Even I don’t know how much I can realistically yap about this one. It’s rare for Oda to go this light on content for a chapter, preferring scene changes and clustering in events back to back to back so it feels like the situation is shifting rapidly. Some say that style can be hard to follow, or doesn’t give some moments the room they need to breathe, but I think it is an undeniable part of One Piece’s long-running success that it could boast chapters where three or more plot threads edged forward a step while other series so often have weeks where the full summary seems to be ‘the fight that was happening continues, character A seems to be getting the upper hand.’

Soooo uh, what do we have to talk about here? I still like the look of Sommers’ Thorn Launcher, even if it feels a bit uncreative to just bring it up again unaltered. It’s interesting that the flames around Zoro’s swords aren’t totally a manifestation of Haki like I think we all would have expected. Sommers has some great expressions, and the bit where Zoro slices him up repeatedly while getting it wrong is a genuine laugh. And was it stated before that Omen is a darker counterpart to Haki, or was that just so obvious the dots connected themselves?

We also get Zoro doing the apparent lightning slash thing we saw when Scopper fought Imu a few chapters ago. Is that the haki lightning actually being used offensively, or is the lightning just emanating from the place the flying slash ended? I’m hoping for the latter, I wouldn’t want Haki to go too much in the direction of energy blasts.

The most interesting point is the way Mihawk talks about the nature of Supreme Kings. I’m taking his words to mean you need an unshakable sense of self to use it. Could it be that lack of personal wavering is the only true qualifier, not genetics. It probably is a retcon, in some technical sense, but I like it more this way. Especially if we’re about to see Sanji reiterate the point by becoming the kind of person to unlock it (especially when you could argue that Sanji telling Zoro to give up on his dream instead of die, and quit the crew to submit to his family were signs he didn’t have the qualities of a king earlier in his character arc.)

It’s hard to imagine this fight holding up to another chapter in full focus from this point. Sommers will surely pull some last-ditch thing for Zoro to cut through with his finisher, but there’s not a lot of genuinely threatening places to go from here. And that begs the question of what are we getting in the next chapter? Do we just end it, and have Zoro’s fight done before Sanji’s for the first time since Arlong Park, or do we cut away and save the final stroke to be done in parallel with other events?

And I guess that has to be it for this week. It feels harsh to use the word ‘filler’ for canon source material, but I can’t help the vibe of some kind of production bottleneck forcing this scene to become a whole chapter. Maybe Oda knew he needed a few more pages to get Zoro where he needed to be for the finish, but also knew he needed a full chapter for the bits coming up for Sanji’s fight. Maybe with all the public holidays this one had a tighter deadline, so the pagecount was reduced to compensate and he decided not to try and force cutaways into so small a space. Maybe it’s getting events aligned for chapter 1200. Either way, a chapter of mostly reused techniques, with inner monologues mostly going over Haki channeling minutia that we could intuit from last chapter, all just feels like fluff to me. And no amount of Zoro aura farming or Mihawk and Perona cameos can make up for that.