the-obnoxious-sibling

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

“Yesterday, you said you’d like to sit down and catch up if you weren’t so busy. If you really meant that… I hear tomorrow’s gonna be a shore day, at least for those of us who don’t have a real role on your ship, so I was thinking…” Buggy shrugged, trying for nonchalant. “I dunno. Maybe we could do that? Can you spare an hour for me?” “Yeah!” Shanks grinned, so wide and bright Buggy could hardly bear to look at it. “Absolutely, I’d love that. But forget an hour, I can give you the whole day if you want.” When Buggy frowned, puzzled, Shanks explained, “I was about to ask you to make time for me.”

i am no doubt repeating myself, but: @midydoof is so good at faces i can hardly stand to look at this. just—augh, my heart.

for any new readers: this is part two of eight of the long, post-marineford part of this shanks/buggy series! this part is a little over three thousand words, and sees buggy eating breakfast, telling tales, and making plans with shanks.

#self-reblog #new chapter next week!

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

Miss Congeniality (2000) dir. Donald Petrie

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

Three times Buggy took Shanks’ hand and the one time he didn’t.

#HELLO #one piece #shuggy #shanks #buggy

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

yes, the entirety of @ProZD's fixitman78 video is available to watch on youtube! just search for fixitman78 to become a part of the hashtag #fixitmanfanfam.

#i'm love him #game changer #dropout

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

attention this is your captain speaking chag sameach pesach to all celebrating and a reminder do not open the airlock to greet elijah the vulcan rabbinic council ruled that opening the door to the room where the seder is occurring is sufficient elijah can get on a starship just fine himself he just likes to be personally invited in to your seder we dont need another incident like last year thank you

#i suspect i reblogged this last year but it’s just too good to resist #star trek #jewish stuff

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

Hi I hope it’s fine but I love your writing and I think it could be hilarious soooooooooo

*Breath in*

You know freaky Friday? And how many shows try to resolve an argument by switching roles/bodies???

*brace myself*

Can you write some headcanons about the idea of shanks and buggy switching bodies/roles?

BYE DONT THINK ILL OF ME

*runs away while crying*

oh, right, i did promise i’d come back to this in a month, didn’t i?

well, anon, you may have guessed that the reason i couldn’t fulfill this request at the time is because i was writing a fic for the one piece fanwork exchange involving this trope! if i had told you my thoughts, and then a couple weeks later an anonymous author published a fic for that exchange which just so happened to incorporate many of my thoughts… well, it wouldn’t have been very anonymous, now would it?

i ended up not finishing the fic in time (orz) but that means i have plenty of thoughts to share! so, a shanks and buggy bodyswap. let’s get into it.

my opfwex bodyswap fic (which i am still writing, but i’m indulging myself and writing the long version now, so it’s gonna be A While before it’s publishable) involves shanks and buggy accidentally getting themselves… cursed with involuntary bodyswapping powers as kids? i think that’s the most succinct way to describe it. they do not break the curse before roger disbands the crew, so they continue to bodyswap off and on for decades before it gets resolved.

now that you have that context, here’s some bodyswap thoughts for you!

as kids shanks and buggy are decent mimics of each other. shanks can’t quite talk as rudely as buggy does, nor buggy as nice as shanks, but physically they do an excellent job. and anyway, they’re never far from each other so they can course-correct pretty quickly.

(no, they don’t tell roger or rayleigh. they got cursed while waiting for the crew to come back from laugh tale—if they reveal the truth, they’ll never be left on their own again!)

shanks does not handle the chop-chop fruit powers well at first—he literally falls apart. i hc (with some support from canon) that devil fruit powers are harder to control the more emotion you’re feeling, and while shanks can repress like nobody’s business there’s still an adjustment period. buggy spends most of that adjustment period laughing at him, or hiding him under a blanket if an adult approaches.

it takes buggy a few swaps before it occurs to him that there are advantages to being in shanks’ body. haki’s a mental thing, and muscle memory can only get you so far in a sword fight, so he can’t do any of shanks’ special tricks. but he can swim again.

their impressions of each other get a bit outdated, after roguetown. they can’t exactly correct each other’s impersonation anymore, you know? and sure, neither of them have changed that much since they were kids, so it’s not terribly inaccurate, but it feels… off.

(no, they don’t tell their crews. shanks can’t bring himself to talk about buggy, and how would buggy explain his connection to shanks?)

things that should give them away: buggy manages pain with pills instead of alcohol; shanks offers closed-mouth smiles instead of toothy grins; buggy tells shanks’ crew stories about the old days, if in vague terms; shanks offers advice to buggy’s sword-wielding crew members.

of course, as far as their crews know, they’ve always been this way, so the crews explain the inconsistencies away. shanks is just having a bad pain day. buggy’s being more generous today.

(neither shanks nor buggy worries about being found out. after all, who would ever think of bodyswapping?)

the only time buggy attempts to communicate with shanks is the first time he swaps with shanks to find him missing an arm. he digs up ink and paper and stares at them for ages, unable to find the right words before they swap back.

(shanks left buggy messages a few times, early on. buggy hid his stationery, and shanks took the hint.)

they swap for a couple hours while buggy’s making his roundabout escape from impel down and shanks is sailing for marineford, so they aren’t surprised to reunite, though they pretend otherwise. buggy grumbles something about shanks’ shitty timing, and that’s the most either of them acknowledges the swapping.

it’s been a long time since shanks saw buggy’s face in anything but a bounty poster or a mirror. longer since he’s properly heard his voice or touched him. he spends a lot of time, during the handful of days they’re together, just watching him, listening to him talk, sitting too close.

buggy does the same, but tells himself it’s so he can better fool shanks’ crew the next time they swap.

a couple of shanks’ crew see something familiar in the way buggy acts. some of them pass it off as the kind of similarities you find in people who were raised together, but one or two have their suspicions. beckman probably gets the truth out of shanks later; he won’t let on to buggy that he knows.

so hey, remember ‘who would ever think of bodyswapping?’ as it turns out, mihawk would. (well, it helps that he’s the only member of cross guild who knows shanks. he recognizes that look in his eye, even on buggy’s face.) he’s not happy to learn he’s sometimes sharing a tent with the man he’s worked so hard to avoid.

#asked and answered #one piece #shuggy #my opfwex fics #maybe i should make a bodyswap fic specific tag? undecided #a lot of bodyswap stories have themes of learning how the other half lives/gaining perspective (the argument resolving part of your ask) #but because i’m writing the bodyswapping over such an extended period this fic is more about… degrees of intimacy? #tfw you know his body as well as your own but haven’t spoken in decades #you know his friends and his circumstances but you don’t know HIM #you can inhabit his life but you can’t know what he’s thinking #and the method to ‘break’ the ‘curse’ is tied into that too

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

✨ Please reblog the polls to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖 Artists and titles will be revealed after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update! ✨

#hell yeah #music #don't mind me i'm just gonna hit repeat a few times so i can dance in my chair to that last bit again and again

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

as an autistic jew, passover is objectively the best holiday because it’s a dinner party with a script that everyone has to follow

#laugh rule reblog #jewish stuff #chag sameach

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

god, that episode was good

are they doing a fucking time loop episode

#game changer #game changer spoilers #unexpected sam lore in there too #part of the larger Thing of the season maybe?? not sure just yet

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

how do i join the fixitman78 fan fam

are they doing a fucking time loop episode

#game changer #game changer spoilers #they really found the perfect spot in this episode for a sungwon cameo

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

are they doing a fucking time loop episode

#game changer #game changer spoilers #hell yeah!!!

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

are they doing a fucking time loop episode

#game changer #game changer spoilers #well i'm all of two minutes in idk if this IS a spoiler #but. what's happening here.

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

This week on Dropout: on Monday, a new Game Changer with guests Mike Trapp, Ify Nwadiwe, Siobhan Thompson, and some very special cameos; on Tuesday, a new Um, Actually with guests Grant O'Brien, Keith Habersberger, and Zach Kornfeld; on Wednesday, episode 16 of Dimension 20: Fantasy High Junior Year; on Thursday, the episode 16 Adventuring Party talkback AND the premiere episode of Smartypants, with speakers Mike Trapp, Demi Adejuyigbe, and Vic Michaelis; and on Friday, Very Important People: Last Looks goes behind-the-scenes on Ally Beardsley's episode!

#*very* excited for that demi presentation #ditto intense nerds on game changer! #it just looks like it's gonna be a good week on dropout yk? #dropout #smartypants #um actually #game changer

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

Aren’t retcons always unplanned beforehand? Doesn’t it mean to change the story to suit the new idea for whatever reason? Seeing same thing from different POV is just adding new details to me

mm, this is kind of what i was getting at with the "strict definitions" comment in my previous post. with a series this long-running you can get into endless debates about what 'counts' as a retcon. but how are we to know if something was always planned for and just wasn't foreshadowed vs an idea the author had at the last minute? does it really look any different on the page?

anyway, i think i've made my opinion clear enough: the author's intentions don't matter to me, it's the events of the story that do. if i have a broader definition of a retcon than most ppl that's fine by me.

#asked and answered #it's subjective!

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

yeah, let’s not call out that specific tweet or the twitter user who tweeted it, since as you say it’s a common enough comment.

…probably because it’s true?

but i think you might be assuming malice or a “(derogatory)” sentiment that doesn’t have to be there. retcons aren’t evil. they aren’t inherently bad writing! any time in serialized fiction where you think X happened, and in a later story learn that secretly Y also happened, or that actually Z is what really happened? that’s a retcon!

and what we were originally told about shanks and buggy’s history is thus:

they were apprentices on a pirate ship

they fought all the time, over silly things and over philosophical differences (re: what being a pirate is all about)

buggy found a map and pretended to eat a devil fruit in order to steal away with both items for personal gain

shanks accidentally cost him both

despite their differences, shanks dove without hesitation into the ocean to save him

that’s it. no roger, no laugh tale, not even their split at roguetown, let alone the reason for that split. now, whether you consider all of these elements retcons or just gradually revealed backstory is a personal preference thing. (some folks get real strict about their definitions.) but one of them is definitely, unambiguously a retcon.

look at shanks’ conversation with whitebeard in chapter 434. shanks’ flashback in that chapter is just one panel, showing two lines of dialogue from the day they went separate ways.

it’s pretty straightforward. shanks asks, buggy refuses, insulting him at the same time. about what you’d expect, given what we already knew about their history.

but then, 650 chapters later…

…that moment is revisited from buggy’s point of view, and it turns out things were not as they seemed. buggy wasn’t just butting heads with shanks, he furiously rejected shanks because shanks changed his mind about his (their) dream!

chapter 1082’s flashback is a textbook retcon of the chapter 434 flashback. it provides us with new details that totally recontextualize that moment for us.

(whether this twist was Intended All Along is, imo, irrelevant. a story element revealed at a much later date that changes how we see the original scene(s) is the essence of a retcon.)

#asked and answered #one piece #shuggy #.434 (shanks & whitebeard chat) #.1082 (roguetown flashback) #ppl do often complain about retcons—and i sympathize! writers who don’t care about the already established characters & story frustrate me #but plenty of retcons are good. both on a character level and on a story level. #sure a secret sibling your protagonist never mentioned before can be hard to believe! *or* it can reveal hidden depths to the character! #(depths which are believable because you already established them as someone who keeps secrets/doesn’t talk about their past) #there’s lazy back-from-the-dead stories just to resurrect your fave & there’s stories like ‘under the red hood’ which have something to SAY

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

I have been saving this since last year. Happy Earth Day everyone.

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

i think lou wilson would be a rlly good taako adventurezone send tweet

#so true… #taz balance #the adventure zone