One Piece Multi-Piece #12: Punk Hazard

Article by Wilkinson D. Sean,

Master Of Tickets,

Meister Of Anime.

I've yet to watch an episode of the ridiculously long Dressrosa arc, as I've been going back through the Punk Hazard episodes to capture screenshots for this review, so expect a long wait before the next piece of the One Piece Multi-Piece. As I said in the June 8 edition of Time Drops, I'm focusing on My Hero Academia next.

After departing Fishman Island and engaging in some filler that I kind of wish I had watched because Giant Luffy (and according to Totally Not Mark in his 100% Blind Review, the anime episode from Fishman Island where they resurface amidst what could be Laboon's old pod, and which was marked as Filler, is the opening of this arc in the manga), the Straw Hats have returned to the surface (still with no Jinbei, and not heading straight for Big Mom as we were promised before, and therefore sailing aimlessly at the whim of Nami's new, multiple choice Log Pose and Luffy's desire to go where the cool stuff is even if it kills them) where they intercept a distress call from a man saying his friends were slaughtered by a samurai on Punk Hazard (causing Zoro to have a flashback of the samurai zombie he fought on Thriller Bark, and we get a name-drop of a country called Wano, which is like feudal One Piece Japan, I guess, and will get its own arc in a few hundred more episodes). Wano had been mentioned first in Thriller Bark as well, but you may remember me being too annoyed and pissed off to notice.

Now, once I had gotten over my dismay that Big Mom would have to wait (that three-eyed girl she had as prisoner really caught my attention), the name Punk Hazard, and the Navy G-5's mention of a disaster there a few years ago, triggered another bout of speculation in my brain. The World Government scientist whose lab Franky used to rebuild himself is named Dr. Vegapunk. The island where that lab was located was a winter island, just like half of Punk Hazard. And the narrator said when Franky accidentally blew up Vegapunk's old lab in the Friends' Whereabouts episodes that it would be remembered as an infamous disaster. So are the Straw Hats sailing to the island Franky blew up and they don't know it‽

....

Nope. That's apparently going to be a thing much later, though. But it is the island where Aokiji fought Akainu for control of the Navy, hence why Punk Hazard is half volcanic, half arctic, which is still interesting, but not as interesting as Franky having to face the repercussions of nuking an entire island civilization on accident would have been.

As the Crew approach Punk Hazard on the volcanic side (they're basically cartoon characters, so being within a foot of exposed lava only causes the weakest of them mild concern and maybe a first-degree burn or two), we see that Nami can use her Clima-Takt to make a path over the surrounding flames using solid clouds like those found in Skypeia, and the Crew splits up after drawing straws.

Luffy, Zoro, Robin, and Usopp go to explore the island while Nami, Chopper, Sanji, Franky, and Brook remain on the Thousand Sunny.

I think this is a good time to mention some fashion, music, and new bumper details because this is kind of where the first episode of the arc ends. Mostly everyone is still in their post-skip designs from Fishman Island, with the exception of Nami (who has a different bikini top now and that's it) and Robin (who still has her "sunglasses perched atop her head" look, but is now wearing a bluish-green sundress over a pink, floral one-piece (puns!).

It's a good, casual look that shows her more carefree demeanor now that she's found a place to belong, as opposed to the aggressively sultry cowgirl outfit we first saw her in as Miss All-Sunday.

The Crew will all get winter coats once they cross to the other side of the island, as well.

As for the music, the OP is still "We Go" in this early part of the arc, and will be replaced by "Hands Up" as of Punk Hazard's twelfth canon episode (591 overall). The new OP song is still kind of hype at first, but generally feels more at ease, thanks in large part to the slice of life visuals accompanying it.

I also wanted to talk about this stuff here because the first episode is where I can remember seeing a post-skip bumper for Usopp for the first time. He picks up his kabuto slingshot off the table here, and the bumper music is the same, unifying fanfare as we heard during Fishman Island. It sounds a bit flatter, but returns to its original quality in later episodes, so maybe it was a mixing or encoding issue?

Another fun detail is that the shadows that play across the wall in the background change with each character's bumper, indicating the rest of the crew running to the Sunny ahead of them. The animators didn't have to try that hard (God knows they didn't try very hard with the rest of the arc, and I'll get to that later), but they did.
With all of the weird things the Straw Hats have seen and done so far, their reaction to the inhabitants of Punk Hazard is kind of cheap and nonsensical.

Like, they've seen merfolk before. They've seen animal-fish the size of small countries. They've fought angel-people who can predict the future. They live in a world where Devil Fruit exists and can do what it does. Nami can control the weather with a stick. Usopp spent two years on a carnivorous flower that grows fully cooked food to attract kaiju and eat them. Luffy made friends with gorgons and giant carnivorous snow rabbits and a kraken. And Oda expects us to buy that in the world he created, no one believes in dragons‽ It's literally the first name of the main character's father, for Haki's sake!

Oh, by the way, the scouting party (Luffy, Zoro, Robin, and Usopp) fight a dragon that has a pair of disembodied talking legs stuck to its back.

Now, anyone with photographic, encyclopedic memory would remember that way back during the Sabaody incident, Trafalgar Law displayed the ability to cut people into pieces and keep them alive, thereby ruining the mystery of what's going on with the distress call and the fart-talking samurai legs (and the harpy, goat-men, and centaur Pirates that the Crew will encounter later), but my brain is just past forty, and as smart as I am, that ain't me. I did feel dumb later for not figuring it out sooner because it is so obvious, but let's move on.

The part of the arc that I'm calling "One Piece Running Simulator" begins when the other half of the Crew get hit with knockout gas and captured by goons in eyeball-masked diving suits (with the exception of Brook because he's a skeleton and they think he's dead).

I'm aware that at the time I began writing this, I have been using the word "goon" a lot lately to refer to a villain's henchmen, which fits these guys pretty well...but I'm also aware of the modern usage of "goon," and in suits like these, what else would they be doing?

Anyway, while Luffy gets stuck to the dismembered samurai legs, Brook wakes and gets attacked by a torso with a sword,

and the captured Straw Hats meet and reassemble his head,

we get our first look at the villain of the arc, who is a poison gas Devil Fruit man with an annoying onomatopoeia laugh. Yay. It's like if Dr. Hogback, Moria, and Warden Magellan had an Act III Substance baby. Kill it now with fire!

His name is Caesar Clown, he's inspired by Pierrot, Julius Caesar, and Joseph Mengele (and a few others I will mention later), and I wish he would "shirorororo"-ut the fuck up!

Oh, right; the One Piece Running Simulator....

The captured Straw Hats discover a roomful of children of various sizes, some of them looking like they're from Elbaf, though it later turns out they are all human children who were captured, lied to, and fed growth hormones and addictive substances disguised as candy so the World Government can have a renewable Giant army. This not only hints at a possible connection to the tamatebako Energy Steroid from Fishman Island (we see later that the "candy"—a word that makes up roughly a quarter of Punk Hazard's dialogue, almost as much as Caesar's laugh—is also red in color),

it gives Nami (once a captive, abused, manipulated child herself) and Chopper (who, despite his constant use as a comedy relief idiot in past arcs, is a competent medic learning why you should never meet your heroes) strong emotional agency in Punk Hazard.

But as I watched and took notes on the arc, I found myself repeatedly writing, "[characters]' fight continues," and "[characters] run/continue to run to [location]" for multiple episodes. Nami and Chopper run to escape with the children, but there's a room made of frozen Impel Down prisoners, so they have to run for another exit, but Law and the G-5 are there, so they have to run back inside.

Caesar has a giant, poisonous blob monster? The goons have to run. Poison gas? Everybody has to run from it. Being chased by Giant-sized children who are violently addicted to drugged candy? Run or die! Brook has to show Sanji and Zoro where the samurai's torso is? Gotta run there before he freezes to death! I honestly think Punk Hazard was an excuse to be lazy and cheap with the animation budget. Granted, it takes a lot to animate characters like Caesar and Smoker when they go intangible, so any opportunity to let the animation team relax with some low-effort run cycles is welcome, but aside from Luffy's "Opposites Attract" dash for the scaffold at Marineford, I don't recall an arc having this much continuous running in it, especially when there are so many fights, characters, and potentially big moments that seemingly amount to nothing.

Take the Cool Brothers, for example. They're a couple of legendary yeti assassins (they are yetis who kill people, not people who assassinate yetis, just in case you were wondering) whom Caesar has employed to eliminate any serious threats to his privacy. Their gimmick is that they make Mr. Freeze puns and their faces are always cast in shadow regardless of lighting conditions. But also, because Ace and Whitebeard are among the only characters who die in One Piece (so far), these legendary assassins never actually kill anyone (they knock Sanji, Zoro, and Brook unconscious, and they apparently kill Brownbeard—he's a Pirate whom Garp drove out of Luffy's hometown at the end of Marineford—no less than three times, but he's fine later) and disappear from the story altogether after being easily defeated by Luffy, Franky, and Trafalgar Law.

There are a few fights later that barely count as fights, and one that isn't a fight at all despite the episode title hyping it up as the most thing ever, but I've gone out of order enough and not covered much ground yet, so let's talk Trafalgar Law.

Law (whom Luffy calls "Traffy" because he's a better judge of character than the majority of his personality lets on, and he thinks they're buds now because "Traffy" repaired the magma-cauterized, chest-sized chest wound that Akainu gave him two years ago) has Devil Fruit powers. And they're broken. Like, localized reality-warping broken. You know those old cartoons where one of the characters falls from a ridiculous height into a safety net, but they get julienned into sentient French fries instead of bouncing, but then they reform into the character again and they're fine? Law can do that to anyone or anything in the circular Room he creates, even making centaurs and harpies by fusing dismembered animal parts onto people. He can teleport. He can Kano someone's heart out of their chest without killing them, or use Shambles to swap people's souls into each other's bodies. He's basically Bugs Bunny from "Duck Amuck," but with a sword and a medical degree. And he's one of the best things about this arc.

Speaking of that soul-swapping trick, once the G-5 make landfall on the winter half of Punk Hazard (where Caesar's lab is), they encounter Law, and Smoker and Tashigi fight him, leading to the above image of Smoker getting his heart extracted after a creative but poorly animated action sequence, and Tashigi getting cut in half. The fodder Marines put her back together, and Law Shambles Smoker and Tashigi into each other's bodies (fulfilling multiple Japravity fetishes under the guise of teaching Tashigi what it means to have the spirit of a true warrior when he sees she lacks the strength and conviction to strike him down...and we see later that it worked because she learned to swordfight with Haki at some point). When he encounters the Straw Hats, he Shambles Franky into Chopper (which makes Robin reveal a twisted fixation on Chopper's adorability later), Chopper into Sanji (which lets him experience life as a human for awhile and give Sanji resting UwU face), Sanji into Nami

(fulfilling multiple Japravity fetishes for the audience and Sanji himself, but also giving Sanji a hypocritical slant to his homophobic feelings about Kamabakka Island. I think they call that poetic irony? Also, it falls under the Bravo le Pew Statute because it's okay to give prolonged screentime and a prominent role to a perverted character if they get their asses kicked for being pervs), and Nami into Franky (which influences his design at the end of the arc?).

By the way, Franky's shirt is a reference to the Japanese slang abbreviation, "JK," which stands for joshi kōsei, or "high school girl," based on Franky's hairstyle. There's probably also an English double meaning there with the texting abbreviation for "just kidding" because duh, joke, and the continuation of the alphabet is perfectly stupid and stupidly perfect.

Getting back on track, Law's plan is ultimately very convoluted but linear. On top of wanting to steal Caesar's research because doctor-Pirate (and probably to endear himself to someone else later and show them that Caesar is more expendable than he thought he was), Law has his sights set on one of the Four Emperors. And to take his target down (we don't hear their name until the end of the arc), he forges an alliance with the Straw Hats (read: Luffy dragging his Crew through certain doom yet again because there's a new ass to kick) to fight and kidnap Caesar as leverage while he searches the mad doctor's facility for something called SAD.

Unfortunately, this leads to the most "that came out dirtier than the dub script wanted it to" Luffy line to date: "I'm gonna kick your ass, and then I'm gonna kidnap it!" It's less awkward-sounding in the subtitles.

Fortunately, this also leads to Luffy punching Caesar hard enough to make gas bleed, and I'm disappointed that I only have two nickels for it (episode recaps and commercial breaks don't count).

Moving on to Caesar Clown (and trying not to dwell on reasons why I hate him besides his laugh, his pompous, sociopathic attitude, and how he's partly based on a real Nazi war criminal but I repeat myself), we learn through the course of the arc that he's highly connected to a number of dangerous people, including Smoker's traitorous boss, Vergo (a skilled Haki user who looks like Attitude Era Dwayne Johnson with lightning bolt sideburns, is hard to take seriously with food stuck to his face, and is responsible for falsely reporting the child disappearances as "lost at sea"),

the Warlord Doflamingo Donquixote (known here by the alias Joker, so we're just waiting on a midnight toker, a space cowboy, a gangster of love, and a guy named Maurice to complete the Steve Miller Band reference, but really he's the one who processes Caesar's SAD substance into something called Smile for his Emperor boss, and he runs a whole-ass crime family, complete with a group of Devil Fruit-powered assassins, some of whom will show up near the end of the arc and probably feature prominently in the next arc),

and said Emperor that the new Pirate Alliance is planning to take down, Kaidou (known as the Beast King, he's been using Joker and Caesar as a supply chain to make Smiles, artificial Zoan-type Devil Fruits to feed to his growing Beast-person army...which makes me wonder if the Gorgon Sisters were early test subjects for Smiles).

Caesar also has a pet slime monster that he created by condensing and deposing the poison gas from the original Punk Hazard disaster into solid form. He calls this monster Smiley (which is totally not confusing, as at one point, proximity to it seems to turn an apple into a Devil Fruit), and it's combustible when exposed to extreme heat (but somehow doesn't explode when surrounded by burning rubble and lava?) and dissolves into poison when exposed to water (but can survive touching ice?). Something about these nonsensical weaknesses makes me think that the Red Hawk Blast would have been more thematically appropriate here than in the Fishman Island arc (punch the monster until it explodes or melt the ice to dissolve it), but instead, we get Caesar's grand plan to keep Punk Hazard a secret...by live-streaming a war crime there? See, the children, hazmat goons, centaur Pirates, and for damned sure the Navy and the Straw Hats, don't matter to Caesar as anything more than test subjects for genocide, regardless of how blindly his followers continue to convince themselves that he has their best interests in mind (obvious, ahead of its time parallel to the MAGA crowd, and further references to Jonestown, the Nazis, or any other real-world ends-with-cide cult you can think of). No, all he cares about is showing his black market viewers (including Big Mom's two henchmen from the end of the previous arc, as well as some of the Supernova Rookies, who get intimidated enough to form an alliance of their own, and a horned silhouette that might be Kaidou himself) what an efficient and creative mass murderer he can be when he feeds his pet poisonous Pepsi monster a giant ball of Mentos and turns it into an "even deadlier" poison gas that can petrify anyone it touches and slowly kill them (but only certain people get to die in One Piece, so when the arc is over, the Navy chips everyone free offscreen to further contribute to the cast bloat and convoluted storytelling in the future). Caesar calls this his Land Of the Dead, which is a George Romero film. Caesar. Romero. Clown. Joker. Poison gas and the ability to turn SAD into Smiles. 

Caesar's Land Of the Dead plan feels like a counterintuitive plot contrivance that was written to draw out the story and makes the self-proclaimed "world's foremost preeminent scientist" (who got a D in vocabulary for repeating himself) look like a moron. Smiley leeched poison gas when cut, became a multi-gigaton explosion when superheated, dissolved into a toxic solution in water, and swallowed and burned people to death on contact. Land Of the Dead...petrified people and could be easily chipped away with zero residual effects if you got to the person within a few hours. Yes, it moves faster than Smiley and can work its way into more places, and it gives Caesar a "final form" a bit later on,

but when the smoke clears at the end of the arc, literally, Smiley has the bigger body count.  And yet, we as an audience are supposed to think him competent and threatening?

I guess I have to give some (more) credit to Oda for exploring the full scope of what it means to control gasses. It's not that surprising with some thought, but being able to condense gas into solid form and give it sentience, merge himself with other gasses, and pull the oxygen from someone's lungs just because they are in proximity at least makes Caesar a dangerous villain, and I like that. It's some real Dr. Stone-level thinking on the author's part.

However, I do think Oda missed a golden opportunity by not naming Caesar Jack Flash because his body is a Gas-Gas gas. And so concludes my catalogue of references associated with Caesar Clown.

But in addition to all of his connections and resources that will shorty—not shortly enough—blow up in his face, Caesar is also working with perhaps one of the most interesting new characters in the arc: the harpy Monet, a literal snowbird (because Devil Fruit powers...but snow is frozen water, so...how does that even work if Devil Fruits mean you can't go in water? Why didn't Crocodile's dehydration touch make him weaker? Why do ice and snow have different Devil Fruits? Or lava and fire? Or darkness and shadow? How can living things in the One Piece world even host Devil Fruit powers given the body's natural water and sodium percentages? "Shut up; it's a cartoon!"? Shut up; it's a cartoon...) with a twisted maternal instinct toward the children and an almost romantic devotion to her true master...Joker. That's right; once the story moves beyond her fanservice design and yandere-light personality, Monet is effectively revealed as Doflamingo's most loyal servant, exhibiting a dark amalgamation of the Straw Hats' defining traits (Nami and Robin's feminine wiles and sometimes cold intelligence, Sanji's chivalry, Zoro's loyalty and badassery with a sword, Usopp's social intelligence, Chopper's versatility, empathy, and...cuteness, and Franky's bombastic self-expression, as well as the Crew's shared desire to achieve the dream of someone they consider a friend and leader). She gets two of the arc's best fight sequences (one featuring the return of Tactical Luffy as he tries to win handicapped vs. her and Caesar—Luffy loses and "Dies Of Exposure," according to the outright lie of an episode title—and another where the unlikely, Moonlighting duo of Zoro and Tashigi finally unload their unspoken baggage and Zoro noticeably fights with Haki for the first time). Monet even gets to die (unsure if I should call that sarcasm because she lived after Zoro cut her in half and Brownbeard survived a barrage of cannon-musket fire at point-blank range) as part of a cool plot twist involving Caesar, Law, and his collection of extracted hearts, which was both the most bait-and-switch, borderline contrived, "all is lost" fakeout of all time and among my favorite moments of the arc, considering Punk Hazard was supposed to explode with everyone on it (another blatant lie of an episode title). Yeah; wide range of emotions with that one.

Getting back to the fallout of these two fights, Luffy is left with no choice but to escape through a hole in the ground and ends up in the laboratory's waste disposal area (because all good shōnen must reference Star Wars at some point), where he meets a small dragon named Momonosuke (the son of the dismembered samurai), who had previously hidden in Vegapunk's old control room where he ate a Devil Fruit (that Vegapunk...made?) that turned him from a pervy little Wano boy into a dragon that can walk on air by making clouds with his hands and feet.

Momonosuke also seems to have developed some trauma from an encounter with Doflamingo that might get explored in the next arc when the crew escort the father and son to Dressrosa to rescue another samurai.

As for the Zoro/Tashigi vs. Monet fight, it reveals something of a chivalrous side to Zoro, such that even when using his Haki to vertically bisect Monet, he doesn't strike to kill because she is a woman. And we get some fun banter between the former Pirate hunter and his late crush's doppelganger that is emblematic of my favorite aspect of this arc.

Though most of the fights don't get the attention they deserve (brief skirmishes or one-shots with moments of above-average animation, if they happen at all), the main villain is an annoying evil prick, and the Running Simulator cheapens most of the visual experience, the character dynamics explored here are too much fun to avoid talking about.

Back in my East Blue review, I mentioned how Pirates in general are "the bad guys" and Marines/the Navy are "the good guys," but Oda frames things differently by making his protagonist in One Piece a Pirate and creating moral conflict and depth by having his first friend, Coby, want to be a Marine, while having some of the first villains Luffy faces (like Helmeppo and Captain Morgan) be Marines. My phrasing wasn't as wordy or sophisticated as that, but my point stands. I also said that the moral lines between Pirates and Marines would blur as the series went on, and with the reveal that Luffy's grandfather is a Marine, the introduction of CP9, and the end of the War Of the Best being brutal and bloody enough to hospitalize Coby for literal psychic trauma, the traditional lines of morality have been, well, ti esrever dna ti pilf nwod gniht ym llup, to quote the great Missy Elliott.

And the characters who have been most actively associated with the Straw Hats' exploits on the Marine side of the moral spectrum have been Smoker, Tashigi, and the G-5 squad. So by sheer necessity (ferreting out the mole in their organization—because season 2 of Poker Face has made me more aware of the invasively mammalian nature of multiple-agency nomenclature—and rescuing the children from Caesar) and the comedy gold that is the chaotic "neutral" influence of the Straw Hats (in particular, the return of "Solo Sanji" as he ends up leading the girl-crazy ranks of the G-5 on a mission to help Nami and Tashigi save the children...until he spots Monet and his perversion almost gets the Marines killed), Punk Hazard becomes such a fount of surreal joy that it almost redeems the arc's Running Simulator aspect for me.

Another powerhouse of character writing is Mocha, a gigantified girl who is the first of the children to detox and helps the Straw Hats navigate Caesar's lab and keep the other children in check. In a very tragic (but nonlethal because only two-ish important people have died in One Piece and Trafalgar Law's doctoring skills are cracked) act of heroism, Mocha ingests all of the drugged candy at once, risking an overdose to ensure that none of the other children will be exposed to it again.

I also think it's kind of important to talk about the Life Debt character dynamic between Sanji, Zoro, Brook, and Kin'emon (partly because it gives me an excuse to talk about a few new character abilities). It's a whole macho camaraderie, dudes wanting to see each other do cool stuff, teach each other cool stuff, and help each other do cool stuff kind of thing that brings more of the same, "serious warrior and pervert bicker" dynamic that's been part of the story since the beginning, but with the index finger slightly crooked in a serious, goal-oriented direction, and because I get to learn new One Piece lore and it clears the very low bar of having almost nothing to do with Caesar Clown, I like it okay.

As for the stuff we learn from this tetrad of macho tolerance, Brook is immune to Smiley's poison gas because he's already dead, Sanji demonstrates that Haki is tied to the heart (or mind, or soul; it's not really clear yet) of the user regardless of what body they're in, and in addition to Kin'emon's Devil Fruit power to turn inanimate objects into clothes, the samurai is also a master of the Foxfire Sword Style, which allows him to cut with a burning edge as well as slice through fire and explosions, which Zoro (and me, for that matter) thinks is really cool.

For all of the explanation and analysis I've done so far, I have to be brutally honest and say that Punk Hazard has its interesting moments and good mystery buildup, but keeping momentum isn't one of its strong points (Chopper puns!). As an example, I don't think it has a truly good, start-to-finish episode until twenty-seven canon episodes in. This episode raises a few questions (like why Smoker and Tashigi didn't tell their G-5 underlings about Vergo being a double-agent, thereby sparing their lives when he shows up here to finger them to death with his Six Powers techniques, and how, after being in such bad psychotic withdrawal that it affected her memory, Mocha suddenly knew exactly where she was and could show Chopper a shortcut back to the playroom), but Smoker and Luffy have great banter as they race each other to confront Caesar and Vergo, and Sanji's chivalry shines as he confronts Vergo in defense of Tashigi (the surviving G-5 fodder are also there). This momentum mostly keeps up through the next ten episodes, including the previously mentioned Luffy vs. Caesar & Monet fight where he clearly uses strategy for the first time since Enies Lobby, a long and well animated cutaway fight between Smoker and Vergo that ends with Law cutting the traitor (and the entire laboratory complex and several nearby mountains) in half,

the romantically charged Zoro & Tashigi vs. Monet fight, Luffy chancing upon Kin'emon's Dragon-Boy son, and Mocha making her dramatic sacrifice for the other children. The Running Simulator and the comedic or dialogue-heavy cutaways do hamper that momentum at times, but from episode twenty-seven onward, each episode hits in its own way, even the episodes with lies for titles.

When Caesar is finally exposed to his men as a sociopath and Luffy defeats him with a "new" attack he calls Grizzly Magnum (a Gum Gum Bazooka with Gear 3 and Armament Haki stacked on top, backed up by bursts of Conqueror's Haki, it's time for two new characters to be introduced!

Enter Buffalo (a human airplane who reminds me of Rufus from Street Fighter IV) and Baby Five (a generic sexy maid design who's armed to the teeth and beyond despite having Devil Fruit powers that let her turn into any weapon—including a missile at one point, and she can survive her own explosion and reform like a T-1000), two assassins who work for Joker. They're mostly played for absurdity against Franky and his Megazord while everyone else runs for their lives and the fate of Punk Hazard "hangs in the balance," but Baby Five working for Joker against her will is interesting at the very least, and I hope to see it explored in the next arc more than it is here.

At the same time as the assassin fight, Joker, a.k.a. Donquixote Doflamingo, a.k.a. my current favorite One Piece villain, makes a crow flight (because beelines look decidedly un-line-like and more like bad cursive) for Punk Hazard to retrieve his two assassins and Caesar, and take bloody revenge for Monet's death. Which means it's time for the requisite end-of-arc banquet party‽

Law uses his powers to cut the drugs out of the children's bodies, Nami and Tashigi make a deal that the G-5 will take the children home (after they get a checkup from Dr. Vegapunk, so maybe things will get worse for them before it gets better, but Nami trusts Tashigi because she reminds Nami of her surrogate mother, Bellemere, who was an ex-Marine), Kin'emon and Momonosuke reunite, and the Navy and Pirates put their mortal enmity aside to share a feast.

After some time-wasting emo "comedy" with the Marines, Tashigi departs with the children, Law and the Straw Hats depart for Dressrosa with Caesar, Kin'emon, and Momonosuke in tow, and Smoker stays behind with the G-5 and Brownbeard to mount a recovery effort on Punk Hazard.

Of course, this puts the latter group directly in Doflamingo's crosshairs, with the wrathful Warlord slicing Smoker into a bloody heap and puppeteering the fodder into shooting each other. But before Doflamingo can strike a killing blow against the Vice Admiral, he's interrupted by the arrival of Aokiji (now going by the civilian name of Kuzan), and the arc ends on another huge lie of an episode title: "Intense! Aokiji vs. Doflamingo!"

My original draft of this review included many derogatory statements about the lack of quality animation and good shōnen fights in this arc. Some of that remains in a tamer form because it's true, but the original severity of my biases stemmed directly from this particular..."fight." Granted, the above title doesn't directly say that the characters mentioned will fight each other, but the use of "vs." and the genre of One Piece certainly give the viewer realistic but false expectations of a physical conflict, and unrealistic expectations of Punk Hazard ending with an insanely well-animated battle for the ages. Instead, we get way too much of Momonosuke perving out over Nami and Robin, and Aokiji flash-freezes Doflamingo on sight, the latter breaking free and heading back to Dressrosa with Buffalo and Baby Five. It could have been spectacular, but is instead as much of a fight as me tripping on a crack in the sidewalk.

At least this image of Doflamingo frozen looks like a fractal masterpiece, though.

Stay Tuned for a packed week of more surprises to come, and please stay the course by remembering to Become A Member Of the Ticketholder Pirates if you haven't already, commenting at the bottom of my Blogger posts, helping out my ad revenue as you read to slowly raise my Bounty above Chopper levels, and joining my Crew on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest snail transmissions of news on my content.

I'm gonna be Master Of Tickets!

(But first, I'm going to be...a brave Hero!)

Piece,

Out!