I’ve been saying for weeks that something else had to be coming, but this beyond my wildest expectations. I thought this chapter would be a big one for Elbaph, but instead it’s a titanic moment for One Piece as a whole. Oda spends every page he had this week building slowly to the final reveal instead of packing in story beats in his usual style, so you can feel even before it happens that something special is coming. This likely being only the second chapter of a new volume, there is a part of me that worries that the final page here will be spoiled by the cover, which will want to represent all the future pages spent dealing with the fallout of this moment. But on the other hand, if you saw that design in a vacuum would your first instinct be connecting it to shapeless form we’ve known Imu through up to this point?

Despite revolving around one moment, there’s actually a lot of smaller details in the chapter that are worthy of picking at and analysing. I really liked the scenes of the Five Elders at the start. You can see how Garling is something of a disruptor to the older four who have served together for decades or more. They’ve met up without him. He presses for more action when they would remain complacent. He’s the first to defer to Imu’s higher authority and call the debate settled. He reads as the new manager trying to make an impression and establish his style next to the dig-in leadership team.

I do want to nitpick one thing though. Garling says all the problems started after Nika awakened, but surely the percieved first of the current troubles was the Revolutionary attack and Imu’s identity being leaked to Sabo during the Reverie. Which, timeline wise, was about a week before Luffy awakened Nika’s ability during the Onigashima raid. So yeah, probably more of a coincidence, huh Garling?

I love the pages showing the chains of inherited will and causality that brought things to where they are. All these nearly 30 years of arcs are still one story. You can feel it coming together here. And like I was saying above, the Government’s issues were building long before Luffy’s awakening.

A bit of lightness before the finale, I really liked Gerd playing with Sommers’ body. And Franky offering to patch the wounded up into cyborgs while a worried Jinbei searches for Chopper. Now that it’s happened it feels like such an obvious bit it’s surprising Oda didn’t get to it sooner.

Breaking the heart to stop regeneration is just another mysterious detail in the whole covenant saga. Remember how Gunko’s whole upper body was blown apart? You can clearly see that she’s gone above the waist with no sign of a heart to destroy. Still not enough info to solve this one.

So Ragnir’s ice can only be thawed by Ragnir itself. Cuuuuuuurious. Wonder what we’re going to find out there frozen by the old Warrior God. Galeila maybe? It never sounded like Ragnir was factoring into Rocks’ plans for Elbaph, but maybe he didn’t have enough info to be sure if it was the legendary Devil Fruit, the hammer, or some innate ability of the king.

The final sequence is one for the ages. The visual of the pentagram over the castle is perfectly done. Egghead did more than enough setup to make those columns of black smoke an icon of fear. When multiple of them shot up, I thought for a moment the Elders might have followed along despite Imu’s orders. But then, the drum sounds? (The translation choice for one of them is close enough to Dandadan to have me reading it like the refrain from that anime’s intro.) The trees and buildings coming alive? It’s a demonic mirror of Big Mom’s soul powers, which has me thinking a lot about souls and demonic possession in this arc. Maybe just having Devil Fruits actually is the answer to resisting Domi Reversi like Luffy, Loki and Chopper have done. Waaay back in Ennies Lobby we got that folklore that you can’t eat a second devil fruit because the two devils from the two fruits would fight. We all thought Jabra was being silly, putting too much stock in a myth, but now I’m wondering if that scene is the cornerstone of the series’ demonic lore.

The immediate aftermath of Imu’s landing shows us why the Elders were so concerned about him handling things personally. The wheezing, the coughing black liquid (I don’t even want to sound too sure it’s blood), the trembling, the screaming, the transformation almost looking involuntary. Just coming here has obviously hurt Imu. So now we have to wonder if it’s something about moving through the abyss, or if there’s something in the Holy Land that holds him together or suppresses the monster inside him. That treasure Doflamingo spoke about maybe? The hat in the freezer? It goes a long way to explain his hesitance to get personally involved before now. And it might give the heroes their way out of this situation, if there’s a time limit on how long he can last before having to return.

Now let’s talk about that design. It feels super un-One Piece-like, but in a way that works for an ancient, unseen threat. I actually feel teased more than anything. Would love a proper, standing full body shot to get a better sense of the patterns for the white lines. His skin appears tan, but Oda uses a darker shade of screen tone here than he did for King, so I’m not fully convinced by Lunarian theories. Maybe Imu will turn out to be red like classical devils. The dude is also big if Oda isn’t playing around with the scaling. That castle is a comfortable fit for Ancient Giants, so Imu has to at least match a regular one, sizing him up to the windows on the tower. But is this his true and final form? That, I’m not so sure about. It’s pretty obviously treated as a transformation, suggesting that the silhouette is another face we haven’t seen, or else he’s able to literally be a figure of amorphous black goo. Is this what Sabo saw in at the Reverie though? Uhhhh maybe. That one’s far enough back that I could see it being the classic Oda silhouette switcheroo.

It’s crazy what a difference one chapter can make. Last couple of weeks I was a little down on One Piece. A real final battle to pay off the anticlimax was far from guaranteed, the balance of short and longterm storytelling focus was askew, key moments for big characters like Usopp and Brook had been rushed past. (And I think feeling this way is normal, when you follow anything for literal decades your passion is going to ebb and flow for periods of time.) But damn, a massive escalation and a very fresh-feeling character design have turned it all around so fast. No complaining about the break week here, I’ve got tons to chew on.