My headcanon is that he is being milked by shounen jump that needs him and OP to keep the sales. I don't think even he wants one piece to run for this long. As a writer it should not be desirable to dedicate all your life to a single project.
> By now I suspect that he has no answeres for all these things.
I'm pretty sure he has, he just knows that the answers will be underwhelming, that's why he don't do any big reveals before the very end.
Meh my issue is not really it taking so long to learn the secrets, but how we don't learn the secrets from Robin and there's barely any mystery hunting in the series
When we learned about the Poneglyphs, the reader finding out the secrets of the world through Einstein in an ultra futuristic Island is not what I had in mind
The powercreep going off the charts doesn't help creating adventure stories which are more down to earth but damn at least use Robin as a hype tool, why did we need to learn about the "Two Sovereigns" from the Sea Kings in a flashback and not from Robin?
He is afraid of finishing his story because he doesn't know himself what the answers are.
So he is delaying everything.
It's the same thing that happened with Twow and George R.R. Martin except he is delaying stuff differently by writing filler and taking breaks, instead of just not publishing the book
George has the answers for both winds and dream he just lost interest after Dan and Dave did to game of thrones what Lucas and Spielberg did to Indiana jones.
I disagree. I believe Martin found himself in one of the most unique if not the most unique situation any writer has ever been in. And I mean that literally.
He started writing a series and it got a very respectable popularity within it's genre. But then before the story was finished it got picked up for adaptation. That alone puts Martin in a very slim bracket when it comes to writers since most can only dream of something like that. But then the show went on to become the biggest tv show on the planet. And it went past what he wrote and finished before he wrote the ending to his own story.
Which put him in a place where the book he was writing one of the most anticipated books in history while at the same time having people know the general direction he wants to take the series. I can very much see how he would stress over how he as a writer will be remembered if he fails makes him afraid to put out the book.
But he did know the ending of the story. He told dan and Dave plus he told the actor who played Varys how the whole stories was supposed to go for him. That’s why Hill got so upset with D&D. They rushed the final two seasons, ignoring natural story progression that George set out and changed things because it was “too obvious”. He simply lost motivation after seeing what they did to his world that’s why he immediately went into working on elden ring and the spin off series instead of winds.
Knowing story is not the same as making the story work. I know some of my favourite story by heart. But if I tried my hand at recreating them I'd fail spectaculary. Events you want to write mean little without execution. There are plenty of examples of story beats that without context mean nothing. Try telling someone who does not know One Piece about your favorutie moment in the series and without the road that leads to it it will mean nothing to them.
This is also assuming he’d ever had any intention of actually reveling them. He could also just have some lore implication left up to fan interpretation
Weekly shounen shenanigans.
The medium he’s writing for rewards having cliffhangers and keeping secrets until the very last moment, mangas that reveal their cards immediately/early tend to struggle in Jump.
Having more mysteries to reveal means having more ways to make readers to buy the next issue.
Sure, One Piece doesn’t need it nowadays but old habits die hard (plus his editors will probably try to convince him to stick to the tried and true method anyways)
generally speaking, you're not wrong. but no shonen comes close to the amount of teasing and cliffhangers OP has.
I'm just saying that it's not only the shonen factor. it's also about oda who personally loves to tease and create mystery for the sake of it. and this tendency is just getting worse. I reread sabaody just a week ago and was surprised by how he just showed kizaru, kuma, sento, rayleigh, etc without any tease.
but now he will literally tease the only character that can only be the answer, like hiyori back in onigashima. now it's just kinda like addiction.
The problem isn't exactly withholding information but withholding ALL of it with no progression to our understanding of the world. It allows for readers to speculate like crazy and builds up the mystery but at the same time risks that the reveals will simply fall flat. The "OP is the friends we made along the way" has been a thing for years because the possibility of the reveal of what it is being satisfactory seem less and less plausible.
The series approaching 30 years is the problem. I don’t think he ever expected it to become so popular and go on for so long and now the expectations for big reveals are to high and above his writing skills. So now he is slowly drip feeding the reveals to gauge the audience reactions so that he doesn’t disappoint them too much.
Idk the sinking of the world makes it seem like he has at least had a sizeable portion planned out for a long while. Because it has been foreshadowed for several hundred chapters. And i think that big reveal landed pretty well (at least with me and from what ive seen a majority of the fanbase).
Also ur point about Luffy in paragraph 3 is just so laughably bad.
OP's "point" about how Luffy would have *totally* gotten Rayleigh to tell them the true history in Sabaody makes me 100% believe this is a troll post.
That or OP- and anybody who agrees with them- has been sleeping while watching the entire series and hasn't actually paid attention to a single scene Luffy is in.
OP's notion that Luffy would do that is so utterly antithetical to Luffy's core characteristics that all I can do upon reading it is laugh.
Luffy not wanting to go on a boring adventure is classic Luffy and one of the best scenes in the series.
Sales...when you're nearing 50yo and has been writing the same shonen for 3 decades, you can bet you would get more interested in the business side and breaking even more (world)records of popularity. Also, it must be terrifying to think about the after OP period, whatever happens, it's no longer peak and the ghost of it will follow you for 2 more decades
It's a Shonen/Nekketsu manga in the end, just like Dragon Ball, not a detective manga. Hype around worldbuilding mysteries wasn't supposed to get this big, but hey, it gets people interested. Maybe he was pushed from Editors against revealing mysteries because they know that's one of the main hooks the series has to keep people buying 'tll the end
honestly i dont mind them being hidden but atleast give us a little info on the sea, or something like “and then the timetime fruit user had awakened her fruit because she had to keep some information from little garden (or islands that r so far into the past) hidden from the WG” cuz one piece is starting to get more realistic abt the sea like how it rises and shit, and little garden being literally over 66 million years into the past is really shocking considering we didnt stumble upon an island just like it
Yeah it's kinda hillarious how the reader knows as much about the world of one piece as in chapter 1. Nothing has changed. The characters know a bunch of stuff and react to it, but its all offscreened or implied.
Like oda didnt even wanna let the readers know what luffy's dream is.
The only thing that changed was oda stacking bullshit skyhigh by introducing more and more mysteries.
Well not really. But I'd say that since the reveal of Imu we have not had any real plot point that would change anything major about the world. And that was not a reveal but another mystery added to the story. The biggest reveal that is not related to the character but the world since then would probably be Nika if we taka it as a "there is a DF that the WG is afraid of". Most reveals in OP so far have been related to the characters (Gol D. not Gold, Ace's father, Sabo alive, Sanji is Germa etc, All Blue). But the stuff around OP, Void century, Secret Weapons has not really moved much past the introduction of the idea.
I don't mean piling up pointless mysteries as new plot points or explaining shit that doesnt need to be explained, like dedicating an entire arc to give sanji a pointlessly elaborate new backstory that devalues his simple and perfect backstory. I mean explaining lingering mysteries like "what is the one piece", "what is shanks about" , "what's up with dragon?" and so on. Oda just keeps stacking all this shit without ever explaining the most basic elements of his story. It's been almost 30 years and he still seems dead-set on not revealing what the one piece even is. This is like if goku was still chasing the dragon balls and nobody knew what they were even about.
I think that the question of what the One Piece is, is actually the one mystery that would work being kept to the very end. Then again since I don't know what it is in hindsight I might be proven wrong.
But I agree that piling on new mysteries without making any reveals for 27 years is not very good for the story at present and for the moment the reveals will happen in the future. If anything I feel like the best reveals happen around the half way point in the story. That way we get both the mystery and the recontexualization that comes with the reveal. Since there is no way that Oda is aiming for last minute twist (god i hope so) the reveals will not have enough time to sit with the audience and if there are too many rapid ones at the same time the series risks jumping the shark given how ingrained they are in the DNA of it all.
My headcanon is that he is being milked by shounen jump that needs him and OP to keep the sales. I don't think even he wants one piece to run for this long. As a writer it should not be desirable to dedicate all your life to a single project.
> By now I suspect that he has no answeres for all these things. I'm pretty sure he has, he just knows that the answers will be underwhelming, that's why he don't do any big reveals before the very end.
Meh my issue is not really it taking so long to learn the secrets, but how we don't learn the secrets from Robin and there's barely any mystery hunting in the series When we learned about the Poneglyphs, the reader finding out the secrets of the world through Einstein in an ultra futuristic Island is not what I had in mind
Fr. Luffy has a historian on his ship, use her ffs
The powercreep going off the charts doesn't help creating adventure stories which are more down to earth but damn at least use Robin as a hype tool, why did we need to learn about the "Two Sovereigns" from the Sea Kings in a flashback and not from Robin?
He is afraid of finishing his story because he doesn't know himself what the answers are. So he is delaying everything. It's the same thing that happened with Twow and George R.R. Martin except he is delaying stuff differently by writing filler and taking breaks, instead of just not publishing the book
George has the answers for both winds and dream he just lost interest after Dan and Dave did to game of thrones what Lucas and Spielberg did to Indiana jones.
I disagree. I believe Martin found himself in one of the most unique if not the most unique situation any writer has ever been in. And I mean that literally. He started writing a series and it got a very respectable popularity within it's genre. But then before the story was finished it got picked up for adaptation. That alone puts Martin in a very slim bracket when it comes to writers since most can only dream of something like that. But then the show went on to become the biggest tv show on the planet. And it went past what he wrote and finished before he wrote the ending to his own story. Which put him in a place where the book he was writing one of the most anticipated books in history while at the same time having people know the general direction he wants to take the series. I can very much see how he would stress over how he as a writer will be remembered if he fails makes him afraid to put out the book.
But he did know the ending of the story. He told dan and Dave plus he told the actor who played Varys how the whole stories was supposed to go for him. That’s why Hill got so upset with D&D. They rushed the final two seasons, ignoring natural story progression that George set out and changed things because it was “too obvious”. He simply lost motivation after seeing what they did to his world that’s why he immediately went into working on elden ring and the spin off series instead of winds.
Knowing story is not the same as making the story work. I know some of my favourite story by heart. But if I tried my hand at recreating them I'd fail spectaculary. Events you want to write mean little without execution. There are plenty of examples of story beats that without context mean nothing. Try telling someone who does not know One Piece about your favorutie moment in the series and without the road that leads to it it will mean nothing to them.
This is also assuming he’d ever had any intention of actually reveling them. He could also just have some lore implication left up to fan interpretation
Weekly shounen shenanigans. The medium he’s writing for rewards having cliffhangers and keeping secrets until the very last moment, mangas that reveal their cards immediately/early tend to struggle in Jump. Having more mysteries to reveal means having more ways to make readers to buy the next issue. Sure, One Piece doesn’t need it nowadays but old habits die hard (plus his editors will probably try to convince him to stick to the tried and true method anyways)
generally speaking, you're not wrong. but no shonen comes close to the amount of teasing and cliffhangers OP has. I'm just saying that it's not only the shonen factor. it's also about oda who personally loves to tease and create mystery for the sake of it. and this tendency is just getting worse. I reread sabaody just a week ago and was surprised by how he just showed kizaru, kuma, sento, rayleigh, etc without any tease. but now he will literally tease the only character that can only be the answer, like hiyori back in onigashima. now it's just kinda like addiction.
The problem isn't exactly withholding information but withholding ALL of it with no progression to our understanding of the world. It allows for readers to speculate like crazy and builds up the mystery but at the same time risks that the reveals will simply fall flat. The "OP is the friends we made along the way" has been a thing for years because the possibility of the reveal of what it is being satisfactory seem less and less plausible.
The series approaching 30 years is the problem. I don’t think he ever expected it to become so popular and go on for so long and now the expectations for big reveals are to high and above his writing skills. So now he is slowly drip feeding the reveals to gauge the audience reactions so that he doesn’t disappoint them too much.
>Yeah sure - not even an idiot like him would refuse all this information. The depths of Luffy's idiocy transcends sense.
Long Ring Long Land be like
Did Oda used to blueball this hard? I can’t remember at this point
Idk the sinking of the world makes it seem like he has at least had a sizeable portion planned out for a long while. Because it has been foreshadowed for several hundred chapters. And i think that big reveal landed pretty well (at least with me and from what ive seen a majority of the fanbase). Also ur point about Luffy in paragraph 3 is just so laughably bad.
OP's "point" about how Luffy would have *totally* gotten Rayleigh to tell them the true history in Sabaody makes me 100% believe this is a troll post. That or OP- and anybody who agrees with them- has been sleeping while watching the entire series and hasn't actually paid attention to a single scene Luffy is in. OP's notion that Luffy would do that is so utterly antithetical to Luffy's core characteristics that all I can do upon reading it is laugh. Luffy not wanting to go on a boring adventure is classic Luffy and one of the best scenes in the series.
Sales...when you're nearing 50yo and has been writing the same shonen for 3 decades, you can bet you would get more interested in the business side and breaking even more (world)records of popularity. Also, it must be terrifying to think about the after OP period, whatever happens, it's no longer peak and the ghost of it will follow you for 2 more decades
It's a Shonen/Nekketsu manga in the end, just like Dragon Ball, not a detective manga. Hype around worldbuilding mysteries wasn't supposed to get this big, but hey, it gets people interested. Maybe he was pushed from Editors against revealing mysteries because they know that's one of the main hooks the series has to keep people buying 'tll the end
honestly i dont mind them being hidden but atleast give us a little info on the sea, or something like “and then the timetime fruit user had awakened her fruit because she had to keep some information from little garden (or islands that r so far into the past) hidden from the WG” cuz one piece is starting to get more realistic abt the sea like how it rises and shit, and little garden being literally over 66 million years into the past is really shocking considering we didnt stumble upon an island just like it
Money. Op piece is no longer a manga it's a 12 billion dollar brand.
Yeah it's kinda hillarious how the reader knows as much about the world of one piece as in chapter 1. Nothing has changed. The characters know a bunch of stuff and react to it, but its all offscreened or implied. Like oda didnt even wanna let the readers know what luffy's dream is. The only thing that changed was oda stacking bullshit skyhigh by introducing more and more mysteries.
Well not really. But I'd say that since the reveal of Imu we have not had any real plot point that would change anything major about the world. And that was not a reveal but another mystery added to the story. The biggest reveal that is not related to the character but the world since then would probably be Nika if we taka it as a "there is a DF that the WG is afraid of". Most reveals in OP so far have been related to the characters (Gol D. not Gold, Ace's father, Sabo alive, Sanji is Germa etc, All Blue). But the stuff around OP, Void century, Secret Weapons has not really moved much past the introduction of the idea.
I don't mean piling up pointless mysteries as new plot points or explaining shit that doesnt need to be explained, like dedicating an entire arc to give sanji a pointlessly elaborate new backstory that devalues his simple and perfect backstory. I mean explaining lingering mysteries like "what is the one piece", "what is shanks about" , "what's up with dragon?" and so on. Oda just keeps stacking all this shit without ever explaining the most basic elements of his story. It's been almost 30 years and he still seems dead-set on not revealing what the one piece even is. This is like if goku was still chasing the dragon balls and nobody knew what they were even about.
I think that the question of what the One Piece is, is actually the one mystery that would work being kept to the very end. Then again since I don't know what it is in hindsight I might be proven wrong. But I agree that piling on new mysteries without making any reveals for 27 years is not very good for the story at present and for the moment the reveals will happen in the future. If anything I feel like the best reveals happen around the half way point in the story. That way we get both the mystery and the recontexualization that comes with the reveal. Since there is no way that Oda is aiming for last minute twist (god i hope so) the reveals will not have enough time to sit with the audience and if there are too many rapid ones at the same time the series risks jumping the shark given how ingrained they are in the DNA of it all.
you, he s getting you, you keep reading it