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

The opening pages here cast some doubt on my prediction that 1036 was the start of a new volume. Oda’s opened both volumes 101 and 102 with cutaways to the festival down below, so what’s one more? It’s a good way to lead into the battle, showing what’s at stake. But is it better than the last chapter’s soft recap of character positions and potential failure consequences?

I’m interested to see where these floating lanterns are going. Up, presumably, but will they be contrasted with Kaido’s fall? Or lead the eyes of the populace to the sky to see the final blow? Or will they just reach Onigashima in time to give someone like Momo a second wind at a critical moment?

Back on the roof, I’m feeling pretty vindicated. I’ve said a few times now in a couple of different threads that I think Kaido can be kinda dull personality-wise. For so much of this arc he’s been a grim, stony-faced brick shithouse. And ever time I complained about that, I said he was a lot more vibrant in his post-Zou and early Wano scenes as a sloppy, over-emotional drunkard, and it’s a shame that he never gets to interact with out heroes in that state. He takes one good hit, says it sobered him up, and goes back to normal. Well now Kaido gets snookered mid-fight and gets to take Luffy on a journey through his mood swings and it’s everything I’ve been asking for all this time!

A shame it’s probably only for this chapter, but still great to see it happen at least once. How has One Piece kept me as a dedicated weekly reader for nearly 15 years? Because Oda always comes through eventually.

And what else can you say about this chapter? I’m not one to try to analyse which moves are the strongest, or say what kind of Haki was used where, or try to unravel the whole story through double meanings in attack names. What I’m focused here is how freaking spectacular the art is and how well the choreography flows. This is a great bit of action with some incredible panels showing motion and impact. Kaido’s opening blow on Luffy sells the power and pain perfectly. Hybrid-mode Kaido looks better than ever, jetting forward with his tail undulating behind him. The moment of implied slowmo as Luffy vaults over his club to get that face kick in is exquisite. The not-even-touching headbutt, so intense. Oda gets so creative making the end of Kaido’s club into a volley of spiked balls countering Luffy’s Third Gear assault. He definitely takes artistic licence with the size and shape of it to make that visual work, but it’s impossible to argue with the results.

One Piece, to me, is adventure and worldbuilding over action, but there’s no going past how good some of the action in Wano has been. I thought the Supernovas vs Emperors fight set a benchmark with its sense of scale, but Oda’s hit the mark all over again with the ferocious intensity of this exchange.

Another interesting note here is how quickly Kaido snaps between his hybrid and serpentine form and back again. Even with such a crazy change in mass, the transformation is all but instantaneous. King was doing the same thing between panels of his fight. The time Zoans take to transform has never been a huge deal in a fight, but it feels so much quicker in Wano than it’s ever been before. There could be interesting animation potential in depicting how these flash changes work. I really want the anime to make good on this chapter, since even in manga form you can see it in motion so easily. But unfortunately, I can’t hold my breath about it. Even if they can do it without adding Dragonball auras to the participants or strobing lights to every blow, the need to make each chapter last at least a whole episode will rob the sequence of the bam-bam-bam back and forth atmosphere of the manga version.

And then we have the final two pages. Really it’s just a lot of vague hinting at things we want to know about. The talk of erasing names makes me think of “the light to be erased from history” from the Reverie. I have to wonder what other lights have been erased in the past, and if the fruit belonged to one of them. Despite the framing (and the Elders having up to date enough reports to know CP0 is going after Robin) it doesn’t seem like the elders are speaking directly with the fleet outside Wano as Zunesha appears, so the discussion of a mysterious Devil Fruit is definitely not a reaction to the big elephant’s appearance. If you pay attention to how Oda uses split panels to mark scene transitions, you can see these are two separate scenes being cut back and forth between.

So what Devil Fruit is it? I don’t think we have enough info to say. Luffy’s, Big Mom’s and Kaido’s are all too specific to be renamed. Law’s powers are abstract enough that you could probably rename the fruit without creating problems, and we know from Doflamingo that it has some relevance to the World Government… That would be my best guess, barring some out there, shot in the dark justification like the Elders changing their topic of conversation between the scene breaks and it’s not someone on Wano at all. Maybe Blackbeard, in that case. But even then, why is the fruit only just now, and so suddenly a huge concern? Or it might be a totally new fruit we haven’t seen yet. That’s probably the safest guess, given how nothing currently in play really seems to tick every box the conversation sets up.

I was wondering what Zunesha’s role in the battle was going to be. Too much setup for it not to make an appearance. But what triggered it to move inward and defend Wano’s waters, then? It couldn’t be a standing order from Momo, even if he had the confidence to do such a thing, because it made no moves against Big Mom’s crew.

I’ve got nothing to add for an outro. Just great action and big mysteries. What more could you want?