Baroque Works Recap

Baroque is a French word and it refers to a style of architecture, music, painting, sculptures and other artforms that were around in early 17th century Europe. Now I looked through the Wikipedia article for this for a little bit and I have to admit I’m not smart enough to see a connection between the 17th century style and whatever the hell Crocodile had planned. Arabasta is supposed to be inspired by Egypt from everything I understand so I don’t think there even is a connection between the two. I figured maybe the baroque style was introduced to Egypt by the Europeans – which I thought was smart thinking of me – but that’s simply not true. So much for trying to be smarter than I actually am. Anyway, with the entire arc behind us, let’s take a step back and talk about the entire thing. And I will mainly focus on Arabasta wince that’s where all the interesting stuff starts.

All of the agents in this arc are named after holidays. The male agents just have a number. The one exception to this rule is Bon Kurei who takes on both the masculine and the feminine role. Having a character that’s very obviously queer in a comic book in the early 2000s is definitely something worthy of respect. Japan isn’t the most progressive country in the world but Oda definitely is a progressive guy. We see a lot more representation in later arcs, but Bon Kurei is a great start. He’s just all around an interesting dude and when push comes to shove he’s a pretty good guy. According to google, the reason Nico Robin is named Ms. All Sunday because every Sunday is a holiday in Oda’s eyes. I’ve seen your work schedule man, don’t lie to us, you don’t do holidays. Although he is currently taking a break for an eye surgery so maybe he is taking some time afterwards to properly rest up. I hope he does, he’s earned it. 

We travel through a few islands to get here. Whiskey Peak and Laboon are an introduction to the hijinx of Baroque Works but we only get some surface level information. After taking small detours to both Little Garden and Drum Island we eventually make our way to the main stage, the sand kingdom of Arabasta. There we have an active coup happening where the people behind everything are searching for secret lore hidden in the kingdom. Arabasta is a very important country within the lore of One Piece for reasons we’re not uncovering for many more chapters, but some of the reasons is the legend that one of the three ancient weapons, Pluton might be located in this country. Or at the very least there should be information about it hidden here. So how does Crocodile plan to take over a country like Arabasta? He’s got a few ideas:

• Resource deprivation
• Widespread propaganda
• Infiltration of every organization

Let’s start with the last one. To get two groups to fight each other can’t be easy. One way to make it easier is by having your own people infiltrate their groups to help fan the flames. Here lies an issue I have with this arc. It’s one pretty big issue, if I’m honest. The foot soldiers are called millions and billions. Early on in the arc they are bounty hunters and seem to have an active role in what is going on. But as the arc shifts into its later parts I find it harder and harder to figure out what these people’s motivation is. With marine foot soldiers or weaker pirates in a big crew there’s a common goal there. They’re fighting for justice or for the fame and fortune of their own crew. But these guys don’t know who their leader is, they don’t know what their leader is planning but they’re doing very dangerous things in the name of this unknown leader regardless. I felt like this was definitely a scenario where the plot needed someone to do something to move things along so someone was there to move things along without any real motivation to do so. But they could have also just been paid off, there’s never really too much time spent on it and it doesn’t take away from the story enough to be a big issue. So let’s move on to propaganda.

Crocodile didn’t need to become king of Arabasta. That’s not quite what his plan was about. He wanted the Poneglyph that has information on Pluton and that’s all. But to get to a position where he can move about in the kingdom as he wishes he also had to establish himself. That’s why he built the casino and pretended to be a hero. If he just one day appeared and things were starting to go wrong then people would suspect him, but he’s the hero that’s defeating pirates while the royal army is doing nothing. His use of the rain dance powder here is also brilliant and brings us to the remaining point; resource deprivation. Rain has always been somewhat scarce in Arabasta and this powder allows Crocodile to manipulate the clouds. We get a little bit of Nami doing the same on a much smaller scale which is pretty clever writing from Oda. Introducing a main character’s new power by showing off how that power would work on a larger scale. Either way, Crocodile has managed to trick a whole bunch of people into either doing his bidding or believing he was some sort of hero. And he would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for those damn kids.

Lastly, I’d like to talk a little bit about the single most important thing that gets introduced in this saga, and it’s two-fold. First, we have Nico Robin. She’s working with Crocodile here but it’s pretty clear they have different end goals. Both of them are looking for the Poneglyph. These are the massive stones written in a script that seemingly no one except for Nico Robin can read. I wonder how that happened? Nico Robin then reads the information on the Poneglyph and talks about the history of Arabasta. Who cares about the long history of Arabasta? She mentions a few events that happened a very long time ago that don’t seem particularly relevant to the story and Crocodile decides she’s outlived her usefulness. Robin was prepared for this, but – as we’ve found out – not prepared enough. 

Vivi is a very loved character and when Arabasta was happening and I saw it for the very first time I was very surprised when she didn’t join the crew. It was time for another woman to join the crew to balance things out a little bit. But unfortunately we’re not getting that quite yet. With this I’ve had to store away my first box set and put the second one on my nightstand so I can start on reading those. I put the Romance Dawn booklet elsewhere because it didn’t fit anymore. As cool as these boxes are to have, I always have the issue that the books won’t fit into the box again after reading them. The manga get a little bit thicker and they don’t account for that in the box. I’d really appreciate it if they’d release these boxes with a little bit more room, perhaps a bit of cardboard just so there’s some leeway. I now worry it’ll be hard to remove the books again if I ever want to read them again. Then again, I might just get rid of the box when we get to that point, who knows. We’ll be continuing this series next week on Wednesday with the start of the Skypiea saga, so get excited for that. There’s a bunch of cool scenes coming up in rapid fire, so don’t miss out. Thanks for reading!