BENGHAZI 2 fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Oct 16, 2015

• Ben Beckmann tells Luffy that the duties of a pirate include "pillaging" and "hostage-taking." While Luffy does technically do those things (stealing the gold from Skypeia, holding Caesar Clown hostage), it implies to me that the Red Hair Pirates are more ruthless than the Straw Hat Pirates, despite Shanks's reluctance to start pointless fights. Lucky Roux's headshot of a mountain bandit seems to confirm this.
  
• Shanks losing his arm to the Lord of the Coast becomes a bit less unimpressive when you consider the implied speed involved; he jumped in from off-panel and yanked Luffy out of harm's way while LotC's jaws were clamping down.
  
• I rewatched the first few episodes of the anime recently as well, and I was struck by how much crueler Luffy hitting Coby seems in the anime. It's one example of how things that "work" in a static medium don't when animated. (Another, repeated, example of this is Luffy's fighting style; the anime tends to make it look like he's giving his opponents huge openings they aren't taking)
  
• On the other hand, Alvida's feats of strength come across more clearly in the anime.
  
• The way Alvida's infobox specifically mentions that she's a female pirate makes me wonder whether Oda originally intended pirates to be almost exclusively male. In fact, after Alvida, we don't meet any female pirates until Nami is revealed to be a member of Arlong's crew; Buggy, Kuro, and Don Krieg all have all-male crews as far I remember.
  
• The scene where one of Alvida's crew members doubts the existence of Devil Fruits and Alvida explains them is anime-only.
  
• Coby says that Luffy "must have eaten the fruit of the Gum-Gum tree." This is rather odd in light of what we learn about Devil Fruits in the Punk Hazard arc. I'm not sure if it was loose translation or Oda originally conceiving of Devil Fruits as growing on trees and then retconning it. It doesn't create a plot hole, since it makes sense that Coby would have no real knowledge of Devil Fruits, but I doubt Oda actually intended Coby to be mistaken at the time.
  
• The Viz translation has Rika saying that Zoro saved her from "a bunch of" Helmeppo's dogs, although the art shows only one dog. Then in the very next panel, Luffy refers to Zoro wounding '"that guy's dog," singular, which Rika confirms. Looks like the translators (not Stephen at this point, but Andy Nakatani and Lance Caselman) weren't thinking things through and got tripped up by the Japanese language's lack of marked plurals.
  
• Zoro's view that being a great swordsman has "nothing to do with being a boy or a girl" is odd in light of some things he says and does later (being shocked when Enel zaps Robin because she's a woman, refusing to fight seriously against Monet). You could argue that it's different because Robin and Monet don't use swords, but neither does Miss Monday, and Zoro had no problem fighting her.
  
• Kuina being lethally off-panelled by a flight of stairs gets mentioned a fair amount, but I'd forgotten that Zoro (whom Kuina beat every time) was already winning against trained adults at that point. Kuina's father then declares that "humans are fragile things," clearly an absurd statement in OPverse. To be fair, this was early in the manga, before Oda had established what "normal" humans could survive.

Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Oct 16, 2015