Entertainment
The First 5 Minutes Of One Piece Season 2 Is Peak Aura Farming
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
If there’s one thing anime has always been able to do better than any other medium, it’s making new characters look like the most dangerous, most powerful, and above all, the coolest, part of the story. Aura farming is what it’s referred to when someone is intentionally trying to look like the coolest person in the room, but anime fans have known about it for years as simply “new character introduction.”
One Piece Season 2: Into the Grand Line keeps the anime trend alive with the introduction of Miss All Sunday and her effortless takedown of a group of Marines while oozing confidence. If you needed a visual as to what aura farming is, this is it.
One Piece Live Action Nails The Anime Character Intro Trope
Miss All Sunday is played by Lera Abova, in only her second series role after Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin, which in any other anime adaptation would be cause for alarm among fans. Someone with that little experience attempting to bring a fan-favorite character to life could be a disaster, and yet, Oda, creator of One Piece, selected the entire cast. He knew what he was doing. The character, powered by the Flower-Flower Devil Fruit, has the ability to spawn duplicates of her limbs on any other surface. Within 20 seconds, the live-action series lets her show what happens when this nightmarish power is unleashed.
Fittingly considering Abova’s background, Miss All Sunday treats the Marine-filled corridor as a fashion runway. Bright pink flower petals are a gorgeous harbinger of arms sprouting out of soldiers and forcing them to stab and shoot themselves, which again, is truly horrifying to think about. The thing is that One Piece makes it look so damn cool.
One Piece Gets The Little Things Right
For decades, the gold standard for live-action adaptations of powers that are super cool in print has been Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) in the opening scene of X-2. The German mutant’s teleportation is on full display as he easily rips through the Secret Service and is only stopped from assassinating the President thanks to a lucky shot. The only part of his powers that can’t come across in that opening scene is the smell of brimstone.
The first season of One Piece is the greatest live-action anime adaptation of all time, and Season 2 is picking right up where it left off. Miss All Sunday’s introduction may seem like a small moment in the grand scheme of the series, but this is the type of sequence that makes the series feel like a live-action version of the anime and not another Dragonball Evolution. Getting the little things right, from Luffy’s infectious smile to the bizarre outfits of everyday citizens, and even the aura farming character introductions, has to be done to win over the fans of the original.
One Piece Season 2: Into the Grand Line has only been out for a few days now, and if you’re binging, you know there’s a lot more of Miss All Sunday to come, and anime/manga fans, well, they know the treat ahead in Season 3. If the series can nail Miss All Sunday’s introduction and powers like this, then how awesome will the Warlords of the Seven Seas be? Will the series even get to Blackbeard?
One Piece Season 2, streaming on Netflix, has raised the bar for anime fans, and all it took to prove it was one 60-second walk down a hallway.