I Want It All (Straw Hat, World Domination, Character Quality)
...and I want it now: On character desires and voices and self-sabotages
Hi! I’m done revising my novel for now! This is a One Piece post. Here’s the index, here’s the tag. Spoilers apply to Film Z and Straw Hat Chase, but really this one is a craft-analysis type of post, like this one.
Here is a quote that miraculously survived the Internet’s penchant for altering and paraphrasing: “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” This is’ by American author Kurt Vonnegut, and further search reveals that this was part of the preface to his short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box, released 1999. What typically gets left out is the context: this one line is part of a couple more rules. At the end, Vonnegut admits that his favorite writer, Flannery O’Connor, “broke every one of [his] rules but the first.” The first is: “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.“ But great writers tend to do that, he concedes. Come to think of it, she possibly may not have broken the seventh, either, which is: “Write to please just one reader”.
I get it, though. “Every character should want something is something that this guy said in his short story collection which he later conceded other people may break because there are infinite ways to write infinite stories” is already synthesizing a one-liner. It is true, generally, that a character that wants something makes for a more active one. It is also true that a want, as a form of action, will bring a reaction, i.e, villains, or at the very least antagonists. And when you have a want, as a writer, you can immediately think of ways to refuse the character what they want. (Catherynne M. Valente lays out the rules as such: “Give [a character] something to want. Give them something to hide. Give them something to fear. Give them something to obsess over. Then hurt them.” Emphasis mine.)
You know, when I first came across this line, taken out of context, probably having seen it somewhere while frantically trying to take in more writing advice1 – as though this alone would make me a better, more sensitive writer, not reading, nor writing – I was gobbling it up. This was about six years ago I think, around the time I first started writing original fiction. I’m a stan of ambition. I love when somebody is determined to get something they want in their way. So if you tell me I’ve already become a better, more focused writer by giving my character something to want that they will near-immediately act on – I’m on board faster than you can utter the w of “want”. (Once, a friend of mine said all my characters have the same spunk. They do. They want and act like villains.)
So here’s the other shoe you were waiting for to drop: just giving a character something to want won’t make them necessarily good. Good, here, means compelling. Good, here, means someone worth following, worth thinking about, worth chewing over. Good is not necessarily the approximation of reality as it is the approximation of a line of thought, a, well, voice in your head you can hear bright and clear. A character want is the first step, but voice, that’s where the money is.
We know what Luffy wants. But what is his voice?
No. Let’s go back a step. Do we know what Luffy wants? I’m not asking this to quiz you. I think of you as someone that can keep up. Really, though, you don’t even have to keep up. Luffy is a character who will state this every single movie and just about every single arc. He wants to be King of the Pirates. We don’t know why – only that it apparently has a reason. Yes. But he also wants to protect his friends, a broadly defined term. He also wants to keep his hat. Because he promised Shanks he would return it to him once he became a great pirate. Is this one desire that I just divided into three just to be annoying? No. I mean, Luffy could at any given point ditch this crew just to become King. He could also at any given point not have friends. They feed off of each other, but more often than not the narrative treats these things separate. But the most separate of all, but also the one that all movies and even Oda himself will fall back on if push comes to shove, is the hat. Luffy really likes that hat. It is a symbol of a promise, but it is also a hat. So in some way, really, he’s treating it like Super Mario’s cap. Without it, he’s… um… half as Luffy.
So curiously enough, he ends up the only character in the whole cast who has these multiple wants. Name me one thing besides wanting to be the greatest swordsman that Zoro wants. “Drinking lots of sake,“ you’ll say. I mean, uh, sure. But he could do without sake. He could not do without his bushido. I suppose it’s the same with Sanji, who… wants… women… I guess… but also to see All Blue. Oda tried to somehow tie these together, but the other characters were kind of confused about it when that happened, so let’s ignore it. The idea is that these two have other wants that are inconsequential to the story. Not Luffy, though. He has to have the hat, and he has to have his friends, and he has to be King of the Pirates.
The wants, again, feed off of each other. His ideal of a king is with his friends, who should all be part of his kingdom, maybe. His ideal of a king is to not wear a crown, but to wear the hat. Here’s the question. If these wants can feed off of each other more often than not, do these wants conflict one another? I’m glad you asked. This is where we get to the voice aspect.
Imagine Zoro’s voice. Gruff, says cool one-liners, often the tsukkomi. Alright. Now Sanji. Immediately you’ll go, “is the other character a woman or a man or Zoro” (famously, the three genders)? You already got it. Now Luffy. What is Luffy’s voice? “I want meat.” Hm. “I want to be King of the Pirates.” Hm. “My hat!” Hm. Okay, Taurus king!
I wasn’t entirely honest with the voice thing earlier, in that I lied by omitting. Voice is just a shorthand to me to describe a character’s perspective. What do they think of a given thing? That invites questions like: what made them this way? That invites anecdotes. Lots of them, probably. You are here creating an interiority, an approximation of life. That life is not / cannot be real. But it should be a voice in your head you can hear. It should be a mirage that, when you close your eyes and imagine a scenario, you can imagine them react and have your brain say, yeah, that sounds about right.
Luffy had that, the voice. It is a voice that says: I don’t care if you burn down the world, I want my strawhat. It is a voice that says: I want my meat, and I don’t care if I die over it, or get poisoned. It is a voice that says: I am here for my friends. You can call this complex. But when I watched Film Z, I was struck with how much it contradicted Luffy. Hilariously enough, the want that propelled that movie is the same want that propels Straw Hat Chase, a movie I thought was at least hilarious and tonally consistent with the rest of the series.
Now to be clear, this is slightly unfair. I know. Straw Hat Chase is a 3D film (read: videogame cut scenes looking like they came out of a Gamecube with a 1080p polish) that runs for a decent thirty minutes. Film Z is one hour longer than that. The scopes are different, too. Straw Hat Chase is about some guy about to die and his dog-bird2 is trying to help him out. Film Z is about some Marine who wants to eradicate all pirates. Film Z is also a curious case of a film that is and isn’t canon, mostly because of the designs appearing for the first time animated, and also some canon things like Kuzan leaving the Marine appears here. The movie spends a lot of time trying to canonize Z as a character by giving ample space for lots of Marine characters to tell us what kind of character he is. Fits my theory, right? No. This is the “tell” part of “show, don’t tell”.
Luffy wants to save his hat in a movie called Straw Hat Chase and it makes sense because that is his entire focus and also the focus of the movie. In the end he makes friends with the dog-bird and the old man. But in Z, Z is trying to end the world. (Whatever.) And Luffy is not thinking of anyone that could possibly be harmed in the world, but rather of his hat. That’s strange for a character who, in a previous romp, willingly got himself to a sky island because another villain (this one canonized) (not that it matters) wanted to nuke East Blue.
Now you can say that One Piece movies are just some way to get more money out of their fans. Not necessarily wrong, but maybe a touch too cynical for my taste. What is of importance to me, though, is that there are multiple authors here, and all of them have a different idea of what Luffy wants. The hat doesn’t tie to anything. It is its own island, its own anecdote. And maybe that worked in establishing a character who has a devil may care attitude in everything except the hat (Orange Town Arc is crucial here), but then this has to be followed through. For a while, the need to be King of Pirates – a want so broad you can’t translate it to an entire attitude – worked hand in hand with the Straw Hat, because Oda used to be able to sometimes, when Luffy threw himself into the most dangerous shit just because he knew dying in the thick of it meant being able to do what one strived for.3 And then, there is the need to protect all friends? That is not an offensive attitude, it can only be defensive. It now means Luffy only ever reacts when his friends are in trouble. Guess who only gets the big fights now as a result.
So in lieu of a solild, strong voice that communicates one want and stacks everything they do around this combination of interior voice and exterior action, Luffy has no voice. Or rather: his voice bends to the will that is prioritized the most at a given time. Since everything matters, very little does. Just like his abilities, forever flexible, end up being a series of Gomu Gomu no Pistols.
Vonnegut said it best: every character should want something. Some thing. Even if that is only a hat made of straw that must always remain intact.
I often jokingly say I treat writing books like self-help books. That’s certainly how I used to treat them… sometimes I still do. We’ll have to talk about this at a later time, though.
Kind of impressive how typing this out always looks stranger than it really is in the world of One Piece.
That Luffy — in particular, Syrup Village Arc Luffy — is one I think so often about you have no idea. Very appealing as a writer.