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kaizokuou-ni-naru · 3 years

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The Voyage So Far: Dressrosa (Part Two)

east blue (1 | 2) || alabasta (1 | 2) || skypiea || water 7 || enies lobby || thriller bark || paramount war (1 | 2) || fishman island || punk hazard || dressrosa (1 | 2) || || whole cake island || wano (1 | 2)

wild how this is upwards of 750 chapters in and yet i still get a big dumb smile whenever luffy declares he’s going to be king of the pirates. one piece is a series very much driven by its main characters and their goals and dreams- i don’t think it would be nearly as good if the main character was anyone but monkey d. luffy.

personally, i always just feel kind of proud whenever he says this, because- yeah!! he is!! that’s luffy, he’s going to be king of the pirates, and we’ve known that since day fucking one.

i really think there’s something to be said about usopp never taking credit for saving luffy and law from sugar. it’s arguably his greatest feat in the entire series thus far- an impossible, perfect shot across an entire country, with an angry mob inches from his back- and he never even tells anybody he did it. he’s come a long way from someone who tells tall tales about heroic acts he never did to someone who doesn’t even feel the need to take credit for ones he really did, so long as his friends are safe.

i really like how corazon’s introduction and characterization throughout the flashback is handled. at the start of law’s flashback, we know a few things about him already: that he’s someone law loved very much, and that he was killed by doflamingo. we know how this ends.

but then cora is introduced as a clumsy mute weirdo who nearly kills law as one of the very first things he does, and we as the audience aren’t really sure how to reconcile that- and then the rest of the flashback is us, along with law, slowly discovering what a complicated and contradictory but ultimately good person he is. something very similar happens with the asl flashback- we know the endpoint of luffy and ace’s relationship, but the flashback is all about how they got there, from attempted murder to willing self-sacrifice.

i think it’s really cool the way law and doflamingo’s backstories are layered together. they’re characters who exist with a lot of parallels and similarities between them already, which is something they’re both clearly aware of- i’ve mentioned before i think the only real difference between them is that law got corazon where doflamingo got the executives- and presenting their backstories simultaneously only makes that more obvious.

i’ve always found it so interesting that we get what’s pretty much our only substantial exposition about the will of d direct from a former celestial dragon. it makes sense- cora’s basically the only character we’ve met who both has this information and is willing to share it- but i don’t know, there’s something that feels very poetic to me about him having this information that’s clearly been suppressed and hidden by the dragons and willingly choosing to share it in order to help protect law, a D, who should technically be the very enemy he was once taught to hate and fear.

i really like corazon.

it fucks me up that we can tell the exact moment cora dies from the moment law starts making noise again.

this might be a controversial take? i’m not sure. but i like baby five. i think her and sai’s relationship is really sweet, and people might complain about her getting off easy or whatever but i’m honestly glad she gets a happy ending after being thoroughly emotionally abused and broken her entire life. and on a lighter note, she’s also just a fun character to watch through the whole arc- the running gag with her crying whenever law glares at her is still one of my favorites in the whole series.

the shot of robin’s bloody back is a favorite of mine, because it’s a reveal that doesn’t get lingered on at all, and yet at once it gives the entire proceeding scene a lot more weight when we understand just how much pain she must’ve been in the entire time. and yet she never even flinched or faltered while protecting rebecca. nico robin is very, very strong.

there’s something so deliciously fitting about diamante’s final fall ending with him cracking his head on scarlett’s grave, and something so lovely about kyros and rebecca finally getting their proper reunion there, when neither of them ever really got a chance to mourn.

law’s line about the strawhats trailing nothing but miracles in their wake is one of the first ones i always think of when i think about the strawhats in general and luffy in particular, mostly because it’s so true. from the very beginning, the strawhats have been doing the impossible, from sailing to the sky to breaking in and out of the world’s greatest prison, and law saw that and staked all his hopes on it and they did not let him down.

also i think it’s very cool of law to, when held at gunpoint and down an arm, grin, flip doflamingo off, and tell him to eat shit and that luffy is going to kick his ass. love that for him.

i think dressrosa does a very good job of making the victory against doflamingo equally law’s and luffy’s. they cooperate and trade off fighting him throughout the arc to great effect, and i think it’s pretty clear that neither of them could have tackled the massive challenge of dressrosa alone.

while the final fight is luffy’s, it’s made clear that that’s only after law’s done absolutely everything he could and spent the majority of the arc distracting doflamingo, keeping him occupied, and even fucking shredding his insides with pure radiation before finally needing to tap out. i think it’s a good balance, given that luffy is the protagonist but law’s grudge against doflamingo is the driving force behind the entire arc.

conqueror’s haki clashes are always very cool, pretty much regardless of who or where or why, but the one between luffy and doflamingo is a favorite.

one of the things that’s always impressed me about one piece in comparison to other shounen series is how it handles its powerscaling- in that it does it well with a gradual increase and villains who vary widely in strength instead of every arc necessarily needing to be bigger and better than the last- and i think the way it handles powering up the main characters is a big part of that.

through the entirety of one piece thus far, i’d say luffy has had three major power-ups- second and third gear in enies lobby, haki at the timeskip, and gear four here in dressrosa (an argument could also be made for ryuuou in wano, but i think that’s less major than these others). this helps prevent runaway powerscaling and also makes new power-ups feel like a genuine event, which i really like.

i once referred to luffy as ‘hopebringer’ in a conversation with friends, and it’s a descriptor for him i think sums up really well how he manages to save so many people while insistently not being a hero. luffy inspires people, inspires whole countries, starting all the way back with coby in romance dawn. it’s one of the reasons i think it’s fitting how thoroughly he’s associated with the dawn.

doflamingo is very, very scary. which is interesting, because he’s indisputably less powerful someone like kaidou, but at the same time i find him a much scarier villain, and i think it comes down to doflamingo’s gleeful, wanton cruelty. not that kaidou is in any way shape or form a nice person, but our first introduction to doflamingo is him forcing marines to attack each other just because he’s a little bored. he hurts people just because he can, and finds it funny.

relating to my earlier comment about hope, i really like how the whole country comes together at the end to cheer luffy on and count down to his return. it makes it feel all the more triumphant when it does, especially for the citizens of dressrosa who’ve been suffocating under doflamingo’s rule for years and can finally, finally see freedom.

other people have put a lot more thought of the symbolism of doflamingo’s eyes and glasses than i intend to, but i’ll settle for saying that it’s the breaking of the glasses, before anything else, before the birdcage even vanishes from the sky and everyone is safe, that shows us that, at long last, doflamingo is well and truly defeated. his glasses break, and so does his power.

i’ve written a longer post about it before (here) but it’s a recurring motif that one piece’s worst villains are those that steal people’s freedom, including, in the cruelest cases, the freedom to express their emotions openly. we see it with koala and the celestial dragons, with the failed smile fruits in wano, and here, too, with kyros. and, much like koala, triumph for him means finally being able to cry.

i mentioned it back in the first post, but i’m so, so happy rebecca and kyros get the happy ending they deserve. they’ve both been fighting a war that they never should have had to for years and years, and they both deserve to get to just live, now, peaceful and quiet and together and surrounded by flowers.

i really dig the note dressrosa ends on. it’s happy, of course, obviously, with the liberation of the country, kyros and rebecca’s happy ending, the creation of the grand fleet, even law getting some degree of closure through his talk with sengoku, but it also leaves this massive, gaping question- what now?

in a way, doflamingo’s speech here follows up on law’s new era speech from punk hazard. luffy and law have just thrown a major wrench into the delicate power equilibrium of the entire new world, and we have all these characters out there who might be affected, who might want to take advantage, who might try to seize the throne.

#the voyage so far #one piece #opmeta #arc: dressrosa #long post #not japanese

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news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog · 5 years

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Lessons from 'Chopped' with Ted Allen: The 15 most rage-inducing mistakes in the TV kitchen

Food Network's Chopped invokes a certain kind of screaming-at-your-TV-screen carnal energy — the baskets! the knife injuries! the leaving an ingredient off the plate when it's sitting RIGHT THERE!

After 10 years and 40 seasons on the air, Chopped still delivers some of the most whiplash-inducing twists on television. Like say when host Ted Allen reads out a seemingly cohesive basket, only to have the last ingredient be something like pickle-flavored cupcakes.

SEE ALSO: Why the '15-minute recipe' sets you up to fail

me yelling at the tv when i watch chopped pic.twitter.com/pW37XlkEej

— nicole ♡ (@suckernasa) March 1, 2018

In Chopped's world of televised culinary surprises, there are still a number of things that always go predictably wrong. As the host of Chopped, Ted Allen has stood front and center for just about every kitchen disaster you can imagine, so we asked him to dish on the most common mistakes made by chefs tackling the unforgiving beast that is a Chopped basket.

"It’s a whole bunch of traps." Allen says. "It's nothing but traps."

1. Whenever anyone attempts to make risotto in under 20 minutes.

me whenever a Chopped contestant assures the viewer that they can and will make risotto in 30 minutes pic.twitter.com/pUYOTrS1QK

— elexus jionde. (@Lexual__) January 24, 2019

"Planning comes into play," Allen says. "Let’s say you’re in the appetizer round. It takes about 20 minutes to cook arborio rice. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but that’s probably not the best choice in round one."

Not only does the chef have to constantly stir the arborio rice to cook it to the right consistency, but then they have zero time to do anything else creative. Risotto is a labor of love — ask any Italian nona!

Lesson: The judges won't be happy with your undercooked rice.

2. Trying to save face when the plates come out looking less than desirable.

*watching chopped* "My plating is sloppy but I know my flavors are there" Me: pic.twitter.com/kJyl9XNvhv

— jojo (@BROCKSQUADD) August 2, 2017

Don't say it. Please don't say it. We know you're going to, and no one wants this, and yet here we are. You used the dreaded 'D' work. There it is...deconstructed.

There are absolutely other words to describe the way the a dish looks. Maybe it's Rushed. Sloppy. Mismatched. But the word you're looking for is not the 'D' one, and it's certainly not the 'R' word either (Rustic).

Time management is key here, or as Allen calls it, rational innovation. "We want you to do something creative, but you have to recognize the incredible limitations you’re up against."

Lesson: Take the time when plating (it's one-third of the judging criteria, after all) and be honest when the presentation isn't its best.

3. Forgetting a basket ingredient.

Okay, so...you know that feeling during the Big Game when the quarterback throws a perfect spiral, and the receiver is wide open, but he drops the ball anyway? Doesn't that make you tear your hair out?

No? You know when a chef forgets a basket ingredient? The camera zooms in, and it's sitting right there on the table? Same range of emotion.

"We’ve almost never had a chef that didn’t get 4 plates made that are reasonably plausible," Allen says. "But we did have one guy who did plenty of cooking, but he just judged his time so poorly that he got nothing at all on except for three edamame on one plate. Yeah, that was a rough one."

Lesson: It's not the end of the world. Someone else's dish could have literal raw bones and trash in it.

4. Trying to make ice cream during the dessert round.

When the Chopped contestant goes to the ice cream machine pic.twitter.com/pVVJRoHoEb

— Lindsey Adler (@lindseyadler) June 1, 2018

Why would this go wrong? Everyone loves ice cream, right? But the other chef is inevitably going to be making an ice cream too — it's the easiest way to hide a funky ingredient, or showcase an ingredient with a milder flavor profile. But you can't ALL use the ice cream machine, people, it's just not possible.

It's also a documented fact that there is purposefully only one ice cream machine, just for the chaos of it all. That's very Cutthroat Kitchen of you, Ted.

Lesson: Make cookies or something. NOT ice cream.

5. Leaving bones, seeds, or otherwise hazardous material in the dish.

One of the first rules new chefs learn is to taste their food as they go along.

The hustle of the Chopped kitchen can cause even the most experienced of chefs to forget this tried and true rule.

If the judges have to spend their precious time picking fish bones or seeds out of the dish, they will not be happy campers. For chefs that are unfamiliar with an ingredient, it's even more paramount to check and check again. Because something inedible might be left over. Or something possibly deadly (Fugu fish, anyone?)

Lesson: Taste it now. Taste it again. When in doubt, taste it.

6. Trying to make bread pudding during the dessert round.

me when the chopped contestant makes it all the way to the dessert round and then starts making a bread pudding pic.twitter.com/E7c9e6X99D

— generation loss (@shoegays) May 12, 2017

Bread pudding is such a popular dish during the dessert round, it might as well be made a requirement to win (please, no).

The dish became so popular, Allen reveals that "we did have a ban on bread pudding for a while. But it seems to have been allowed to creep back in. It’s just that you don’t want a show where everybody always goes to that, so we kinda had to push people to be more creative and think of other approaches to things."

The Chopped kitchen god himself has spoken.

Lesson: Get creative, even if you're not a pastry chef. Make something no-bake! Elbow your opponent for the ice cream machine! Make some candy, anything!

7. Not cleaning off the counter space.

My feelings exactly.

Image: GIPHY

One thing Allen says that viewers rarely consider when thinking about the difficulty of the kitchen is the small counter space. Most of which, he says, is taken up by the 7 knives chefs are allowed to bring.

"One pitfall that is often a giveaway [of who will be chopped] is people that don’t clean off their stations after they’ve done something, because of that lack of space. It’s always a good sign if somebody chops the onion, they put the chopped onion in a bowl, and then they clear off everything, and move on the next [task]."

Lesson: A clean station denotes an organized chef. And if you don't believe Allen, Ratatouille makes a pretty great point.

8. Calling anything with chocolate and chili a "mole."

Every time a Chopped chef introduces a "mole," the judging table reacts with grace, but you can see it in their eyes: Your mole sits on a throne of lies.

There's a wide variety of traditional mole sauces from different parts of Mexico, but the most ubiquitous kind typically includes roasted red chilis, nuts, spices such as coriander, cloves, and anise, and of course, chocolate. But very little chocolate is actually used, and it's added more like a spice.

Lesson: Of course no one's going to be judging on complete culinary purity when the basket ingredients are a wild mix. But if you melt a Hershey's bar and put some cayenne in it, don't call it a mole. You will be in the wrong.

9. Not planning out a dish before jumping into the cooking.

This one is hard. According to Allen, chefs get, at most, a minute or two to think after they open the basket, and they certainly don't know what's in the basket beforehand. The four ingredients are often so wildly different (such as Korean short ribs, canned spaghetti, purple artichokes, and baby pineapple) that there's no obvious connection.

"What often indicates that someone might do well is, instead of just jumping right in, taking a moment to plan. If you pointed to an 8-pound Peruvian leg of lamb, I mean I’ve literally seen people salt it and pepper it, then throw it in the oven whole before it occurred to them that, wait a minute, that’s never gonna work."

Lesson: It's all about taking a second to think about what is doable before it's 5 minutes left and you have an inedible raw lamb.

10. The goddamn siphon (aka the whipped cream canister).

Why does this one piece of kitchen equipment never seem to work? It might just be that chefs don't typically come into contact with a siphon on a daily basis, now that we've moved beyond non-dessert 'foams' and 'whips' that dominated the trend of molecular gastronomy. Or it could just be cursed.

Lesson: Shake it like a polaroid picture, or prepare to just see a spittle of sad sauce drip out.

11. Throwing any of the basket ingredients on the plate at the last minute, or as a garnish.

http://crayola-colored-skeletons.tumblr.com/post/161837244904/if-you-use-a-basket-ingredient-as-a-garnish-on

Part of the beauty (and the challenge) of Chopped is to take four disparate ingredients and transform them into one cohesive unit. But the keyword here is transform.

The chefs are under immense pressure, so it's easy to get all knees weak, arms spaghetti and forget a basket ingredient. But sometimes chefs will knowingly leave an ingredient to use at the last minute as a garnish.

Where's the showmanship? The pizzaz? You are not dripping in any culinary finesse if you don't figure out a way to incorporate all the ingredients.

Lesson: "Have the judgement to fit those mismatched pieces into a puzzle without masking them with too [sic] much with items from the pantry," Allen says.

12. Relying too heavily on the pantry ingredients.

Leaning heavily into the basket ingredients tends to score bigger points with the judges, however strange they might seem at first glance. You might not want to touch that black chicken, but at this point, what choice do you have?

Depending on what's given to the chefs, though, they might actually do worse the "better" the basket might seem.

"When you’ve been given a basic basket — with a T-bone steak, and a sweet potato, and butter, and a carton of heavy cream — it seems like such a layup, but it almost seems like [the chefs] do the worst job when they don’t have enough of a challenge."

Allen says that while something like pickled giblets might not be "the first thing you'd ask for," it might force chefs to get more creative.

Lesson: You don't always get what you want, but you might just get what you need.

13. Using rookie culinary techniques, such as adding truffle oil or a mint leaf.

Why do we dislike truffle oil on #Chopped? Most is synthetic & contains no truffle. It’s strong, & tends to overwhelm a dish. It was trendy (a long time ago), & we don’t like trendiness. It feels pretentious, now—a cheap way to try to make a dish seem fancy.

— Ted Allen (@TheTedAllen) June 5, 2018

If a Chopped judge utters the words "why are they going to the pantry, oh god, there's only 30 seconds left," you know this isn't going to be good.

Most of the time these last-minute additions are at best, superfluous, and at worse, ruin the integrity of the dish as a whole. The perfectionist anxiety to add ingredient upon ingredient in search of making your dish stand out is understandable.

"I mean this in a positive way, a chef is generally a control freak," says Allen. "Someone who has a strong point of view, something that they want to say with food. On Chopped, we take away all of that control, all of it."

Lesson: At a certain point, the dish is going to be what it is. And tossing something like truffle oil or saffron on top with five seconds left won't make your dish any fancier.

14. Trying to hide your basket ingredient through the magic of blending.

http://luvkurai.tumblr.com/post/165382319715/i-didnt-used-to-understand-why-people-got-so

Blending is the one technique that shows you're either the smartest person in the Chopped kitchen, or you have no idea what the hell is going on.

Okay, sometimes there's really nothing left to do when there's a basket that's mostly normal, but has one giant curveball. In that case, feel free to hit the judges with some foot-long oversized gummy worm gastrique.

Lesson: If the Chopped judges have to ask where you a put an ingredient, and the answer is "...it's in the sauce", perhaps the blender was not your best friend.

15. Starting to cook ANYTHING, or plating, with less than a minute left.

http://projectcatzo.tumblr.com/post/159772284409/ted-allen-one-minute-left-chopped-contestant

Hmm, I think my dish is missing something. Let me just whip up a little salad dressing real quick...oh, I should probably get my stuff on the plate too. How much time do I have left? 45 seconds? I got time!

Then, shockingly, they did not have time. And there is never really enough time. But as we've established, the secret ingredient to winning Chopped isn't necessarily killer cooking skills, it's killer time management.

Listen to Ted Allen on this one, kids: "If it’s going to take 20 minutes to make something, I might be able to pull off a ham sandwich. 20 minutes is nothing. It’s just nothing. Take a second to plan and realize that you’re gonna have to slice something smaller or make something that’s doable."

Lesson: Don't do the culinary crime if you can't manage your kitchen time.

me, with no professional experience, yelling @ chopped competitors when they burn anything or forget an ingredient pic.twitter.com/zMKbBk4gJT

— meg 🐉 (@n_agem) April 25, 2017

Sure, we'd love to think we know everything about goes down during Chopped's intense 20-30 minute rounds, but we're just Average Joes yelling about coulis and beurre blanc to a screen. The Chopped competition turns us all into pseudo-culinary experts, while perched on the sofa eating half-frozen chicken nuggets.

Allen says that if you ever find yourself getting frustrated at the chefs, "set the clock to 20 minutes, and ask your wife or husband to take out four weird ingredients, and see how you do. 'Cause it could be an eye-opener for you."

But that's the fun part! Chopped manages to show us a life lesson best expressed in Ratatouille: Anyone can cook. And, just as important, anyone can think they can whip up a risotto in 20 minutes and fail miserably.

"In this business, you’re only as good as the last plate you cooked. So the stakes are pretty high."

Ted Allen is right — the chopping block is a great, delicious equalizer.

WATCH: A study of 'ultraprocessed foods' had some bleak results

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