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

We’re pumping the brakes a little here, compared to the last couple of chapters, but that’s okay. We’re in a new volume, one way or another, so things will need to start building up again. It’s a short chapter too, going into the break, but I’ll live.

Judge VS Caesar is an interesting matchup. They used to work together, so the question becomes how well does Judge know Caesar’s hax powers and did he incorporate a breathing apparatus into his Raid suit? I’ll bet on Judge for now, but I’m not sure what to expect to come after this. The upheaval of Caesar winning and presumably trying to usurp the Germa 66, on the other hand, would make a clear path for the next few volumes of this story.

I’m surprised to learn Vegapunk has a devil fruit, but happy that it’s made clear he was already a genius before eating it. You can have all the information in the world but what really matters is how you use it. The real world internet has given us many examples of people who have access to the majority of all human knowledge but no idea how to parse the useful from the irrelevant, the instructional from the cautionary and the entertaining from the factual. (Put a pin in the the internet as a concept for this chapter…) It also plays into what I was saying last week from the books at the bottom of the lake. They’re all publicly available texts, it takes either a team of world class-researchers or a full fledges genius to use that knowledge to even learn about the Ancient Kingdom’s existence through them.

Obviously the Vegaclones don’t need the actual power of the fruit with the Punk Records storage to call back to, but did they inherit the weaknesses to water and seastone from the main body? I’ll be interested to see what the answer is.

The other important implication of the big brain coming from a devil fruit is that Vegapunk is now almost certainly not the first to have that giant head. So the Space Pirates, with their noticeably similar jolly roger, don’t have to have been made in his lifetime.

The whole Punk Records bit is an interesting fantasy take on the internet. Jinbe raises an excellent point about the kind of idealogical bias that can influence the data if you take from too many sources without properly vetting either them or their information. And Vegapunk waves his concerns off before we even get to the real important stuff, the idea from above that people don’t always know how to use information. Getting lots of points of view on an issue or event can be useful, but if the people accessing that data aren’t equipped to think critically about it they can end up being influenced. And that’s not even starting on the shift from biases to agendas. It’s more than possible to deliver factually correct information in a way that leads people who take what you’re saying at face value to draw the wrong conclusion. A good example from the real world internet would be the use of crime statistics in discussions about race, which are used by racists to suggest cultural or even biological predispositions to certain behaviours; when they’re really evidence of systemic issues pushing certain groups of people into more desperate circumstances. And the World Government, with years of experience erasing history and manipulating the media to say what they want, would absolutely start taking advantage of that.

Wow, the politics of information and how it’s presented are complicated, huh? Let’s go back to our silly pirate comic.

Luffy’s stag beetle bit and Vegapunk’s perfectionism are both pretty funny. But how did Vegapunk know what colour the dragon would be before anyone even ate the fruit?

The 900 year old robot that attacked Marie Geoise the year fishmen started acquiring their human rights is a tantalising plot tease, but I’m not expecting a full explanation of why a connection between Ryugu Kingdom and the World Government was so important until the actual Void Century flashback. Maybe a failsafe to keep Poseidon from falling into enemy hands?

Vegapunk asking to leave Egghead has a lot of potential as a plot hook. He has the Elbaf ties to lead the crew there for Robin and Saul’s reunion, among other things. He could want to go somewhere to complete his Devil Fruit reserach. He might just want to know the truth of the Void Century and decide to be the kick in the pants the crew need to start getting into it. Of course it’s far from guaranteed that he’ll actually leave with them (and certainly won’t do so as a full crewmate), but I’m liking the concept for now.

I’m not sure what to make of Kuma’s awakening at the end. Nothing that happens in the chapter really feels like it could be a trigger that would reach him from so far away. It could be the Vegaclones getting ready for battle, I guess, but I’m not fully sold.

And that’s where this story leaves us for the break. A lot of stuff set up, not much resolved, but you’ve gotta have ones like that sometimes to let the story build, especially when we’re still so relatively early into a new arc.