Oh damn, flashback’s on! And sooner than I expected. Let’s take a minute to think about why it’s been placed like it is. Oda likes to use flashbacks to build into a moment of catharsis or emotional payoff, and usually that means setting them up at the darkest hour. Right when Bonney’s about to be shot. Right after seeing the samurai fleet isn’t coming. Etc. Etc. This means we can go from the darkness of the flashback to the high of these characters getting rescued. While things are looking dire for Elbaph up above, I would expect that kind of flashback to be used right as the blade is about to fall on Jarul or the first of the child hostages, but that’s not what we’re doing.

Some flashbacks precede the tides suddenly turning against the heroes, like the moment before the assassination plan fails on Whole Cake Island, or shortly in advance of Law’s one on one clash with Doflamingo going south on Dressrosa. It means going from one downer scene to another before giving the mood a chance to rally. But that’s not the one for this arc either.

The last thing a flashback tends to build to is a character’s big decision or realisation, such as Jinbei request human help to save Fishman Island, Luffy remembering what he still has after Marineford or Robin choosing to live at Ennies Lobby. With the choice to free Loki in Hajrudin’s hands, I think that’s where the emotional heart of this flashback is going to be. But how well will this work? Hajrudin has an understandable internal debate going over whether to change what he believes about the man who killed his father and acts as his rival to the throne, but despite him having been around since Dressrosa, is anyone truly that invested in Hajrudin’s emotional stakes? I don’t dislike him, but I don’t think he sticks out that much as a character either. Loki is a lot more interesting, and the release of being exonerated and freed would be clearly meaningful to him, but he’s not a character we’ve known for very long to build a relationship with. It’s going to be the job of the flashback to build these two half-brothers up enough for its climax and the present-day decision that follows it to stick the landing.

Buuut we don’t go straight into the flashback. There’s some present day stuff to go through first. There’s the disappointing revelation that the answer to the immortality problem is just more Conqueror’s Haki. Boooo. I can only hope there’s at least going to be something special about how it’s used to make the trick work. Because if it’s just any kind of Conqueror’s coating, it wouldn’t have made sense for Luffy’s attacks to not work at Egghead unless he was forgetting to use his newest and strongest skill against those seemingly-unstoppable monsters just so we could have this reveal an arc later.

And if it’s so hard to pick up that Scopper can’t do it reliably after just going a bit out of practice and Luffy didn’t get the knack of it out of sheer desperation, how come Loki was doing it intuitively without even knowing the name? It just feels messy coming up like this.

I did enjoy Sanji being absolutely snubbed and Zoro getting told off as it gets discussed though. The Zoro one is particularly interesting when we think back to him in Punk Hazard having a go at Luffy for not taking the New World seriously enough. I wonder what steps he’ll take to feel like he’s catching back up? Maybe it will put in perspective something that happened at Ryuma’s grave for him to remember…

I don’t believe for a minute Loki becoming a Strawhat, but it’s interesting that making him a subordinate is thrown out as a solution to his wildness. How believable do we think that really is? The argument that Loki is too large to ride on the Sunny is obvious and insurmountable. I’ve seen some comments from people saying the presence of Adam Tree wood on Elbaph could be used to expand the Sunny, and to that I say, did you guys freaking read the series? The best shipwrights in the world walked us through this. The upper limits of a ship’s size are dictated by it’s keel, which has to be a single piece. Since everything else builds on the ribs which connect to the keel, you can’t replace the keel without rebuilding the ship from the ground up. The Going Merry didn’t die of a broken keel just for these engineering problems to disappear on the Sunny. It would fully break the rules and I won’t entertain it.

After this, the flashback starts properly. Within a few pages we’re seeing surprises. Did Loki acquire Ragnir after this incident, or did something happen to change the hammer’s appearance between now and the present? Loki reads abrasively in this first scene, embodying everything I was worried the themes of the arc might be when it first contrasted the children of peace with the warriors of old.

And the big shocker, Harald being attacked by his own guards. Though most are horned, everyone here lacks the wings and glowing eyes of Imu’s flipped giants, and even if they were, wouldn’t it make the most sense to flip the king who’d already been collaborating with the Government? So already things aren’t playing up the way it seemed like they would. I’m more curious about the truth, and how Loki came to be blamed for it, than ever.

But that was only a teaser. From there we get Scopper and Shanks, and what’s that on Shanks’s arm? It looks very similar to the mark on Sommers and Killingham’s armbands, minus a few lines. But it’s far less intricate than any of the marks or tattoos seen on Sommers’ arm underneath. But I think it’s a point in favour of a connection that they’re all marked on the upper parts of their right arms. Shamrock and Gunko don’t show these parts of their bodies (Gunko has a bandage or arrow wrapped around where then band should be, Shamrock keeps his arm under his cloak), but for Gunko at least we can be fairly certain they didn’t mark her legs. We knew Shanks visited Marie Geoise after sailing with Roger, but integrating enough to be touched by the Holy Knights’ system is a shock. For the differing levels of detail in the marks, I wonder if it’s some kind of ranking or scaling system. Like, the first stage just lets you travel through the abyss, the next one lets you borrow Imu’s immortality, and the ultimate form is a transformation like the Elders’, for example. Whatever the case, this lost marking puts Shanks’s sacrifice for Luffy in a new light. “Only an arm,” he said to reassure the boy after. You liar!

I’m unsure of what to make of this “child of fate” line. It could be anything from a poetic way of saying it was good luck – a twist of fate – that resulted in Shanks landing in that treasure chest and ending up on Roger’s ship unharmed, or it could be that Roger had been grooming Shanks for the Nika role and to claim the One Piece when the time was right. The Red-haired Pirates did seem to be searching fairly intently for something when they stayed at Windmill village, making so many expeditions using that one port as a base. How would a prospective chosen one feel seeing his Devil Fruit choose a child instead? Like a weight was lifted (see how he laments not being able to pirate freely with his friend), or that a whole new one had been placed?

And truly unexpected is that we enter a deeper flashback with the apparent intent of showing Harald’s life story. Given what we see in these first two pages, it’s going to be a long and fascinating journey to make him someone would forge a land of peace and cooperate with the World Government.

To feel like the whole arc has been building to this flashback sequence and Loki’s crime, and then for it to start with surprises despite all that time feeling like we were getting clues to put together makes me very excited to see what Oda’s cooking up for the next couple of months.