One Piece Multi-Piece #16: Dressrosa Arc (Fourth Piece)

Ship's Log by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. Master Of the Tickets,

Meister Of Anime.

Ahoy, Ticketholders!

Friday ended up being my first thousand-plus-view day in awhile (since 2024, I think). In One Piece Pirate fashion, I'd like to say that if you're actually a human reading what I write (or at least giving me clicks out of pity because I'm still bothering to blog in 2026), thank you very much.

But if you're just following me on social media to farm my content for AI training, unfollow me immediately, go to an actual farm, touch grass until you find a particularly tall patch of it, and hide therein while you go fuck yourself.

When we last left things, Trafalgar Law was in a rematch with Donquixote Doflamingo while Luffy was stuck between a String double of Doflamingo and a puppeteered Bellamy the Hyena.

And because the Dressrosa Arc in particular (though it's happened before on a smaller scale in shorter arcs) likes to ruin the pacing of its fights and the impact of its big moments with cutaways and flashbacks (some of which feel like they were included for the sake of their own inclusion), this week's Fourth Piece of Dressrosa begins with Law getting a childhood flashback, in which Doflamingo gets his own flashback via dream sequence like One Piece is suddenly Inception or something.

As we've seen so far, the Celestial Dragons think themselves gods in the flesh, and so enslave, kidnap, assault, and murder members of the "lesser races" like humans and Fishmen according to whatever whim excites or offends their "sensibilities" at any given moment. So attempting to humanize someone like Doflamingo with a "traumatic" flashback where he (child version voiced by Brittany Karbowski in the dub) experiences his family being tortured after they surrender their Celestial Dragon status to live fuller lives among humans is an exercise in wasting everyone's time (unless you're an internet chud who thinks all fictional villainy can be justified on the basis of psychology and social fluidity, then I refer you back to my opening statements).

As for Law (full name revealed here as Trafalgar D. WaterLaw), his past is actually sympathetic because he was the child of a doctor in the affluent town of Flevance, which became known as White Town (so he can never be "Your Woman") following the release of a white lead deposit beneath it that was made widespread commercial use of in the town and abroad. And if you know anything about real-world white lead and/or how the World Government operates in One Piece, you'll quickly guess correctly that everyone in Flevance died of lead poisoning (both the literal and mafia slang varieties) or were executed by sanitation squads when it was put on lockdown under the false narrative that White Town was a contagion zone. So it stands to whatever passes for reason in the mind of a child with survivor's guilt that he would come to the realization that people suck and people in power suck more, and that he would seek kinship among seemingly like-minded, nihilistic individuals like the Donquixote Family (the younger designs for whom are similar enough that you aren't confused at who's who, yet different enough from the modern versions that you can see their progression and that Oda-sensei puts effort into character-based "show, don't tell"). The sequence where the Family casually massacres a town while lamenting the tragic, cruel hypocrisy of the Flevance incident is masterfully hypocritical in its own right (I mean that as a positive for the storytelling here, by the way).

But the heart and heartlessness (and puns!) of the flashback are strongest in the relationship between Law, Doflamingo, and Doflamingo's "kid-hating" brother Rosinante, a.k.a. Corazon. The twists with them are the best-handled, most emotional in the arc so far, and because One Piece is as dense and epic as it is, spoiling any of them would not only spoil them all, but rob the experience of its very soul. Just know that there's a reason Law is so personally invested in Doflamingo's defeat, there's a reason Corazon isn't around anymore, and that Law survived his white lead poisoning by removing it from himself after eating the Op-Op Fruit. Also, the Navy rescued a child escapee from Doflamingo's first(?) Birdcage attack who didn't get a name but will probably be someone important later because One Piece is like that.

Back in the present, all of the fights (and "fights") continue.

In addition to the main Doflamingo fight (where he finally releases Bellamy from his puppeteering and Luffy dismembers the String double with a Red Hawk Blast/Jet Gattling combo), the other fights are as follows:

•  Zoro vs Pica: for a fight featuring the second-strongest Straw Hat and an earth-moving giant with functional teleportation, this is drawn-out, repetitive, and often visually uninteresting. Pica laughing like a Pikachu and Zoro poking fun at his "soprano man" voice as a psychological tactic are just about the only things that don't overstay their welcome. There's some deep, long-term narrative stuff with Zoro and his rivalry/training with Mihawk that feeds into the final strike against Pica and feels more satisfying than the fight itself, but that, too, loses its impact because we've known since the Monet fight in Punk Hazard (a far more narratively rich and better-looking conflict for Zoro) that our potential World's Greatest Swordsman can use Haki, and I was pretty much looking at my watch since last week to see why he didn't just use it already.
• Luffy vs. Bellamy the Hyena: Even half-dead and deemed useless by Doflamingo, Bellamy still tries to prove his worth against Luffy...by bouncing around the palace for three fucking weeks while Luffy stands there taking his shots and yelling at him to stop. It's again repetitive and visually boring, but the narrative is stronger because of the history between the two characters directly involved in the fight, the relevant flashbacks to Skypeia that don't overstay their welcome, and the doubled callback imagery of Luffy's one and final punch.
• Nico Robin, Rebecca, and Kyros vs Diamante: between Brad Hawkins (VR Troopers) hamming it up in a good Jason Douglas (Dragon Ball Super) approximation with some of the most homicidally cliché villain lines ever and the literal flexibility of Diamante's power set (and of course, the powerful emotional history between him and the two former Dressrosa nobles), this is the fight to watch before the fight to watch. The choreography isn't anything to die on a hill for (too soon? Too soon...), and Rebecca and Robin are just there as hostage and defender, respectively, but I found it narratively compelling.
• Franky vs Señor Pink is boring, absurd, depraved, and repetitive, and should not exist. There's an attempt at saving the narrative with a sympathy flashback for Señor Pink, but fuck this "fight" in a hazmat suit.
• Chin Jao vs Lao G: two old man martial artists beating the shit out of each other, exploiting every conceivable tasteful cliché (and more than a little ageism for comedic effect) that this particular character trope has to offer. The visuals are fun and the choreography is creative for what it is, and Chin Jao and his family are pretty endearing macho characters.
• Sai vs Baby 5: That continues here. Baby 5 was established in Punk Hazard as a needy, desperately gullible to the point of darkness simp, and Sai (Chin Jao's son and apprentice) has been fighting her for several episodes of minimal exposure, all the while ignorantly regaling her with tastefully romantic double-entendre lines as they clash blades. This is honestly a masterpiece of comedic writing by One Piece standards (I'd even generously place it a little classier than that), and leads to the most unique means of passively defeating an enemy general that the series has ever conceived.
• "Destruction Fist" Ideo (a Long-Arm tribesman who's basically Chad from Bleach as a One Piece character with guyliner), Elizabello (the king who looks like a Punch Out! character and lost in the Coliseum after whiffing his one, good attack), Bartolomeo, and Cavendish/Hakuba vs Dellinger (a queer half-Fishman, which is interesting, and they fight with Haki and a mixed martial arts style that's visually cool for a third-string villain in One Piece) and Gladius (a steampunk guy with a cool design who can make anything he touches into an explosive balloon): This is a messy lineup of a bunch of supporting characters and motive-less villains who weave in and out of each other's fights, and the more important ones mentioned above, until Cavendish falls asleep again and his evil side comes out to slaughter for some more convenient cleanup. Meh.
• Hajrudin vs Machvise: this could barely be considered a fight, but it's a definite "wow!" moment in the arc. Machvise is a fat biker beard design who possibly has the same Devil Fruit powers as Miss Valentine from Baroque Works, and his one joke is teachING the children in the audience (of this attention span-defyING series with murder, blood, existential horror, fanservice, PG-13 cursING, slavery, and sex crimes) about gerunds (Lao G: "that's gerunds. With a capital...G!!!!") by sayING them in a French accent. And Hajrudin is a giant (with a capital...G!!!!) voiced by Overlord's Chris Guerrero (with a literally capital...G!!!!) who sacrifices half of his body uppercutting Machvise into space despite the man crushING him with ten thousand tons from roughly a mile in the sky. It was short and predictable, but also very, very hype.

Which brings this Fourth Piece of the Dressrosa Arc review to a close. With all of the Donquixote Family's Executives and pawns defeated or otherwise engaged (puns!), the Doflamingo fight (and that snot guy who is too gross to be allowed a continued existence, but is still alive because that's the point of him) is all that's left. I tried getting through the last three episodes I assigned myself (one of which is just people all across Dressrosa screaming about the Birdcage shrinking because this arc is Under the Dome now, and the other two are actual fight episodes with recycled flashback scenes peppered throughout and Luffy reminding us of Doflamingo's name at the highest volume barely tolerable), but I decided to put off the big action until next week to give the full fight my uninterrupted, conscious attention.

Stay Tuned for a new Gear and my plans for September. But first, let The Game begin, and Tokyo sends an S.O.S. to the world. And if you're not currently doing something indecent to yourself in the tall grass, please continue to support me and what I do by Becoming A Ticketholder (you haven't yet), leaving a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, helping out my ad revenue as you read because shoestring budgets can be dangerous, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

20

Master Of Tickets,

Piece,

Out!