1. At school I’ve more or less defaulted to lecturing, as trying to get the kids to engage hasn’t been too profitable for most of the classes. Though oddly enough, turning to lecturing interspersed with questions has gotten a lot more interaction going, so perhaps it works out.

2. I ended up correcting the history textbook in class today: it claimed that Charles Carroll of Carrollton grounded his support for the revolution in the fact that the English monarchy had been illegitimate since the expulsion of King James II in 1688. Trouble is, while prepping for class, I actually looked up what he wrote in his semi-famous exchanges with Mr. Dusquane, and discovered that he in fact expressed his support for the ‘Glorious Revolution’ (and as I told the kids, most of the Jacobites in America were Loyalists, so that particular framing fails twice over). He may, of course, have just been trying to get in good with the other rebels, but for historical purpose we pretty much have to take what is written as written.

All that’s not meant as a slight against him so much as against the author of the textbook for not bothering to check before making a superficially plausible claim.

3. Recently I was hearing rumors of a strange, unprecedented creature: a live-action western-made anime adaptation that was actually both competently made and faithful to its original. A good anime adaptation, if you can believe it. So, finding a place where I could watch it without a Netflix account, I checked it out.

And…yeah, amazingly enough, it is. The One Piece adaptation is pretty darn solid in its own right, and the more I delve into the original, the more faithful I find it to be.

Granted, I’m not super familiar with One Piece: I had a cursory knowledge of it, but the sheer size of the franchise had always scared me off (over 1000 episodes and counting). But following along with TV Tropes and some other sources, I was able to get a decent idea how they compare. And since then I’ve dipped my toes into the anime. And I was continually surprised by just how close they stuck to the original, really only making minor, reasonable adjustments (like changing the sequence of how Zoro gets arrested and strung up in a prison yard, or re-staging the fight with Buggy the Clown to both make it more contained and more serious), but sticking to the overall plot and structure very well. It’s easily recognizable as the same story, not as a watered-down cash-grab by people who only want the name recognition.

4. I especially liked how matter-of-fact they were. This is a crazy world of pirates, super-powers, sea monsters, and a bizarre mishmash of aesthetics (e.g. 16th century pirate garb existing side-by-side with baseball caps with ‘Marine’ stenciled on, or one pirate has a duck theme to her ship that extends to the spiked clubs she uses to brutally murder people) that probably shouldn’t work, but somehow does because the filmmakers really go for it and just portray the world as is without anyone making self-aware comments on it.

Characters do make quips about the proceedings, but more in ways that fit the world than ones that take us out of it. For instance, when Zoro, the pirate hunter with three swords, draws his third sword and holds it in his teeth, our cheerfully-dimwitted hero Luffy comments “So that’s where it goes.” Which makes sense for someone who is not a master swordsman familiar with obscure styles to say (and it isn’t far off from the anime: “I wasn’t sure which sword was yours, so I brought all three”). And no one subsequently follows up by asking how Zoro is able to hold or wield the sword in his teeth, or cracking about overcompensation or anything stupid like that. It’s a quick, in-character quip and the three-sword-style is played straight for the rest of the series as just a thing that can be done in this world.

This sort of matter-of-fact craziness and highly stylized aesthetics really makes the show feel more like an anime than like a western show.

5. Also typical anime: the crazy world and goofy fun exists side-by-side with some startlingly dark and dramatic moments that can take you off guard, like a flashback to one character watching her mother being executed in front of her, or another character’s harrowing backstory involving a month stranded on a rock with limited rations, which he thinks have been divided between him and his captor / companion….

That’s something I’ve noticed that anime does that really sets it apart from western media: in the west, you may have atypically dark episodes, but usually a show is going to maintain a fairly consistent tone throughout with certain things that just aren’t going to be shown. Kim Possible isn’t going to uncover a camp of child soldiers toiling for the dictator who slaughtered their village, for instance. Even Avatar the Last Airbender, with all its backstory-genocide, couldn’t allow Sokka to actually stab anyone with his cool new sword.

In anime, though, you can have a cheerfully goofy semi-parody show like Spy x Family, and still feature a story arc flashing back to Twilight’s soul-destroying wartime experiences. The Japanese seem to have no issue mixing goofy fun and high-concept fantasy with dark, serious drama and frightening levels of trauma and violence.

(One western show – heavily anime influenced – that did do something like this was Teen Titans, though I think they may have gone a little too far in the tonal shifts, so you could have a episode with a silly Chuck-Jones inspired slapstick chase-scene be followed by one where the villain assaults Raven and rips half of her clothes off to force her to accept her destiny as a world-destroying demon. But that’s a story for another time).

6. Basically, One Piece all felt very much like the anime style in terms of worldview, tone, and storytelling. There are copious flashbacks, multiple competing factions whose alignments with one another constantly shift, moral complexity without reducing everything to shades of grey, a cheerfully foolish hero with a heart of gold and so on.

Also strong, admirable male mentor figures (“Scars aren’t what make a pirate: it’s the lessons behind the scars that matter. And you didn’t earn that one”), deeply loyal friendships, an awareness of good and bad people on all sides of a conflict, and rejecting the idea that past abuse justifies current crimes.

(Apparently the manga’s creator maintained creative control of the series and exercised it with a vengeance).

7. My only real complaint is that there’s some unnecessary profanity and a few other things that make this out of reach for a younger audience, all of which could easily have been cut. I mean, the violent content is too intense for little kids, but with a few minor tweaks you could have gotten this to a reasonable pg-13 level, and there was really no need to push it any higher.

So, overall, I’d recommend it. Honestly, the style alone and the crazy aesthetics make it worth the watch, but the ensemble cast of mostly-unknowns does a fine job as well (I especially like how the guy who plays Luffy can turn on a dime from cheery idiot hero to seriously determined warrior). Not perfect, but a rare gem indeed.