Boa Hancock Quotes

Played as a gag, and the gag is doing a job it is not good at. The decision on this page is a serious one: the Empress of Amazon Lily has agreed to go to the government as one of the Seven Warlords, and later in the chapter the Navy counts her as its sixth. Hancock explains it as helpless infatuation, blushing into her hand. The better account is on the same page, in Grandma Nyon's mouth. By going to the government and defending her title, Nyon says, she defends the nation as well as helping Monkey D. Luffy, and the previous empresses ruined themselves by suppressing feelings like hers. That is a reasoned choice with two beneficiaries. The line reduces it to one, and to a joke about a woman who cannot say no to a boy in a straw hat. The comedy works well enough on its own terms, though the Kuja crowd swooning over a single smile is funnier. What it costs is the character's agency at the exact moment she exercises it. Her own dialogue makes Hancock the least interesting explanation of what Hancock is doing.

Everyone else on the island has a title for her. Voices in the crowd correct Luffy for calling her Snake Lady, which is rude, and tell him the proper form is Snake Princess; the crowd at the port shouts it again as she sails. Against all of that she asks one person to drop the rank and use the bare name. It is the most exposed thing she says on these pages, because a name without a title is a request to be treated as an equal, and she makes it blushing, chin on hand. The cost arrives in the next panel. Okay, Hammock, says Luffy, and a bystander has to correct him. The request commits her to an intimacy the other party has not noticed he was offered, and the chapter lets that imbalance stand without comment. Grandma Nyon's verdict, a woman in love, is the island's reading. The page's reading is blunter: the woman a whole island calls princess has handed over the one thing her title protected, and got a hammock back.