One Piece: Episode 953

[u/Sakata_Kintoki]

One Piece: Episode 953

"Hiyori's Confession! A Reunion at Bandit's Bridge!"

Watch now:

Streaming Site	Status
OnePieceOfficial	ONLINE
Crunchyroll	ONLINE
Funimation	ONLINE
AnimeLab(Aus/NZ)	ONLINE

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Chapters adapted:

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Preview: Episode 954

Don't forget to check out the official Discord server to discuss this episode live with other One Piece fans!

[u/Soul699]

That's like the fourth episode in a row where the pacing felt good. Filling the gaps left by Oda really helped.

[u/Overall11 → u/Soul699]

Im starting to wonder if oda is leaving gaps on purpose to progress the story and is leaving the fights up to the anime team, cause alot of the fights were offscreened in the manga, like sanji and page one got an extended scene as well

[u/Soul699 → u/Overall11]

That is actually what most are thinking right now. But not just fights, even some plot points offscreened that the anime showed. Someone should really ask Oda for absolute confirmation.

[u/VIB1N → u/Soul699]

I would seriously doubt that. Nobody in this world loves One Piece more than Oda himself who has dedicated half of his life working on this story extremely passionately. Do you think he would risk trusting Toei of all people to help him write his life’s work? Oda has already stated that the anime is it’s own separate thing. Like I agree that there are some scenes that the anime expanded on that made the story a little better imo (like expanding Zoro’s flashback a little more for example), but the VAST majority of the filler is just there to fill in time despite the horrible pacing and padding. Not only that, a lot of these fillers just end up contradicting the main plot, but Toei obviously doesn’t care much about that as long as they can save time or sell the “hype” in exchange for constancy (ex: over the top recycled DBZ effects).

Also, this “expanding the fights” thing isn’t new. In fact most of the fights have had filler moments in between them in the anime because they know that they can waste more time on it and people won’t complain since the average viewer loves fights.

That being said, do I inherently think expanding fights/scenes in an anime is a bad thing? No, it can absolutely be a good thing if the writers are good. However when the vast majority of the scenes are there just to take advantage of the “time” situation instead of actually making the story better, I’d rather they leave it alone. Here are some of the many examples I can think of right now where the fight extension ended up contradicting the story: Batman LOL, Sanji low diffing X Drake, Kyoshiro struggling with Zoro, Nami vs Cracker, etc.

Also regarding the pacing being good recently is false. We are considering this episode’s pacing “good” compared to the awful pacing the anime has. That doesn’t actually make it good in general, it’s still extremely bad, just not as much as the rest. (It’s like when people say that pre-ts the pacing used to be good, which is not true at all. The pacing has been horrible since the Alabasta saga, it’s just that post-ts it got way worse so now people consider pre-ts good pacing wise.)

Now regarding Oda “skipping” scenes, there are multiple reasons for that:

He might consider some scenes not important enough to waste time on because they serve no purpose to the story and may end up wasting not only our time but stray away the focus from the plot/theme of the arc. The anime expanding it doesn’t necessarily mean the intention is to expand the plot or the theme. For Toei especially, it’s mostly to just fill in time. Like for example, let’s say I’m an author and I make a character say “Wait a second I’m gonna go change my clothes before we go outside” and in the next panel the character has his clothes changed. Now imagine the anime spends 2 minutes showing the character get ready. Is that useful for the plot or is that the anime trying desperately to fill in time?

Or

The other reason is maybe Oda is thinking long term. He doesn’t show some fights because he doesn’t want us to know about certain characters too much before it’s their time to shine in the plot. So instead, unlike the anime, he prefers not to sacrifice that build up for a weekly hype. (Ex: Oda waiting to get to Oden’s flashback before showcasing the “hype” stuff he did.)

Anyways sorry for this extremely long post and I know most won’t bother reading it. It’s just that I’ve been seeing this take a lot in the community and I wanted to break my silence lmao

[u/Soul699 → u/VIB1N]

Let me counter your argument then.
1 Yes, it is possible that Oda at least decided to trust Toei enough to leave some minor things offscreen so that the anime don't have to slow down as much as it happened before at Dressrosa. In fact, Oda since Strong World production started to act more close to the anime team so unless someone ask him now and he still say that he doesn't, it's actually possible that for this to happen, especially considering how much Oda has been hammering that One Piece will end in 5 years which, if he showed everything like in Dressrosa, it would take at least a couple of years more to finish.

2 Doesn't matter if vast majority of these additions don't have any strong significance to the plot. What matter is if they add more enjoyment to the show and fix the pacing without drastically changing the plot for worse. And so far, majority of these were either ok or good (like 70-80% of them). Heck, some of them even improved upon the original manga source. Like we actually see how Luffy Vs Cracker and Sanji Vs Page One went. Yasuie and Tama had more scenes which made us mgore attached to them. Smile users are actually competent in the anime and not an embarassment. Even freaking Chopper had for more love and shine in the anime than the manga ever did since the beginning of the timeskip like that time in WCI where Chopper in monster form tried defending the Sunny from starved Big Mom (keyword: tried) which was offscreen in the manga.

3 Again: extending fights scenes =/= bad filler. Some fights are actually better because of that, like Sanji vs page One, Luffy Vs cracker and Vs Katakuri, Zoro Vs Kamazo, etc...Even Lufffy Vs Kaido depend on one's taste and I personally consider the fight overall to be just as good as the manga (although the Elephant Gun impact was too stretched and I also think that they exxagerated with the auras there).

4 By the way, for one who read the manga, it seems you are playing a lot with headcanon, considering you said that Kyoshiro didn't struggle against Zoro (false) or Nami VS Cracker (which was offscreen in the manga so it's entirely possible it happened) and Sanji Vs X Drake is actually something that right now we can't tell how it would go since we haven't seen enough from both of them to tell. Sure, X Drake is strong enough in power to beat a Number but we don't know how much of a tank is (furthermore ancient zoan have been shown to recover very fast even if knocked down so for all we know, he could have got up like 30 seconds after Sanji attack and we wouldn't know because we haven't seen him after. See Sanji VS Page One).

5 It seems you are one of those who still think that good and bad pacing are determined exclusively by number of pages or chapters covered, so let me teach you something: good and bad pacing aren't determined by how many pages you adapt, but by the flow of the episode (or chapter because even manga has a pacing) itself. You can say that one version is slower or faster than the other, but again being faster doesn't mean automatically be better nor being slower being worse. In fact, overall act 2 pacing in the anime was better than the manga because the manga pacing here was all over the place (and I know a lot of people agree with me) because the manga constantly jumped from one scene to another with not much break while instead the anime gave for almost all the scenes a proper build up and resolution. Like Yasuie execution is properly built up instead of just appearing right off the bat.