#vegapunk arc

[berivan-noctisia]

GREAT, I am totally normal about this

One Piece 1100 // Kuma's Jolly Roger

[raconteur-wanpi]

This is the unfunny video Tumblr wouldn't let me embed on this post.

[dannymans66]

Vegapunk York

[laboratory-for-peace]

Another serving of MADS memes yipeeee.

[berivan-noctisia]

My heart keeps being wrecked by how much her crew cares for her

rip my heart out why don't you

[apparently-artless]

sinister robin strikes again ( ‾́ ◡ ‾́ )

[luffyism]

ONE PIECE / ワンピース (1999) EP 1095 • the brain of a genius - six vegapunks!

[yoshida-midoriko]

♪ ”Uuuuus! (あーーっす！)"by Hiroshi Kitadani ♩

[chosisbox]

Punk-02 lilith you have my heart (and you are the easier Op character to draw for me love you for that)

[shysheeperz]

[missingn000]

hey, y’all! i’ve got an exciting announcement to make!!

i’ve posted a few times about my upcoming seraphim ace (designated s-flame) fic, titled heaven down an angel. it’ll be a multi-chap story starting with an egghead arc rewrite, followed by a journey throughout the grand line and beyond. however, what i haven’t shared yet is this: i’ve got a partner in crime for this monstrosity! meet my close friend and amazing artist nera (@njere), who will be illustrating this fic!!

info, premise, and more art below cut!! (thank you to nera for the beautiful pic formatting✨)

and last but not least: tpg readers, don’t be alarmed! i’ll get back to it someday. just gotta get this out of my system first. :)

[badly-drawn-doflamingo]

This dub is taking me out??? He sounds like someone’s nice nerd father, if Paul Lynde was your dad and he played TMBG’s for you before school.

[raconteur-wanpi]

Egghead from Stella's POV is very funny.

[dannymans66]

Vegapunk Lilith ⚗️!!

[kaizokuou-ni-naru]

Thoughts on the Seraphim, assuming you have any?

one thing i think is quite interesting in egghead, which hasn't necessarily been highlighted prominently by the narrative but which underlies the whole arc, is the similar treatment of the various artificial humans created by vegapunk: the satellites, the seraphim, stussy, and, to a certain extent, kuma.

i think one of the points of egghead is that it's both inhumane and impossible to try and create a person with no individuality or free will. like, it's immoral, but it also just doesn't work. you can't create a person just to serve your own needs and have them not have any personality or identity of their own; it's antithetical to human nature. one piece consistently says that all things strive, and all things dream, and all things want to be free, and that's why vegapunk's creations keep becoming real people in ways that he didn't intend or foresee.

all of the artificial humans in this arc have some degree of identity and individual thought, even those who were specifically designed to be perfectly obedient. we see this when vegapunk is shocked to hear that s-snake is capable of defying orders to help luffy, and when kuma comes to save bonney despite every fact of science saying that he should be brain-dead.

york's betrayal is also consistent with this. vegapunk didn't see it coming, because he created and viewed the satellites as extensions of himself, but they aren't! they're sentient people with, at least, the potential to develop their own dreams and motivations and goals that don't necessarily align with his. that's what being human is.

in that sense, the fact that vegapunk's downfall is brought about by york's self-actualization is quite karmic. her actions are evil and extreme and cause massive collateral damage, of course, but i honestly think they're also pretty understandable when you consider her as a person who was created to only be an extra limb of someone else, trying to define herself. how else was she ever supposed to be free?

this theme is, i think, particularly embodied in stussy, who is clearly undergoing something of an identity crisis. she's caught between loyalty to the purpose she was seemingly created for and loyalty to the identity and relationships she's developed for herself while living out in the world as her own person; she betrays the latter for the former, which is something that clearly pains her greatly, and then loses the former anyways, leaving her with nothing.

the situation that stussy is put in is really very cruel, and honestly, egghead is a fundamentally inhumane place. it's full of people who are expected to not be people. it's frankly no wonder one of them eventually freaked out and turned evil.

vegapunk pressuring sentoumaru into betraying the world government for him is played for comedy, and it's basically implied sentoumaru would've done that anyways, but at the same time it's rather telling of the way vegapunk tends to treat his subordinates and creations: like their own thoughts and feelings, if they have any, don't really matter. vegapunk doesn't ever intend to be cruel, i don't think, but he's certainly thoughtless and inconsiderate, and when you're dealing with human life that can be just as damaging.

this all brings us back to the seraphim. they're weapons of war, yes, but they're also children who had no say in their own creation, and who clearly have at least somewhat more individuality than vegapunk intended them to have (as we see definitively with s-snake). they're effectively slaves of the world government, currently. even when you look at how they were created, they're products of experimentation on a captive child (king), and two of them, s-snake and s-bear, are cloned from former child slaves themselves.

one piece is a story about freedom. i think one way or another, thematically, the seraphim will have to end up free. i can't predict when or how that'll happen, but everything about egghead and the series as a whole indicates that the desire of living things to be free and dream is irrepressible.

[laboratory-for-peace]

Elaborating further on the world's dumbest headcanon. Be glad she didn't ask for the mohawk.