YMMV / One Piece – Alabasta Arc

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Does Smoker letting the Straw Hats go at Rainbase stem purely from his Personal Justice... or is he (also?) trying to escape the shame of knowing that up until this moment, he would never have done the same for them (as remember, his grand plan back in Loguetown was to let the Buggy Pirates and Straw Hats slaughter each other so his men would have easier arrests) despite ostensibly being a Good Guy?
• Ass Pull: Pell surviving the 5-km-range bomb that went off right under him is widely considered to be the biggest example of this in the entire series, especially because it was unnecessary. As a sympathetic but fairly unimportant side character, he was the perfect candidate for a Heroic Sacrifice; the fact that he survives not only makes his sacrifice moot, but also calls into question the very insightful and important speech Luffy gave to Vivi about how "people die." Apparently, "people" simply refers to members of the Red Shirt Army. This incident is actually a huge part of where the phrase "Nobody dies in One Piece" came from.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The four soldiers from the elite Kicking Claw Force who come out of nowhere to back up Vivi and Chaka in their fight against Crocodile. They apparently drank some kind of special water that was never mentioned before in the series and is never mentioned again, which gives them insane amounts of strength at the cost of dying a few minutes later. Crocodile proceeds to float up to the roof to get away from them, and just waits for the water to kill them. They all die completely pointless deaths after accomplishing absolutely nothing (we don't even get to see them fight), and are never brought up again afterwards.
• Fridge Brilliance: For the entire saga. Crocodile and the Baroque Works assassins were originally targeting only Luffy, Zoro, and Nami for assassination along with Vivi; the assassins didn't learn about Usopp until Little Garden (and Crocodile himself didn't learn about him until Alabasta), and nobody knew about Sanji until it was too late. And yet, though it's very easy to forget, there was one BW member who knew about both of them from the beginning: Miss All-Sunday/Nico Robin, who met the entire crew at the end of the Whiskey Peak arc. The fact that she clearly never told Crocodile about the additional members at any time is, in hindsight, another subtle hint that she was never really on his side to begin with and was undermining him the whole time.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Ace being mistaken for dead with his introduction is this when he does die during the Marineford arc.
  • The end of the Wano Arc reveals that Cobra was assassinated and Vivi went missing, making this arc a bit tougher to rewatch.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: As of the Wano Arc, Crocodile’s ambitions to obtain the legendary weapon Pluton becomes something of a villainous "Shaggy Dog" Story with the reveal that he would have to travel to the New World and invade the territory of Kaido, an Emperor of the Sea to reach Pluton.
• Magnificent Bastard: Sir Crocodile, the "Desert King", is one of the Seven Warlords of the Sea and the brilliant master of the Baroque Works syndicate. Playing himself off as a public hero while secretly running the aforementioned criminal organization, Crocodile manufactures a drought and a rebellion to weaken the Nefertari family in Alabasta, while plotting a takeover himself. Showing contingency after contingency, Crocodile manipulates countless people, including his right-hand woman, Nico Robin, with whom he intends to seize the superweapon Pluton in order to cow the World Government into recognizing his authority. Even after defeat and arrest, Crocodile later returns in the Impel Down prison and helps organize the jailbreak with his enemy Luffy, securing both their freedoms in the process.
• Signature Scene:
  • Luffy throttling Crocodile in their third and final encounter and Vivi voice getting through across the battlefield.
  • The tearful goodbye between Vivi and the Straw Hats with them showing their x-marks on their arms.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: There will always be some people who kinda wish that Vivi chose to continue journeying with the Straw Hats after Alabasta had been saved. Especially when you consider that she was pretty much an honorary Straw Hat member by that point.