What is milking ?
Like the action of milking a cow, Milking in storytelling is the technique that consist in getting the most amount of narration out of the least amount of content. In other words, it is the action of enhancing the narration through content in your story, every bit of content.
This is a little bit conceptual so let me clear up:
Let's take as exemple an arc in One Piece where Oda went completely crazy on the milking part, and therefore, created one of the best stories of One Piece: The Totland Arc
Two scale
Now, we have two scales:
1. The layers of "Milking themes" It's is the number and nature of the themes present in the story. In Totland we have a lot of theme but let's choose a few ones:
- Parenthood
- Truth and Lies
- Trust and Honor
- Relation to food
Etc.
2. The spectra of clearness of said "milking theme". This is the scale related to the obviousness of the Milking into the story. A hard punch might be good to make a impact, but other times, subtle milking, is what make the story shine and outlive the author.
In whole cake
In whole cake: most of the themes have one goal: To serve Sanji (and Luffy)'s story. So let's take one of the "milking theme" as an example: "Truth and Lies" and ask ourselves:
How can this theme be "milked" to serves the story of Sanji and Luffy?
As an author, you have in front of you a whole range of possibilities: from plots to the designs, to line of dialogues.. So, briefly, how did Oda enhanced the story of Sanji and Luffy through this theme with the help of Milking?
First by creating a midpoint in the arc where Truth and Lies would swiched completely and directly through the character of Sanji. By making Sanji lied to himself during the first part of Whole Cake, Oda created the basis for a powerfull character arc.
To enhance this "switch", Oda created a ripple effect in both direction of the story, before and after the midpoint. This transformed Whole cake into a mind game and this put the readers into a state of lack of confidence the closer the story was to the midpoint. Like Sanji, the more we entered whole Cake, the more we were unsured of everything around us.
One of the tools Oda used to milked the story, is the duality in the characters. A lot of the major characters in whole Cake act in duality. It can be from the obvious designs or transformations to more subtle dualities. All of those reenforced the theme of the treasure (or curse) hidding behind closed doors.
The theme of Truth and Lies is major in Whole cake and impacts directly the actions of the protagonist and the character of Sanji. But.. If you look closely, there is a reason why the Midpoint is possible. And that is because behind all this apparente game of truth and Lies... There is a shining light of pure and hard truth during this arc and this light acts as a guide to Sanji's character: Luffy
Here again, Oda used the milking technique to enhance Luffy's "Truthness". By making him act and stay on character as he always is, this is the "Obvious" ones:
Then, by making the character of Luffy see through all the lies of his friend and making even his ennemy become true to themselves through sheer willpower.. (this is a most impactfull yet less obvious milking..)
And then, the bonus. This is the milking done to enhance the quality of the story/theme that is not meant to be discovered at the first reading, this is the "Wow, I didn't noticed that before" moment: Did you noticed that in this arc, strangely, Luffy can see through disguises?
This is the power of Milking, by enhancing a theme through the possibilities of a story, we can enhance the impact of the global storytelling of a plot making the story FAR much larger that it already is.
Milking is everywhere in One Piece.