Saltier than Carthage

(this is very selfindulgent and silly, and its fine if you dont want to do it) maybe roger somehow shows up, but ace is like ‘i already have a dad’! ty, i really love your art

Can we get a Sanji thoughts/analysis now that you're on WCI?

oh, boy. hm. yeah. 

for the sake of my sanity, i’m gonna leave off addressing the sexism thing here, because i’ve talked about it before in other posts (check this tag if you really want) and also other people have done it better than me. my friend star has a really good essay on the matter and why different people have such different opinions on it that you can find here.

that disclaimer out of the way: i really like sanji, actually. i’ve said before that if not for the amount of regrettable joke material oda has saddled him with, i think he’d be my favorite strawhat, and even as is, i still like him a whole lot.

sanji is, of the strawhats, maybe the most self-sacrificially inclined, which is almost impressive given how many attempted heroic sacrifices these assholes attempt to pull. with sanji, though, it’s an established trait ever since his introductory arc- first with his refusal to quit working at the baratie because of his perceived debt despite zeff literally firing him, and later with his willingness to just fucking let pearl kill him for the same reason. whole cake island and his actions during it is basically the culmination of this character trait. 

sanji, by all appearances, doesn’t value his own life and happiness very highly, despite the amount of justified confidence he has in his abilities as both a fighter and a cook. this is something that makes a lot more sense when you look at the environment he was brought up in- if everyone around a child is telling him he’s a worthless mistake for the first eight or so years of his life, he’s kind of bound to internalize that at least somewhat. 

sanji is one of the more independent actors on the crew in general. he has a tendency to kind of fuck off and do stuff on his own that everyone else only finds out about after shit starts blowing up (see: enel’s arc, mr. prince, gates of justice), which is one of my favorite aspects of his character. and that’s what he’s attempting to do in whole cake island too, pretty clearly- sneak off on his own and solve the problem for everybody else before it becomes a problem. it just doesn’t work out that way, because the cost this time around isn’t something his crewmates will tolerate. 

sanji cares very much about the people he’s close to, both the strawhats and zeff, but it doesn’t seem to occur to him that they care about him just as much. he’s genuinely surprised when luffy bombs into whole cake island to rescue him even though any objective observer could have predicted that in a heartbeat. sanji’s seen luffy go through hell and high water for nami, robin, vivi, and ace, among others, and still doesn’t expect that he’ll merit that same level of concern. not to mention that zeff is clearly upset at sanji’s self-sacrificial bullshit during the baratie arc (which sanji ignores). can you imagine how pissed he’d be if he knew what sanji was trying to pull to keep him safe during WCI? 

tldr: someone needs to beat “you are loved” into sanji’s stupid stupid head asap.