One Piece Diaries #71 – Fishman Island Arc #2

One Piece is one of the most beloved anime in history, but at over 1,000 episodes, it’s tough for those who haven’t been watching from the start to jump on board. One Piece Diaries tracks one writer’s experience with this daunting rite of passage. With hype for the highs and critique for the lows, this column will help you decide whether to take your own One Piece journey — or let you relive the one you’re already on. It will be updated biweekly every other Thursday.

Episodes Watched: 532 – 538

Last time I updated this column, it was almost a year ago. I told you I’d be a little late because I couldn’t watch all of One Piece from Sri Lanka, which was where I was on vacation at the time. I fully intended to get right back on the horse as soon as I got home, but I didn’t. The reasons for this are twofold: the first is that I’ve been doing a lot of cool, life-changing stuff like getting a YA novel published and getting accepted into an MFA program. The second is about One Piece itself.

For personal reasons, I’ve been having a really hard time with this arc. It was to the point where I really, really didn’t want to keep watching for a while. This is probably going to sound ridiculous, but Luffy continually criticizing Shirahoshi for crying and being anxious hit me hard.

Shirahoshi has been locked up in the Ryugu Palace for most of her life. Naturally, she’s both fascinated by and terrified of the outside world. She isn’t being contained because her family is cruel or excessively protected — she’s in very real danger from Vander Decken. He started pursuing her romantically immediately after her mother died. She was only six years old at the time. His “attention” was so relentless that she couldn’t even go to the funeral. He explicitly tells her that if she doesn’t marry him, he will kill her. His Mark-Mark Fruit — which lets him ‘mark’ a target and attack them with weapons long distance — means that escaping him is nearly impossible. So she’s spent ten years hiding from this man who is threatening her life; controlled by a man’s sexual aggression and never getting the chance to properly grieve her mother. She’s also isolated from the rest of the world … of course she’s a wreck.

When Luffy first meets her, he calls her a crybaby and a coward. He flat out says he doesn’t like her even though he then went on to help her experience life outside of her tower. His words were unnecessarily harsh. I know I’m supposed to focus on the ways he encouraged her or helped her rather than what he said when he first met her … I just couldn’t.

I know it was supposed to be funny, but it wasn’t. It was just dismissive and mean. And while I don’t need my shonen heroes to be flawless, I don’t want them to be mean.

I’m actually looking forward to the next few episodes, since they seem like they’ll provide some backstory on the Fishman conflict. That is always where I feel this series really shines. So, hopefully this means I will be motivated to continue watching and get back to you in two week’s time.

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