I Was Gonna Make A Joke Like How Does Hallucination Dazai Know The Status Of Kyoka And Lucy But No Actually

Headcanon: Chuuya being on the ceiling is never planned—it just happens.

One second, he’s standing like a normal person. The next? He’s casually upside down on the ceiling like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Half the time, he doesn’t even realise he’s doing it. Someone pisses him off? Gravity shifts before he even thinks about it. Need to get out of a conversation? Ceiling. Dazai being insufferable? Ceiling. Need a moment to process? Ceiling.

At this point, the Port Mafia barely reacts. New recruits get spooked when they realise Chuuya is watching them from above like some kind of feral gargoyle, but the executives don’t even bat an eye.

Meanwhile, Dazai has an entire catalogue of dumb jokes. “Flew too close to the sun again, Slug?” “How’s the weather up there?” “Should I start leaving food on the ceiling for you?”

One day, Chuuya’s going to lose patience and dropkick him from above.

Might make this a running series of HCs.. someone please draw feral gargoyle Chuuya on the ceiling I will love you forever...

WHAT IS YOUR SECRET BROOK???

Controversial Opinion.

The One Piece Anti's are actually CORRECT about One Piece having a bunch of overly-convenient powers being held by ladies, lately.

And I love it.

I love Tama and her ability to mind control literally ALL of Kaido's gifters, making her an unexpectedly central part of the protagonists' victory.

I love Jewelry Bonney and her ability to imitate Gear Five Luffy and help turn the tide of the current arc, and also control all Kuma-Fistas

I love Boa Hancock having just the right mix of powers and attractiveness that lets her Insta-KO entire armies, as well as some of the setting's most powerful characters.

Hell, if they're doing what I think they're doing with Catarina Devon, I even love that.

Powerful Mary-Sue-ish Ladies Sweep!

the fact that atsushi saw akutagawa was alive and thought 'i must save him', not out of 'i must save him so we can defeat this villain' but simply out of 'alive. must save'

which is his default thinking at any point but isn't it ✨️refreshing✨️ for akutagawa to be part of this mindset

I love that Usopp is the only straw hat who interacts with our main girl in One Piece Fan Letter. Because Usopp gets it. He’s been there. Of all the Straw Hats, I feel like he’s the closest one to a “normal” person. Even now with all the insane skills he has—the portrayal of the other Straw Hats on Sabaody felt like celebrity cameos, giants spotted in the wild…whereas Usopp is portrayed as just a guy. Bending down to help a girl pick up her things, checking if she’s ok, giving her terrible advice on how to sneak into a bar. Part of this is because at this point Usopp doesn’t have a bounty under his own name, so nobody would know him. But it’s notable that for all the little fandom jokes and Easter eggs the episode sprinkles in, nobody mentions Sogeking. It would’ve been so easy to drop even one quick joke about it. But no. Because with Usopp, we don’t love him for the persona. We love him for the goofy, insecure, empathetic guy that he is. So of course the Straw Hat with the most speaking lines in an episode about regular people is Usopp. Of course he’s the one to see our girl, actually see her, and reach out to her. Of course.

The Holy Knights have the same regeneration ability as the Gorosei, so if we don't find a way to deal with it in this arc, we're screwed

more old chibis

One Piece 1137 Spoilers

Not a review, just talking about a way Oda often handles characters and how we see that again this chapter.

OK while everyone is busy freaking out and talking about Shamrock and blah blah blah, I'm gonna bring up something way more inconsequential, but like.

I cannot BELIEVE Oda said "let's give Rodo, the comic-relief horrible creep, a tiny and extremely brief moment of genuinely humane characterization" lmao. Also let's use that as a chance to reflect on Zoro's role once more lol.

He has a habit of doing this -it reminds me a lot of how Helmeppo was nothing but a comic-relief bastard at first, but when you least expected it he somehow got a bunch of characterization and development. Oda loooves writing even the most unlikable characters to still feel like people. And honestly, it takes skill, even it it's in really small ways. And he does it in a way where they're not like, forgiven for their bad elements or anything, just expanded upon. Like, Rodo is still an asshole and creep, but even a joke of a character like him can have selfless motivations, and that's very interesting and hard to pull off as a writer.

I am now most curious to see more of Hajrudin and where his story takes him after this! Yeah yeah God Knights, whatever, that's cool too. But honestly, my attention was fully held by the Ancient Giant lore and potential Royal Family Drama instead! I neeeeed those Harald, Loki & Hajrudin flashbacks stat.

Elbaph has been showing a lot of thematic signs of like... weird behavior around Outcasts, actually. Between Harald ripping his own horns off becuase he considers the blood of ancient giants "barbaric" (how does this affect those still born with them?), Loki being branded as cursed and destined to be evil BEFORE his was even born, Hajrudin being seen as "not pure-blooded" due to his mother being from another giant tribe, even Rodo having only one friend (even though that's his fault honestly), and of course Collun being a branded a "wild child" and mocked by his peers... yeah. I see a Theme a bit.

Hrm hrm today I’m having thoughts about Kuina and her overwhelming Lost Boy vibes and how like. You NEVER GET Lost Girls like that. Narratively, she is The Girl Who Didn’t Grow Up. She will always be eleven and perfect, immortalized in memory. In Zoro’s mind, she is forever just a little bit older and a little bit taller than him. Even now when he remembers her, he pictures her face from an upward angle. She will ALWAYS be “older” and yet she will NEVER be more than eleven. I want to know what was happening in Zoro’s head when he turned 12 and realized he was older than she would ever get to be. I just. All the vibes, give them to me. This is one of the things that just gets me every fucking time!!!

(Sabo is also positioned like this, and is a fairly straightforward example up until it gets subverted by him ACTUALLY GROWING UP. Sabo is what happens when the lost boy grows up and it’s fucking FASCINATING.)

I think the key thing is, in order to be a "lost boy" narrative and not just a tragically dead child character, there needs to have been an expectation of greatness. It's not that little girls don't die in fiction, or that they aren't mourned. But this particular type of narrative emphasizes the specific grief of the loss of incredible potential, which isn't a thing dead little girl characters usually get. They're usually narratives about the loss of innocence or the fragility of life and the injustice of mortality, and Kuina has a little of that - how unfair it is for her life to be cut short. But it's also the bit of, if you'll let me get lyrical for a moment, you could have done so much more if you only had time.

as people grow up, one of the things we have to deal with is the loss of the possibilities of what we could have been, because we can only become one of our possible selves. Even if you become great, even if you're happy, even if you made the best possible choice, you still have to make that decision that to become this I must give up on becoming that. Lost Boys don't ever get to become, so they are enshrined with all that potential still in them. All of the people they could have been, all of the paths they might have taken.

(A thing that drives me crazy: balancing the grief of growing up with the grief of not-growing-up. The tragedy of becoming and the tragedy of never getting to become. The dozens of ghosts of possible selves that every adult carries around with them. Not relevant to the current discussion, but still, a thing to think about!)

There's also the fact that she gets set up with a projected character arc - we can see how she might've grown and dealt with her insecurities and overcome the obstacles in her path, but she'll never get to do it. And Zoro can take their shared dream on himself and make that his responsibility, but he can't resolve her emotional baggage for her, because that's not how that works. And we don't know! Maybe she wouldn't ever have managed it! But Kuina-the-confident-adult is just one of the many possible people she'll never get to be.

Lucy: an Emphasis on Vulnerability 🫧

(Note: this is a write-up from eight months ago that I very recently edited, so... not new, but certainly improved lol)

If I had to settle on just one thing, my favorite aspect of Lucy’s character would definitely be how her emphasis on vulnerability shapes her relationship with Atsushi. It’s something I appreciate more and more every time I comb through her appearances…

… which I do because I’m starved for Lucy content, rip. ༎ຶ‿༎ຶ

---

No, but seriously. If you ask me, Lucy doesn't entirely avoid the pitfall of the archetypal tsundere who’s bad at being vulnerable, sporting her fair share of arbitrary hot-and-cold moments. But while she isn’t a full-on deconstruction, it wouldn’t be fair to call her played straight, either.

For one, her criticisms of Atsushi are, more often than not, genuine criticisms, not simply deflections, and “being vulnerable” encompasses considerably more than just “admitting her crush.” Furthermore, being bad at vulnerability is, by itself, not the crux of her conflict; it's being bad at vulnerability while at the same time valuing vulnerability above all else. Let me explain.

Prior to her epiphany on the Moby Dick, Lucy resented Atsushi for having found people who – in her mind anyway – valued him unconditionally, considering him privileged on this front. Meanwhile, the man she worked for was a literal power tycoon, and at no point did she express the same envy toward him. This wasn’t hypocrisy on her part – not necessarily. If anything, it was a subtle hint at the way she thinks. She doesn't measure “privilege” by how rich or well-off someone is, rather, by whether or not they've found a place to belong.

This checks out in more ways than one. After all, Lucy’s only real goal while in the Guild was belonging, and she went above and beyond to achieve said goal. Hell, she crafted an entire persona around the villainous role she'd been assigned, all in the hopes that she’d win Fitzgerald’s favor and be kept around. And when that went awry, she allowed herself to become a maid – a source of menial labor, not too far a cry from her orphanage roots – just to avoid being alone.

She didn't care about the money or the benefits (in stark contrast to why most of the other members were there), and though she was eager to engage in villainy if it meant painting over her victimhood, she just barely tolerated being a villain, viewing it more as a means to an end than anything worthwhile.

It’s no coincidence, then, that she turned seemingly on a dime when Atsushi prompted her to re-evaluate her victimhood. She was receptive to his appeal not to abandon her past self, not just because he’d made himself “credible” in her eyes by revealing his scars, but also because – ultimately – a change of heart for her was as simple as lowering a mask.

Presently, Lucy is Atsushi's caring critic first and foremost.

She frequently calls into question his reckless heroism, i.e., his tendency to dive headfirst into danger for the sake of being a hero, thereby validating his existence. It’s a habit born of the Headmaster’s abuse – one he continues to cling to, and one she consistently challenges.

Hell, Lucy’s very introduction posed a challenge to Atsushi’s reckless heroism in the sense that, try as he might, he couldn't save her, only defeat her. Conventional heroism – the kind he used to save Kyōka, for example – was simply not enough...

... and lo and behold, it wasn't his strength that got through to Lucy, rather, his vulnerability.

But while Lucy is a blatant reversal of the way Atsushi often views his relationships (that is, through a lens of heroism) – and though she already understands Atsushi on a level most don’t, simply by virtue of perceiving his victimhood (as he does hers) – she also expects more from him than just salvation. Including just by existing, she presents a conflict that demands Atsushi be more of a person than a hero.

Their farewell “promise” is a prime example of this.

Bottom line is, it was never a real promise; Lucy knew full well that neither of them would be able to follow through. It was a last-ditch effort on her part to ensure Atsushi's well-being, knowing he was hellbent on jumping either way.

She appealed to Atsushi’s narrative by presenting an incentive for heroism, with the implicit condition that, in order to come back for her, he'd first have to… y’know, survive. Unbeknownst to Atsushi, though, salvation was never truly on Lucy’s agenda.

So in other words, the one time she did feed into his reckless heroism, it wasn’t to be saved, rather, to make him promise to live another day without his even realizing it. 

Post-Guild arc, this trend continues, albeit in different ways.

When Atsushi performs his aforementioned hero-dives in Lucy's presence, she tells him off for it.

In chapter 43, Cherrirs!, her upbraiding Atsushi for almost drowning is, notably, the first mention of his victory against the Guild that isn't an accolade. His fellow detectives have praised him left and right for it, and the Yokohama newspaper hails him (rightly) as the city’s savior. But Lucy’s reaction is another thing entirely. Is she in awe of his achievement? Absolutely. That's not what she focuses on, though. She focuses on him, insisting that he show a little self-preservation, like a person would. 

When he tries to insert himself into others’ plights uninvited, she intercepts him.

She doesn't appreciate his repeated attempts to be the hero in situations that aren't his to be the hero in, and urges him instead to let people fight their own battles – again, like a person would.

When he fumbles in his relationships, she confronts him. In contrast to Kyōka, who earlier in Cherrirs! indicates that she doesn't really require anything from Atsushi – just being around him is enough – Lucy requires him to talk things out with her. After the Moby Dick goes down and they don't see each other for a while, Atsushi more or less forgets about her. In his mind, Lucy asked him to save her, he wasn’t able to, she got off the ship by herself... and that might as well be the end of it. He doesn’t consider the possibility that their interaction meant more to her than a failed promise of heroism; that she might expect him to remember her as a person, not just forget her as someone he couldn't save.

When the people close to him don't consider how their being hurt or killed might affect him, she reminds them. When Kyōka recklessly tries to leave Anne's Room in chapter 118, Mystifying Being, Lucy stops her, pointing out how devastated Atsushi would be if anything were to happen to her. In doing so, she applies her philosophy of person > hero to Atsushi and Kyōka both at the same time. She encourages Kyōka to be more than just a hero by telling her to think of how it would impact Atsushi as a person if she died.

Atsushi doesn’t want the Headmaster's words haunting him forever. His ultimate goal, albeit unconscious, is to grow into his own person – a person who believes in themselves and doesn’t base their entire worth off of one attribute. Lucy is someone who pushes him toward that goal, if also unconsciously. Like Akutagawa, she doesn't think Atsushi's trauma defines him. She may not be informed of the specifics – of the Headmaster’s role in it all – but she continues to see Atsushi as more than just a hero, and treats him accordingly.

It’s worth noting, too, that – by the Guild Aftermath arc – Lucy has already gotten what she was after all along, and so it’s no wonder she hasn’t expressed any desire to join the Agency. In her Guild days, she never truly wanted to be a villain. It makes perfect sense, then, that – upon being dissuaded from villainy – she wouldn’t simply “default” to heroism. Unlike Kyōka, her watershed realization wasn't that she wanted to save people, rather that, through "imagination" (read: empathy), loneliness could be vanquished. Belonging is Lucy’s ultimate goal, and she’s nothing if not consistent.

As it often goes with tsunderes, being vulnerable isn't Lucy’s strong suit. That's why her go-to method of conveying her care for Atsushi is yelling at him to stop being so thoughtless. That's why her comforting skills could use some serious work.

And that's why, at one point, she absentmindedly reveals to Atsushi how much his Moby Dick display meant to her, only to backpedal.

But for all she dances around the subject of her crush on Atsushi, feigning indifference or even hostility, their shared vulnerability is like a precious gem to her. So naturally, her feelings of debt toward him, as implied in the above interaction, stand regardless of his many failures to save her in the conventional hero way. After all, he saved her in the way she values most: as a person.

For a time, all Lucy was capable of giving in return for Atsushi’s “ultimate favor” was conventional heroism – or in other words, many a close call and many a trip to Anne’s Room. That, of course, brought up a whole new dilemma: if conventional heroism was a worthless currency, but vulnerability was just out of reach, how could Lucy ever come close to repaying her debt? She didn't know. All she did know was that she had to pay him back one way or another, and that’s where her most glaring flaw – her quid-pro-quo mindset – came into play.

Lucy's quid-pro-quo mindset, seen mostly (though not exclusively) in her relationship with Atsushi, is her most glaring flaw because it undermines the values and priorities that make her, well… her. It’s a relic of her time in the Guild – a time defined by a strict (and frankly damaging) principle of transaction: usefulness in exchange for not being alone. It makes it so she's driven to help Atsushi out of a sense of indebtedness, rather than out of the same genuine care – the same emphasis on personhood and vulnerability – by which she would be driven otherwise. Furthermore, it inspires recklessness and self-sacrifice, two qualities she openly discourages in Atsushi.

It goes without saying, then, that the events of the Sky Casino arc were a major leap forward (no pun intended) for her. When Atsushi saved her from Nathaniel, thereby repaying her for her acts of service as he’d promised so many times he would, she realized that – just as her care for Atsushi doesn’t depend on his being a hero, Atsushi's care for her doesn’t depend on her being vulnerable. The illusion was shattered.

Ah, the wonders of character development. ✨

Thanks for reading!