One Piece, Chapter 866: Natural Born Destroyer
After a one-week hiatus, we return to our regularly scheduled One Piece reviews. The cover page is still following Cavendish, about how his sheer bishonen powers causes so many women to refuse to marry. Er, because.
We open in the flashback of little Charlotte Linlin, who the manga takes pains to point out that she's "human, 5 years old", even though she's easily triple the size of her parents, who tells her to wait on that spot while they handle some business. Even as a child, she's very much enamoured with sweets and candy. Apparently little Linlin is exiled from the country, and her parents are pretty upset as they sailed away from the island. And, well, Linlin just waits and waits and waits, all Charmander-style.
Then we cut away to how, a hundred years ago, the two great warrior pirate captains of Elbaf (Brogy and Dorry, of course) went missing, and when their crew were about to be executed by the Marines, young Sister Carmel (who's pretty!) shows up, claiming that the Heavens demand a peaceful resolution. Sister Carmel beseeched the marine heads to spare the pirates, and her speech about how the heavens will be upset is followed by a storm appearing (conveniently, or on purpose?). The argument that the execution of Elbaf's pirates will cause retaliation causes the pirates to be spared, and Carmel apparently guided said pirates, as well as orphaned children, and ends up being the bridge of friendship between races.
Then she got old, and turned into how she looked in Big Mom's photograph in the present day. Carmel, of course, adopted big, baby Charlotte Linlin among her assortment of orphaned kids in the island of Elbaf. We get to see Linlin acting like a child. She tried to make a bear and a wolf become friends with each other, and accidentally killed the bear when she lightly hit the bear for eating the wolf, but Carmel saw the good intentions in Linlin, and tells her that she's a good child.
Really, really should've taught her how to control her strength, though. Good intentions don't matter if you break some random dude's bones when you're trying to help swat a mosquito, because, y'know, that dude's bones are still broken. And honestly, I don't agree with Carmel's method of parenting at all, and with her forgiving every single near-mutilation that Linlin does because "aw, she's a kid, she doesn't know better", look at how warped her world-view ends up being! Parents, encourage your kids and don't be a jackass, but sometimes kids need to be sat down and have a long, slow talk about how sometimes they hurt people even though they mean well.
Oh, and Linlin's obsession in making everyone get along and confirm to her ideas of normalcy is totally why she's, like, marrying all kinda of different races and having children with them, right?
Oh, and Linlin's obsession in making everyone get along and confirm to her ideas of normalcy is totally why she's, like, marrying all kinda of different races and having children with them, right?
Anyway, Linlin is accepted into Elbaf culture because giants are nice, and she's introduced to the most horrible thing she could probably imagine -- a 12-day fasting festival, apparently in celebration of the birth of Prince Loki. Oh, and we also get to see young Hajrudin, training to become the successor and/or second-in-command to one of the great pirate warriors (who, um, will totally end up showing up to be Luffy's very influential allies somewhere in the future, yeah?). We also get to see Omo and Kasshi, the giants from the Enies' Lobby arc, hang out and talking about how they should go get their captains around ten years later.
We also get to see two super-old elders of the village, "Waterfall Beard" Yoruru and "Mountain Beard" Yaruru, who, while respecting of the trading-over-pillaging concept that Carmel brought to their land, but they kind of don't want the old viking-giant style of warrior culture to be forgotten.
We also get to see two super-old elders of the village, "Waterfall Beard" Yoruru and "Mountain Beard" Yaruru, who, while respecting of the trading-over-pillaging concept that Carmel brought to their land, but they kind of don't want the old viking-giant style of warrior culture to be forgotten.
Also, someone had to tell Linlin that there is this super-delicious snack called Semla, and she goes full gluttony and starts eating it a lot. Three days later, fasting doesn't agree well with Linlin, of course, and her obsession with sweets, and the bad parenting mentality of 'oh, she doesn't mean any harm, so it's okay' combined with the fact that she's apparently a super-powered child...
Ends up having Linlin fuck up the village. I'm pretty sure all the giants that are on the ground around the rampaging semla-hungered Linlin only have broken bones and concussions, but still, come on. Yes, Yoruru going straight into "kill the kid!" mode isn't much better (and he's probably going to get killed by Linlin because of it) but honestly, can you blame the kid? Blame the parent, really, for spoiling the kid so much that she literally can't take no for an answer. And before someone mentions it -- no, a parent that enables and spoils their child is nowhere as bad as a piece of human filth like Judge that actively shits on their offspring, but you can't say that Carmel's methods of parenting are good at all.
So, yeah. A pretty decent flashback, I suppose. Shows the origin of Big Mom's warped womanchild personality, and manages to show Carmel as a kind and well-intentioned parent. Even if I strongly disagree with her parenting methods.
well,big mom can split fire while I was not watching .because i dont see another reason why the village is on fire other than for a dramatic scene .
ReplyDeleteand giant are pretty weak after all . i'm a little disappointed.
Well, personally, I think it's less that giants are weak and more that Haki is just that powerful - it's like in Dragon-Ball where muscles are good, Ki is really good, and muscles plus Ki are even more-so. And in One Piece, Haki can basically let you either read the future, sap the will to fight from others, or break or cut down stuff way bigger than you or would normally be intangible to you (like Logia-Types) whilst making yourself all but invulnerable to anything else but other Haki-users.
DeleteAlot of what Big Mom seems able to do is because she was a natural at Haki, which is probably what got her exiled when little in the first place. It also explains why she wanted to get re-inducted into giant's culture through Lola - she grew up with them, so wanting back to that world after a loss of control would of course be a dream for her. Of course, as Blackjack already pointed out, it really didn't help that the concept of "boundaries" (or even a real separation between desires and intents or why good wishes alone doesn't justify overruling/trampling on other people's right) wasn't really taught to her all that well. So of course there's no control factor there.
It's not that the giants are weak, I think, it's that Big Mom is that hideously strong. Which I think is what the flashback is trying to point out in relation to how she is in the present day.
DeleteLike, she is still a Yonkou, which means she's the equal to the likes of Kaidou (a.k.a. the immortal man that cannot be killed) in terms of power levels. The chapter quickly establishes that little Linlin, even when she's not rampaging due to a sweet-eating-desire (which, in her adulthood, we've seen to be quite destructive where she literally eats her son's soul), is already capable of causing multiple fractures on a giant by an act equivalent to slapping a mosquito. Add Haki to that whole mix, and whatever the reason she's so big (is she an adopted giant? Did she eat the soul soul fruit before she was 5? Is she part of Vegapunk's experiments?), and the fact that she probably took the giants by surprise...
Plus, we have seen giants beaten before -- they're just big humans, after all, and while they might be more durable than most... Neither the pre-timeskip Straw Hats nor the Marines really had much trouble dealing with Omo and Kasshi; and Hajrudin was taken out like three times during the Dressrosa arc by different combatants.