“Romance Dawn”

Today's episode is a story of Luffy in an alternate reality. While sailing on the sea by himself, a strange bird crashes into his small boat. He looks up to find a giant ship where a girl named Ann has been captured. It seems like the bird belongs to her.

As part of the 20th-anniversary aspect of the property, one of the early drafts of what would become One Piece gets animated (again).The tale is simple but it works to define who some of these characters are in their various drafts with how they would become. Opening with Luffy sailing on his own in his small boat, thing chang when a bird crashes into it that belongs to a young blue-hard woman named Anne that’s being chased by pirates for it. Anne, tied to the mast of the pirates ship, fills in Luffy before we get introduced to the colorfully intimidating pirate captain Six Hones Speil. Luffy’s general disrespect is about what you’d expect as he deals with him like the kid that he is at this point, not realizing the greater dangers he’ll face in the future. The early innocence of Luffy is captured well here while Anne as an early Nami has all the seriousness and pent-up anger that you’d expect as we hear her story about the bond with her bird and why she’s so intent on freeing him.

The episode goes into some of Luffy’s foundations as well with his grandpa and you can see the evolution and changes that would come from there in the final product. Early drafts are always interesting to see how things change when working with a good editor and guide as well as just working out the kinks on it.

Young Luffy is definitely amusing to watch here and it helps to set up his weakness nicely with the swimming thing as well. The episode overall is fairly well structured in what it has to accomplish as we get some decent action in the back half as Luffy stands up for what’s right and his abilities shine and delight after surprising everyone. It’s comical in all the right ways and you can see exactly where Eiichiro Oda was going with it and how we ended up where we are with these characters and this story in the main.

Thanks for reading! See you next week!

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