One Piece 597

So. :|a

I reacted, let us say, Not Well to the Zoro section of OP 597, and it's only been through much ranting to whiteadelphi and soul-searching and awesome conversation that I've been mostly reconciled to it. Not entirely! There remain issues, but at least I'm not making lineface every time I think about it, now. Instead of reiterating, I'm just going to link to the post WA made that contains basically our whole IM conversation on the topic.

To clarify before we even start, my problem wasn't at all to do with the plain fact that Zoro asked Mihawk to train him and humbled himself terribly in the process. In fact, that hardly comes up in our massive combined tl;dr AIM conversation, and I'm surprised that a lot of people seem to have issues with it. Not like he hasn't shown that he'll sacrifice his dream for Luffy at this point, after all. And yeah, it's painful and shaming and he had to throw away his pride to do it, and he doesn't care, he'll get on his hands and knees and press his forehead to the floor and hold there, bleeding all over Mihawk's carpet until the man agrees to train him, and then look so thrilled and happy when he finally does (>.> socute). I thought that was awesome, actually, it hammers in just how far he'll go—he won't just die to protect Luffy and his dream and the rest of his crew, he'll humiliate himself in front of his ultimate rival and live and get stronger in order to better support him, too.

...Which is the thought which sparks my ACTUAL problem. >_____> So here are the links.

( Links and more stuff under the cut )

Edit: Now with links actually added, derp.