 This video is sponsored by NordVPN, which I greatly appreciate, thanks for that. But hello and welcome to the Groundline Review Your Source for everything One Piece, and today it's time we take a moment, or a couple, and ten, I know how many moments are in a roughly ten minute video. Whatever it is, we are taking them to examine the dark underbelly of One Piece, because this series is often praised and characterised for being the epitome of action, comedy, and drama, and that third one aside, the overall impression of One Piece tends to be quite light and fun. However, with that said, there are some extraordinarily dark, creepy, and legitimately shocking aspects of the series. Stuff that you wouldn't necessarily expect to see in a Shona Manga, all of which is masked by the very gleeful presence of one rubber boy. But I'm afraid it's time that we took off our vibrant, happy sunglasses in order to take a glimpse of One Piece reality. But in order to do so, you will first need to take the red pill by pressing the subscribe button for the Groundline Review, which will grant you regular and truthful One Piece content uploaded straight into your YouTube feed. Or you could not subscribe, thus taking the blue pill, and remain blissfully ignorant of this channel, but really, that's no way to live now, is it? Yes, you think on that? As we begin exploring the darkness of One Piece with Number 10, the Dolphemingo and Viola Relationship. So this is quite an interesting one, and a great example of One Piece canon that Oda was afraid to state openly in the series itself. But if you look back on Dress Rose, are these two appear to refer to each other with more intimate names, seen specifically here in Chapter 788. And when Oda was asked why this was in the SPS of Olimet 3, he stated the following. There is a deep, secret setting I can't tell you about though. I inform the supervisor about it, but since it's a pretty adult part of the story, it remains hidden in the Shona Manga which One Piece is. To all adults, please try to imagine yourselves. Dress Rose is a truly passionate country. So basically, not only did Dolphemingo take over the country, enslave its citizens, turn their king into an unwilling mass murderer. But on top of all of that, yes, he also had sex with their princess, who almost certainly had to go along with it for her own survival and for the future of the nation. That's a pretty dark secret for One Piece, and I'm surprised that any semblance of it whatsoever made it into the story. But this is far from the first or last time that Oda would implement some of life's more challenging ideas. Or even death's more challenging ideas as we move on to Number 9, Brooke's Half a Century of Hell. Just as with Austro-Hatz, Brooke certainly has no shortage of tragedy in his life, but one very overlooked aspect of it, I feel, is the fact that this man spent five decades alone on a ship, populated only by the corpses of his dead crewmates. And to be perfectly honest at my age, which is not young, but it's also not old, I don't even have a concept of what 50 years feels like. But that was the amount of time that Brooke was trapped on the ship with nothing to do except sing and play music on his own. And when he did sleep, every night he would dream that his crew was still alive, only to be woken by the despairful reality of their demise. Which by the way, just a little sub-factor here, the rumba pirate ship just happened to carry coffins, like a lot of coffins, signifying that these guys well and truly expected death on their journey, quite a bit of death, which is the harsh reality of the ground lion. With that said, I can't imagine that Frankie has built any coffins aboard Thousand Sunny, so this is one of those moments where One Piece just went super super dark. It does get much worse though. Much much worse with sugar's disturbing devil fruit. So the Hobby Hobby No Meat, in my opinion, is one of the most overpowered things to have ever existed in One Piece. But a lot of that power incurs a very dark cost. It basically allows sugar to touch someone and instantly transform them into a toy slave. A toy slave who must obey her once a contract is formed. Pretty dark already, but the worst part is that after becoming a toy, everyone you knew in life immediately forgets about you. Their memories of you are either wiped or replaced. So for all intents and purposes, you just effectively stop existing. And when I first read this in the manga, I legitimately felt sick to my stomach. It's such a horrible thing to do to someone far worse than actually killing them. Because you're severing their relationships and their bonds, you're destroying them in a way that death never could. And not only that, you are making these victims live on with that knowledge in eternal servitude. This is a very special brand of hell. And Dressroser certainly does have quite a bit to answer for. As does Whole Cake Island as we move on to number seven, which is going to be the existence of a soul tax. A unique endeavor exclusive to Tottenland, whereby twice annually some of Big Mom's soul homie things go around the empire and ask its citizens a very simple question. Leave or life. Indicating that the individual has the choice to leave Tottenland or forfeit part of their life to remain within the empire. That part coming directly in the form of a portion of their soul. And Big Mom of course uses these souls to create more homies and increase the size of her kingdom. And whilst people, I suppose, do technically willingly give up their souls, it's not quite that simple. It's very much a false choice because what are they supposed to do? Just decide to leave Tottenland and venture out into the new old, aka the most dangerous and volatile sea on the entire planet? So with that in mind, this choice kind of boils down to the following. You die immediately or you die slowly. With your life gradually being milked like some sort of farm animal. Which is what Tottenland is. It's one gigantic farm. In a literal sense because each island produces a type of food or ingredient. But also because Big Mom farms its citizens life force directly to gain power. It's a pretty damn scary place really. As is the internet in general. And if you'd like to feel a bit safer online then look no further than the sponsor of this video, NordVPN. A VPN is essentially a service that protects your online privacy by securing and encrypting your internet traffic whilst changing your original IP address. And I know lots of complex, non, one-piece sounding words there, but it basically protects your data from those trying to spy on it. Let's put it this way. If the O'Hara scholars had been using NordVPN then the world government probably would not have found out about their forbidden research because that is the grand importance of privacy. So to make sure something like the O'Hara instant never happens again, NordVPN is offering a special deal as every purchase of a two-year plan will gain you an additional four months for free. It also has a 30-day money back guarantee so if you find that you're not a fan of, you know, privacy then you can resume your exhibitionist lifestyle at no cost. All one needs to do is go to this funky link here, NordVPN.com slash Grand Line and use the coupon code which is also Grand Line. Now with that said, let's get into some more horrendously dark secrets of the one-piece world and number six is simply slavery. This concept exists all over the world in one-piece, although it was brought particularly into focus during the initial Sabadyak, where we stumbled upon a human auction house. A place where wealthy individuals could go to bid on slaves of various different races commanding various different prices. In fact, you really didn't have to be all that wealthy because certain lives are valued as far less than others, though almost on the picking order being a basic human with an average price of 500,000 berries, which in the one-piece world is pretty much nothing. With that said, the practice of slavery is epitomized mainly by the world nobles who have quite a sickening collection of slaves and they enjoy gathering and showing them all off like I would with one-piece volumes. And this has had a particularly large impact on the fishmen and merfolk races who are simultaneously seen as lower beings get also prized slavery stop. It is a disturbing and despicable practice, but it is overwhelmingly present in one-piece. And you want to know something really disturbing? A good chunk of everything we've just gone through is what is publicly known and to some degree publicly accepted, which really does make you wonder what goes down in private. And with that, we land at number five, which is human experimentation. Pankazza gave us a glimpse into the one-piece world that I don't think I was quite ready for. And when people make arguments of Caesar clown for Nakama, in my mind, I'm always like, all right, the guy who kidnapped imprisoned and tortured children all for the sake of vaguely defined science. He also experimented on adults as well, but their kids hit me particularly hard, crossing an even further moral boundary. And it's hard to reconcile that at times because Caesar's character had a bit of a renaissance during Hawkeye Island, where he did become quite hilarious and just fun to be around. But if you think that Chopper would ever, ever allow someone like him to be on the crew, then you are 100% insane. He is just responsible for far too much evil in this world, far reaching evil as well because he also has a hand in number four, smile devil fruits. Now Caesar isn't solely responsible for these, but he does develop a core component of these dark items. And these edibles are truly cursed because they have a 90% chance of being defective, leading to purely negative side effects, the most profound of which is the consumer being unable to express any negative emotions and being forced to smile and laugh at all times. Something which is shown to be truly heartbreaking with Toko, when whilst watching her father being executed, she could do nothing but laugh uncontrollably. It's a really sinister item that Oda has come up with here. The idea that you're forced to express joy in the darkest of times is a pretty confronting juxtaposition, especially when you see an entire group of people affected by this curse, such as the residents of Abisu Town. Who you know ate the smile fruits rather gleefully thinking that they were food because they were starving. Which actually brings us to number three, the perpetual abuse of the Wano people. Because whether or not you've eaten a smile, fruit life on this island is horrific, and I think that is best illustrated in Okubora Town, where Oda drew a very provocative panel. Basically on the verge of starvation, he depicted a family literally moments away from committing suicide. There was a mother about to kill her baby and what looked like an elderly citizen about to hang themselves. And luckily they were stopped at the last second by news of food reaching the town thanks to Luffy and company. But this is a pretty wild panel and quite understandably it was omitted from the anime adaptation. So it's another one of those situations where it becomes clear that Oda actually sees this world with a much fuller spectrum than we do. He sees and implements these very dark concepts in the background, but we only really ever see a small sliver of that presented to us. But the dark secrets of the series are always there, whether we see them or not. Which brings us to the intriguing case of number two, that time when Oda did everything he could to depict cannibalism without actually showing the cannibalism. So Charlotte Lin Lin is a truly tragic existence, particularly her childhood. Something that she does not know the full truth about to this very day, however we do and that truth is, it's not good to say the least. Because basically on her sixth birthday, Lin Lin went into a state of hunger bliss so powerful that she not only ate all of the food at her party, but also all of the guests at her party, including her treasured mother Carmel. Now we don't see this play out in the series for obvious reasons, but the aftermath and the witness accounts make it very clear that this was a case of cannibalism. Involuntary cannibalism, but still cannibalism. The two people who witnessed the incident had very different reactions as well. One was a giant who was so horrified that he fled as quickly as he could, and the other was Streusen, who immediately decided to use this monster for his own personal goals. Whatever the case, cannibalism is canon, but it's still not the darkest that One Piece is gone, and that honor is reserved for number one, the existence of not just one, but in fact numerous examples of genocide. The deliberate killing of people from particular nations seems to be just one of those things that happens in One Piece, with the obvious example being the Ohara incident. In this case, the world government ordered the destruction of the island after discovering that a group of scholars were engaging in forbidden research. However, then Vice Admiral Sakazuki took this a step further by ordering the slaughter of all Oharan citizens, not wanting to risk even the chance of a single person escaping with some forbidden knowledge. But in another case also occurred with the nation of Flavons, the home of Trafalgar Law. In this case, the large majority of its citizens became infected with amber-led syndrome, a condition that was known by both the world government and the royalty of Flavons to both exist and be fatal. However, they kept this under wraps for the sake of profit, but when the people of Flavons attempted to leave the nation, the neighboring kingdoms conducted a swift genocide out of fear of the condition spreading to them. Thus, leading to one of the darkest visuals that One Piece has to offer, in which Trafalgar Law was able to escape Flavons by hiding in a mound of corpses. And that's a pretty good taste of what One Piece has to offer within its dark crevices. Certainly not all though, there are a lot of dark secrets that I just didn't have the time to mention here today, but I suppose you should just be aware that this world isn't quite as light and fluffy as it often seems. But what do you guys think? Please do leave your thoughts in the comments below or even join my Discord server. And if you'd like to see more videos like this, then please do go and check out some of my other content or even subscribe to the channel for more glorious One Piece business uploaded straight into your YouTube feeds. But for now, this has been the Grand Line Review, and I'll see you next time.