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

As the last chapter said, the story certainly is hurtling toward the present day. That was probably the right choice, pacing-wise, since most of the things that happen here have been discussed at least once already. I see this being the last full chapter of flashback. There’ll be a few more pages with black gutters at the start of the next one, maybe half the chapter, but then we’re back to the present, probably just in time to use Luffy’s reappearance and the announcing of a present-day counterattack as the end-of-volume cliffhanger.

The history of Wano, Oden, Orochi and Kaido has been something of a puzzle not just for the Wano arc but for almost all of the New World to date. Oda started sowing jigsaw pieces around the place as far back as Kinemon’s introduction all the way back in 2012. Over the past eight years we’ve been getting all these little, vague hints, and this was the point where Oda finally put them together into a picture. While it’s obvious he knew the big moments, like Kaido being a dragon, the samurai being from the past and Oden, we also know that Oda will often sort out the fine details as he goes and make changes as he puts the chapters together, so it must have been just as much of a problem-solving exercise for him as it was for us. How often did he have to reconcile what he established years ago with stuff he came up with on the spot today? How how many of the long-term hints were added on a whim and now had to be worked into the planned framework of the story? I’d love to hear more about the process of planning and writing this whole arc at some point, whether it comes from Greg when Wano is less current and his hands aren’t tied for behind the scenes stuff, or whether it comes up in an interview with Oda or an editor further down the line.

Despite the sheer number of plot points and offhand dialogue hint puzzle pieces that needed to be worked into the final tapestry here, Oda has done remarkably well with continuity. But there are two little points where he has perhaps taken the scissors to his jiggies to make them fit.

The first thing is from chapter 818:

Obviously we know now that Oden’s execution didn’t really have anything to do with his journey with Roger or the secrets he learned about the world. It was a pure power grab from Orochi that Kaido played along with because it benefited his interests. It’s not even as if they used the crime of exiting the country as fodder at Oden’s offscreen mock trial – the narration in chapter 970 says the crime he was tried for was “rebellion against the shogun.” We could maybe take the chapter 818 scene is something disingenuous from Kinemon, who sees the flow-on from Oden’s journey with Roger to trying to open Wano’s borders to the rebellion that got him executed, and is laying out the root cause from his own perspective, but that does feel like a little bit of a stretch to me.

It would also still leave the line about Kaido attempting to get information as an outlier, but I think that actually can be made to work with what we know. Kaido didn’t seem to have any real interest in being King of the Pirates or finding the One Piece in the flashback, but that could have changed over 20 years. I don’t know what the original Japanese says, but Kin says “Kaido is trying to pry information out of us.” Not was, but is. In chapter 819, we get this exchange:

This makes it seem like people trying to learn the secrets of the world from the samurai is mainly a post-timejump problem, something that’s been affecting them mostly as they move through the present, not something that only happened in the past. Suppose Kaido only decided he cared about the One Piece during the past 20 years. Suppose he left standing orders that should the samurai reappear his underlings should grill them for information. The best time for Kin’s group to learn that would be when they were exploring Wano after the jump, maybe from Shinobu having picked it up while spying in the palace.

It’s a little inelegant, and it would be great to have the reasoning set in stone, even by an SBS, but it can be made to work.

The second little issue, from chapter 922:

There are exactly two points in time where Ashura and Denjiro could have confronted Kaido like this, and there were no echoes of this memory in either of them. In the battle in chapter 970, Denjiro is show fighting close to Oden and Kanjuro, but never Ashura, and it can’t have happened after Oden was knocked out, because Ashura was backstabbed and fell almost immediately after. The framing of the memory is similar to the scene in chapter 973 where they drop back to buy some time for the rest, but there they seem to be facing one of the Numbers, not Kaido himself. Even though neither Ashura or Denjiro was sent to the future, this couldn’t have happened during the 20 years due to Denjiro’s transformation. So when did it happen?

Well, it could have happened offscreen in chapter 973. The pair dispatch a Number, then are quickly knocked down by Kaido before he hurries to overtake Kin on the way to Kuri Castle, but it is a little bit of a shame not to have shown it. It wouldn’t totally shock me if the panel was edited to a more Kaido-y silhouette for the volume release.

Overall, Oden’s story has been a strong bit of long-form storytelling, even with its two little continuity glitches here. I look forward to Oda fast-talking his way around the issues and providing bullshit-but-believable explanations in a future SBS.

As for chapter 973 itself, it’s a rapid-fire, dramatic conclusion to the flashback now that the climactic moment has come and gone. Most of the first half served to connect the dots between past and present and tick off the last few plot boxes. I was expecting a little more from Kaido and Momo’s meeting. An interrogation about his father’s travels. The same holding-him-over-a-drop thing but during a dizzying dragon flight to really justify Momo’s fears of dragons and heights. But we have to remember that the child is young and that this night was only a couple of months ago from his perspective. These wounds are still incredibly raw. It can just be hard to keep that in mind because it’s technically been 20 years in-universe, and eight in the real world.

The Kyoshiro reveal is an excellent twist, even if the explanation for the face change is ridiculous. But the layers it adds to Kyoshiro’s previous scenes are amazing. Go reread any of his dialogue to date, especially regarding Orochi and it’s all put in a totally different light. I’ve been saying it again and again over the past few chapters, but Wano really is an arc built for the reread, and this is just another way it’s going to be better the second time around.

Hyori as Komurasaki isn’t really a reveal due to how it’s been framed, but it is important to note that this is the first time it’s been directly stated to the readers. So there you go, another thing confirmed.

As said above, I expect the first half of the next chapter to rapidly bring us up to speed with the present, mostly doing little continuity housekeeping things. I want to see how Cat and Dog managed to get off Wano, given that they were seemingly captured and the country has so few ships. Maybe Kaido’s men chose to toss them over the waterfall like the outsiders they are as a means of execution. I’d like to see Kaido developing an interest in the One Piece and the secrets of the world, just to justify the above continuity issue (but this could come in a later Kaido flashback) and I’d like to see how Denjiro and Hyori pulled off her fake death. Then we’ll probably see Denjiro putting his plan for the promised night into action to get the plan back on track, building up to the reintroduction of the Straw Hats for the last page of the chapter and volume. After all these months, that’s going to be a hell of a feeling.