Cherri

Before driving deeper into Usopp’s side of thing, I want to focus a little bit on Luffy, because as I’ve mentioned previously, this fight between has a bit of a different flavor from other Luffy-centric battles, but what I haven’t mentioned yet is how public all this is. The final battles with big bads like Arlong, Crocodile, and Enel were all away from other people, but not here. The shift of Luffy becoming a more public figure started with his ass whooping of Bellamy way back in Jaya, but even that was only in front of a bunch of pirates. Showing up to rock Enies Lobby is what’s really going to launch him into the public spotlight, and so it stands to reason that this final stand against Lucci is seen by both the marines and the Straw Hat Pirates.

So far he and Lucci have been on pretty equal footing, but Lucci managed to save his last big trump card until this moment, and seems to have Luffy beat when Usopp shows himself for real. Oda puts a ton of emphasis on Luffy’s expression, this panel alone taking up ¾ of the page.

And, like, imagine Luffy’s shock. The gag of him not recognizing who Sogeking is turns on its head and is instead played for the deepest, juiciest drama. Usopp isn’t a Straw Hat anymore. He had no obligation to come to Enies Lobby. But he did.

All throughout Enies Lobby there’s been this running thread of the Straw Hats helping each other out of situations they couldn’t handle alone. Nami saving Sanji, Sanji saving Usopp, Usopp saving Robin. Hell, Robin not trusting her friends to keep her safe from the World Government is what kicked off this mess in the first place. The whole reason Luffy was so adamant about going against Lucci was because he recognized him as the strongest threat to the crew, and it’s Luffy’s job as the captain to protect those under his leadership from that kind of danger.

But right now he can’t. He’s not strong enough. And it’s not until Usopp threatens to put himself in harm’s way against an enemy they both know he has no chance about that he stands up and finishes the fight. Because even the captain needs to be propped up by his crew once in a while, and Luffy would rather die than have one of his crew get killed.

Do you remember now the fight started between Usopp and Luffy in the first place? Usopp argued, using the Merry as a proxy for his feelings, that Luffy would leave behind and abandon the weakest members of his crew to further his own ambition, and here, now, Luffy is showing in a very real way that that’s not true. But even if Luffy is willing to put his life on the line to protect Usopp from people like Lucci, he still needs Usopp’s help. He still needed those words from his best friend in order to stand up one last time. 

old art

If you're asexual and enjoy yuri (girl's love) manga, please check out the manga series Doughnuts Under A Crescent Moon by Shio Usui. As a bi grey aroace person, I enjoyed it for the following reasons:

Degenerate solidarity ✨️

So within two days of each other, Fox News writes an article comparing aromanticism and asexuality to pedophilia, and then Matt Walsh releases a video saying asexuality is a mental illness and asexuals are tricking teenagers into having depression.

Not sure what’s going on right now over in Conservative World, but it’s a hell of wild U-turn for them to suddenly switch from “Oh no! The left is sexualizing our children!” to “Oh no! The left is asexualizing our children!”

It’s a reminder, I guess, that they’re coming for all of us. The fash and the white supremacists will not make nice distinctions between the queers when they put us up against the wall. There is no gatekeeping, no label-policing, no purity-purging and no assimilation that any of us can do that will save us. They want us dead, and while they’ll start with whoever is most vulnerable at any given time, they’ll get around to all of us eventually.

Queer solidarity means all of us because the fash are coming for all of us.

All Dividers are Feds. Stand united or die separately.

ANYONE who is trying to divide our community is a fucking Fed. That includes other queers who like to argue about who is and isn’t “allowed” in our community.

Art by u/reachling

If you showed this to a person from a century ago he wouldn't be confused like yeah these are hot topics, you would have a totally normal conversation with him.

shaking in my metaphorical boots as I approach Dressrosa at high speed

TV Executives: “if the strike goes in, you won’t get new episodes of your favorite shows! You won’t get new movies you were looking forward to! Isn’t that terrible, what the writers are doing to you?”

Me: Bitch, that might have been an effective threat in 2007, but we have since survived a Covid shutdown and discovered ways to amuse ourselves while we waited, we can outwait this shit, too. I got a pile of shows saved I haven’t even watched yet, and a Mt. TBR waiting for me.

Compensate (and respect) your writers for their work, assholes.

It's just hilarious that they're trying to pull this whole "but your favorite shows!" nonsense.

Oh, you mean the shows you cancel after the third season no matter how good they're doing to avoid paying writers residuals? The shows that get produced and then never aired because you found a nice tax writeoff? The shows whose writing suffers because the writers' room got six weeks to write before getting booted and making the showrunner adapt all their scripts? The shows you straight up pulled from your streaming service to scam their crews out of rewatch money?

I will happily sacrifice my shows for the writers that gave them to me, no questions needed, but if anyone tries to say that the blatantly terrible way streaming treats its writers is somehow beneficial to shows, remind them of Infinity Train and Batgirl. That's the ideal they're pushing towards if someone doesn't say no, and we should be thankful that the writers are doing that for us.

me, as i force a dollar bill into the self-checkout machine: thats right…..good boy……vore president washington

im begging all of you to stop reblogging th is

Your actions have consequences

every time i see discourse about pedohysteria amidst a trans genocide i think about that news article from 2016 about the mexican immigrant who voted for trump because trump said he’d get rid of all the “bad hombres” from mexico, only to be deported himself because it turns out what trump was really saying was that he wanted to deport all mexicans, not just “the bad ones”

not just him, but there were many other examples too, like white conservatives who have mexican immigrant friends and family or people in the community important to them who were mexican immigrants, and they voted for trump because they thought trump was just getting rid of “criminals”, and then they regret it when their families and communities get torn apart by deportations of their spouses, their friends, their favourite restaurant owners, etc.

anyways, i hope young queers, trans people esp, understand that when conservatives talk about “pedophiles” and “groomers”, they’re not talking about actual child abusers, they’re talking about all queer people. they’re talking about all trans people. it’s why in florida, they’re categorizing “drag” as a child sex crime, and making sex crimes against children punishable by death. they’re trying to execute every single trans person, and that’s just the rhetoric they’re using

so stop buying into the pedohysteria. it’s easy to think “well, i’m not a pedophile, so i’ll be safe” when you don’t realize that in the eyes of conservatives, every single queer person is a pedophile and deserves death, and contributing to their rhetoric by trying to figure out which trans woman is a pedophile is just accelerating your own march to the gallows

When I was in school, the argument – and in fact the standard belief – was that no gay person, ever, could be a teacher, because all gay people were pedophiles and groomers. It was for the “safety of children.” Lesbians and gay men couldn’t be allowed in locker rooms with “normal” people because we would ogle and assault them. Every gay, every lesbian, every trans person, every bi person (pan didn’t really exist as a term then) had the assumption of being a sex offender just waiting for an opportunity.

Literally everything they say about trans people now, they said about gay people 30 years ago.

There are people right now in government trying to outlaw gay marriage again, saying that Pete Buttigieg – the human equivalent of a Wonder Bread pb&j sandwich, as wholesome in image as they come – shouldn’t be allowed to raise his children because he’s abusing his children by raising them. People on Twitter have started openly calling for rounding up and executing anyone who ever helped a minor access HRT - parents, doctors, nurses, the receptionist who checked us in for my daughter’s appointments - and while those are only random people online, that isn’t a thing you saw happening frequently just a couple of years ago. Louder voices have started calling for mentally ill people – starting with trans and gay people – to lose our rights to vote.

Do I think queer people are being rounded up right now? No. Do I see the rhetoric escalating? Yes. Is it aimed at all of us? Oh yes.

Groomer, pedo, degenerate, freak: they mean all of us. There are no exceptions. If you think there are, you’re fooling yourself.

Join, or Die.

Lizzo defies drag ban  by inviting drag queens on stage in Tennessee

Pink News writes:

“In an act of defiance against Tennessee’s anti-drag law, Lizzo has performed in the state with a whole bunch of Drag Race faves and local queens, and yes, it was iconic.”

Lizzo said:

Together we can beat the Fascists.

(Video from SBS News embedded above).

(stole the template from @/margesimpsonsqueef)

Two impressions of Erik（？）

（For P3, I drawn it on Artstudio and did use some references and tutorials🧐🧐🧐( That's why the coloring style is a little bit different

Phantom of the opera 🥀