This is one of those ones that feels very much worth the wait. It’s amazing how Oda can make Sanji swing from being one of my least liked to most liked Strawhats with a single chapter of focus. The perv jokes will always make me roll my eyes, but the stuff at the heart of the character has the potential to be so good, and it’s chapters like this one that prove it.

Oda builds the chapter up as a testament to Sanji’s arc up to this point. We acknowledge a chef’s need for his hands for the first time since Whole Cake Island (did Killingham intuit that from the fighting style, or has he fought a hardcore chef before, or did Sanji just mention it offscreen?). We get flashbacks to Germa and to Luffy telling Sanji how he needs him. Even more impressive, Oda avoids all of his usual low-hanging Sanji fruits as he does this. We see how his connection to his captain drives him, rather than falling back on the usual Nami and Robin bits. He makes Ivakov into a personal nightmare without needing to lean on the homophobia and transphobia that dominated Sanji/okama interactions back around the timeskip era (crazy to think how different of a time 2010 was). There is actually so much nuance in this guy that all gets lost under surface-level gags 90% of the time.

And it’s not just a great chapter from the character perspective – it’s also hilarious and over the top in the ways only One Piece can be. Ivan coming out of Sanji’s head as a worst nightmare is one thing (Lights Output is a diabolical pun from Stephen), but the “intersection of dreams and reality”? The fusion dance style leap together with the lens flare where they combine? The insane dragon Ivan from the vol 108 SBS halfway becoming canon (give or take the ridiculous, chubby horse body on the bottom with fishnets on all four limbs)? This is all so silly, and I absolutely love it.

I don’t like Killingham not recognising Iva though. The Knights should at least have a dossier on high ranked Revolutionaries, especially with how quickly they’ve been stepping up attacks on the Holy Land lately. Prime candidate for a line to be tweaked for the volume edition.

In the flashback, Ivan raises an interesting point about Sanji taking damage he doesn’t need to in his fights. And it’s certainly true that you can flip back through 1200 chapters and see Sanji getting the shit kicked out of him a lot. But I’m not so sure he stands out from other characters in this regard. Luffy and Zoro also tend to get so badly hurt they can’t walk away from their victories. It’s a hard thing to judge in manga, where the reader’s interpretation fills in so many of the gaps between panels, but I don’t think the choreography has that strong of a suggestion that Sanji is taking hits he could have avoided. The best example is probably the final move of the Jabra fight, where he takes five finger pistols to the chest just to get the Diable Jambe off at point blank. Maybe the choice to fight Kuroobi underwater could also be read as suicidal, but I think Sanji just wasn’t worldly enough to know how much of a disadvantage he really had there.

That said, if we take fight-to-win battles out of the equation, we can see Sanji with an above average ability to stand still and endure a beating without defending himself. Pearl, Kalifa and Black Maria all got the chance to just wail on him while he was only restrained psychologically. And of course the self-sacrifice story beats were well-documented in the last chapter.

(I couldn’t quite find the time to go panel by panel through every Sanji fight before I wrote this though, let me know if I’ve missed some good examples.)

I said last week that Ivan was the perfect teacher for a lesson in self love but man, I didn’t figure he’d use those exact words so directly. I know that Oda’s depiction of okama as blokey, unpassing drag queens leaves a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths (believe me, I get it), but their use for scenes like this does strike at something sincere. And the lesson itself reads well too. I like the idea that Sanji’s love as a whole can be seen as wounded – a connection drawn between his childhood rejections and the simpering need for female validation he has now. I think saying Sanji will lose the ability to keep saving who he loves because of earlier sacrifice is a sympathetic way to tie a harsh wake-up call into his normal priorities.

Ivan’s statement about a man he would give his life to protect has my interest piqued. Obviously Dragon, right? But what history do those two really have? I can’t wait to find out.

We come out of the flashback into a great hype-builder of an ending. Sanji has remembered the lesson he repressed before he could fully absorb, then used what he’s learned from being reunited with his crew and reckoning with the Vinsmokes to finally internalise it, and he’s ready to go. The fight isn’t over yet though. Sanji has to make good on his promise not to be hit again, actually demonstrate his new Haki and give Killingham a few pages to freak out of his newfound vulnerability. I think we’re spending another chapter with this pair at least, but the time for the Sanji and Zoro fights to wrap up is surely close. Maybe we spend the next two to three chapters with the wings, then cut back to Imu just in time for him to pull a crazy new trump card for chapter 1200.