#the fact that sabo not only views dragon as his leader but someone he could talk to about everything even personal stuff

[no1deahow]

The Sabo part came out of nowhere

[tyler3273]

Shipping Luffy

So I have decided to talk about my point of view on shipping Luffy and who I ship him with.

OK so first things first I see Luffy as asexual and, although I don’t think its impossible for Oda to make Luffy fall in love with someone, I believe if Luffy does end up with someone it will be due to a sense of obligation, with in Luffys point of view.

An example of what I mean is how in Dragon Ball Goku did not marry Chichi because he loved her but because he felt obligated to.

when Goku and Chichi were kids Chichi asked Goku if he would get married with her when they are older and Goku said he would, not understanding what marriage is.After Chichi tracked him down and reminded him of his promise Goku STILL didn’t know what marriage was believing it to be food. Then when Goku was told what marriage was he just agreed to marry Chichi because he promised her he would because HE felt he had an obligation to do so.

Now Luffy knows what marriage is so obviously its not going to be the exact same which is a good thing because One piece is not Dragon Ball and Luffy is not Goku that said Oda is greatly inspired by Dragon Ball and Luffy ending up with someone in a similar way as Goku is possible.

Whats more is Oda may have already set this obligation up with.....

Boa Hancock

How well because of

Hancocks Love sickness something she got because of Luffy. Now something people may point out is the fact that the love sickness already severed a purpose, but I do not believe it did. Hancock took Luffy to Impel Down because she fell in Love with Luffy not because of the illness she got as a result of that love. The illness did not play a role but was just something mentioned as a thing that exist and Hancock has.Something else people may point out is that the sickness was cured I would say yes and no. Yes because after spending time with Luffy Hancock was no longer sick and no because I do not believe that this “cure” is permanent. Hancock is fine now but you have to remember that she has basically created a fantasy world in which she and Luffy are already together but what happens when this fantasy shatters. I doubt that Hancock will still be “cured”. This is completely possible because as I said the illness has yet to truly play a role.

I believe that at some point in the future of the story Hancock will get this love sickness again and it will be up to someone like Hancocks sisters to fine Luffy and to tell him about the situation. And because Luffy is both so pure and so simple I can completely see Luffy responding to the news of Hancocks sickness with “Oh Hancock is sick and will die if she dose not spend time with me well then I will just stay by her side because Hancock is my friend and I don’t want her to die if I can do something to stop it.” Thats that kind of person Luffy is and no it may not be marriage or even dating but for someone who is as asexual as Luffy its the closes we may get to Luffy being with someone and thats not to say that Luffy can’t fall in Love with Hancock over time.

NOW that being said I do not ship Luffy and Hancock. I do believe that they will end up together and I fully accept that but I am not a fan of the couple.

If Oda was to come up to me and say “hey you random person on tumblr that is way to invested in the romantic relationships of fictional characters tell me who you want Luffy to be with and I will make it happen no matter who it may be.”

I would say that I would want Luffy to be with....

Nefertari Vivi

Now at its core the reason I like Luffy x Vivi is simply that I like it.Most reasons I could give in support of Luffy x Vivi and another reason it is so hard to ship Luffy other then his asexuality it that Luffy treats everyone he likes that same.Anything I say in support of Luffy x Vivi can just as easily be said about Luffy x *insert name here* so preference is really all we have when you get down to it.

That said there are a couple things I would like to point out in favor of Luffy x Vivi.

One is that Vivi is someone that loves adventure just as luffy does but is still level headed making her and Luffy work really well together.

Second is the fact that Luffy and Vivi has showed one another what means to be a leader.

Vivi Showed Luffy that you don’t need to solve everything with violence

and Luffy showed Vivi that you can’t always save everyone and sometimes you have to fight to protect the ones you love.

Next we have the fact that Luffy only really started to show interest in the news of the reveri when Nami mentioned Vivi.I think this could be telling of potential felling Luffy may have or develop for Vivi.

and the last thing I want to talk about in the fact that Vivi is in a very unique position when it comes to Luffy however to explain what I mean I first have to talk about why I don’t think Luffy will end up with anyone that is an official member of the Strawhat crew.

I believe that Luffy views his crew on the same level he as one another and on the same level as he views even Sabo and Ace I believe that Luffy loves everyone one his crew as his family. I believe that if Luffy was to view someone on his crew romantically it would symbolically separate that person from the rest of the crew.And that in a writing perspective if would feel awkward. What I mean is it would mean that Luffy would have to act in one of two ways either he would

A: he would continue to acknowledge that person the same as he always has and the same as the rest of his crew in which case there would be no point in being in a romantic relationship to begin with or..

B: he would acknowledge that he is in a romantic relationship leading to the awkward separation with that person needing to be stated as a crew mate and lover with “This is my crew and this person who is also my lover” something like this seems like it can get a bit annoying in a writing perspective.

Another reason I don’t think Luffy should end up with someone on his crew  is because that crew mates achievement of there dream and there position on the crew would take a back seat to the knowledge that they are the lover of the Pirate King which I don’t think any of the Strawhats would want.

NOW with that said we can now go back to Vivi and her unique position and that is Vivi is an honorary Strawhat which already puts her in a separate position then the official members. I do not think Vivi will ever become an official member of the crew.But she is still someone that Luffy views on the same level as his crew and Ace and Sabo but because Vivi is already separate from everyone else it would not be awkward for Luffys love for her to go from platonic to romantic.

And if you do think that Luffy should only have a platonic love for Vivi like he has with the rest of his crew and brothers and or if you think that Luffy falling in love is unlikely then fair.

As I already stated at its core I ship Luffy x Vivi simply because I like it.

AND with that, that covers my point of view on shipping Luffy and who I think he will end up with, who I ship him with and why I do not ship him with anyone on his crew.

Thank You for reading 

[cheswirls]

tether notes 2/3

pt. 3

i mentioned this in the last part, but i used muroran as basis for veilstone, not abashiri. actually, if you want my opinion, i think shari, hokkaido, is a better depiction of veilstone than abashiri. mostly, i used muroran bc i could find pictures there that were more than just boat-icebreaker-drift ice-boat. abashiri is cold. and full of drift ice. if you need context, it’s level with toronto, canada. a pretty cold place to live. muroran is further south, and it’s also a port city, so i jus used that.

shari looks nicer, but it’s more into the hook of hokkaido (that piece on sinnoh map that jutts out right below battle zone) and not nestled into the mountains, so. mostly it was out.

makino’s cafe/bar is based on the diner in veilstone. so, walk in, counter bar to your left, tables to your right, possibly a happiny underfoot carrying trays of food. 

but, compared to the more rustic and colored veilstone, i wanted to depict more of hokkaido city here. so, more rundown, rusted due to sea breeze, older things without much repair. passable, sure, for daily life. but new and extravagant? no. far from.

if makino is so close with luffy, how come she doesn’t know sabo?

simple. she’s not close with luffy. makino has a fulltime job running a diner in veilstone, sinnoh. luffy grew up on the sevii islands, kanto. when he was in sinnoh, he was training with shanks. yeah, sure, they would come by for food, and makino is good friends with shanks, so of course she and luffy have a relationship. but, also at this point where shanks began to bring luffy around, instead of teaching him out in nowhere, sevii islands, they began to keep things secret. luffy was here “just visiting” to anyone who asks, but they wouldn’t seen him much around, not in the isolation shanks trained him in. also also at this point, because i derailed that sentence completely, ace and sabo were already out traveling. it just never came up. makino is friendly with luffy, she knows luffy, but she doesn’t know him, not really.

pokemon hunters is another anime concept i wanted to use, again to make the story more gritty. no evil teams here with world-domination plots, just poachers. pretty standard. still awful, especially if they’re poaching people, now, but nothing as wide-scale as team galactic.

i had so much fun writing ship captain jinbe. i wished i got more of a chance to write his crew, too. at this point i think i had just caught up reading blackbird by milo, and i was hooked on the idea of biker fishman gang and leader jinbe, so i adapted it into ship crew here. praline is there, yes. she’s badass. i said so, you heard it here. 

i talked a lot with my big bang partner, and we eventually decided jinbe’s a mix of hoenn and sinnoh descent. so, darker skin, almost polynesian, from hoenn’s more pacific island vibe. dark, curly hair. i drew a picture once? oh, here it is. jus a little sketch. he probably actually comes from hoenn, but he does cargo runs throughout sinnoh now. [i should probably say around, since there arent rly canals thru sinnoh?]

regarding law’s map error, i really jus wanted to reference flower paradise. of course the map he got was a tourist version, so of course it’s gonna include the magical pathway connecting the sinnoh league to an island of flowers. but it doesn’t actually exist, or if it does, it’s not always there, since they sail through the space with ease. just another fun easter egg. 

the marsh scene was another i’ve known i wanted since the beginning. i had so much fun drawing the map for it. i actually based the scenes entirely off the map, so while i knew the general direction i wanted it to go in, and that they would run into sabo, the part about wandering into the rain and encountering volcarona spawned while marking the map. crazy how things work, huh?

i think i made the chase move a little too fast, so most of the time out of their 12 hr limit is spent after departing from the marsh, wandering thru route 212. don get me wrong, the marsh scene spans over the course of hours, but its still less time from leaving the ship to leaving sabo than it is to get back to the ship.

the aegislash scene is the first one i conceptualized, of the marsh scene series. introducing law’s team was strategic, especially once i revealed luffy only had four pokemon. it was always meant to be a readers gamble how many law had. at the end of part 3, it’s pretty easy to gauge how many, but still, the surprise of the sixth pokemon in pt 4 is something im still proud of c:

anyway, yes, the first sense of real danger. poachers have no qualms in using their pokemon to harm other people. they’re there for the money, which they get from capturing and caging rare pokemon. who cares if they hurt a few people along the way? who cares if they brutalize them to take a particular pokemon, a-la mr. cleffa sir? law reacts to this very quickly, in part because he’s used to it, as explained in tragic backstory number 2, right behind one-brother-dies-and-the-other-runs-away from protag #2. 

actually, i guess the first danger was the wild kadabra, but this is the one in which someone gets hurt! . . . or, worse-hurt, because law’s scratch doesn’t count. luffy’s gash in his shoulder? that’s a big injury. especially when they can’t just stop to treat it, especially when law still has blood on his face from it, especially when they have to go right back to running around the marsh.

and then sabo appears!! i lied, this was the first marsh scene. i drabble-wrote it in my series-of-drabbles-to-add-to-the-outline before i made pt 3′s outline, and then wrote it for real. the aegislash-being-badass-therefore-law-also-by-proxy was the second. one of the first sentences i ever wrote for tether was law realizing the face from luffy’s picture was right before his eyes. 

so why do the hunters ignore luffy calling for sabo while running away?

yes, why the no consequences? i realized at this point they were too far away to hear and law too out of it (its law’s pov, still) to figure what they were saying, to i had to play it off. it’s another scene where i almost wrote a few paragraphs from a different perspective [the other two were the tsuru-caesar confrontation and the mr. cleffa dude ft. sabo scene, both of which i had to expand upon by talking, instead of a flashback to show it. i rly went full soul-eater approach here, huh? explaining everything through present means. well. save for law’s backstory, but that’s about the only thing.] but decided not to in the end.

here’s how the scene plays out, full disclosure. law and luffy spot the two hunters. a third person, sabo comes into view. the hunters tell sabo the situation, that they were being chased. law recognizes sabo, luffy does too, and calls out to him, loudly. this causes the hunters to panic, and they tell sabo, there, there’s the people chasing after us. law figures sabo has some secret reason for posing as a hunter and pulls luffy again out of view, not wanting to give him away. all three hunters take off running in the opposite direction. luffy calls out for sabo again, and sabo turns to question the other two, asking which pokemon they stole that was named ‘sabo’. he has a fake name, obviously. they don’t know he’s sabo. before they can figure it out, he derails the topic. but then he slips crossed fingers behind his back at the same time, signaling silently to luffy, who stops calling out.

so, tldr, sabo’s not using his real name while with the hunters and is smart enough to cover his ass from luffy’s mistake.

i wanted law carrying luffy, on their way down the route, to the stormclouds, and i’m pretty sure the one reason i didnt go thru with it is because law’s backpack. and, y’know, luffy being caked in mud. 

okay, do. panic attack time. ptsd time. a mix of both, ig. whatever you wanna call it. originally, this scene was going to be a bit different, and happen way earlier in the story. it didnt bc of sinnoh’s lack of fire types [there are only 2 i think, 2 lines i mean, so like 5] and the fact that ace’s team featured none of them. and then i thought, oh, i’ll jus make the same thing happen w sabo, except none of sabo’s team were one of them as well.

originally, it was going to be that law/lu encounter a clan of a specific type of wild fire pokemon. i think for the longest time it was talonflame, not sure anymore. anyway, so it was gonna go that luffy recognizes ace’s former pokemon outta the bunch, and they recognize lu as well, and the two reunite and all that jazz, and meanwhile law has his attack bc the group they encounter are one of the pokemon that tormented him in alola.

and, nope, now i remember why it didnt happen. as much as i hate dof, i had to craft a team for him for plot purposes, and that ended up being a bug team to go w the whole string motif. the problem was i had this scene planned for a looooong time, and it needed to be w a fire type, one of ace’s pokemon. except there are like no fire/bug pokemon, except for volcarona, who wasn’t on ace’s already-planned team at this point. i debated for foreeeeever and finally decided to screw it, and i made it sabo’s unova pokemon. so, instead of getting a unova dragon, in the land of dragons unova, sabo gets a volcarona and ace a darmanitan. all for plot purposes. no sense here. none at all.

[not that it matters, since sabo morphs into a fire trainer anyway after ace dies]

so, after i decided it would be sabos pokemon, the point came back to how they would encounter it. no hordes of wild volcarona in sinnoh. i sadly had to scrap the idea. this is what i came up with instead: volcarona coming to luffy to deliver a letter, and scarring law in the process.

Law has a chocolate bar, because he’s ten and anxious and chocolate seemed good at the time.

-aka my favorite line of the whole entire story!!!

and then law’s backstory time. so!!! for the longest time i was torn between setting the story in sinnoh or alola. this was my big compromise. i wrote a draft-outline for law’s alola backstory before i wrote a real outline for tether as a whole. this was the first part of the story i really wrote. i was done with it before i started pt 1, because i wanted to outline before i started writing. 

the thing abt law is that his life is so much of a tragedy. oda writes it so well, to the point where you’re thinking this can’t get any worse and then it gets worse, every time. i wanted to mimic that here. i didn’t do it justice, but i at least tried.

law’s life is filled with mistrust. his whole village dies, he nearly does as well, and so he packs up and runs away, and hides his one pokemon abra because he’s not a registered trainer and he refuses to abandon abra so theres mistrust towards everyone who can turn him in, and everyone who didnt care enough to help with the water crisis. he’s done with sinnoh. so he spends a bit holed up in a library, and once he reads about alola, he’s sold. he’s so mistrustful it’s not a matter of ‘anywhere is better than sinnoh’, its a matter of ‘i can’t end up in another place just like this’. alola is the solution.

except, he’s still mistrustful. so he hides abra, and he hides his money, and he doesn’t speak with anyone, and he leaves the city as soon as he can. he doesn’t know the rules of this place, but abra is all he has. he can’t lose abra. and then things go wrong.

because he’s out of sinnoh, but alola is different. he’s ten, and he’s never had a real pokemon battle, and all the wild pokemon of alola are too eager. he’s ten, and a pangoro attacks and he loses all his supplies on his very first day, because abra’s too exhausted to teleport them away this time. [in hindsight, i did a really bad continuity error here, throughout the entire flashback. it’s thru law’s eyes, so i describe the pokemon he doesn’t know about, and yet sometimes i name the pokemon he really shouldn’t know about. my bad.]

he’s ten, and the only food he finds is being guarded by a giant sumo crab, so he crawls to the other side of the beach and falls asleep on the sand, hungry. he’s ten, and he’s living off berries because money is only so good when you can exchange it, and he’s far away from civilization. he’s ten, and he spends the very last of his money on money for abra, for his only pokemon and his only ally, because going to a pokemon center would mean being seen and asking for a license to verify and its too risky, he can’t risk it. 

he’s ten, and he’s hungry, and he has nothing but the abra clutched in his arms and his ripped clothes clinging to his body, and he witnesses a murder. and they catch him in the act, and then he’s stuck, because he shouldn’t have a pokemon so young, and he’s a witness to a crime, and too quickly he’s in a very bad position.

he’s ten, and to keep abra alive, he joins a gang in alola.

he’s ten, and he’s blackmailed into working or risking abra being taken away. he’s ten, and he has morals, and there’s some tasks he won’t do, but the family boss punishes him for it, harshly. he stops having morals. it wouldn’t do him good here. 

law turns eleven, and suddenly gang tasks involve pokemon battles. law’s eleven, and doflamingo trains law himself, beating the weakness out of him, burning him, scarring him, terrorizing him because he can, and because law can’t refuse. 

law’s eleven when he realizes his picture-perfect alola was nothing but an illusion, because the lack of monopolies and corporations and factories actually had nothing to do with how much the natives cared about their own, or cared at all, about anything. just because alola didn’t have a pokemon league didn’t mean it wasn’t a bad place to be.

he’s eleven when he meets corazon, and finally, finally, gets a breath of fresh air, gets a taste of a person who isn’t there to ridicule him or abuse him. he’s eleven when he meets his first real friend since his sister died, meets someone that finally treats him like a human being. and it doesnt matter that he’s doflamingo’s brother, because he’s kind to law.

law’s eleven and corazon works to repair the damage done by the gang, little by little. he gets law out on an island challenge, and he wanders through melemele and akala and meets kind people and has fun and experiences the real alola. and he realizes, somewhere along the way, that he never wants to go back to the family ever again.

law’s eleven when he realizes he has no choice. because he belongs to doflamingo, because he has to skip out on ula’ula to accomplish a task for the family, because corazon sits there and lets it happen. 

law’s eleven when he’s given a pokemon egg, and when he’s given hope.

corazon was going to take care of everything. he was going to get them out, safely. they were going to rescue a captive pokemon. law was going to be free. law was never going to be hurt by the family again.

except, that’s not how it goes. corazon dies. corazon’s pokemon are tortured in order to lure law out. corazon’s pokemon all die for him and law has no option left but to run with all his might, all the way from one tip of ula’ula to the other. and then, because he can’t trust anyone, anyone, law runs away into a desert with no supplies to speak of.

law’s eleven when he comes face to face with the most temperamental tapu in the alola region, and even with all he’s been through, it’s the most scared he’s even been in his entire life. and then, when he comes to, he finds himself stranded in the kalos region. he’s eleven. he goes through all of this and he’s not even a teenager yet.

so, backing up just a bit, you can see how seeing a volcarona is going to invoke some rather strong emotions in law. he panics. he passes out. luffy puts volcarona away, because me might be oblivious on a lot of things, but he can understand the pure terror in law’s eyes.

alright, what else. the letter. of course luffy disavows the letter, he’s luffy, he can’t follow a plan to save his life.