 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line review your source for everything one piece. Last week marked a devastating moment in the series with the forced separation of the straw hats and this week we are following the solo adventures of Luffy on the all-female island of Amazon Lily. Amazon Lily is the 20th arc in the series consisting of 11 manga chapters and 14 anime episodes making it the shortest arc we've seen for quite some time. I mean even long ring long land was well longer. The premise of this arc is much simpler than most. Basically Luffy just ends up on an island as the result of being sent there by Bartholomew Kuma. There's no real goal or any prior knowledge of the island so it's a journey into the complete unknown which is great because generally that's when I feel like one piece is at its best. However in regards to this island I'm not so sure that's the case. Amazon Lily is a fairly flat location there's nothing hugely intriguing about the island itself it's pretty standard stuff. Lots of forest and lots of big rocks and this initial impression of the island is appropriate I suppose because it is located in the calm belt the region of the world that we have only ever briefly stepped into for a tiny portion of one chapter but that's good reason for that because apart from the rampant sea kings it's a pretty visually flat stretch of sea. Hence the name I guess. Luckily Amazon Lily does get a bit more exciting once we reach the inhabitants the all-female Kooja tribe. I really like this society as a whole because it forced Oda to break his standard formula for drawing women and actually make some cool and unique characters. The Kooja tribe come in a ridiculous amount of different shapes and sizes creating a surprisingly diverse environment for an island consisting of only a single gender and I like this even more when you consider one of the core beliefs of the island which is that in this land the strong are beautiful. So apart from the obvious with Bawa Hancock who we'll get into inhabitants of this island are formed upon in direct relation to their strength. People absolutely love Sandersonia and Marigold even though they're not as let's say traditionally beautiful as someone like Marguerite. It's a fresh perspective that I appreciate because Oda has a very formulaic approach to female characters which works well enough but it gets boring when you just keep seeing Nami reintroduced with different hair. I also enjoy that the all-female tribe have an unexplained fascination with snakes because you know that's not valid at all. Our main ally for the Amazon Lily arc is Marguerite, a character who on the scale of Nami clones ranks at about an eight. The body is a complete copy but her face is adequately unique. I don't mention her personality because she really doesn't have one, at least not one that stands out in a series like this although I will admit that she does have a great line when she asks Luffy to remove his balls so that she can take a closer look at them. I like Marguerite but I generally forget that she even exists especially compared to Hancock. So let's talk about the leader of the Kooch tribe because it was one hell of a surprise that Bawa Hancock was a warlord of the sea. When the arc first began I never even dreamed that we'd meet the final warlord so easily and her initial appearance was pretty amazing. I love the running gag of there being something cute like a kitten or a baby seal wherever Hancock happens to be walking and she just ruthlessly kicks them out of the way. But my favorite Hancock gag and probably one of my favorite character traits in the entire series is the fact that she has the ability to look so far down on a person that she's actually looking up. But Bawa Hancock is actually quite fearsome easily dealing with an entire battleship full of marines and forcing a vice admiral to his knees. Which by the way shout out to Vice Admiral Mamonga. He was by far my favorite Buster call admiral so I was much more excited than I should have been to see his return even in the small capacity. But he was here to prove that Hancock's power is pretty formidable even if it does come in an overly cutesy lovey-dovey package. And with all of that said I really don't like how Hancock just all of a sudden fell for Luffy. I've come to terms with it these days and it has led to a lot of brilliant comic moments but I think I wanted something very different from the only female warlord of the sea. Hancock does have an interesting past though in that she was once a slave for the celestial dragons which is pretty dark stuff and it makes her devil fruit power much more forgivable because it was fed to her purely for the entertainment of her captors. So rather than the hot female character having love powers for the hell of it it would have been structured by a very cruel individual. Hancock sisters also have devil fruit abilities both snake zoans rather conveniently. I always find that it's little bit too forced when you encounter a group of fruit users with very similar powers because these things are supposed to be damn hard to find let alone hunting them based on a theme. But I guess it's forgivable in this case because the celestial dragons would have essentially infinite resources and realistically could have found two similar fruits. It's less forgivable in cases like Dressrosa when the Tom Tata tribe just happened to have two insect related zoan fruits. It's not a huge issue it's just a little immersion breaking. But all in all Amazon Lily is not one piece at its greatest. I think it suffers from a lack of characters because when you think about it other than Luffy there are only five characters of any real relevance. A number that low is something we haven't seen since the very beginning of one piece and it's weird to be stripped back to something like that at this stage when we're very used to complex storytelling featuring an extended cast. Amazon Lily also feels much more tropey than most arcs in the series because once it gets going it's a predictable arc in almost every single way especially with the whole main protagonist accidentally intruding on the female character in the bath. And there were a lot of other times like that during this arc where it just felt like I was reading any number of different manga series. Another issue is that this arc doesn't quite have a clear direction until it's almost over. Usually in one piece there is some sort of goal even if that goal is just general like straw hats wanting to visit a cool island. Amazon Lily lands in a kind of limbo where we as an audience have no idea what's going on or why and as a result the events of the arc can seem a bit pointless at times. Serious Drive only returns to the story once we find out about Ace's plight and the plan to break into Impel Down is proposed. This was a great what the hell moment by the way because it hit us with the reality that the straw hats aren't going to be returning for a very long time and that one piece is now entering completely uncharted territory which was super exciting but it wasn't due to Amazon Lily it was due to the promise of the arc after Amazon Lily. If anything this revelation just made me want to get off the island even quicker and begin the next arc. I would also like to say that this is one of the very few arcs that may have been improved by adding filler into the anime. In the adaptation Toei chose to diffuse Amazon Lily by giving us short portions of the rest of the straw hat crew whose journeys were told through cover stories in the manga. Although during the Amazon Lily arc this was almost definitely filler. The straw hats were all on the right islands but a lot of weird shit happened here that did not happen in the manga like Zoro being put into the Kumusi suit but I can imagine that these scenes did a lot to break up the monotony of Amazon Lily which isn't a bad arc. This review has been quite negative but Amazon Lily is a perfectly serviceable arc. It's just not the best that one piece has to offer by any means and it is completely overshadowed by what came before it and what is to come after it. So that pretty much does it for Amazon Lily. Next week we will be doing The Unthinkable by breaking into the most highly secured prison in the world in Pell Down. If you enjoyed this video then feel free to like, favorite or subscribe and please do comment with your thoughts on Amazon Lily. This has been the Grand Line Review and I'll see you next time.