![One Piece Book Club - [Part 9, Whole Cake]](https://img5.nokimo.com/storage/2/qz/ih/fb3178-019e879d-2dae-7d4b-81b3-cb63a8eada69.jpg)
One Piece Book Club - [Part 9, Whole Cake]
Added 2023-10-08 20:14:58 +0000 UTCIt's Whole Cake / Totto Land, baby. That's the Big Mom arc, a.k.a. the only good arc in the New World of One Piece. Unless Egghead wants to finish strong and prove me wrong!
Comments
I think there is a good reason for all five Vinsmoke kids to exist. Reinu shouldn't be special, or anything, its should just be five kids with color coordinated powers and no emotions (except Sanji), and the others basically act as 1-2 characters, basically indistinguishable in personality. The amount of Vinsmokes isn't about character arcs, it's a design influence, drawing from super sentai and power rangers and stuff. The Vinsmoke Children aren't characters, they're action figures. Judge isn't a awesome evil mercenary, he's a bully who throws his cool action figures at people who he doesn't like. By reducing the mumber of kids, it makes that influence less obvious and less potent. Vinsmoke Judge has been churning out his children to mold them into his perfect toys. Just like Big Mom is a kid playing house, Judge is a bully 'pretending' to murder people with action figures (except he actually is murdering people, unlike a real child).
Noah Finch
2025-06-19 21:55:13 +0000 UTCHaving it be so constant is indeed weird, yes. Every princess being 15-16 and in little tiny outfits is indeed weird and nothing really would have stopped Oda from making any / all of them older. (In their 20s). Not disagreeing. I just don’t personally see a massive issue with pudding specifically because it is fully legal to do it in Sweden where i live… I am personally more of the opinion that the arbitrary line of 16 and 18 just is bullcrap. It Should be HIGHER. You don’t develop fully until you are like 25 anyway and the difference between 15-16-17-18 is as good as indistuingishable. I guess i just have the ever so slightly annoyance, as someone from another country, that every american i meet have this strange focus on ”Anything below 18 is bad! 18 is this magical number.” When 18 is just a randomly picked number at best, when (AFAIK) the rest of the world average around 16. Sorry for a weird tangeant.
Wincent, The Hollow Knight
2023-10-13 12:21:01 +0000 UTCConsistently making the active choice to write every single princess as sixteen years old and sexualizing her with big tits is Fucking Weirdo Behavior™. It is fully within the author's power to make a character 20 or 30 or 55 and give them an outfit that doesn't look like Rebecca's bikini armor. Pudding being *less* gross than the others does not change the fact she is literally the fourth 16 y/o princess in the series at this point. This is an issue. Making Shirahoshi a minor and having a scary creep thirst after her and call her cute at 4 years old is weirdo behavior. Dressing Rebecca like a 70s fetish movie blow up doll is weirdo behavior. Giving Vivi nipple blades that she pulls out of her boobs is weirdo behavior. Anyone over the age of twenty five will tell you that pairing the 21-year-old Sanji off with the 16-year-old pudding is fucking weirdo behavior. Do not defend this shit again.
JelloApocalypse
2023-10-13 08:30:59 +0000 UTCI see, thanks for saying that because he does not look in any way like he isn't a human who ate the mammoth devil fruit. My mistake.
BreadBunny
2023-10-11 18:36:16 +0000 UTCJack is a Fish-Man, he can breathe underwater, but because of his having a Devil Fruit, he can't swim
verdragon 5
2023-10-11 03:48:27 +0000 UTCSo I was trying to figure out why Sanji's sister can drink poison and while it turns out it's just "Germa science" I also found out the wiki divides character combats between important and filler fights and I'm just like... are you fucking kidding me Oda. How bad do you have to be that fans of the series are actually dividing fights between real and unnecessary. By the way sure is fucked up that it's just hard confirmed that if you eat someone who has devil fruit powers then that counts as eating that devil fruit and you get their powers. Oh right do you like how Jack survives getting his entire fleet one shot and drowning for several days! It really made be disbelieve that Pedro actually died when he blew himself up. So in the better version of Whole Cake I would make it so Reiju got put into Sanji's role as scapegoat after he left so her excuse of "oh they'll pick on me if I don't laugh along" would actually ring true and it would give her just that little bit more of a reason to want her brothers and father dead. Then Reiju should have been in secret talks with Big Mom to fuck over her dad and brothers basically promising to make Germa 66 fully subservient to Big Mom instead of just becoming allied in exchange for getting rid of her family and that's why they're planning to kill the Vinsmokes rather than just Big Mom deciding to betray them because she knows they'll betray her first otherwise. It would give Reiju something to do with her "I secretly hate my dad and brothers" deal and also give an interesting conflict between her and Sanji where she'd just tell him straight up like "I've made a deal with Big Mom, you can go and I'll get married". (I'd have her still be getting married to Pudding too btw because like I don't actually see Big Mom caring about grandchildren more than she cares about the connection that marriage brings, also Germa science can make science babies so who cares) Then Sanji has to choose between simply leaving Reiju behind to continue doing work she hates under Big Mom's rule or actually trying to get her out of there too. And then with Luffy barging in it becomes like an active conflict where Reiju is essentially throwing Sanji out of the house but Sanji just keeps coming back to take her with him because he already left without her once and he can't do that again. You can even keep the moment where Judge Vinsmoke has his last minute face-turn where he realizes how hard he fucked up with the way his sons simply do not care and with how his daughter was actively trying to get him killed. Or you can just let them get killed. And Reiji is the only one who gets away either with or without the Germa kingdom surviving. Additionally the revery is where my dislike for Garp started, because like you're telling me he escorts the fishmen up to the Red Line but not up to MarieJeoise where he'd actually be needed to safeguard them from the World Nobles who are going to enslave them! And like sure cool moment for unnessecary character Mjosgard but like Garp should have been the one to stop that telling the world government to fuck off using his status as the hero of the marines. Also last thing, what the fuck is up with the giant straw hat??? Like the straw hat is conceptually very important because it's Roger's old hat but it's just a normal hat right. So why the fuck is there a giant straw hat in the secret super vault???
BreadBunny
2023-10-09 14:37:52 +0000 UTCWhen I think of characters that don't need to exist, I think of Charlotte Baravois, the guy who shows up during the second half of the escape to be next to Perospero
KenofRedLions
2023-10-09 13:09:31 +0000 UTCI will argue that Pudding’s age (being 16), while honestly not necessary and probably could be older anyway… isn’t necessarily a problem. 1: She is not sexualised at any point. She is shown as cute / beautiful… but that is another matter. 2: It does show that Big mom as a character is completely open to marry her children away as soon as possible. Which from a western perspective is very freaky. And 3: I HAVE to point out that age of marriage is 16 in a LOT of different places around the world, including states in the US. To say that a fictional world, especially one as fantastical and dangerous as the one piece one, wouldn’t or couldn’t have a relatively young marriage age is kinda weird. Once again, not saying that Pudding shouldn’t have been older, but at the same time, not a big deal to start with.
Wincent, The Hollow Knight
2023-10-09 04:39:43 +0000 UTCY'know, I tried to come up with some clever way to actually make use of Carrot, some fix- but I kept coming up empty. Like, it's not like she's set up for the potential to do X and then fails to do it, there's no "of course! just use this element of her character and connect it to this bit of the plot!"... there just isn't anything to work with. The more I think about it- you know what they should've done is just *cut Zou*. Like the whole thing. What does it do? It sets up this big scary Jack guy, who's going to be important in Wano- except he's *not* important in Wano. He's just one more interchangeable non-character to eat up screentime with an illegible boss fight involving none of the Strawhats. It sets up some of the samurai a little- except they *already* set up more than enough samurai. You don't need more samurai and you don't need a guy for them to fight! Put the poneglyph somewhere else, have anyone at all drop whatever Kaidou exposition you need to drop without having a mini-arc about it, and just... don't do it! (Which is a shame, because I honestly like a lot of the Mink character designs, and the idea of a migratory living island, and even the stupid static electricity gimmick which is cool in spite of not making any sense. It's kind of like how Homestuck is better if you completely cut the cherub stuff, even though "HAVE THE MALE EAT THE CHILD" is the funniest fucking thing in the comic.)
Benedict Ide
2023-10-09 03:13:40 +0000 UTCDamn it. Double checked for any updates only a couple hours before there was one saying when the stream would be. Then got sucked into playing Stray Gods and before I realized it 7 hours had passed and I had completely missed the stream! I had been looking forward to being in chat in an arc that y'all were going to be more positive towards than negative.
Shortstop wishes all a Happy Holidays
2023-10-09 01:40:34 +0000 UTCWhole Cake Island I think as a setting is perhaps one of the most enjoyable in terms of how it related to Big Mom, the Emperor who rules it, as a reflection of her sort of operation, unlike Kaido who I think flounders it. Big Mom, a Massive vaguely capitalistic Women-child obsessed with sweets, food and a maladjusted notion of equality and togetherness formed a nation basically founded on all her ideals warts and all. She has entire islands dedicated to the production and mastery of various food-stuffs (which allows for an easy fix for her hunger meltdowns and cravings), dozens of children who basically needed to master all sorts of cooking and food related things to match her interests, and a whole Pirate racketeering scheme based solely on food import and harvesting soul fragments to power her omnipresent grip on her people. It is not perfect writing wise, but Whole Cake feels like a setting that was truly crafted by Big Mom and informed by her wants and whims, which makes sense since she is one of the biggest pirate figure heads in the world who could do that kind of stuff. Kaido on the other hand basically squats in Wano as sort of a ominous figure in the background exploiting it for his poorly explained Arms and weaponry trade and stockpile, which is fine, but is even his base Onigashima is not really HIS when you compare it to like Big Mom's turf is it? He has a big Oni shaped skull for a house, cool he looks like that I guess, but its basically just a castle themed after Wano that, while thematic for Wano itself, is not thematic for Kaido (for what little consistent elements we got for him thematically) Big Mom has a much stronger presence in her territory and feels like hers down to the way her crew and citizens dress while Kaido's crib feels like some Japanese fortress he rents (and his crew a bunch of horned bikers which is less a theme and more a dress code), and not truly his. I don't know the comments on Zou being more an interesting set piece than a setting made me think Whole Cake, even if it kinda stupid as a 1984 wonderland of food, really enhances and informs its central figure, Big Mom, while Kaido's hold in Wano feels more like an afterthought where you could have put him anywhere and his exact effect in that setting would be basically the same end result for it and his character.
Zach Rainey
2023-10-09 01:21:09 +0000 UTCThe more of these I watch, the more I find myself simply disagreeing with some of Jello's takes. And it just comes down to personal tastes. I like the lots and lots of characters that comes with Shonen because it leads to some fascinating designs and eventually something's bound to click with someone, even if they don't do a ton. And there's just that raw part of me that's frustrating when Jello immediately calls it bad and needs to be removed, always looking at media through a critical, objective eye. Idk, maybe it's just the fact that I like Shonen for what it is, the filthy Fairy Tail enjoyer that I am. I still enjoy Jello's writing, it's great. It just comes off that he can't let other works have their issues.
mirrorwolf9
2023-10-08 23:19:15 +0000 UTCDang it, I've got a meme about how much Oven sucks and makes no sense but I can't post images on Patreon. Tried to remember the broad strokes of his "plan," It's so terrible.
Blue Glasses
2023-10-08 21:02:16 +0000 UTCHighly disagree on egg head not already proving ya wrong eggs head has been some of the most fun I’ve had with one piece in a while it’s back to exploring and learning of the world and it’s short like it’s not 3 years long it’s already wrapping up and has been one of my favorite arcs because of how much it explores the world egg head doesn’t get enough credit for how fun it is and how much better written it is and how it doesn’t just rely on fights it’s a really hecking strong start for the final saga is all I’m saying
Autumn moon
2023-10-08 20:52:19 +0000 UTCProbs gonna miss it cause work but I wanna say I love how sanji’s cigarette is actually used for it’s intended purpose in this arc instead of just “smoking is cool” (not to say it doesn’t make him look cool) like how he will rapid fire smoke when stressed or take a massive inhale when he see his two older brothers again.
Psycho
2023-10-08 20:35:35 +0000 UTC
