duvallon:

brawltogethernow:

brawltogethernow:

Tama: gives Luffy a bowl of rice when he needs it instead of eating herself
Luffy: showers her starving town in literal mountains of fresh food and water in repayment
me: Monkey D. Luffy operates like a fucking fey and for everyone he meets is the random supernatural encounter in a parable about karma starring them. In this essay I will—

#HOLY SHIT YOURE RIGHT
#WHERES THE REST OF THE ESSAY OP (via officialhigashikatajosuke)

Actually there is more. Luffy things:

• strong weirdly rote devotion to wild feasts w/ dancing
• follows rigid but alien blue and orange morality
• rebalances the scales wherever he goes so most people get exactly what’s coming to them beyond the bounds of reason (when Luffy is not nearby, the One Piece universe very much does not operate like this); most major exceptions: both his sworn brothers, who might be of similar stock and obviously don’t count somehow
• on rare occasions spirits people away from their lives on whims
• does not always give them back
• avoids calling people not among this number their real names

• What the actual fuck is One Piece.

if you’re interested in more context, oda based luffy significantly on sun wukong, a monkey god who attained the same power as the daoist pantheon and wreaked havoc in heaven. journey to the west was loosely based on a historical journey to obtain a forbidden set of Buddhist scripture, and sun wukong was in turn based on hanuman, a hindu deity who I think predates the concept of the fae by a couple centuries. incidentally, dbz was based more directly on jttw and oda was absolutely obsessed with dragonball as a kid

but in that sense, sun wukong & many other characters in journey to the west are supernaturally powerful figures whose actions affect those around them in major unexpected and unpredictable ways, a lot like an encounter with the fae might. a lot of wukong’s adventures take him to places where a demon or deity has normal, vulnerable people under his control and he’s strong-armed into helping them or he feels compelled to help because they’ve been kind to him. his first instinct when something or someone pisses him off is usually to beat it up.

that doesn’t seem a lot like luffy, except he does like to say that he’s a pirate, not a hero, and he doesn’t wanna be a hero cause a hero has to share his food. one piece is pretty much exactly what you’d get if you were pitching a concept like ‘journey to the west but pirates, and the main character is the monkey instead of the whiny monk’