Oh, I’m surprised the anime colour spread gets to be included in the official release as a part of the chapter. When I heard it wasn’t drawn by Oda and the chapter had a normal cover anyway, I figured it was just colour pages for the magazine. Wonder if it’ll keep its place in the volume, or get moved out of the way to the back like the enormous WT100 spread did. Oda may not have illustrated this, but I can see him doing something in this ballpark, and having the clock showing the new Japanese timeslot is fun.

I’ve been manga-only for a long, long time, but I’m keen to see what the anime can do with some time off and a switch to a more seasonal format. The first episode off the block still only covered a single chapter, which doesn’t fill me with confidence, but maybe they planned that one out before the break. I’m willing to give them a couple more to see if anything changes.

The hunting scene makes an interesting opener – kind of a non-sequitur considering all the action building elsewhere on the island. I guess if this is the start of a new volume it could work as kind of a cold open to the book before getting back into the meat of things. Either way, it’s neat to see Zoro and Sanji working together. And I suppose they’d have to – the Groggysaurus is freaking big. Look at it tower over Goldberg in the opening panel. I wish there’d been at least one shot where it gets properly sized up against a normal human to show what a beast it is. Unfortunately, the perspective on the final shot of Zoro slicing it makes him look way bigger in proportion to it.

And there’s some lore here with Goldberg’s homie shield, Nash. This thing was first shown off in chapter 899, just as Whole Cake Island was wrapping up, in Hadjrudin’s segment of the Grand Fleet cover story, which was perhaps suspiciously just a series of character intros rather than a mini story like the rest. How far in advance has this been planned? I’m definitely curious to hear any details about a fight between the giants and Big Mom after she left Elbaph and acquired her powers. Does it have to do with the marriage arrangement with Loki that fell through, or did some giants at some point come to settle things over her childhood rampage? Feel like I’m forgetting whether or not this was hinted at anywhere else. It’d be cool for it to end up being plot relevant, but my gut is saying SBS summary.

I love Luffy’s inept attempts to nurse Loki in the following scene, and Gerd egging him on is a great punchline. But, of course, the big thing here is Loki’s connection to Rocks in an obviously twisted, abusive version of the Luffy-Shanks dynamic. I’m now ten times more invested in the inevitable Loki flashback. What did he admire in Rocks and how did he try to emulate it in his mysterious falling out with Harald?

And I’m going to throw this out there more as a thought than an actual theory, but what if this has something to do with the blindfold? We know Loki was wearing it at a young age – about the age he seems to be in the flashback panel here. But his helmet conveniently obscures the whole top half of his face. There are lines that might be the bottom of the bandages peeking out, but they might just be trickles of blood. At face value (heh) it seems like Newgate is scolding Rocks for impaling Loki, but what if it went further than that? Suppose Rocks took Loki’s eyes. I’d need a few more hints before I call it likely, but it would definitely make for compelling drama.

Cool moment for Jinbei here, even if it hasn’t been that long since he saved everyone from a fire the same way on Onigashima. The real surprise is the ticking clock of Elbaph burning being silenced so soon. If not that, then what?

We also get some more chatter about hiding your voice from CoO from Gaban. I’d love to learn more about this.

Gunko’s arrival of Collun’s svar promises a good confrontation for next chapter. Definitely curious to see how a Holy Knight stacks up against a pretty decent spectrum of low to high level Strawhat combat threats. I’m not into powerscaling and want to distance myself from most of the kinds of talks that come up if you search ‘powerscaling’ (which is a whole rant of its own for another place and time), but yeah, I want to see how strong these guys really are. The hype is big, but savaging wild animals and a chained man doesn’t tell us much.

Plus she doesn’t seem to have noticed Brook is there yet, so that’ll surely be fun.

Finally, while we’re on this, that’s such an Oda set of panels, when she appears (embedded above). It’s basically three shots overlapping each other, all showing the same moment from different angles and at different levels of closeup. The top one bisects the bottom one but doesn’t look out of place because even though the element going across the top breaks the line of sight between the crew and the thing they’re reacting to, it’s actually that same thing. You just don’t see other manga artists doing them like this.

I think the next chapter will ultimately be a loss for the weaker Strawhats, even with Jinbei present. Something to get Collun in position to be a damsel for the adults and a hero in his own right to the weaker kids. Maybe this results in the Strawhats being ejected from the svar and dropped to the Underworld to meet up with Luffy’s group and pull them into the situation. I can only hope it’s educational about how the rest of the arc and the final confrontations with the Holy Knights will play out.