Top Gun

I'm mostly confused about how I'd "seem bald." How is that a thing?

The fuck we doing here?

From what I understand the Deen adaptation also throws in some content from the UBW and Heaven's Feel arcs, so if you're not interested in playing the VN any part you start with is going to at least partially spoil the other parts. (I've also heard that, while decent, it doesn't quite live up to ufotable's work on the franchise. Deen's single-movie adaptation of UBW is supposed to be a complete trainwreck though.) I have seen some suggestions to watch Zero before UBW, and after getting through the first episode of the former that feels like terrible advice. UBW eases you into the story with individual episodes focused on Rin and Shirou, so things get explained to you as they are to them, but Zero's first episode throws a whole bunch of names out there that would mean nothing unless you'd experienced some form of the story before that.

Unlimited Blade Works is good shit, though with the caveat that as a visual novel adaptation it's part of a larger interconnected story that also has at least a dozen other random spinoffs. I never got into Fate stuff before this because it seemed completely inscrutable as an outsider, but I think UBW wound up being as good a place as any to start. There's a prequel called Fate/Zero that ufotable animated before doing UBW and provides some important backstory for it, but the catch is that the novel Zero is based on came out after the original visual novel, so it's a toss-up as to what's actually "supposed" to come first. Based on the nerd arguments I've seen there are valid arguments either way.

Plus I think the point Poke was making was that...the season's over. It's a rerun now. Of course it'll get bumped to the end.

I still have no idea what the hell Anime.com actually does.

Amazed it lasted this long to be honest. Guess it was good for getting me to finally watch a Fate thing.

Oh man, Dutch Wonderland, now that brings me back. We went there several times when I was a little kid.

Ooh, fancy.

Kinda disappointed you didn't go with "Vote me baby one more time."

Luffy isn't going to kill anybody ever. It's not in his nature, not should it be. He beat down Doflamingo, the Navy has him in custody, and he's out of the picture in Dressrosa. That's all that matters. Even if the government wants to execute him, they literally just took him prisoner, and they weren't going to shoot him on the spot. But they almost certainly won't. For one, he no doubt has massive dirt on all sorts of powerful individuals, and maybe he'll feel chatty about them at some point. Much more importantly...he's a World Noble. A disgraced, exiled World Noble, but still. (And a former Warlord to boot.) That's not the type of blood the government is going to willingly spill. At least not publicly, anyway. And why shouldn't Doffy get one more word in? He's a great villain with swag for days.

Luffy hasn't killed a single villain he's beaten for the entire series. What makes you think he's going to start now?

The Mutts continuing to Mutt is the very best thing about baseball each year.

You can usually peel them off, use a piece of Scotch tape to remove the offending hair, and put them back on again.

Carl's Stone Cold Lock of da Century: Of da Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek

What are you talking about, it was clearly because I sat in that one specific spot on the couch and didn't move the whole game.

I'm not about to sit through this whole thing right now, but depending on when the Toonami team made those comments they were...probably right? After the original slate of Cartoon Cartoons tailed off there were a lot of lean years for the network, before you got to more modern successes like Adventure Time or Regular Show.

I think Monet had bigger concerns than the explosion...namely, Caesar mistakenly stabbing her heart because he thought it was Smoker's. Hard to come back from that one. Buffalo was Baby 5's partner, the big guy who could fly with a propeller growing out of his neck. We saw him as a kid during Law's flashback. I'm pretty sure he was explicitly shown getting arrested by the Marines after Doflamingo was defeated. And psh, you think a little fire was enough to kill Jesus? He will rise again!

Imagine getting murdered by Pica's giant stone crotch.

Hell I'd watch that.

Arlong Park is a bit of an oddity in that it really starts in the middle of the previous arc, Baratie. You're right that I did have to look up a bit as a refresher (again, it's been a long time), but the arc kicks off when Nami steals the Going Merry and sails to her home. Zoro and Usopp chase after her right away, and after Luffy finishes off the Baratie antagonist he and Sanji follow them too. So in that regard they all wind up on Nami's home island due directly to her actions. After that there are really only a handful of episodes before the big final fight starts. Nami interacts with the rest of the crew a couple of times in an attempt to drive them away (including a faked killing of Usopp to save him from the Arlong Pirates), and then the key part is Nami's sister showing up to tell her whole backstory. You do have a point in that Luffy doesn't really care about this part and checks out, but that's more down to his character: he's a single-minded and direct kind of guy, and if he's already decided that he trusts someone, then he doesn't need to hear anything else. Then after that Nami gets screwed over one last time and begs Luffy for help and you have the iconic scenes of him putting his hat on her and marching on Arlong Park and the big fights begin. The characters don't have much time to do any wandering before the crucial flashback and subsequent fight, and what they do on the island is either related to finding Nami or interacting with her directly. I think I have a better understanding of what you mean now, but I don't think that Arlong Park is the best example of it. If there are story elements that I think fit what you're describing, then they occur fairly early on in the series ("early" being a relative term for something this gargantuan), and as I said I think it largely moves past them. Maybe it didn't move past them quickly enough for you, and that's fair enough. I said it before, but I also think there's a need to differentiate between the story that Oda wrote, and the way in which Toei has adapted that story into anime. Like every long-running shounen adaptation ever created, there's a need to stretch the material out to fill a weekly anime slot, and in One Piece's case that's usually done by slowing down the pacing in-episode, rather than inserting gargantuan filler arcs like Naruto or Bleach. I don't read the manga myself, but I've spent enough time with the anime to have a good nose for when Toei's pulling some stalling tactics. Without any other specific examples to go on, I'd wager that at least some of the "comedy relief side plots" you're talking about are anime-original material. There are still some traditional filler episodes and arcs too. During the Loguetown arc there are a few random filler episodes (I think one of them is actually based on a published side story), and after it the whole Apis arc with the dragons and the girl with the dumb pope hat is filler as well. There are a handful of filler episodes scattered throughout Alabasta too. Not to say that any and all comic relief is filler, far from it, but I have to think that at least some of your complaints fall under it. I guess the last bit is that the characters that Oda reintroduces and gives expanded roles much later on tend to be those involved in the main plot of an arc, even if in an ancillary fashion. Just as one example, one of the Fishmen from the Arlong Park arc plays a significant role in an arc much later on (and got a cover arc story in the manga before that). It's not a character I don't think most people were clamoring to see again, but it's fun when those sorts of characters pop up and get a chance to do more the second time around. The more significant a character was the first time they appeared, the more impact they'll have later on. Vivi was the driving force behind the entire Baroque Works saga, and let's just say she's been involved in a huge way in the manga/anime's recent past. Probably the most noteworthy example of this are the Supernovas, a group of pirates with unique designs and powers vaguely on-par with Luffy that Oda infamously banged out in a week or so because I guess he wanted to draw some cool characters. Nearly all of them have been major players in the second half of the series, and some of them have spent dozens or even hundreds of episodes involved with the Straw Hats and received massive character development themselves. Again, I get it if you're not interested in waiting around for that long, but maybe the best thing about One Piece for those of us who are fans is that pretty much everything gets a great payoff in the long run.

Not just that, but Doflamingo was a notorious underworld broker. We know he was working directly for Kaido, hence Law's original plan (read: excuse) to target him, but let's just say that wasn't his only client.

No, it does worse than that, because it's basically saying "no, carbon dioxide doesn't do anything, and a bunch of computer programmers made the rest up." It's willful disinformation.

You know an article is legit when it starts with a shitty AI image at the top. But yeah, this is dumb and wrong on just about every level. Read things that cite actual peer-reviewed research please.

(Got beat to this reply but I'm too lazy to go back and change what I had.) I wish you had some specific examples of what you meant, because I've been following this series continuously for nearly 20 years but nothing immediately comes to mind. Granted it's been a hot minute since I've gone back and watched Romance Dawn. What I do know is that those early arcs were very simplistic in structure. You'd have one main villain that Luffy needed to fight, maybe a couple of subordinates for one or two of the other crew members to take on, and not a whole lot else. As the arcs start getting more complex and there are multiple concurrent plot threads going on, that's when you see the crew split up to complete important tasks or fights on their own. The Alabasta arc is probably the first time it happens on a larger scale. By the time you get to the Dressrosa arc that's just finishing up on the Toonami broadcast, the amount of "MEANWHILE..." cut-aways to all of the different conflicts going on at once got to meme level. The Devil Fruit thing makes some sense if you think about how the One Piece world is set up. The Grand Line is the place where almost everything big happens: the Marines are mostly based there, the most dangerous pirates are either all there or want to be there, the most powerful kingdoms all seem to be there, and the very seat of the World Government is located there. This is where most pirates and Marines with Devil Fruits are going to wind up. In contrast, the four regular oceans are relatively quiet, and East Blue in particular is described as the most backwater and inconsequential part of the world. To add to that, sea travel is still relatively dangerous unless you're strong yourself, so most normal people presumably spend their whole lives on the same island they were born on. If you're a regular citizen somewhere in the East Blue, you're almost certainly never going to encounter someone with Devil Fruit powers yourself (at least not until Luffy shows up), so the best you might have is a distant rumor. I doubt the Marines are that eager to see their soldiers' powers revealed in the papers either. The best chance most of these people would have to see Devil Fruit powers in action was in a massive series-changing war that was essentially livestreamed to most of the world, but that comes much later. And true, it's also that the series expanded a great deal from its earliest days, so what was a rare power at the start became ubiquitous later. But when I mentioned world-building I was thinking about elements that you almost certainly didn't see yet in your time with the series. One Piece is a narrative that operates on a few different levels. The first is the basic moment-to-moment story that's limited to the island on which the Straw Hats currently find themselves. For the most part that's all that's going on in the Romance Dawn saga. It's not until the Straw Hats enter the Grand Line and the Baroque Works saga starts that we get the first example of the second level, an overarching goal that connects multiple islands together (in this case helping Vivi return to her kingdom to expose Crocodile and prevent a civil war). And it's not really until the climax of the Alabasta arc that we get the first real glimpse of the higher-level narrative: the mystery of this world's past, how its current rulers seized power and suppressed that knowledge, of hidden ancient weapons and the "Will of D." That's the level that most One Piece fans enjoy the most, that has us hanging on every new reveal over years or even decades. There's been some huge stuff happening in the anime recently (and I'd imagine even more in the manga, which I'm not current on), and it's been immensely satisfying seeing these payoffs after so long. It's definitely a series you need to be in for the long haul though.