follow me into the rain

Going through my tag "my meta" on Tumblr to see if there's stuff I want to repost here. (I haven't done the back-up thing because I'm honestly not sure most of my Tumblr posts are worth saving.)

And I found a post on One Piece about what the Strawhats call each other and how each of them tends to speak in general. This was originally posted to the old One Piece comm on LJ, years ago, and then reposted to Tumblr in a slightly edited form. I didn't want to lose those edits. Since all my old LJ posts are exported here, I could just go back and edit that one, but I was lazy.

At first I was going to back-date it but then figured that maybe someone will see this and add a comment. I don't know Japanese and depend a lot on what others say regarding this content. Plus I haven't paid as much attention to One Piece dialogue in recent years as I once did. So more contributions are very welcome!
( but it's all behind the cut )

Reposting old stuff from Tumblr, somewhat edited.

Something I find interesting about Blackbeard in One Piece: on the one hand, he's the only D we've seen so far in the series who's shown as legit afraid of dying and ready to plead for his life. (While Luffy's shown some fear as well, it's more of a momentary thing on the surface, while his acceptance of danger and smile in the face of death runs deeper.)

On the other hand, this less than heroic attitude of Blackbeard's hasn't seem to hinder him any. Normally, in an action-oriented shonen narrative like this one, being fearful of physical harm tends to hold characters back and/or make them commit mistakes. This has been true for both sympathetic characters like the early Coby (and on-again, off-again for Usopp) and for profoundly unsympathetic characters like Spandam, whose cowardice hinders him almost as much as his refusal to realise his own flaws does.

Not so for Blackbeard. Maybe eventually that will happen - I wouldn't be surprised - but so far this tendency of his hasn't stopped him from laying out his plans or carrying them out. If anything, it seems to work for him, as it makes him more assiduous about planning well before making his move, waiting patiently for the right moment to strike.

Of course, it should still be noted he's got to have a lot of basic courage anyway to do what he does and move in the very high-stake circles where he goes. And he does show acceptance of the possibility of pain with the use of his Devil Fruit. Still, his attitude towards danger and death nevertheless makes him stand out from other characters with D in their names, as does his unabashedly treacherous nature.

Hullo! Sorry about my scarcity. I come bearing not one, but two recommendations! One for a recently concluded webcomic, one for ongoing One Piece meta.

The first one, I thought I had raved about before, but if so I didn't tag it properly, because I can't find that now. "The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ And Amal" is a webcomic be E.L. Weaver which concluded about a month or so ago. It's a bit of a coming-out gay road movie with a strong slice-of-life-ish atmosphere, full of realistic-feeling observations, lovely art, humour and angst and drama... and great pacing, too. As for the plot, I'll quote from the "About" blurb on the website:

May 16, 2008 - In the span of a single day, Amal calls off his arranged marriage, comes out to his conservative parents, promptly gets disowned, goes on a bender... and wakes up the next morning to find TJ, a lanky, dreadlocked vagrant, frying eggs and singing Paul Simon in his kitchen.

TJ claims that the two have made a drunken pact to drive all the way from Berkeley to Providence. As it happens, Amal promised his sister he'd be there for her graduation from Brown University. And TJ, well... TJ has his own reasons.

The agreement is simple: Amal does the driving; TJ pays the way - but a 3500 mile journey leaves plenty of time for things to get complicated.

***
My second recommendation is another look at One Piece, the manga, from the beginning! This is a bit of a different angle to it than sara_tanaquil's ongoing re-read, which I still heartily recommend: we_are goes deep into themes and characterisation and relationships for each post. Warning: and unlike the former re-read series, we-are does so from the viewpoint of where the series is now (more or less), with spoilers in plain text, not hidden. Currently, we-are just concluded the Kuro arc, and I'm sure the Baratie arc will follow very soon, as we've had updates practically every day lately. This is lovely, meaty stuff, so if you're into meta on One Piece, don't hesitate to dig in! Comments are very welcome too. The master list with links to all the posts so far is here.