. The whole situation was even worse for the Heart captain due to seastone shackles that were A) weakening him and B) blocking his devil fruit’s powers so it was a freestyle “falling” he couldn’t in any way control or prevent if something went wrong. And Law seems like the type of person who likes to have control over things. So the resentment toward Luffy was an understable reaction.

One more important note about the landing scene - like was previously mentioned, Luffy for the majority of upcoming interaction between the three Supernovas was presented as a central figure, a “connection” between Zoro and Law. Both on the contextual level on which the analysis is based and in the visibility; in the sense how the layout of the panel has been planned. The biggest, most oblivious exception to the usual dynamic of Zoro-Luffy-Law were moments in which Zoro switched his position to put Law in the (safest) middle. Whatever he did that solely for Law’s safety or just Luffy’s (who by carrying all the time Trafalgar on his right arm couldn’t fight at 100% of his abilities and thus the right side was less guarded), the change was beneficial to Heart captain.

Since Luffy carried powerless Trafalgar, Zoro was the only one mobile to actually adapt his position to the needs of the situation. Like right now, cornered by the enemy, Zoro stood a bit ahead of two captains, with a katana already in hand, ready to fight.

Let’s just think about Law’s situation for a moment. Defenseless and surrounded on all sides by enemies, absolutely dependent on protection of fellow Supernovas he barely knew - including one chaotic dumbass responsible for his misery in the first place. Zoro, on another hand, was the only one person from Straw Hats crew that did not irritate or confuse Trafalgar in the last days of stress. But then the build impression of stoic, straight-thinking Zoro slowly started crackling. Like in the landing scene: Luffy thought he landed in a bad place to which Zoro noted there wasn’t any good place for them on Dressrosa right now and it was time to run away… just to run in the wrong direction. Which Luffy corrected the swordsman only to run in the wrong way too.

Law seriously didn’t need more stress at this point of life, yet not only Luffy but Zoro too, were challenging his self-control and patience.

Not much time has passed and Luffy already was caught by enemy’s attack:

Straw Hat managed to dodge “Super weight man” but get stuck for good. Both captains were saved from the powerful/deadly kick of Dellinger thanks to Zoro. Roronoa didn’t even cut the enemy, just kicked Dellinger in the ass and used his attack to push heavy Visa off from Luffy, freeing him for good (and once again, the frame presents Law in the middle).

The same like on Punk Hazard, Roronoa reminded Luffy to be careful.

This moment has an ambiguous feeling about it. On one hand, Zoro once again seemed to ignore Law's presence and focused on Luffy. On another, I think there is something diplomatic about the way Zoro addressed the situation. Because Luffy would be more or less fine, even if stamped by Visa. He was, in the end, a rubber-man and it wouldn't be the first time when something heavy crashed into him with high speed. Going Merry did that on a few occasions, when Luffy was using gomu gomu no balloon to save the ship from crashing into mountains / rocks. Unlike Law, who would be crushed to death.

The biggest problem during the run of Three Supernovas was how defenseless - thus useless in fight - Law was at that moment. He was totally dependent on Straw Hats and Zoro couldn't be not aware of that. On Sabaody Archipelago, when Eustass Kid decided to deal with marines alone, both Luffy and Law got so pissed off at the mere suggestion they needed to be saved. But there, Law was in need of save because seastone cuffs took all his powers, all his control over the situation. It was so easy to make fun of Heart captain, point out how powerless he was, complain about that. And some people would abuse the situation to laugh at Law. Zoro could say something along the line “be careful because Law can't fight”, yet he reprimanded Luffy without dragging Law into discussion. Without a fuss or making Trafalgar feel like a burden. Warning Luffy to be careful is similar to Punk Hazard's scene in the regard of demanding from the captain to not fool around and get the grip of himself. But unlike the previous arc, Zoro's demand was kept short, to the point. No speech how one mistake can cost them life - what was true in Dressrosa too.

Law didn't betray any reaction to Roronoa's words but I think there was a part of him that could feel glad for not humiliating him any more. He already had a hard time being carried like a sack of potatoes and forced to trust Straw Hats to not kill him in the process. He didn't need to be reminded how powerless he currently was.

Soon after that the Three Supernovas run into a crowd of citizens trying to capture Doflamingo's enemies. Zoro showed concern about them, not feeling right to cut desperate common people which Luffy agreed. Once again, Straw Hats proved how different they were from the majority of pirates. Law alone was okay to set Kaido after Doffy's head which in the long run would put the people of Dressrosa in harm's way.

Finally, the admiral Issho showed up - Zoro, due to previous movement of dodging an attack, didn't have time to change his position thus came at Luffy's left side. In that formation, Law was the least protected one which put Luffy at disadvantage as well.

Though Zoro was the character of lower status (the only non-captain Supernova and two stars on Doffy’s list in contrast to Luffy & Law’s three), it was Roronoa who actually fought the marine officer. What makes sense; he already had a chance to test Issho’s strength and was capable of freeing himself with a flying slash from gravity trap / attack while Law and Luffy couldn’t fight at full capability. Of course, manga only gave a small insight into their fight and the skirmish with the admiral was ultimately stopped by Pica's giant presence.

Of course, once Luffy heard the high pitched voice of a colossal enemy, he laughed like a maniac, despite Zoro’s (and enemy foot soldiers) warning.

Straw Hat’s reaction hit Pica’s berserk button to the point the man didn’t care if he killed members of his own Family or subordinates with his destructive attack (“It’s not even a punch anymore!! The town is falling on us”). Everyone could only run away as far as possible. While on the run, Zoro once again reprimanded his own captain. Or, at least, tried. Until he started laughing himself (chapter 748).

(Once again, the translation varies from one site to another; in some versions, Law told Luffy and Zoro “knock it off, you two…!!” or outright called them “you dipshits…!!”. Still, all three translations made it clear how unhappy Law was about the whole situation)

That moment is another breaking point of Law's impression about Zoro as the stoic, reasonable counter-balance to Luffy's madness. Because Roronoa wasn't any better than Monkey D. Luffy and that was the biggest "betrayal" to Trafalgar’s idea of what Pirate Hunter should be so far. Law was so, so disappointed in the angry way and he did not try to hide it.

Frankly, Law’s stoicism was put to the test the whole time and it was cracking under pressure more and more. Zoro and Luffy’s lack of self-preservation instinct definitely didn’t help at all.

Pica’s attack sent Supernova Trio flying far away from the palace, what allowed them to (sort of) catch a break. Zoro’s main focus was of course at the gigantic enemy, wondering how they could defeat him. His words weren’t directed at anyone in particular, but gave an opening for Law to join the discussion. In the past, Law shared his knowledge about powers of enemies and how they worked yet this time he had no advice to give. It may suggest that Trafalgar wasn’t that familiar with the true nature and weakness of Ishi Ishi no Mi (what makes sense, since Pica’s powers are strictly related to rock and his attacks too destructive to use them recklessly, so young Law may never truly see the true potential of Pica in fight. Also, Doflamingo did not mention Pica when he named those of Family Law learned fighting skills from nor Law’s flashback showed any closer interaction with the man).

Or maybe Law didn’t have enough time to recover to talk about strategy against Pica and once Candevish showed up, there were other matters to worry about right then. Especially since the man tried to kill Law on the spot who was saved only by Luffy’s quick reaction (though Zoro already had a sword in hand, once he noticed the non familiar face, so maybe all of them felt the ill intention coming off Cavendish?).

Through the whole discussion with the man, Zoro stayed silent, while Law was furious at both Luffy and Cavendish. Including Luffy’s declaration of them being friends.

Law denied it and frankly, after the whole “adventure” of almost dying time after time because of Monkey D. Luffy’s lack of common sense, no one can blame him for such rage and lost composure. Still, whatever Law said about his relationship with Straw Hat, Zoro was guarding him more than his own captain. What makes sense - right now Luffy didn’t have to carry Heart captain (thus in case of attack wasn’t burdened in any way) while Law was still powerless by seastone. Zoro didn’t sheathe the sword and stood behind Luffy, the same as Law. At least until Luffy’s former rival (enemy) didn’t declare to be sort of on the same side as them. Law once again was faced with Luffy’s insanity, when rubber-man admitted that food given to him by Rebecca was the main motivation for his actions. Through the whole meeting with Candevish, Zoro was the only one person in the group that did not piss off Law even a bit.

Luffy and Candevish had another argument (who is gonna beat Doflamingo), but this time Luffy decided to run away and leave the man to his delusional talk about popularity. The Supernovas Trio soon met another Luffy’s rivals from Colosseum: Happo Navy Gang, the giant Hajrudin, king Elizabello II & Dogma, Abdullah & Jet, admiral Olombus, Ideo, Slayman, Blue Gilly. All powerful in their own right, all feeling indebted to Usopp (Straw Hats) for breaking Sugar’s curse to the point every one of them decided to take Doffy’s head.

Luffy was not really happy to see his rivals showing up one after another, even less when none cared that he decided to personally kick Doflamingo’s ass. Zoro’s initial reaction was commenting “you know lots of weird people” but beyond that did not show any distress (unlike Luffy) while Law did not talk at all.

In the group of so many self-assured fighters arguing who will take down the enemy, only Roronoa seemed to not be affected by emotions and approached the matter with cold pragmatism. He proposed a compromise: all fighters backing them up but the proposition was shut down. Mainly because all had too big egos and were too stubborn. Including Luffy, to Law’s utter shock.

Here some interesting details:

↪ Zoro once again held a sword in a hand. What suggests he didn’t consider the meeting between pirate alliance and the colosseum fighters as the “safest”. At the same time, the sword stayed unsheathed so it wasn’t totally “hazardous” feeling either. Though the situation could quickly get out of control and turn into a fight no one really needed, Zoro gave the fighters a benefit of doubt.

↪ Despite the benefit of doubt, Zoro still changed the usual position from Luffy’s left side to his right. Once again, Law was put in the (safest) middle. The change happened quickly, with the (second rival) giant Hajrudin showing up. After meeting with the Happo Gang, Luffy already was ready to run away while Zoro did not betray any sign of worry. The framing makes it look like he went ahead to face the gigantic man just in case, thus putting himself between two captains and the possible enemy.

↪ Once again Zoro acted protective of other Supernovas without making a fuss about it.

↪ There is a visible difference between how Luffy and Zoro approached the subject of the argument. Through the few pages, from meeting Candevish to arguing with all colosseum fighters, Luffy kept saying he will kick Doflamingo’s ass - in contrast, Zoro said to other men “back up us” what sounds like he actually remembered about Trafalgar. Considering how personal taking down Doflamingo was to Law, being included despite the current state of powerlessness most likely alone made (again) a good impression. On other hand, Luffy from the start to the end was selfish in the sense he decided to kick Doffy’s ass on his own and outright dismissed the very thought that anyone else should do it. Surprisingly, somehow along the way, Straw Hat switched from “we will go to the palace to kick Doflamingo’s ass” (said to the crew at the beginning of battle) to “I’m gonna do that” without including even Zoro.

↪ There is something interesting in the fact that the bigger group around them, then Zoro and Law spoke less. Even more, when one spoke the other usually stayed silent through the conversation with the strangers. What could be seen with Cavendish (Law was screaming talking) and the bunch of colosseum fighters (Zoro’s solution to join the forces). In the case of Roronoa, it seems like a normal thing for him; the more unfamiliar people the bigger chance he will keep quiet and simply observe what is going on around. That of course does not mean he is shy or anything like that, just acts like an introvert. Law seems here to operate in a similar way. Though in contrast to Zoro (who occasionally was commenting on people's idiocy), to Trafalgar the whole situation was as much as ridiculous as overwhelming judging by his shocked face.

↪ Even if Law’s impression of Zoro cracked a bit due to his bad sense of direction and laughing with Luffy at dangerous enemy, when it mattered Roronoa A) didn’t lost his composure and was not influenced by emotions or personal pride and B) was reliable. In contrast, Law’s tolerance for all the chaos and absurdity (and one chaotic dumbass) was barely maintained the whole time.Trafalgar screamed in powerless(?) furypowerless fury(?) a lot and in general showed emotions in unusual manners. On Sabaody Archipelago and Punk Hazard, Zoro rarely couldhad a chance see Law so stressed and out of his depth. Dressrosa for the first time allowed him to see a different side of Law. In a way, Zoro finally had a chance to see (judge) what kind of man Trafalgar was once the control and devil fruit powers were taken away from him. He saw Law when he was vulnerable and it seems this shared experience builtin the long run built a solid ground between those two characters.

The argument between Luffy and gladiators was temporarily stopped by enemy attack. After that all of them rushed after Doffy’s head. Luffy met a befriended in colosseum bull and on his back rode alongside Zoro and Law. Since the situation became more dangerous, Law permanently ended between the Straw Hats, with Luffy defending the front while Zoro secured the rear.

During the run to the palace, King Elizabello and Chinjao stopped Pica’s attack and destroyed his stone arm but no true damage was done to the enemy. Zoro then advised the men to not waste energy until they figure out how Pica’s powers work and for now, just run (chapter 749).

Surprisingly, the fighters that not so long ago were all about their pride and ego listened to Luffy’s subordinate while still arguing with Straw Hat himself who should defeat Doflamingo and calling him the “stupid savior”. Through their journey, Law didn’t say any useful information about Pica nor shared any observations that might help in the fight, despite being to some degree familiar with Pica and pretty smart to analyze other people’s fighting styles.

Frankly, Zoro was the only one sharing aloud his observations with his captain (and Law?) after Luffy hit the enemy with a powerful, yet fruitless attack. Because of that, it seems like Pirate Hunter so far had the best understanding of stone giant’s powers.

Soon after that Pica finally showed up his true body. Up to this moment, Roronoa was more or less neutral about the whole chaos around him and now had his killer smile (that Law most likely couldn't see but could pick up the predatory tone from Zoro’s voice) due to upcoming fight with a strong opponent.

Law’s reaction was not shown at all, but once again he experienced Zoro’s insanity; the thrill of deadly fight, instead of worry about danger. Dressrosa, like Sabaody Archipelago and Punk Hazard arcs, confirm Pirate Hunter’s lust for battle. Another thing is the complete trust between Straw Hat Supernovas - Luffy avoided Pica’s attack (saving everyone in the process) and was just like “I’ll keep going ahead” while Zoro took on himself stopping Pica for good.

Like fighting a tricky devil fruit user is no big deal. Even insulted Pica by calling him “a pebble” and “Soprano singer” while knowing full well how sensitive the man was to such words - what Law may or may not heard before he and Luffy get too far away.

The next part: Birdcage, Pica & Doflamingo

#one piece #roronoa zoro #trafalgar law #The development of Law’s relationship with Zoro #monkey d. luffy #pica #colosseum fighters #dressrosa arc #my analyze #the best part of the arc when it comes to zoro and law during battle #zoro & law

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someguyscaliforniavoterguide · 5 years

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Select L.A. County/California Races, March 3, 2020

Hi friends, it’s me again. I am here to offer my opinions on how you should vote. As before I am up front about my biases: I am a Warren supporter, I live in L.A. and I am actively pro-density (Yay SB50, you deserved better) and pro-transit. I live in the east Valley, so I tend to focus more closely on the issues that directly impact my side of town, though I try to keep an ear out on things countywide.

Last time I did this a couple of folks reached out to give me gifts to say thanks for doing this guide. This year, I would encourage anybody who wants to say thanks to donate $5 to Fair Fight, a group founded by Stacey Abrams to fight voter suppression in the 2020 election. We’re gonna need all the help we can get in November to defeat the GOP, and Abrams is doing it in a smart way.

Other voting guides

This is my voting guide and reflects my general opinion on things. However, I am indebeted to many other guides, including the Knock L.A. Voter Guide and the L.A. Podcast Voter Guide for their takes. I don’t always agree with them, but both of these are invaluable resources for the progressive voter in Los Angeles.

L.A. City Council

This year the even numbered seats are up for re-election. Half of them are effectively uncontested, a couple are very much contested, and two are free for all because of term limits.

CD2: Ayinde Jones

Look none of these candidates set my heart afire. I work with Councilmember Krekorian’s office a lot (remember, I live in the east Valley) and he’s a competent politician with a ton of endorsements and community ties, I have no illusion he’s going to win his full term comfortably on March 3. However, I believe it’s good to encourage competition, and Ayinde Jones did a good (not great) job at the candidate forum I attended hitting on themes of how the parts of CD2 north of Victory are being left behind as the area evolves. I wish he were better on S50, but then again all three candidates were opposed, so that’s kind of a wash. I look forward to hearing more from Jones in the future.

CD4: Sarah Kate Levy

From a paucity of options to a surplus of options next door. CD4 is currently represented by David Ryu, a politician who came out of the Neighborhood Council system and went on to become...a city hall politician. Both his opponents are great. Nithya Raman is the founder of SELAH, a group that does amazing work helping the unhoused in Los Angeles, and recently led Times Up! Hollywood for a year. I’d vote for her in a heartbeat, but I am encouraging people to vote for Sarah Kate Levy for two reasons: first, Levy is unabashedly supportive of SB50 and we need this kind of leadership, and second I am hoping these two excellent women will get so many votes that they overwhelm Ryu and leave him in third place. Fingers crossed.

CD6: Bill Haller

This is another shoo-in. Nury Martinez is the City Council president and has the backing of the County party and all the local clubs. I am endorsing Bill Haller because he supports an agenda that includes more public funding for affordable housing, more and better transit, and climate justice.

CD8: Marqueece Harris-Dawson

There are no other candidates in this race, so congratulations on your re-election Councilmember Harris-Dawson.

CD10: Aura Vasquez

This is an open seat, and the smart money has Mark Ridley-Thomas as the frontrunner. Ridley-Thomas is a current member of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors (more on them later) who is termed out of that position. I’m endorsing Aura Vasquez, a progressive activist with ties to Mid-City who has served as a commissioner for LADWP and led fights for renewable energy, banning single use plastics, and housing affordability in her community.

CD12: Loraine Lundquist

Dr. Lundquist rules. She takes public transit to debates, she is an honest to goodness scientist, and she nearly beat a Republican in what is the most conservative district in L.A. during a special election. I have donated money to this lady because we need to win this one. Her opponent, John Lee, wasted no time in trying to block housing for the homeless in his district and in attacking a successful safer streets project on Reseda Blvd. The city has a chance - a really great chance thanks to the realigned municipal elections - to toss out the worst possible councilmember in favor of the most progressive voice, don’t mess it up.

CD14: Cyndi Otteson

This race is Kevin de Léon’s to lose, but he won’t commit to serving a full term since he really wants to be mayor. I say let him have his spare time to run for mayor and select Ms. Otteson, a grassroots activist who has the support of the UTLA and who is the only voice in favor of the Colorado Blvd alignment of the NoHo to Pasadena BRT project. Transit equity matters, and Ms. Otteson deserves your vote this March.

LAUSD School Board

Deferring to the teachers’ endorsements on this one.

Board Seat 1: George McKenna

Board Seat 3: Scott Schmerlson

Board Seat 5: Jackie Goldberg

Board Seat 7: Patricia Castellanos

Glendale City Council: Dan Brotman

An environmental activist with progresive views, Brotman will be a useful voice in Glendale’s city hall.

District Attorney: Rachel Rossi

George Gascón and Rachel Rossi will both be light years better than the current county D.A., Jackie Lacey. Both have promised to make substantial reforms in the office. I am really torn on this one, since I think Gascón’s experience as a Deputy DA in San Francisco is a big deal, and since he has the backing of the County Party. I am endorsing Rossi in a tilt-at-windmills hope that somehow she and Gascón make it to the final ballot in November and give us a thoughtful debate between a career prosecutor bent on reform and a public defender whose goal is reform about methods and ideas. Anyway, don’t vote for Jackie Lacey is all I am saying here.

Superior Court

Voting for judges is stupid. We shouldn’t be doing this, but since we have to, I’ll make some suggestions. My math is based on other progressive endorsements, Party endorsements, and reverse-engineering some well known conservative voting guides to, if nothing else, make sure I am not voting for their endorsement.

Office 17: Shannon Kathleen Cooley (the race is uncontested)

Office 42: Linda Sun

Office 72: Myanna Dellinger

Office 76: Emily Cole (Cole is a prosecutor, but her opponent is a man who literally changed his name to “Judge” after serving as a judge in Stanislaus County)

Office 80: Klint James McKay

Currently an administrative law judge, he impressed Public Defender Union representatives with his thoughtful and articulate answers to their questioning.

Office 97: Sherry L. Powell (Powell’s opponent ran as a conservative Republican for state assembly in 2018, this is a defensive vote)

Office 129: Kenneth Fuller

Office 131: Michelle Kelley (the race is uncontested)

Office 141: Lana Kim (the race is uncontested)

Office 145: Troy Slaten (Slaten’s opponent has a troubling history of misconduct and should not be elected to a judgeship)

Office 150: Tom Parsekian

Office 162: David D. Diamond

L.A. County Board of Supervisors

The Supervisors oversee policy for the County, including all unincorporated areas, the LASD, County Health services, etc. For a county of TEN MILLION PEOPLE, there are only five supervisors, so they have a hugely outsized influence.

Seat 2: Jorge Nuno

A lot of progressives are endorsing Holly Mitchell in this seat. Me, I just can’t go there when she’s speaking at events for Livable California and when she gave a floor speech opposing SB50. Though he’s the front runner, Herb Wesson doesn’t deserve your vote - he was City Council president when the homelessness crisis exploded and he’s done little to address it. Nuno is a progressive and has an ambitious platform.

Seat 4: Janice Hahn

She’s solid, and nobody’s pushing her from the left.

Seat 5: John Harabedian

Kathryn Barger, the incumbent, is a Republican who supports Trump’s immigration policies. John Harabedian is a solidly Center Left Democrat who has the backing of the county party and who could, in this presidential election year, win an upset in what is traditionally a Republican stronghold of L.A. County. Vote for him.

County Ballot Measures

Measure R: YES YES YES

This will provide crucial tools to the already existing civilian oversight committee for the LASD, including subpoena powers. It also requires the commission to study ways to divert offenders from jail. You need to vote yes on this.

State Ballot Measures

Prop 13: Yes

$15B in bonds to invest in public schools and “local control” to allow local school districts to issue larger bonds. The only real opposition is from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, a revanchist organization that is singlehandedly responsible for much of our state and local problems in the past few decades. Don’t listen to them.

Congressional Elections

Despite some misgivings, I am generally supporting the progressive challengers here to hopefully lead to a Progressive/Center Left election in the fall.

CD 25: Christy Smith

She has a good track record in the state assembly and a strong local support network. She’s not a carpetbagger with a YouTube show, and she’s not a Republican.

CD 28: Adam Schiff

He’s not the most progressive guy in Congress but he’s been critical to holding Trump accountable. He’s earned this vote.

CD 29: Angelica Duenas

Tony Cardenas is a bit of a non-entity on the national stage but he does good local work and he was an early vote in favor of impeachment. The rape allegations against him which troubled me last time were dismissed with prejudice in 2019. Cardenas has a progressive challenger, Angelica Marie Duenas, who has run in the past as a Green Party candidate. I don’t trust her decision to abandon that label and come into the Democrats after getting drubbed in 2018, but overall I like her ideas and I’d be happy to see her and Cardenas in a runoff this year.

CD 30: CJ Berina

Brad Sherman is an okay Congressmember. CJ Berina is a young, progressive challenger who’s attracted the attention of the Sunrise Movement. I’d vote for him to try to push the GOP out of the runoff and make this a race between the Center Left and the Progressive Left.

CD 34: Frances Yasmeen Motiwalla

Jimmy Gomez is solid; let’s push the GOP out of the runoff though by supporting this progressive.

State House

District 39: Luz Rivas

District 41: Chris Holden

District 43: Laura Friedman

District 44: Jacqui Irwin

District 45: Jesse Gabriel

District 46: Adrin Nazarian

District 48: Blanca Rubio

District 49: Edwin Chau

District 50: Richard Bloom

District 51: Wendy Carillo

District 53: Godfrey Plata

District 54: Tracey Jones

District 55: Andrew Rodriguez

District 58: Margaret Villa

District 59: Reggie Jones-Sawyer

District 62: Autumn Burke

District 63: Anthony Rendon

District 64: Fatima Iqbal-Zubair

District 66: Al Muratsuchi

District 70: Patrick O’Donnell

State Senate

SD 21: Kipp Mueller

SD 23: Abigail Medina

SD 25: No Endorsement - I rarely do this but honestly Anthony Portantino does not deserve your vote. Write in Mickey Mouse.

SD 27: Henry Stern

SD 29: Josh Newman

SD 31: Richard Roth

SD 33: Lena Gonzalez

SD 35: Steven Bradford

County Committees

Look this is getting waaaaaaaaaaaaaay into the weeds. What I am going to say is this: I know that a lot of “progressive” slates are out there and I encourage you to try your best to vet them. In my district, one of the candidates is somebody I know personally - she actively campaigned for Jill Stein, she circulated the decades-old “Clinton Death List” to voters, and she pushed Pizzagate theories. I am not voting for this person, but she is endorsed by “Progressive California” so...just be careful.

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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The Trial of the Chicago 7: Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin Were the Martin and Lewis of the Radical Left

https://ift.tt/3497VU7

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan intoned on his song “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” influencing a group of young mad bombers to blow against the wind. The group at the center of Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 didn’t blow up bathrooms in federal investigative agencies; they protested bombings, and all other forms of violence, when they stood against authority at the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

The Youth International Party, or Yippies, was non-violent, even if one of the co-founders, Abbie Hoffman (played by Sacha Baron Cohen in the movie), wrote his first radical tract, Fuck the System, under the pseudonym George Metesky, a mad bomber from the 1940s. The other, Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong on screen), blew bubbles while dressed as George Washington at his HUAC hearing.

Rubin would go on to beat bongos as part of John Lennon’s morphing street musician crusaders, playing live at political demonstrations across America, while Hoffman was knocked upside the head with the guitar of The Who’s Pete Townshend when he interrupted the band at Woodstock. But Lennon had the last word about Rubin. “I gotta ask you comrades and brothers, how do you treat your own woman back home?” Lennon asked in the song “Power to the People.” He was singing to Rubin.

Abbie Hoffman was a radical. He believed in the redistribution of wealth and power, universal hospital care, and that the richest country in the world should not have homeless people. Radical, said his political enemies. Insane. Crazy like the Flower Power movement he was part of. Flowers don’t power things, oil does. Money does. Blood does.

Hoffman’s contribution to political literature was a guidebook on living free, and the first step was to take the title literally: Steal This Book. By the time Hoffman resurfaced from his years underground as a drug dealing charged fugitive, he expressed his primary concern, and that of many caught up in the insane no-tolerance drug policies of the time, with the book Steal This Urine Test. It didn’t suggest dumping them in the holy water. It waged guerilla warfare on the War on Drugs.

Hoffman was a born outlaw, a duck-tailed, leather jacketed teen rebel looking for a cause. Born Nov. 30, 1936 in Worcester, Massachusetts, he was expelled from Classical High School when a paper he wrote concluded God could not possibly exist, prompting his teacher to call him a Communist punk. Hoffman proved it by jumping the teacher.

Rubin was born July 14, 1938 in Cincinnati. His father was a union organizer. Rubin was one of the leaders of the 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon. After the heyday of the protest movement, Rubin moved from radical politics to freeing the mind with human potential, although it wasn’t free of charge.

Rubin was a burgeoning businessman, but was also an outlaw at heart. He even died breaking a law. One of the most basic laws almost everyone, regardless of class, color, or creed, thinks nothing of breaking. Rubin died of a heart attack two weeks after being hit by a car while jaywalking. The implications seem almost surreal, but the Yippie movement was filled with ridiculous ways to challenge legal authority.

Well before Rubin’s death in the ‘90s, he was there with Hoffman on Aug. 24, 1967, tossing fistfuls of dollars, real and fake, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to protest capitalism. Traders went crazy grabbing at the cash. The NYSE built a wall to stop the unfettered financial fun. The Youth International Party nominated Pigasus, a pig, as its candidate for president in the 1968 election campaign.

The “Chicago Seven” trial, named after Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers was tried separately from the original defendants, was loaded with courthouse street theater. They even wanted to design their own costumes. The first things Rubin, Hoffman, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, and Lee Weiner did when they went into trial was to stomp on their judicial robes. When Hoffman got sworn in as a witness, his hand was giving the finger.

The defendants were charged with conspiracy to incite a riot, but they were a riot in court. Sadly, the judge at the bench didn’t get the jokes. Judge Julius Hoffman’s humor went another way. He thought it was fitting to have Seale bound and gagged when he wanted to be tried separately, and didn’t like to be heckled. The giddy group of mischievous militants were cited for contempt over 200 times.

The Chicago Seven Trial saw the appearances of “cultural witnesses” like Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, Arlo Guthrie, and Norman Mailer. Hoffman gave a speech saying if Abraham Lincoln were alive and in Chicago during the convention, he would have been arrested in Lincoln Park. When he was being sentenced, Hoffman offered to hook the judge up with an LSD dealer he knew.The U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the Chicago Seven convictions, cited errors by Judge Hoffman and criticized his courtroom demeanor. The Walker Commission, which investigated the disruption at the Chicago Democratic Convention, concluded it was a “police riot.”

The old guard Left was also lacking in its sense of humor. The militant youth movement, hippies, self-proclaimed freaks and Free Speech movers, were merry pranksters. Diehard socialists fought with placards, bricks, and feet. Hoffman tried to levitate the Pentagon. Was it childish? The demonstration would have heard noted baby-rearing author Dr. Benjamin Spock speak about the importance of protecting children of any age. The protesters were met by soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division. With poet Allen Ginsberg leading Tibetan chants behind him, Hoffman telepathically tuned in and declared the Vietnam War would end when the Pentagon started to vibrate and turn orange.

The Youth International Party had no official membership or leadership. Before the Yippie movement, Rubin ran as the radical candidate for mayor of Berkeley, on a platform of exposing his opponent’s racist hiring policies. Hoffman was involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a radical community-action group called the Diggers, who kicked him out for being a media junky. Abbie published a book blowing “the hustle of every poor person on the Lower East Side,” according to Peter Coyote.

Following the trial, Rubin wrote the books Do It! and We Are Everywhere, which made him think he was a rock star. He appeared with Lennon, Yoko Ono, Bobby Seale, Ralph Nader, Chuck Berry, and George Carlin on The Mike Douglas Show. Until the end of his career, Douglas maintained that was the most interesting week of his entire career.

On Aug. 28, 1973, Hoffman was arrested in New York City for trying to sell $36,000 worth of cocaine. He said he was set up and entrapped. He jumped bail in 1974 and vanished, occasionally popping up to remind police he’d disappeared. Turns out he was actually working for the rock magazine Crawdaddy! as a travel writer under the name Barry Freed and had his face rendered unrecognizable by plastic surgery. He surrendered to authorities in 1980, but not until after he taped an interview with Barbara Walters for ABC’s 20/20. He received a one-year sentence but was released after four months.

In the late ‘70s, Rubin discovered seminar training with est and sold a nutritional drink called Wow, which had plenty of kelp, ginseng and bee pollen. Bobby Seale was one of his salesmen. Having broken down the $20,000 financial firewall constructed after the fistfuls-of-dollars stunt, Rubin returned to Wall Street in the 1980s decade of greed and trickle-down voodoo economics. At first, he claimed he was trying to bring some consciousness to the spiritual center of capitalism. But then he sold his soul for a three-piece suit and became a broker. He opened Business Networking Salons, Inc., hosting parties at Studio 54, and said he was part of a real American revolution. Rubin and Hoffman went on a speaking tour giving public debates about yuppies versus Yippies.

Movies

The Trial of the Chicago 7 Ending: What Happened Next?

By David Crow

Movies

Aaron Sorkin: Donald Trump Made The Trial of the Chicago 7 Movie Possible

By David Crow

Rubin took to the “Me Generation” with the same fervor he had with the cultural revolution of the 1960s. He embarked on an inner revolution, eating carrots until he turned orange. He also atoned for his misogynist past by discussing his own sexual shortcomings in the 1980 book The War Between the Sheets, which he wrote with his wife, commodities futures trader Mimi Leonard.

Rubin could afford it, he had by this time become a multimillionaire, having invested in Apple Computer. Hoffman never bit the apple, continuing in the tradition of American civil disobedience whether it came to saving trees from deforestation or Third World Countries from the U.S. intelligence community. One embraced the unfettered financial social coup, the other was disgusted with the anti-capitalist complacency of Reagan America.

Hoffman made a cameo appearance playing himself in Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July, the story of anti-war activist Ron Kovic. Rubin would have been quite comfortable as himself in Stone’s Wall Street, the embodiment of the “Greed is Good” mentality.

Hoffman was arrested In November 1986, along with Amy Carter, the daughter of former President Jimmy Carter, for trespassing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to protest CIA recruitment on its campus. The federal district trial which followed exposed CIA involvement in Nicaragua, along with decades of illegal covert activities.

Hoffman was found dead in his apartment, on April 12, 1989, in an apparent suicide. When Abbie died, Jerry was the only Chicago conspiracy defendant at the funeral. “I used to say, ‘Don’t trust anyone over 30,’” Rubin told a reporter in his financially fatter latter years. “Now I say don’t trust anyone under 50.” Abbie maintained the ideals of his youth, but found far fewer dividends.

The pair were happy to be the “clowns for peace” Lennon called himself during his and Yoko’s honeymoon protest. They brought the generational divide closer together by exposing the ridiculous nature of the divisions. Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 sets out to capture all three rings of the circus of political justice. Rubin and Hoffman were masters of ceremonies in the most unceremonious of ways.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

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topworldhistory · 5 years

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The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago is most-remembered for what happened on the streets outside of it. Before the convention began on August 26, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley refused protest permits to most anti-war demonstrators and deployed 12,000 police officers, 5,600 members of the Illinois National Guard and 5,000 Army soldiers on the streets to meet any who showed up. These police and military forces violently clashed with Vietnam War protesters, resulting in hundreds of injuries and 668 arrests during the four-day convention.

“One day in Grant Park somebody took down a flag and the police used that as an excuse to go through the crowd beating people with nightsticks,” recalls John Froines, who helped organize the DNC anti-war demonstrations with Rennie Davis of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. “Rennie Davis and I were hit on the head with night sticks.”

Froines, who is now a professor emeritus of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, wasn’t arrested that day. But a year later, the U.S. government accused him, Davis and six other men of conspiring to incite a riot at the DNC. The others were Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party; David Dellinger, a longtime anti-war activist; Tom Hayden, cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society; Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party (whose members were called “yippies”); and Lee Weiner, who had volunteered as a marshal for the DNC demonstrations to help with crowd control.

The evidence against the Chicago Eight, as they became known, was always slim. None were convicted of conspiracy, and although five of them were convicted of inciting a riot, an appellate court dismissed the charges because it found that the judge had been biased against them. Fifty years later, here’s why the Chicago Eight trial that opened on September 24, 1969 was such a big deal.

1. The Chicago Eight were the first people tried under the first federal anti-riot law.

1968 Riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago (TV-PG; 2:03)

Anti-riot laws were all at the local or state level until the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which included a provision making it illegal to cross state lines to incite a riot. After violence erupted at the Chicago DNC, Mayor Daley wanted the government to prosecute some of the demonstrators under the new act. However, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s attorney general Ramsey Clark didn’t think there was a case.

“I interviewed [Clark] and he said he saw there was no evidence to try the defendants,” says Nick Sharman, a researcher at the University of Melbourne and author of The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and the Press. “He thought that there was more evidence against the police, who had violated the civil rights of the protesters in Chicago.”

The next year, Richard Nixon took office and appointed John Mitchell as the new attorney general. Mitchell—who was later convicted for his role in the Watergate conspiracy—was much more receptive to Daley, and decided to prosecute the Chicago Eight under the new federal anti-riot law.

2. Prominent voices challenged the legitimacy of the anti-riot law.

The Chicago Eight: (top L-R) Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman,Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Bobby Seale, Lee Weiner, John Froines and David Dellinger, circa 1968.

Three months before the Chicago Eight trial began, a group of prominent writers and thinkers published a letter to the editors of The New York Review of Books arguing that the anti-riot law set a dangerous precedent.

“The effect of this ‘anti-riot’ act is to subvert the first Amendment guarantee of free assembly by equating organized political protest with organized violence,” it read. “Potentially, this law is the foundation for a police state in America.”

The letter was signed by 19 people, including Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Judy Collins and Norman Mailer (Collins and Mailer would also testify at the trial). Because the Chicago Eight had begun referring to themselves as “The Conspiracy,” the 19 signers dubbed themselves the Committee to Defend the Conspiracy. They pledged to raise money to fund the Chicago Eight’s legal defense and encouraged readers to make donations.

3. There was a clear cultural clash between the judge and the defendants.

Judge Julius Hoffman, 1969.

During the trial, yippies Hoffman and Rubin sometimes used unusual tactics to draw attention to their arguments. In one instance, they showed up to court wearing judicial robes to protest Judge Julius Hoffman’s decision to revoke Dellinger’s bail. When the judge demanded they remove their robes, they took them off and stomped on them. Underneath, they were wearing Chicago police uniforms. Another time, Hoffman unfurled a National Liberation Front (aka “Viet Cong”) flag on the defense table, and engaged in a tug-of-war over it with a court marshal who tried to remove it.

Sharman says the media tended to emphasize moments like these because they were so unusual. However, he thinks it’s important to understand these incidents in the context of the judge’s behavior toward the defendants.

“Even on the first day, Tom Hayden gave a fist salute to the jury and he was given a contempt of court citation,” he says. “It was like nothing could be done without the judge sort of stamping on them, so that sort of encouraged them to do it, I think.” By the end of the trial, the judge had charged all of the Chicago Eight as well as defense attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass with contempt of court.

4. The judge ordered Bobby Seale to be chained and gagged in court.

Courtroom drawing of Bobby Seale bound and gagged during the trial, by Franklin McMahon.

Froines argues Hoffman and Rubin’s robe incident “was basically a minor disruption,” and that “the main event in terms of disruption was Bobby Seale being chained and gagged.”

Seale had chosen lawyer Charles Garry to represent him in court, and because Garry needed gallbladder surgery, he asked Judge Hoffman to postpone the trial. To Garry’s shock, the judge denied the request and assigned Seale a new lawyer. Seale in turn rejected the court-appointed lawyer and asserted his right to defend himself. When the judge told him he couldn’t, Seale—the sole black defendant—called him a racist, and continued his attempts to represent himself in court.

On October 29, about a month after the trial started, the judge became irate and ordered staffers to chain Seale to his chair and gag him so he couldn’t speak anymore. There were no cameras allowed in the courtroom, but newspapers printed the shocking sketches of Seale bound and gagged in court. (The incident inspired the Graham Nash song “Chicago” released a year and a half later.)

“It was a horrendous thing that occurred,” Froines says. “It got a lot of attention, and should have.”

5. The judge sentenced Seale to four years for contempt and removed him from the trial.

Former Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale speaking with press during the Chicago Eight trial.

A week after Judge Hoffman first chained and gagged Seale in court, the judge sentenced Seale to four years in prison for contempt of court. He also declared a mistrial in Seale’s case and removed him from the trial, turning the Chicago Eight into the Chicago Seven.

Judge Hoffman intended to try Seale separately for conspiracy in a new trial next year. However, after a jury failed to convict the Chicago Seven of conspiracy, the U.S. attorney in Chicago told Judge Hoffman that “it would be inappropriate to try Seale alone on a conspiracy charge,” and the judge dropped Seale’s charges.

6. Famous writers and performers took the witness stand.

Courtroom drawings of poet Allen Ginsberg and musician Country Joe McDonald at the Chicago Eight trial.

During the trial, the defendants argued that the anti-war demonstrations had been peaceful, and that the violence was instigated by the police. To make this point, the defense called over 100 witnesses, many of whom had been in Chicago during the protests. At the time, a lot of prominent writers and performers were involved with the anti-war movement, and the witness list reflected this. The court heard testimony from comedian Dick Gregory, beat poet Allen Ginsberg, writers William Styron and Norman Mailer and singers Arlo Guthrie and Judy Collins.

It even heard testimony from Country Joe McDonald, a musician newly famous for singing the “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” at Woodstock just a month before the trial began. McDonald tried to sing the anti-war song in court, and when the judge forbid it, he recited the lyrics out loud.

7. The conservative judge’s disdain for the defendants helped overturn the convictions.

Portrait of the Chicago Seven and their lawyers as they raise they're fists in unison outside the courthouse where they were on trial for conspiracy and inciting a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, 1969. (L-R) Lawyer Leonard Weinglass, Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Lee Weiner, David Dellinger, John Froines, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and lawyer William Kunstler.

On February 18, 1970, the jury acquitted all seven defendants of the conspiracy charges, but still convicted five of them—Davis, Dellinger, Hayden, Hoffman and Rubin—of individually crossing state lines to incite a riot. Everyone (including the lawyers) already had prison sentences for contempt of court; and in addition to this, Judge Hoffman sentenced the five convicted men to five years in prison and gave each a $5,000 fine.

Rather than being happy with his acquittal, Froines says, “I was very upset by that because I wanted to be with my friends, of course. And having five people found guilty and two people being acquitted—I cried at that.”

Two years later, an appellate court threw out all of the convictions and the sentences Judge Hoffman had handed down—including Seale’s four years for contempt—citing the fact that the judge had been obviously biased against the defendants. At one point, Judge Hoffman even prevented former attorney general Ramsey Clark from testifying in front of the jury in favor of the defense, arguing that Clark had nothing useful to say.

After the appeal, most of the Chicago Eight continued their activist work, with Rubin standing out as the infamous yippie who became a yuppie in the 1980s. The four members who survived to see the trial’s 50th anniversary in 2019 are John Froines, Rennie Davis, Bobby Seale and Lee Weiner.

from Stories - HISTORY https://ift.tt/2lgWhD7 September 25, 2019 at 12:50AM

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benrleeusa · 6 years

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[Eugene Volokh] "The American Legion Briefing: Four Characters in Search of an Establishment Clause Standard"

An analysis of the amicus briefs in the Establishment Clause / cross monument case, from Eric Rassbach at the Becket Fund.

I've been backlogged on various projects recently, so I haven't blogged as much as I'd have liked about many things, including the Court's latest Establishment Clause case. But I thought that I'd pass along this analysis of the briefs in the case from Eric Rassbach of the Becket Fund; unsurprisingly, it track some of the analysis in the Becket Fund's own brief, but I still found to be an interesting, if opinionated, guide.

My own view is that both the Lemon v. Kurtzman test and the endorsement test have ultimately failed to deliver workable legal rules; and I think they have exacerbated religious tensions in American life, even though they have often been advocated as means of supposedly reducing such tensions. I'm also generally inclined towards Becket's history-based approach; though it can yield its own uncertainties, I think it's likely to be better than the current mess. (I have no firm views on the standing argument that Becket makes in Part II of its brief.) In any event, though, here's Eric's analysis; I'd also be glad to post other interesting perspectives from people who have been closely following the case, if anyone wants to pass them along.

The American Legion Briefing: Four Characters in Search of an Establishment Clause Standard [by Eric Rassbach]

The Maryland Peace Cross case, American Legion v. American Humanist Association, will be argued on February 27. The briefs are now in, and the arguments are shaping up much as my colleague Luke Goodrich predicted they would: some people still want the Supreme Court to save the notorious Lemon test from a well-deserved death, some want the Court to punt, some want the Court to adopt a coercion standard, and some want the Court to focus on the historical elements of an establishment of religion. There are thus four main groups of characters searching for an Establishment Clause standard:

The Diehards

First, the plaintiffs American Humanist Association and some of their amici want to save the Lemon test, arguing at times fantastically that Lemon "has brought clarity and consistency to religious-display cases." But there is an air of defeat surrounding this position; it feels like a last stand. Typical in this regard is the amicus brief of Professor Douglas Laycock, which dwells at length (pp. 31-37) on how the Court might uphold the Peace Cross without changing much else in Establishment Clause doctrine. Professors Walter Dellinger and Marty Lederman even filed in support of neither party, saying that this particular Peace Cross ought not be a problem, but other ones they can imagine probably would be. If they think an Establishment Clause case is a loser, it's a loser.

More fundamentally, the Diehards' position is doctrinally adrift. Because Lemon doesn't provide a coherent rule, but the Diehards can't let Lemon go, their briefing often devolves into "here's a bunch of facts about why we should win." These repeat church-state litigants would be better served by renouncing Lemon and starting anew with a more intellectually coherent foundation for their position. In any case, they haven't offered one to the Court here.

The Punters

Another possible outcome for American Legion is a punt. That is, the Court could again avoid dealing with Lemon and apply a totality-of-the-circumstances test. As with previous decisions in this genre (e.g., Van Orden, Buono), such a decision would be valid for one journey only, and would provide no meaningful guidance to the lower courts.

Nevertheless, the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission defendants ask the Court to do just that—arguing that "the Court should not revisit [its] precedents here," but should instead uphold the cross "under existing law," which "would provide substantial clarity for lower courts" and would avoid "generat[ing] deep religious divisions."

Whatever the motive behind this position, it is willfully blind to the reality of Establishment Clause litigation nationwide. As multiple Justices and lower court judges have lamented, the Court's precedents already "generate deep religious divisions." And far from providing "clarity," using existing law (read: Lemon) to decide American Legion would keep lower courts and local governments in the state of Establishment Clause purgatory they've been lamenting for decades.

The Abstract Expressionists

By contrast, the American Legion defendant-intervenors offer a rule, but it is still not quite right. They say that history—and specifically Town of Greece's "historical practices and understandings"—ought to be the Court's guiding principle. So far, so good. But then they take a second step, attempting to reduce all of that history to a single principle: no coercion. There are three problems with this approach.

The first is that as a matter of history it simply isn't true. Professor McConnell's scholarship identifies six characteristics of a religious establishment during the founding era, and in their opening brief the American Legion defendants dwelled at length on those characteristics and Professor McConnell's scholarship. But not every one of the six characteristics of historical establishments is in fact rooted in coercion.

For example, a formal government proclamation of an official state church, with nothing more, is not coercive, though it would certainly have been a problem for the founding generation. The American Legion defendants say in their reply brief that such actions, though "arguably non-coercive," should nevertheless be treated as coercive. But relying on "arguably non-coercive" actions to be deemed coercion simply demonstrates the standard's unworkability. Similarly, government funding—particularly from non-tax revenue streams like park fees or rental income—is not always coercive, even though from a historical perspective the source of the funding would be largely irrelevant.

Second, even where coercion could be alleged, a coercion test does not provide a clear rule of decision. For example, all taxes can in some sense be viewed as coercive, but not all tax-supported funding of religious organizations is unconstitutional. Some funding is problematic—like when the government gives aid exclusively to religious groups for religious purposes. But other funding is permissible—like when government broadly funds both religious and nonreligious groups. The "coercion" test can't distinguish among these types of funding.

Third, like abstract art, abstract legal terms like "coercion" can mean different things to different people. That makes them poor rules of judicial decision. Take the idea of government "endorsement"—the Jackson Pollock of legal ideas. Different courts have taken radically different views about whether a particular government practice "endorses" religious belief or practice. To a certain degree, endorsement is in the eye of the beholder, which is why the endorsement test vexes lower courts and local governments alike.

But the American Legion defendants would replace one Rorschach test with another, because "coercion" is almost as abstract an idea as "endorsement." It is not too hard to imagine scenarios where almost any challenged practice—the Pledge of Allegiance, "In God We Trust" on the currency, or Moses in the courtroom frieze—would be seen as coercive by some (very sincere) litigants. Indeed, in this very case the plaintiffs argue that the Peace Cross is coercive. The upshot is that adopting a coercion standard would put the Court back into the "heaven of legal concepts" it is trying to escape.

The Historians

A simpler rule is the one we offered in our amicus brief: a government practice violates the Establishment Clause only if it shares the characteristics of a historical establishment—as determined by objectively known "historical practices and understandings" at the time of the Founding. And as Professor McConnell has demonstrated, history discloses six main characteristics of a historical establishment: (1) government control over doctrine and personnel of the established church; (2) mandatory attendance in the established church; (3) government financial support of the established church; (4) restrictions on worship in dissenting churches; (5) restrictions on political participation by dissenters; and (6) use of the established church to carry out civil functions.

The historical approach gets the balance between church and state correct. It forbids the state from controlling religious doctrine, compelling religious observance, or providing exclusive funding for religious institutions. But it also avoids needlessly hostility toward religion in the public square.

Several of the briefs criticize our proposed approach. The American Legion defendants say their "general coercion standard" is superior to a historical test for three reasons: (1) "because coercion is the common denominator underlying" the six hallmarks of a religious establishment; (2) because a general coercion test "would likely be more manageable to apply, and (3) because a general coercion test "has already been adopted in this Court's cases[.]" None of these distinctions has merit.

First, as noted above, coercion is not a common denominator of the six characteristics of a historical establishment. Coercion offers no basis for distinguishing between permissible and impermissible types of government funding of religion. It also fails to address non-coercive actions like the use of non-tax government revenues or a government proclamation that "Zeus is Lord of America." Since coercion and history are not coextensive, and the coercion principle is based on history, coercion cannot be a common denominator because it is underinclusive.

Similarly, in practice coercion will also be overinclusive, because the abstract nature of the coercion inquiry will mean that many practices—including passive displays like the Peace Cross—will, for some judges in some locations, be considered coercive. In short, the American Legion defendants are incorrect when they state that "either formulation will lead to the same results."

Second, for the reasons stated above, a coercion test will not be more manageable because its abstract nature would divorce the judicial inquiry from concrete historical fact.

Third, a historical approach has been used by the Supreme Court both in deciding cases like Everson and more recently in cases like Town of Greece. The problem is not that the test has never been used—it is that it has been used inconsistently.

There a few other criticisms of the historical approach. At one point, Doug Laycock claims it is an "anything goes" standard. But this is also not true. As we have pointed out, the historical approach aligns with the outcomes in this Court's Establishment Clause cases since 1947.

Similarly, one of the amicus briefs decries the idea that "eighteenth century apples" can be compared to "twenty-first century oranges". But this is a silly attack on the judicial use of history altogether and belies the general trend in Bill of Rights jurisprudence towards a historical approach, not to mention Town of Greece. If one cannot look at eighteenth century apples, then much of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence in many other areas of the law must go.

In short, there are good reasons to adopt the historical approach, and no plausible reason not to adopt it.

The End, or A Beginning?

As the briefing shows, there are four main paths the Court can follow with respect to the governing Establishment Clause standard. Those paths lead in very different directions. Lemon is a dead end. Punting would leave the courts stuck in the Lemon dead end. A reductio ad coercion would mean decades of wandering in a different wilderness of abstraction.

Only the historical approach offers a method of deciding Establishment Clause cases that can be built out over the long term. Future cases can investigate how the founders thought about funding, or government proclamations, or displays on coinage, and the like. But for now it is enough to undertake a new beginning for Establishment Clause jurisprudence by grounding it in history.

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blogparadiseisland · 6 years

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Nature In Chastising Sessions Over Indictments of Two Republicans, Trump Crosses a Line

Nature In Chastising Sessions Over Indictments of Two Republicans, Trump Crosses a Line Nature In Chastising Sessions Over Indictments of Two Republicans, Trump Crosses a Line http://www.nature-business.com/nature-in-chastising-sessions-over-indictments-of-two-republicans-trump-crosses-a-line/

Nature

News Analysis

Image

The president said on Twitter that the Justice Department shouldn’t have charged two Republican congressmen before the midterms.CreditCreditT.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — If President Trump is worried that he could be impeached should Democrats take control of the House in the midterm elections, he is not acting like it. If anything lately, he seems to be offering more examples for his opponents to use against him.

His tweet over the holiday weekend chastising Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, for the Justice Department’s recent indictments of two Republican congressmen because it could cost the party seats in November crossed lines that even he had not yet breached, asserting that specific continuing criminal prosecutions should be decided on the basis of partisan advantage.

Shocking as many legal and political figures found it — one Republican senator compared it to “banana republic” thinking — the message by itself might not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors required for impeachment because it could be construed as commentary rather than an order. But legal scholars and some lawmakers said it could be one more exhibit in trying to prove a pattern of obstruction or reckless disregard for the rule of law in a future impeachment proceeding.

“I think it was appalling,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine, another Republican, told reporters asking on Tuesday about the tweet. “It’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and a former United States attorney, said “rare is the case that you make with one item of evidence,” but the president’s comment could be “potentially additional evidence of corrupt intent in an obstruction of justice prosecution.”

The tweet got lost to some extent amid the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett M. Kavanaugh and the new Bob Woodward book filled with titillating anecdotes from inside Mr. Trump’s White House. But it further cemented the impression of a president who sees the law enforcement agencies that report to him as political instruments rather than semiautonomous organs that should remain free of partisan influence.

Over nearly 20 months in office, Mr. Trump has repeatedly castigated the Justice Department and F.B.I. for investigating his associates and not investigating his enemies. He has threatened time and again to fire Mr. Sessions because his recusal from the Russia investigation meant that he could not protect the president from the inquiry.

Mr. Woodward’s book, “Fear,” quotes Mr. Trump excoriating Mr. Sessions in particularly personal terms. “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner,” the president was said to tell advisers. “How in the world was I ever persuaded to pick him for my attorney general? He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”

The White House called the book “nothing more than fabricated stories” but did not specifically deny the quotes attributed to Mr. Trump about Mr. Sessions.

The post Mr. Trump wrote on Monday took his criticism of the Justice Department to the next step, suggesting that defending the Republican majority in the House should determine whether two members are prosecuted.

“Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department,” he wrote. “Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff.”

He was presumably referring to indictments of Representatives Duncan Hunter of California, who was charged with using more than $250,000 in campaign funds for personal expenses, and Chris Collins of New York, who was charged with insider trading. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Mr. Trump’s suggestion would have been a major scandal under any other president, veterans of past administrations said. “His interference in an ongoing criminal investigation may be the single most shocking thing he’s done as president,” said Walter E. Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general under President Bill Clinton.

Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, a Republican who has been among the president’s most outspoken critics in his own party, had the same reaction. “Those who study this kind of thing say it’s a lot more evidence for abuse of power or obstruction,” he said. “I just know it’s not healthy for the institutions of government to have the president want to use the Department of Justice that way.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, likewise criticized the president’s comments. “I’m looking at them just as you are looking at them,” she told reporters. “I thought that yesterday’s comments were not appropriate and they upset me.”

Asked if Mr. Trump was only feeding Democrats’ interest in impeachment, she said, “I have no idea what he is doing. I have no idea what he is thinking.”

Other Republicans avoided commenting or seemed less concerned. “I have no reason to believe these prosecutions are politically motivated,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. “I think it was a comment not designed to obstruct justice but in my view, not appropriate.”

As has become increasingly the pattern, the White House held no briefing for reporters on Tuesday and a spokesman for the president did not respond to a request for comment.

But David B. Rivkin, a Washington lawyer and veteran of past Republican administrations, said it was fair to question why the Justice Department charged the two congressmen so close to an election when the past three attorneys general signed memos discouraging such prosecutions during a campaign season.

“What is missing in this whole controversy is D.O.J. derogation from decades-long policy from not pursuing any overt investigative actions against politicians close to the elections,” Mr. Rivkin said. “Trump has a salient point even if he didn’t phrase it well, making it seem like he is objecting to the indictments of those individuals, period.”

Mr. Trump seems so intent on pushing the boundaries when it comes to the nation’s law enforcement agencies that some wonder whether he is almost baiting Democrats to pursue impeachment against him — either because he wants it to be an issue in the midterm elections to motivate his conservative base to turn out to defend him or to delegitimize any postelection impeachment effort as a strictly partisan affair.

The president has been told many times that tweets like the one over the weekend could expose him to trouble, if not from Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, then from Democrats, who can interpret the constitutional phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” as they choose if they take power.

Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, said his persistence in weighing in on law enforcement actions represented a defiance of the establishment that keeps telling him he should not do so. “He’s not going to kowtow to anybody, there are no sacred cows that he won’t move out of the way and that still apparently resonates,” she said.

If Mr. Sessions had actually done what Mr. Trump suggested — refused to indict to protect Republican seats in the election — it could be considered a crime or an impeachable offense for the attorney general. But because Mr. Trump merely offered his opinion, as opposed to issuing an order, some legal scholars said it might be hard to define that as an impeachable offense by the president.

“Impeaching on this basis would be extraordinarily difficult because he would have available to him the defense that it was public commentary and not a directive to the attorney general,” said Joshua Matz, a co-author of “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment” and publisher of Take Care, a blog that follows legal issues raised by Mr. Trump’s presidency.

But impeachment advocates could include it as one more point among the president’s many tweets and comments on law enforcement to demonstrate an intent to abuse his authority.

“To the extent that they can all be strung together convincingly as a pattern of using the power of government to destroy political opponents,” Mr. Matz said, “that might well justify serious consideration of articles of impeachment.”

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With a Barb, Trump Blurs A Legal Line

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Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/us/politics/trump-sessions-republicans.html | http://www.nytimes.com/by/peter-baker, https://www.nytimes.com/by/nicholas-fandos

Nature In Chastising Sessions Over Indictments of Two Republicans, Trump Crosses a Line, in 2018-09-05 01:42:18

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