#blue period is such a visceral manga to me | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

team7-headquarter · 3 months

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Now that I'm reading One Piece, let me say this: even when I think One Piece is better written, the comparison between both mangas in their pre timeskip period is often done poorly.

Naruto decides to be immediately a more explicit and visceral story in terms of cruelty, with a main cast of 12 year old children. While One Piece takes its time building the foundation for its characters and future arcs, Naruto jumps right into the issue at hand. The first chapter is practically spelling it out to you, the reason why Naruto could and even should be a villain, given the circumstances. He's a sad sight, the loneliness and general dark feelings coating Naruto as a story are strong from the very start. I'm not saying that One Piece doesn't have a lot of dark themes and feelings too, but Oda style is to use comedy and good humor to balance it first. One Piece is lighter at the beginning.

For example, compare the East Blue saga and the Land of the Waves arc. Unfair, I know, but I want to prove a certain point here.

Each arc of the East Blue has a bit of cruelty in it, the worst being Arlong Park. In the 3 first arcs, when Luffy meets his three first nakamas, we can say it is more comedy than tragedy. No one dies, there is cruelty and battles, but it's kept on the "safe side". The villains are shown to be more "evil" than anything else. Morgan, Buggy and Kuro are pirates after all. Then they reach the Baratie and things start to get serious. Sanji's backstory is heavy (everything Sanji and Zeff went through is dark, from the starvation to the amputation and the grey scale of their animosity turned bond). You have the first hint at Nami's complexity as a character, you get a taste of the Grand Line in the Mihawk and Zoro encounter where Zoro almost dies, there's explicit sacrifice...

Like I said, Arlong Park is the worst of it all. The story of the town, of Bell-Mere and her children, of what the fish-men did to Nami... It would be incorrect to say that comedy is out aside. First of all, because one of the most common purposes of comedy is to build the ground for drama. You will need a light mood to present the gravity of the situation at hand. The reader must be desperate to see the characters laughing and joking again, to recover the good times, to preserve the bonds and friendships. All the previous arcs needed to be so silly for Arlong Park to be impactful. Nami lived through hell. There's war and discrimination, abuse, manipulation, government corruption and betrayal. I'd never dare to say it's a light arc.

With Naruto, it's like they went straight to their own Arlong Park. It doesn't get clearer than the explanation Tazuna gave about what was going on with Kato and the bridge. They step out of the gates and there's an assassination attempt where Kakashi pretends to get explicitly murdered in front of the kids so he can figure out what they're dealing with. You have the story of how the local town hero was basically crucified to get his arms ripped by Kato's men. Hell, before all of these you have things like the Uchiha massacre and Sasuke saying his goal is to kill someone.

Then the top of the cake: Zabuza and Haku. They end up dead, both of them. Suddenly the enemy is not just "evil" or "ambitious" but also very very human. Kids killing kids or refusing to kill kids, it's a nightmare. Kakashi kills Haku with a chidori to the chest and the manga lingers on the blood of it all. There's a panel when Sasuke takes a hit meant for Naruto— the visual impact is insane. That one panel of Naruto awakening the kyubi's chakra and threatening to kill Haku? This is not a story about pirates and treasures and dreams. This is a story about survival and murder and duty, where a kid happens to want to dream above all the misery of his world.

Compare now the Arabasta saga and the Chuning Exams. Both are about politics, foul play to take a country/hidden village down, how normal people are nothing but pieces of a bigger game, how the world is baster and more dangerous than anyone could ever imagine.

The difference is that the straw hats choose to participate and choose how to do so. Every step is one they take conscious of the risk. They are teenagers still, sure, but they have their agency and they're powerful enough to not let anyone else push them around. They're at the heart of the conflict, they know what's going on behind the curtains. One Piece is about freedom, something that people in Naruto clearly lack. Even when there's death and sacrifices and a lot of cruelty, it's shown differently than in Naruto.

Team 7 gets thrown into the mess of Konoha's crush knowing nothing. The Chunning Exams are a shit show. The horror of Orochimaru and the cursed mark, the Hyuuga's plotline about family branches and slavery, arms exploding, Rock Lee's fight, Hiruzen's death, Gaara's backstory... Team 7 (at least the kids) move on such a different scale. It's terrifying. The Chunning Exams are war in a micro scale, designed to keep the power balance using their lower class soldiers, children included.

I can keep going, but well. I feel like I made my point clear with this post.

While Naruto's story pace is faster, the characters and the themes aren't rushed per se. It fits that in a world in constant conflict, things keep coming faster and the characters can't catch a break. The journey of the straw hats allows them more time to build the foundations of the crew, going from island to island. The way the stories are told are different too, so it'd be futile to compare them if you don't acknowledge that. What are the core values of the story? What is the general feeling? What is it trying to tell and how it corresponds to the way the story is told?

You either ask yourself those questions or you'll get a half-assed analysis, at most.

#shan's naruto posts #shan blogs about one piece!#shan posts about one piece!#naruto #one piece

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enigmari · 2 years

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i picked up the first volume of blue period last month on a whim and was subsequently absolutely emotionally wrecked. i've never had a story feel like it was lab grown to speak to my high school-early college self the way this does.

i’ve tried to fit my thoughts about this manga into twitter threads, but i have too much i want to say so i’m making it here.

reading blue period fills me with overwhelming feelings of nostalgia and sorrow in equal parts. well, maybe nostalgia is inherently kind of sad, because it’s a fondness for something that’s long gone.

i guess i should start with where i’m coming from going into this. i’ve loved art for my whole life. my earliest memories of art are from when i was maybe 4 or 5, drawing out stories i made with my family. that being said, i never took any art classes as a kid. it wasn’t something i had to really think about or question until i was in junior year of high school, and we all were supposed to pick a career path and colleges and stuff.

at that time, i had no idea what i wanted to do with my career. even though i liked drawing a lot, i wasn’t really good at any field of art in particular. i definitely knew that at the time, which is why i ended up going to college to pursue a graphic design major. i figured i’d just learn as i went and try to make a career out of a ‘safer’ art-related field.

well, seven years and a major change later, that didn’t happen. i didn’t even last that long as an art major, i was already switching to political science in my second year of college. and the thing is, it wasn’t really any feeling of burnout that made me quit. it was being in a room full of my peers, whose objective skills in color theory and life drawing and art theory may have been better or worse than my own, but ultimately they all had something to Say with their art. and i didn’t.

i remember distinctly my final for one of my illustration classes. we were supposed to incorporate the concepts we’d learned over the semester into an 14x22 poster painting, using any materials we wanted. i had been able to feel successful in all the previous assignments we had, because they were all about executing a single concept. but here, at the final stretch, i had all the tools i should have needed. except i just... didn’t have anything to say. i had no theme, no inspiration, no sense of self. (i was also severely depressed and not going to therapy at that time, huh.) standing in our final peer review and looking at how my classmates’ pieces each Said Something, i started to feel right then that i was empty. and this feeling kept coming up in every art class i had that asked me to create something with Meaning, rather than just executing on a skill.

i don’t regret changing majors. legal work is fulfilling for me and i know i’m good at this work, or at least i know how to cultivate the skills i’d need. i can rely on my writing and analysis, and there’s only so many ways to make a legal argument when your system is based on precedents. i can immerse myself in this small bubble of pleadings and research and not have to be faced with existential dread about whether i have Something To Say to the World. i know it’s a little cowardly. i’m okay with living like that for now.

but man, blue period just... drags out all the emotions i thought i had resolved years ago. it makes me viscerally relive the days in high school when i went to college campuses to see their art departments, and i was so in awe of the idea that my work could be on those walls one day. it brings me back to college days of coming to my oil painting classroom on weekends to work on an assignment, and chatting during breaks with the few other classmates doing the same. it makes my hands ache with the phantom memory of holding a charcoal stick and a rubber eraser, the uncomfortable wooden art horse where i drew a classmate’s portrait. i remember all of this and it’s so sweet and gold tinted and it physically hurts.

that’s not even getting into the individual characters in blue period. i find yatora’s slow realization of his own passion, his fumbles when he doesn’t know how to improve or even what improvement looks like, his lightbulb moments when he can understand a new concept or how to execute a new idea all to be so beautiful and real. yuka’s struggles with their gender expression and difficult relationship with their family’s expectations of them. maki’s crushing inferiority complex and constant comparisons to her talented older sister (i didn’t have an older sister to be compared to, but a close high school friend of mine instead). even the characters i don’t find relatable on a personal level still feel so real to me, especially the teacher characters.

i still do art as a hobby, but my free time has been so limited lately because i work full time and i’m also back in school for my paralegal certification. even when i have time, i’m too exhausted to create anything. i think my sense of self has gotten more stable since those early college years, but it’s always been very muted anyways. i don’t know if i would now have Something to Say if i went back to pursuing art as a career, but as i said earlier it’s not something i have to face on a regular basis anyway.

all that is to say, reading this manga has been a journey of self-reflection. it’s an excavation of a path not taken. i’m only turning 25 this year, so i haven’t had much of those to regret in my life yet. i wonder if this will be the first.

#mari.txt #long post #tl;dr the manga about studying art hits different when you did study art #also if we are mutuals on here feel free to shoot me a dm for my twitter

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