#what really interests me is when sanji is forced to confront that fucked up view of the self he has | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

to-the-all-blue · 5 months

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On my walk home from the cafe I was thinking about Sanji (as one does) and how every influence in his life for 19 years screamed at him to hunker down, stay silent, and never appear weak.

As much as I love Zeff and know he loved Sanji, it's clear he has such a straight-laced and unflinching view of masculinity and what it means to be a man. The environment on the Baratie was an extension of that.

It was a machismo world where affection was hidden behind kicks to the head and insults. The kind of environment where cutting your hand or something gets a response of "what? You call that an injury? Don't cry over nothing". Where outright kindness has to be dragged out of people, and then immediately covered up with a half-baked insult.

Throw into that environmemt a little boy who is desperate to prove he's not the failure he was told he was, and out pops a man who wears his heart on his sleeve for "acceptable manly emotions" but who hides real emotions behind anger, and hides pain (physical or emotional) altogether so as not to seem weak.

Tack onto that the idea that the only surefire way to show love is through self sacrifice (his mom + Zeff), then of course Sanji will be all sorts of jacked up.

We see throughout the series how Sanji is so unwilling to be vulnerable or to even admit he's feeling hurt at all. Plaster a smile on, make some comment about loving women, and voila! He's the man's man everyone expects. No need to worry about him. After all: he's strong.

...🥺

#op meta #the news coo latest #sanji #i have like 10 different sanji-centric fics rolling around in the ol' noggin #but every single one of them features at least one scene where someone (Zoro) sees through his hyper-masculine bullshit #what really interests me is when sanji is forced to confront that fucked up view of the self he has #like for example: Zoro gets hurt and allows himself to rest or something and is unapologetically fine with being 'weak'#sanji so desperately wants to rib him for it but zoro is so stoic about it that he starts to realize 'oh...its ok...to not be ok? publicly?'#imma sit here and stew on this for awhile #Anyway the coffee from the cafe is good but now I need to go read as much Sanji trauma dump fic I can get my hands on lol #to be clear btw: i dont doubt zeff cared for sanji when he was down but i feel sanji had to be in a bad way to get the 'real emotions'

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