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

Oh man, what a chapter! Wano’s had more than a few spectacular environments so far – the flower capital, the ruined Oden castle and Tama’s empty village coming immediately to mind – but Onigashima is the best of the lot. I love the atmosphere. I love the absurd scale of everything. I want there to be a One Piece video game that has a 1:1 recreation of that entrance area as a mini sandbox so I can walk around and really see how much everything towers overhead when put to scale. I want to climb around and see which ones of the oversized things strewn around I can get on top of. That first spread is going to go down as an all-time favourite.

The possibility of the skull being an actual bone is increased by the skyscraper-sized katana stuck in the ground in front of it. This one’s even bigger than both Oars and the skull on Punk Hazard! The mysteries of the ancient giants are one of the things I’m most interested to get all the answers for. I really hope Kaido’s possible connection to them (suggested by the distinct horns) is genuine and we can start paying off on almost a decade’s worth of hints and foreshadowing. The only thing I’m more curious for in the long run is what the hell is up with the moon, but I don’t think we’re going to get much more on that until after Wano.

Luffy and Zoro are missing their scars in the new outfits Kin provides. Art error, or do his his powers of disguise go further than previously assumed. We’ll probably get a better look in the next chapter. I expect that panel to be touched up in the volume release. Oh, and while it’s a shame to see Luffy’s captain coat disappearing so soon, Oda feeling the need to clarify that damage will make the disguises vanish makes me think it won’t be gone for long.

I would have loved a wider shot of the Onigashima interior, but just from what was shown it already seems like an interesting locale for a battle, with all these bridges, trees and raised blocks ahead of the overlooking castle wall. I could be wrong, but outside maybe some of the vignettes in Law’s flashback, I think this is the first time we’ve seen an enemy crew having a proper end-of-arc-Strawhats-style party. We know Kaido isn’t above letting his underlings become collateral damage or annihilating a few of them in a drunken tantrum, but this chapter makes it seem like morale is at a high within the Beast Pirates. I’m interested to see how much loyalty these guys are going to have when their organisation starts to fall. Love all the Gifter designs as well!

The Tobi Roppo designs are all pretty cool looking, and Oda does his trademark fantastic job of introducing a bunch of characters at once in a way that still gives us a strong impression of who each of them are. Seriously, it looks so easy here but this kind of mass-intro is so hard to pull off without either making the characters feel indistinct from each other or overwhelming the reader. Pay Pay – uh, Page One – looks a hell of a lot different from what his earlier appearance suggested. I wish he wasn’t sitting so bundled up like that so we could get a better view of his outfit. Visually, my favourite is Who’s-Who. He’s got strong F-Zero vibes that make me keen to see what he can do.

The discussions surrounding this chapter have raised some thoughts about translations. For example, Ulti’s speech quirk. My understanding is that in the raw she’s trying to copy the way Komurasaki spoke, but in Japanese this was achieved by adding a term to the end of her sentences. It was the right choice not to do that – it’s the kind of thing that only works in Japanese. I’ve seen translators try to keep things like that in and it’s at best awkward and at worst outright confusing. Problem being, while Komurasaki’s dialogue was written a bit more upper-crust than the people speaking around her, it wasn’t a huge enough difference to make an imitation of her obvious. I don’t think this was a failing on Stephen’s part or anything; who could have guessed her speaking style would ever be commented on in this way? And worse still to have to recapture it in just two lines from Ulti before Page One snaps at her and she stops talking that way. Maybe if there was a way to get Ulti to echo one of Komurasaki’s more memorable lines (“I have only scorn for the poor man” to “Queen just called the Tobi Roppo arrogant punks! I have only scorn for him!” to spitball a possibility), but this is really another one of those things like Oden’s last words that can only be smoothly worked out in hindsight. The perils of having an up-to-date translation.

I have no idea how some people didn’t manage to catch at all that Ulti’s word choices and emphasis were different from everyone around her though. It’s noticeable! Especially coming right after Queen’s more casual hype man dialogue.

The other thing that came up translation-wise was a lot of scan-readers being forced to expose themselves to Tobi Roppo instead of “Flying Six” for the first time, thanks to Oda choosing to write it out himself. And that’s had me thinking – the names of these senior ranks kinda don’t work for me. All of them come from traditional Japanese theatre, but two are different kinds of performers and the last is a specific kind of stage exit, a performance. Why not keep it to just stage movements or just performers? Worse is how hard they are to translate. The two performers lose the traditional Japanese connotations but are at least able to keep the theatre feeling. The most direct translation for Tobi Roppo, on the other hand, sounds more like a group of circus acrobats than stageplay types. I suppose you could keep them all in Japanese. Shinuchi, Okanban and Tobi Roppo at least sound consistent with each other, but it makes for a lot of foreign words to throw at the reader, and wouldn’t be remotely acceptable if the crew wasn’t headquartered in the in-universe equivalent to Japan. And even then they’re going to stand out and sound excessively weeb-y next to the other groups of the crew, the Waiters, Gifters and Pleasures, which are used as English loanwords in the raw because apparently Oda cares a lot less about this kind of consistency than I do. Big, rambly nitpick, I know. I think it just bugs me because I like trying to solve these kinds of langue problems and there’s just no way I can see not to make Tobi Roppo as a name stick out like a sore thumb from the things around it. I truly do not envy any translator trying to deal with all the linguistic and cultural things Oda is doing with this arc.

So it looks like all the pieces (save for the Numbers) are set up and ready to clash. Next week, I think we’ll start to escalate, working in the last few factors like the Numbers, the Big Mom Pirates and Katakuri’s kid one at a time as the tension ramps up. As conclusive as it feels now, I don’t think Onigashima is going to be the place the Wano arc ends. There are twists and turns and unexpected developments in the works, all leading to a flight back to the mainland. There’s probably one more most desperate hour to go as well (and I don’t expect Cat and/or Marco a moment sooner than that) and a lot of manga to go before things ramp down. If the structure of Tottoland is anything to go by, we could barely be past the halfway point of Wano. I can’t wait to see what’s coming next!