This text was originally written for Arlong Park forums’ discussion thread.

There’s some chapters where you read it and you just know Oda did a couple of pages less than normal even before you look at the pagecount. This was the kind of chapter where I would have guessed a plus size 19 pages right after reading, even though it’s actually just 15. What a week for One Piece!

Bege’s story has taken a near-immediate turn from the direction most people expected it to go. No idea where he could go from here, but the implications are interesting. We don’t know whether this is taking place the day after Whole Cake Island or a little later, so it’s pretty likely the Reverie is still running in the cover pages. It’d be very interesting to get some extra glimpses of it this way, but I kinda doubt we will.

The new about how entry and exit from Wano works has interesting implications. It’s a pretty common theory that the island is a bunch of smaller islands put together by the Ancient Giants, but the diagram shown this week really doesn’t look much like that. It looks to me a lot more like a solid, if oddly shaped, landmass rather than an island cluster.

The Numbers are an odd-looking group. I’m not convinced that they’re Ancient Giants yet. The body shapes are off compared to what we’ve seen, and the horns are all wrong. It doesn’t feel right that Onigashima, the skull on Punk Hazard, Oars, Little Oars Jr and Kaido would all have the same horns while the rest of the species is totally different. I’m just not seeing it. They could be from a seriously diluted bloodline, or be failed attempts from the World Government to recreate the Ancient Giants, but they’re certainly not the same thing.

But of course the big news is Kaido and Big Mom’s alliance. Holy shit guys. I think the fact that even Onigashima itself looked shocked is all the confirmation needed of what a huge deal this is. It’s absolutely the right choice for the direction of the story though. I wrote a lot of words about the possibility of a team-up over in the Wano thread the other week which I won’t repeat all of here, but my feelings are essentially that this is a necessary development to flesh out Kaido’s somewhat lacking own crew. It also raises the chances of Luffy being able to take on an Emperor in a one on one fight (or at least do most of the fighting himself). A team effort to topple Kaido was a good theory before this, but now that there’s definitely enough enemies to give all of Luffy’s huge alliance a decent fight before it comes to that, we can feel a lot more certain our boy is gonna stand his ground against either Kaido or Big Mom for real.

Worth noting also, this is confirmed as the first chapter of volume 95. This is just the opening of the book. Imagine how much more crazy things are going to get if this is the starting point!