Random Idea #71: One Piece Peggy Sue fics Rant · 7:06am Jan 26th, 2020
I went down a dig through One Piece fanfics, and something popped out at me, in regards to Peggy Sue fics.
First of all, for those who don’t know, Peggy Sue refers to a situation where the main character somehow time travels from near the end of the story to the beginning of the adventure. Say, Ch 100 back to Ch 1.
For some reason, I noticed that all of the fics I found for the One Piece fandom involve horrific death before time travel based reincarnation. This ... causes a bit of a problem in terms of tone.
You see, despite all of the challenges the crew faces, there’s always a bit of light-heartedness to it. There’s a big struggle, a beat down, then a celebration once its over. Then comes the preparations to go the next island, eager to continue their journey.
That whole “suffered horrible death” thing kiiinda puts a damper on all of that. Now, when the characters next wake up back in their 8 year old bodies, everything is now focused on power leveling as fast as possible in order to completely obliterate their threats. Considering what they faced and lost, this is a reasonable reaction, can’t blame them, really.
However ... this pretty much bowls over the tone of the story, the focus on adventure and the thrill of traveling into the unknown. With the years they’ve had to prepare, the unknown is now being constantly obliterated in overkill. Even Inserts don’t cause that much trampling over the Feel of the story, even if said Insert causes a world-wide spontaneous revolution. (This Bites! Is a pretty great fic)
Also, why is it that the only way that people can come up with to cause a reason to send everyone back in time is through horrible death? Why not peaceful death? An accident?
An amusing Naruto time travel fic I read a while back had the protag team decide to go back after finding a weird item years after the events of the main story (written before the canon ending was finished), and they decided to go fix their shitty childhoods before cruising along and enjoying life.
Not a lot of life enjoying in any One Piece fics in contrast.
>: (
As for where I’m going with this, I don’t know. While pondering this, I idly wondered about having the Crew succeed in their goals, and die mostly peacefully decades later despite probably royally pissing off the Marines. My point is, they accepted it, no matter the situation, but now they’re back at Game Start. Well now what?
Maybe Brook, since his fruit appears to give him near immortality of some sort, so maybe sending his soul through space time could be a thing. Also he’s basically the oldest, so most able to get around before anything starts happening. As for what he does waking up 40 years back in the past, I haven’t thought that far yet.
I think the 'dies horribly but quick, goes to another time/place and have easy, fun and exciting adventures' is a type of particular wish fulfillment, honestly.
"Man, imagine if I got hit by a buss, blood and guts flying everywhere tomorrow, and woke up as my younger self! I wouldn't have to do that that super hard algebra test, and could ace that one Math 101 test I flunked that started the entire downward spiral!"
That sort of thing. Not only exciting your current bad situation with a lot of drama, but you get to fix all your problems easily without actually working hard to improve yourself.
But~ well, most people aren't going to be interested in reading about Susan, age 12, exploding in a freak dishwasher accident and getting reincarnated as a magical Princess that never needs clean her own room, so they go write about Naruto, The Straw-Hat Pirates, or... well, an MLP character doing their stories equivalent of that instead.
Think it's pretty harmless, honestly, even if I personally don't care much for it either. Nothing wrong with that setup in theory, but I've seen it die a few chapters in too many times due to the author losing interest.
5193450
I actually found one that deals with it quite well. Well, one out of the like, 5 other ones that did it poorly.
It just, the feeling as adventure got replaced by a mono-focused drive to turn the entire journey into a more involved game of whack a mole at the expense of character, well, anything. Interactions, learning about the situation, growth.
They start right back at the beginning of the story, skipping 3 years of being a child and going straight to punching the shit out of people.
Also I am very annoyed that what's apparently a highly rated fic turns entire scenes into a brief summary (allowing them to skip chunks of dialog into "he talked about X"), the author hasn't entirely figured out that dialog of different characters need to be separated, and no one seems to have called them out for that.
5193548
Know of a few classic books that do that for the 'filler' conversations, to be fair. Basically getting the geist accros of what happened, while also acknowledging that it simply doesn't matter for the actual story. 'They spoke of the weather, before leaving.' That sort of thing.
Have to admit I also find it an annoyingly lazy, 'telly' style, but I can see why it gets used. It has a few advantages in basically 'telegraphing' to the reader that THIS PART IS NOT ACTUALLY IMPORTANT. GO READ THE IMPORTANT BITS INSTEAD.
Again, extremely lazy and dated, though. So it's a heavily flawed style even to the bones of it.
5193559
There are good places to use it and bad places to use it. This author uses it at least twice a chapter.
>: (