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REVIEW: One Piece Film Red 4K SteelBook Blu-ray Review

Sorry if this sounds rude, but is this Reviewer familier with recent One Piece? They make it sound like they barely understand the celestrial dragons and WG, which have been a huge factor in the story for at least most of the decade.

Oda has gone on record in his SBS column that the loss of a protector forces the characters to grow, explaining why so few characters have mothers. While some fans agree that this is a narrative necessity, I can't help but think it is also a very creepy fetish to continually put children in horrific situations to wring empathy out of an audience.

But in the review, and maaaaaybe I'm just overthinking this (I apologize in advance if I'm making too big a deal out of it), the lines below bothered me a bit:

Quote:

Oda has gone on record in his SBS column that the loss of a protector forces the characters to grow, explaining why so few characters have mothers. While some fans agree that this is a narrative necessity, I can't help but think it is also a very creepy fetish to continually put children in horrific situations to wring empathy out of an audience.

I was talking to a friend yesterday about how I often try to write tragedies (because it's one of my favorite genres to read), but then I cave to my instincts and can't hurt my characters. She responded by saying that she finds herself so "goody-two-shoes" (following expectations, not being able to emote well, etc.) irl that she needs an outlet for her emotions in her writing and will take wholesome characters and drop them into tragedies or kill them off as a personal means of expression. Only then will she try to give the tragedies and deaths substance, which surprised me because she's really good at writing short stories. I've heard similar sentiments from Ohkawa-sensei in CLAMP, and I think I get it as a writer who wants to express myself in fiction, but has the opposite problem and is too brutally honest and passive to just... hurt my characters like I think needs to happen for them.

I think One Piece is largely thematically _about_ how abuse of power structures hurts people, and a lot of it involves long-term trauma because most of the tragedy is setup for Luffy and the crew to walk into an already bad situation that they can solve, meaning the people they meet were kids when things got started. It can certainly be exploitative for the sake of empathy for the audience, but as someone with childhood trauma, it resonates better for me on an emotional level that way.

Well, I don't think One Piece typically needs any spirited defense, whether whole or in part, and especially not when this particular movie has already made a small fortune and is in no danger of being ignored, underrated or forgotten, but be that as it may...I personally really liked this film and the fact it is the thematically darkest (or, I suppose, perhaps the second darkest) motion picture in the history of the property ultimately counts as a positive rather than a negative in my book. There's arguably more nuance to Uta's character as well, even if you can still notice the storytelling tropes, but even that angle has been better debated and explored elsewhere across the Internet by this point. If anything, the currently rather depressing state of the world makes me appreciate this kind of movie more than the alternative.

I think One Piece is largely thematically _about_ how abuse of power structures hurts people

But you'll excuse me if I rely on the creator's ideal of "adventure," which is rooted in loss and trauma. An inordinate amount of anime relies on children's trauma and I do find it creepy. Not just here, but across the entire medium. There are good reasons for it in many cases, but as an adult, children's tears make me very angry and I do not care to be made angry as a jumping-off point in my "entertainment." I do think it is creepy to lean on hurting children so often in a story created for children.

Hi there. I have been watching One Piece since the very beginning, so yes. Thanks for your concern. When I said I did not "understand" the Celestial Dragons, it was a rhetorical means to indicate that they are an annoying, stupid, pointless plot complication, like having ketamine-fueled techbros and "actually" guys running a government. Irritating and obnoxious and not at all entertaining.

To clarify, since I don't think it was mentioned in the review: the episodes on the bonus disc were part of the TV series run that aired before the movie. More specifically, the two-part Uta flashback was the standard movie tie-in that the anime has been doing since...Strong World I think, while the Shanks episode was one of the recap specials that the anime has been using during Wano and Egghead to buy time, albeit with a bit of Uta framing at the start and finish. The flashback episodes in particular should be watched before the movie, since they aired before its release and lead right into it. (They're also arguably more "canon" than the movie itself, since Uta fits into the same category as Shiki from Film Z: they're both canon characters, but their movies don't necessarily fit into the main series storyline.) The Shanks recap isn't really necessary unless you need a refresher on the character. And not that it's all that important or anything, but only two actual movies (8 and 9) have been arc summaries; the "Episode of" entries that did that were all TV specials.