One Piece, Chapter 942: The Daimyo of Hakumai, Shimotsuki Yasuie
It feels like forever since I last did a manga review! And this chapter is... it's neat. One Piece is a pretty great long-running manga, but one biggest complaint is its bad habit to basically handle death pretty poorly. Other than Whitebeard and Ace, every other non-villain death in One Piece tends to be marred with the fandom asking the question of "well, is he really dead, or is it just a cop-out?" And while One Piece doesn't do cop-outs as many times and as troll-y as other shonen manga, it does enough that things like, say, Pedro or Pound in the previous arc really end up being cheapened due to that fact.
So killing off Yasuie or Tonoyasu or whoever you want to call him, is... it's definitely a nice move. I honestly can't say that I really care. I've seen people online basically stating that they're in tears and this is a very emotional scene, but I genuinely don't think we spent enough time with Tonoyasu to really care about him as more than a plot device. I feel sad because of his daughter's reaction, less so about losing him as a character -- if nothing else, his death felt more like a bombastic epic-sacrifice moment than an actual tragedy.
Tonoyasu-ie basically uses the highly-public execution to talk shit about Orochi, while also claiming that things like those little scraps of paper that the rebellion are actually using is "just a prank" or something along those lines, while also riling up the public and the citizens to dislike Orochi. We get brief scenes with Ashura Douji, Inuarashi and Kin'emon, before Tonoyasu-ie continues to talk about how Orochi is a shitbag and a coward and a dishonourable scum in front of everyone, and apparently it's enough to get troops whispering about how Orochi totally panicked and fucked things up and all that?
And then Orochi arrives and riddles Tonoyasu's body with bullet holes, seemingly hitting him in the head and causing him to drop from that gigantic cross. Everyone from Ebisu town, including O-Toko, are all crying tears while laughing a lot, and... and it's interesting. Like I said before, Tonoyasu's death is a neat, self-contained arc for this character even if it's not one I'm personally invested in, but we get a bit of a talk from Komurasaki to Zoro, telling him that people of Ebisu Town are straight-up unable to do anything but smile, because of the "Fruit known as SMILE".
And it's an interesting statement. So presumably it's a situation somewhat similar to the whole memory thing in Dressrosa, except instead of taking away people's memories, something is taking away people's emotions? I mean, we know that Caesar Clown's making S.A.D. at one point during the Punk Hazard arc, so it might very well be an interesting plot point about people with their emotions taken away from them. Overall, it's a pretty strong chapter -- again, I really wish the buildup was a bit more gradual because I really didn't feel much of a thing when Tonoyasu dies here, but it's at least something pretty eventful in-universe, and I am interested on the ramifications of what will come from Tonoyasu's death.
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