Halfway Broken 137-139 (Patreon)
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Righto then! Off we go with more Halfway Broken! A solid 11,000 words this time, taking us to nearly 21,000 for the month! Now, onward! I have a bit more long-winded rambling about the chapters than usual to do!
First, I have determined that Eiichiro Oda is insane.
Whether that's 'insanely talented' or just plain old normal 'insane' is up for debate! As for why I'm starting off discussing how the chapters went with that statement...its because the whole Amazon Lily/Germa Rescue thing was my own little experiment in attempting to replicate the chaotic energy of something like Whole Cake Island or the Wano Arc. You know, with all the little fragments of a larger battle that you jump between?
I failed. Full stop and no contest.
Which doesn't make the chapters bad, they just didn't manage to replicate that sort of energy. I ended up simplifying, then simplifying a second time, to maintain my own sanity! Frankly, I probably ought to have known better than to try, given that fight sequences are the hardest thing for me to write in general.
On the up side, I think the Amazon Lily side showed everything I wanted, just in a little less detail than I'd intended. I ended up not showing as much of Luffy vs Akaniu as I'd planned, for example, simply because I realized Sakazaki is...actually a really terrible match for his Luffy. Terrible for the Admiral, that is. Lightning is much hotter than Lava, Luffy is faster by a considerable degree, and I don't think any of the Logia Admirals have ever shown of Conqueror's Haki (I checked, and the lava man hasn't, at least). Frankly, the fight was turning into a bit of a let down, so I cut it off without showing it in too much detail.
On the down side, we don't get to see as many pieces of the whole. In particular, I skipped out showing pretty much any detailed fights on the Germa Rescue side of things. Though there, I have to admit, my muse just flat out failed me. I'd wanted to show a confrontation between Sanji and his father/brothers, sort of like happened in the Whole Cake Island arc. The problem is that...I'm just not invested at all in Sanji as a character. I genuinely find him annoying in canon, which is why I smoothed out some of his more extreme traits with my version of him. With the larger crew, though, I just haven't gotten all that invested in my version either. Which made it extremely difficult to create the sort of emotional scene I'd wanted, and I ultimately ended up just leaving my attempts out.
Frankly, I don't think the result really suffers from the lack, as I still got some emotional Sanji angst in there anyway, combined with a twist at the end working out exactly the way I wanted it to. Which it wouldn't have, not as well at least, if I'd had to move it into next month's release. It was essentially the perfect way to end this release, providing a bit of mood whiplash I think went well :-p. I also think the pacing it set up is going to work out better for the next set of releases, whereas it might have started dragging a bit if I'd gone with my original plans.
Anyway! Enough of my rambling! As usual, the new stuff is attached here in various formats. Since this is the final Halfway Broken update for September, I will also be updating the Master Files in the pinned post shortly. Also as usual, I'll stick some author's notes in the comments when I get a few minutes to write them ;-). Now go enjoy more One Piece: Halfway Broken!