Sooo. One Piece.

I have resisted this series for a long time. I don't know particularly why I did; maybe it was the artwork, maybe it was that it just didn't look like something I'd go for - I'm a bit shounen-impaired, I admit - and maybe it was because I was terrified I might have to WATCH THE DUB, which has apparently become infamous in anime fandom due to its slight tendency to totally butcher the show in an attempt to make it 'child-safe'. Maybe it's because I preferred ninjas. (Note: 'preferred'.) Anyway, whatever the reason was I wasn't ever planning on trying to watch it.

Enter pichi, of course, with seductive talk of anime I should be watching. After I finish watching School Days and screaming at Makoto to DIE IN FIRE ALREADY, taking recommendations seemed like a really good idea. (It probably was, because if I hadn't I would have tried to watch .hack//SIGN on the strength of its truly awesome soundtrack, which would apparently have been a really really big mistake.) Besides, I wouldn't have found School Days without taking advice on it, even if the advice given was largely unintentional.

So. I have pichi and anime recs. And, as a consequence, One Piece.

I was still not sure I wanted to watch it. No idea why not. I trust her taste in many things and, though we differ on enough subjects to keep things interesting, she is very much FANDOM TWIN and CO-CULPRIT. So, if she says that One Piece is worth watching and I should avoid .hack//SIGN like the plague she's probably spot-on and it is. If she says I'll like the hero I probably will. She knows me far too well and we're braintwins, so it comes with the territory.

So, as it comes reccoemnded by my fandom braintwin, naturally I watch it. In fact, we both watch it because that's just what we do sometimes. I'm still a little uncertain, perhaps because of my shonen-impairment. However, what seems like about 2.5 seconds later, I'm confronted with a voiceover which explains that the greatest pirate in the world left his treasure in, basically, 'that place', and told the world that yeah, he left it someplace extremely vague but anyone who finds it can have it and so huge amounts of people decided to become pirates to go find 'that place' and get his treasure. For some reason I can't explain, I found this ridiculously funny.

In fact, I found the whole thing ridiculously funny. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen, makes his first appearance floating around aimlessly in a barrel after sailing straight into a whirlpool and that's a pretty good introduction to the kind of a guy he is. Apparently the series gets darker later, but I can handle that because no matter how dark things get, Luffy's still a dork who ate a fruit that turned him into rubber. I presume there is a reason he did this, but I won't much care if there isn't.

(This turns out to be a surprisingly useful ability. Screw firebreathing and telekinesis, this guy's a human hi-bounce ball and it's awesome. It makes him very hard to damage and gives him a good excuse as to why he can bounce wildly about the place as anime characters are wont to do. I love seeing characters with imaginative special powers; there are way too many pyrokines and telepaths out there already.)

... yeah, I'm watching this for several reasons but the primary reason is Luffy. Gah. What can I say about this guy apart from he's the dorkiest dork who ever dorked and I love him for it. I'm having to fight the urge to include a Youtube clip (not that I can find one of his introduction, alas, and anything else might contain spoilers, which are very much DO NOT WANT where One Piece is concerned as for the first time in years I've come to a series knowing virtually nothing about it) because Luffy cannot be explained, only experienced, and there's no way to do justice in mere words to what a dorky maniac he is. Any character who can grin like he does at totally inopportune moments is fine by me. I guess now I know what Ken Hidaka has done to my taste in anime boys - I used to like the pretty, gender-confused waifs with the mental health issues; I now seem to like surprisingly ordinary-looking dark-haired teenage dorks who grin a lot, habitually miss the point, believe 'planning ahead' is something that happens to other people and think the world of their friends. I can't say I really mind.

I don't know who his voice actor is but whoever they are, they're awesome.

I left off at the end of Episode Three. (NEED MOAR.) So far I have discovered that it's really not a good idea to fight a guy who's made of rubber and there's never an inappropriate time to eat a lot. Also, it's possible to be a pirate by yourself, without a ship. So far the Dread Pirate Luffy's crew is made up of himself and Zoro and they're sailing off into the sunset to find treasure in THE MOST RIDICULOUS PIRATE SHIP IN THE WORLD, EVER. Because it's a small sailboat that just about fits the two of them and if they came up against anyone with an actual pirate ship they would be flattened. Still, I suppose everyone's gotta start somewhere.

There needs to be more Nami. So far she's not done much save sneak around and steal everything shiny she can lay her hands on, and though she's been in the right area these past three episodes she hasn't actually met up with the main plotline yet. She needs to, because she looks cool and I want to see more of her.

If this is pirates and Naruto is ninjas I think that I'm going to have to root for pirates from now on.

... finally, I know full well there are some truly dreadful One Piece Sues out there; I've seen a couple of them coming through marysues and other various spork journals. Part of me wants to go back and look now I have a slightly better idea what's going on with the series. The rest of me - and it's a very very large part of me - just goes AUGH not my new fandom BITCH STAY AWAY FROM LUFFY. They do not deserve his awesome, but then again, who does?

Also, Danny Elfman is a twisted genius.