This episode was a bit of a rare glimpse into Luffy confronting that pirates are typically pretty evil. The dissonance between his experienced reality of piracy & the theoretical concept of piracy he holds in his heart causes the eponymous anger within him, but he wins the battle and moves on, as expected. When Luffy states “I’m gunna be King of the Pirates!” and the Black Cat crew is like, “Really?” they seem genuinely to believe him, though, and I think that’s interesting.
This wholeass episode mostly just focused on Usopp leaving the island, which I guess makes sense as this is essentially the conclusion of his origin arc. I feel like the opening credit animation thing is a bit of a spoiler cuz I guessed he was going to be a permanent crew addition based on that, and now I will expect the same in future episodes with other characters in the intro animation. I think an important & clever detail that wasn’t explicitly mentioned was that Usopp is leaving his children pirate crew behind to pursue a life of piracy in a very similar way to how his own father left him behind for a life of piracy.
The giant backpack was clearly a metaphor for Usopp’s baggage in life, mentally, emotionally, or otherwise, and it was an impactful sequence of scenes seeing how leaving his house with all the baggage left the home in shambles, and then propelled him even faster to the ship, but then became possibly dangerous, until his new friends were easily able to help calm him down & keep him safe; more excellent storytelling that utilizes the advantages of animation.
We do see that Usopp’s “lying” is ultimately shown to “pay off” in a sense, but it makes me wonder, is it better to keep the people in the village ignorant to the facts of the situation? It probably was, all things considered, if they had never been otherwise attacked by pirates before. The people on the island would be much happier and calmer if unaware of the dangers of reality, but is that a morally superior position? Soren Kierkegaard would say something like being ignorant of despair is worse than despair, but is he correct? Again, these answers are much deeper than “yes” or “no” and this episode explores potential results from varied approaches to these dilemmas. This philosophical dichotomy is emphasized by another perspective on the value of reputation by contrasting how most of the village views Usopp with the way his close friends on the island view him: both are true but each one is more useful to each one who holds it in this scenario, and there is no absolute truth to be held.
I am posting this after midnight but I watched this episode on my 36th birthday, the 26th anniversary of the first episode of One Piece airing, with my wife & my mom who is visiting, and what a trip of an episode to be my birthday episode to watch with the family by sheer coincidence. So many quick paced scenes and flashbacks and exposition and unattached dialogue bits, I honestly wish more of the show went at this pace more often. I’m curious if anyone has stitched together nothing but 1000+ of the recap scenes at the beginning of each episode into an abridged version of the show, it would likely be over 24 hours long but maybe still more approachable somehow.
Last note, how did Merry survive? I thought for sure that dude died and it was part of the power of that episode but I guess he is alive and maybe that doesn’t take away from the power because the feelings of fear and loss Merry & Kaya were feeling in that episode were still valid even if Merry was ultimately okay. The trauma of the unfortunate events is not invalidated by survivorship.