I like stories a lot first of all and I think the key reason I got into One Piece was because Naruto(which I could fight to defend as the greatest story ever written) was losing steam for me. I dreaded the thought of actually disliking Naruto after so many years of worship so I decided to start another show for the sake of disliking IT in Naruto’s stead.
I remembered a friend of mine who I hated(you know those types of friends who you hate) for ever comparing some no name show called One Piece to Naruto even though he’d watched both and I’d never even as much as seen fan art of One Piece. He’d describe the “cool” stuff in the show and it was equivalent to nails on a chalkboard for me. So in my time of need I looked up OP for the first time ever and starting with cover art I was sure this was some Pokémonesque “anime” that’s actually just an American Cartoon and I was ready to hate it. Even though I quite like Pokémon and American cartoons but at the time I just wanted to find anything to compare to Naruto and say Naruto is better.
As expected the first five minutes of episode one of the anime were enough for me to pull up all these ridiculous conclusions of how shit the show is. I even befriended that friend of mine on Facebook specifically to diss the show directly to him having not even finished the first episode. But after that initial rant the reason I wanted to watch the show in the first place came back to me, I wanted to hate something more than Naruto was pissing me off so I had to either find some other lame show to watch or keep watching OP even though I’d sworn to my friend that I would never finish the first episode to save my life.
Of course I came up with another irrational option, I just decided Anime in general was getting stale and I needed a break(having seen like maybe 2 dozen anime but still thought I’d seen enough to be an expert on whether the entire Medium was stale). Around this point I decided to go into the nostalgia driven world of Anime YouTube channels, that regurgitate my sensibilities with “best AMVs”, “best fights”, “best superpowers”, “Why Naruto is awesome” and the like. It was here that I found a 30 second video of the end of Lucci vs Luffy fight and my jaw literally dropped.
Immediately the details of my friend’s stories of leopard men fighting Steam covered rubber pirates came back and as I watched that clip all I wanted to know was “Why the hell is this kid so intense?”. I repeated the clip over and over again and the most frustrating thing was that I couldn’t remember what the story was leading to this. I could tell it was One Piece despite the better animation by then but I needed to know what the hell was happening, where the hell was the fire coming from in that scene.
Eight episodes or so into the OP anime, a random Dog in a town terrorized by a clown pirate had one of the best backstories I’d ever seen and I immediately could tell this show was special. Somehow all that built up bias disappeared because at heart I know I like stories a lot and OP is one of the best stories ever and I just couldn’t keep away no matter what.(300 episodes later I was shocked to see the return of the Leopard man and it dawned on me I’d forgotten this entire thing a very long time ago).
Submitted September 05, 2018 at 12:25AM by ImmaIvanoM https://ift.tt/2PB3LtW
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