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

While I think it’s a fun novelty to redraw an older colour spread with the full crew (and that it came out great in this case) I hope it’s not an idea Oda gets too attached to I want to keep seeing new settings and activities for this kind of art, not too many retreads. Oh, but speaking of past colour spreads – and this may be a reach – but does Jinbe’s blue tricorn remind anyone of the 20th anniversary colour spread that he missed being a part of? He’d need a new kimono, but that hat would fit right in with what everyone else was wearing then.

Oda will likely never outright confirm that the crew is full. Debates over each island’s new crew candidate drive way too much engagement for the series to ever fully give them up, but this chapter has me feeling stronger than ever that we’re all done. Yamato was the last big tease and he came up short. We see the infamous barrel is occupied. There’s the whole thing with Luffy’s dream I’ll talk about later. And then there’s the colour spread. It wouldn’t make sense to start redoing old spreads to update the crew in them if there was just going to be another recruit in a year or two. I also can’t help noticing Chopper’s shirt outlining him as “No 6.” Debates have raged over whether Luffy saying in the first chapter he wanted a crew of ten included himself or not. Chopper is only number six if Luffy is number one, giving us a full ten as things are. No matter what is teased with the new arrival from the chapter’s last page, I won’t be convinced of any candidate until they’re joining Jinbe on the spreads.

Most of this chapter has a great relaxed atmosphere with crew interactions during some well-deserved downtime. And it’s rare to see the whole group discussing events from the paper so directly. All of the different reactions and opinions were a lot of fun.

I’m glad we get some clarification on the Revolutionary army’s politics from Robin. Even if the answer is that they don’t really have a political position as much as an anti-World Government one. I can respect aiming only for the head of the snake and ensuring focused progress by committing to a single target, but it does feel shortsighted of them to be so outraged about an attack on anyone other than a World Noble. There is plenty of evidence of regular monarchies abusing their power throughout One Piece’s world, with a pertinent current plot thread being the common people rising up against their cruel rulers. What will the Revolutionaries do after unseating Imu and ousting the Celestial Dragons? Rest on their laurels, or move down the chain of authority and properly break apart the systems that enabled the world’s Wapols and Sekis. How many King Cobras must the monarchy create to make one King Doflamingo worth looking the other way from? But I guess a lot of that is me bringing my own opinions into it.

I’m not sure who I support between Luffy and Zoro on the Vivi issue. I respect Luffy being so willing to put his adventure on hold for a friend rather than looking the other way (like a certain samurai did). There are things happening in the world that the crew’s firepower could go a long way in ensuring a good outcome for. But Zoro is right that they wouldn’t be any help in Alabasta and the odds would be against them at New Marineford. Without knowing exactly where they need to go and what actions would help, they could either get in a lot of trouble for nothing, or end up doing more harm than good.

There’s also a likelihood that dropping everything to return to a nation they visited once at the first sign of trouble could expose the crew’s friends to attacks and hostage situations to draw them in. Being too jumpy about this kind of thing exposes a weak point.

That said, I’m not sure how well the argument about Ace holds up, given how things were actually going for Ace at the time… But it’s nice that Zoro has so much faith in Vivi’s strength, even after so long apart.

Brook never hearing about issues with Alabasta’s leadership is worth noting because he probably means from back before he died, giving the Nefeltaris a strong track record. You have to wonder if he actually knows about the civil war his crew got involved in there.

Oda is such a tease, having Robin mention other familiar names in the paper (I have to guess involved in events even us readers don’t know of yet) and Luffy rejecting it all. I love Luffy, but he and I are very different. Give me more news if he doesn’t want it. I wanna knooooooooow!

Luffy telling the crew his dream is a big moment, but there’s not much to say about it. I’m not going to pretend I can Sherlock Holmes the right answer out of the crew’s reactions and I think anyone claiming we do have enough information to solve it definitively is selling snake oil (or maybe their Youtube channel). But it’s a nice scene, and I’m very interested to see what Oda eventually does with this plot point. And this happening now has big implications for the final crew – this hint could have been dropped at any time, but Oda saved it for after Jinbe was aboard. It’s hard to imagine anyone new being added having not heard this (even if they might have found out vial other sources).

I’ll be interested to what Oda does with Caribou after this. He mentioned not being able to hear very well, so he might conveniently have missed it to keep this a symbolic crew only thing. But maybe he’ll leak Luffy’s ultimate goal to the world, for better or worse…

It’s surprising to me that the last Poneglyph is considered the one lost to time with no clues. You would think the one on Zou, in a hidden alcove that the allegedly-cannibalistic locals would guard on pain of death and show only to their closest allies, would be more of a mystery to the outside world. Roger wouldn’t have blabbed about it, so odds are it hasn’t been seen by anyone besides him and the pirate-mink-samurai-ninja alliance in even longer than this fourth one, the trail for which goes cold only 20-something years ago at Fishman Island.

Sabo’s sequence is where things get really interesting. I have so many questions that I know I’ll be waiting a long time for answers to. Is the World Government worried that info about Imu and the Empty Throne being overheard by the Marines’ surveillance division and the Revolutionaries, or are they confident the propaganda they push will be enough to get it all dismissed as Revolutionary lies. Might be a bad play, given how their news manipulator, Morgans, has gone rogue.

I like the detail of Seki threatening impalements. He’s got that vampire look, and we all know about the overlap between Vlad the Impaler and Dracula.

Seeing a whole island destroyed in an instant is pretty shocking, and marks a genuine escalation of One Piece’s power scale. Where the likes of Dragon Ball went fast enough to have planet busters by volume 30, One Piece has done remarkably well sticking with the ceiling it set with Mihawk’s introduction in basically year one. Abilities that could potentially destroy an island, not just depopulate its surface, have been few and far between, and have always seemed like it would still take the user significant time and effort to actually sink a whole landmass. It was, of course, inevitable that things would reach this point by the endgame, but it’s still something else to see it actually happening.

I don’t think Sabo is dead, and I’m skeptical that Oda would slay the number of characters confirmed to reside on Lulusia (six by the wiki’s count) so casually. But how is he going to execute the escape? That explosion seems to go a decent way out to sea as well as covering the whole island. Interestingly, the island doesn’t seem to have been targeted because of Sabo’s presence. So are the other seven kingdoms also in a state of active revolt about to be nuked as well? Or perhaps they already have been.

The final scene is a cool bit of Grand Line chaos, the likes of which we haven’t seen in a bit. And we get Jewelry Bonney! I’m looking forward to seeing what she has to share about the Reverie and the history of the world. This girl’s had too many odd reactions to different things (Whitebeard’s death and Kuma’s enslavement) not to have some lore bombs to drop.

We’re on a decently long run of great, exciting chapters here that really make it feel like the world is moving and the endgame is getting in gear. Can’t wait to see what comes next as things continue ramping up!