-
The Tide Child Trilogy review
R.J. Barker’s Tide Child Trilogy feels like a premise that could have been engineered by a focus group made up entirely of clones of me. In his afterword, Barker Cites Robin Hobb and Patrick O’Brian, the two authors I’ve read the most of over the past year, as major influences. On every conceptual level, I should be absolutely in love with these books, but the reality is that I only like them a lot. I will sing praise for most of this review, and these books have earned that, but it’s hard to shake the part of me that wishes they’d found that perfect, soul-touching personal emotional resonance to go with the tailor-made premise. Your mileage may vary if your expectations aren’t set as high by the elevator pitch.
The series is set on an ocean world of scattered archipelagos where the Hundred Isles and the Gaunt Islands have fought an unending war facilitated by ships made of the bones of ancient sea dragons. These leviathans – the arakeesians – were hunted to extinction generations to go, leaving shipbuilding resources to dwindle, but recently a live one has been spotted in waters far to the south, and whichever side secures it will gain an insurmountable advantage. Former fisherman come condemned man Joron Twiner is raised from a drunken stupor by disgraced highborn woman Meas Gilbryn and made first officer on the ship she is to captain, the eponymous Tide Child, on a mission to find the last arakeesian. But Meas’s intentions aren’t the same as the hunters of the two warring nations.
The setting is the star of the show in this one, a harsh and unforgiving world presented immersively. The island environments allow little space for forests of lumber or grazing land for livestock, and this dictates what people eat, what they build with, and even what they make their clothes out of. The local religions, mythologies and superstitions touch everything from the language used in the narration to character motives and the ways battle plans are laid out, the rituals for protection and luck before action seen as unskippable. The warlike, pirate-viking cultures of the islands have ideas about gender and sexuality that shift whether on land or at sea and their own views of what traits are socially desirable. Even the knowledge that a ship was once a dragon changes the language used surrounding it. Ships are referred to with masculine pronouns, and have beaks and rumps instead of bows and sterns, spines instead of masts and wings instead of sails. It’s a world crafted with intricate thought put into the ways each aspect would change the ways people live and the cultural flow-on of those changes, and Barker prefers to drop you in the deep end of unfamiliar terminology and practices and let you piece together the meanings from context.
And I’d be remiss not to mention the Gullaime, a race of birdlike weather mages who are enslaved and forced to use their powers to move ships. These little guys are a charming and entertaining presence, and the discovery of their culture and history as Joron learns to treat the one on his ship as a sentient being is an undeniable highlight.
With maybe a hundred pages to go in the last book, I started to worry I wouldn’t get the deeper look into the history of the world that I’d really been wanting to see. It’s a setting with so many unique features it would have been a shame to wrap up without at least hinting at how and why it all ended up like it is, but there just didn’t seem to be space left for it. And that’s when Barker pulls off an impressive reversal, taking all the religion, superstition and folklore the series had built up and recontextualising it into a more tangible creation myth, giving the reader tools to understand what is metaphor for what (and which parts are surprisingly literal). There’s plenty of ambiguity left, but you get enough of a baseline for a satisfying ‘ohhhh’ moment as the info clicks into place. It makes me interested to someday do a reread and find out what smaller symbols I missed.
While the series is well-plotted and paced and the primary characters experience arcs that come full circle across its pages, none of them have the same surprising wow factor as the worldbuilding. Surface themes of leadership and crew-building play out alongside deeper ideas about honour, loyalty, balancing devotion to one’s own nation and culture against the good of the world, and how to change traditions without undermining the social pillars the traditions were made to reinforce. I enjoyed the journey and I liked the characters, but it never quite tugged at my heartstrings the way I hoped it would.
There is a little structural oddness between books when read as a set. The first one ends not with a cliffhanger, but with such a strong feeling of more to come that you expect the sequel to pick up exactly where it left off, and then you open the book and it’s been a year. It’s just different enough from what I expected to be jarring. You also find out in the recappy bits at the start of the first book about a very important, load-bearing romantic relationship between major characters that had apparently been happening during the first book. There were signs, on reflection, but they were far too subtle for the weight placed on the relationship from that point forward. I can respect Barker not wanting to write about romance or sex in anything but the most distant terms, but this one needed to be clearer to serve the narrative as intended.
For a nitpick among nitpicks, I also think the series and individual books could all have been titled better. The Bone Ships/Call of the Bone Ships/The Bone Ship’s Wake? These titles are all practically the same! I wouldn’t bring it up at all, except that the series has consistently great chapter titles. They’re all evocative and eye-catching without giving too much away as your eye rolls down the table of contents. Make ‘the Bone Ships’ the series name and give each book a title at least half interesting as its chapter titles, I say!
But I’d be doing Barker a disservice to linger any longer on that. The level of quality in the series remains absolutely consistent through to the end. Immersive worldbuilding, fantastic action, characters that are enjoyable but held a little too much at arms’ length to get really into their heads. I appreciated the desperate, against the odds, almost out of time tone that plans and manoeuvres increasingly take on as the series pushes towards its finale. There’s no boredom or wasted time, and major characters die just often enough that the tension never drops (although it is eventually noticeable that a few random hands among the crew will suddenly get names just ahead of a big fight because we need some deaths and can’t afford to sacrifice any of the main players just now).
The Tide Child is an easy rec. No part of it is bad. Some of it is excellent, but that makes me want more from the parts that are only good. Regardless of my personal unmet desire for a new hyperfixation, Barker tells an original story with skill and confidence that will entertain anyone with even a passing interest in fantasy and/or naval action.
-
One Piece chapter 1168 review
The climax of the flashback draws close, I feel like in maybe as few as two chapters we could be back in the present for the first time since… June? Jesus christ. That’s such a long time to go without our actual main character. There’s more leaping forward in time here with some surprising skips. I’m shocked we don’t at least get a nod to Lola, but maybe it’s being saved for later.
Also I think the choice to say ‘that same year’ in the opening narration box confirms this chapter to be in the same volume as the one before it. Wouldn’t make sense to say that if there’d been the four month gap of volume releases between them, but if they’re separated by two pages it works just fine.
While I criticised the Loki and Ida relationship last week, I think Ida’s death was really well handled in this chapter. The way Harald thinks and speaks of her after this first jump forward brings an ominous feeling that builds to reveal of the grave and the flashback to her actual death. And that itself is a classic tragedy. The talk of dreams and then her arm going limp. The completely silent sequence as Harald leaves and Hajrudin rushes in. The grief on Hajrudin’s face. Loki mourning in silence in his cell. Beautiful stuff. I really liked Ida and energy she brought to the story. It tugs on my heart to see her go.
Oda does something interesting here in having both Saul and Ida argue against Harald’s ideals. Mentor characters in One Piece tend to go to extremes and are rarely outright questioned on it. But here, the scholar Saul wonders about the tradeoffs of the cultural shift. He certainly would have seen what could happen to a nation of thinkers without the ability to defend themselves Ida, who sees the good in everything, seems to have been attracted to the warrior aesthetic and sees value in embracing one’s roots. I think Harald has a pretty insurmountable counter-argument for her when he says that same culture kept them from marrying, but these two conversations lay a groundwork of doubt over Harald’s dream and the idea of unquestioningly inheriting his will. You can’t turn Elbaph back into a blank slate, not withing losing more than you intend to. Finding a balance where the nation holds onto some independent security and retains a culture it can feel proud of is going to be key to setting Elbaph up for the future. We might be about to see a different kind of inherited will where a person’s dreams aren’t just completed by the next generation but augmented into a better version of themselves first.
The dramatic tension of Harald’s meeting with the Elders is undercut somewhat by the absurdity of the panel where he walks after them with only his enormous foot in the frame. Oda’s pretty lucky he drew this hall so big back in 2018, or maybe he knew all along he was going to put giants in here. (although I saw a pretty funny fan edit showing how big Harald is actually meant to be next to the Elders. And hey, there’s an awful lot of empty space in the top right of the middle panel of page 9, so was he maybe drawn bigger then erased and shrunk down for better framing?) There’s an obvious jump forward in the middle of the scene which makes we wonder if we’re going to eventually return here and learn how Imu explained his existence to Harald in a way that left Harald still willing to trust him. Did Harald have to verbally agree to something to confirm his Depths Covenant? Did he have to make physical contact with Imu to start the process of the mark transforming? Or could Imu forcibly upgrade any Shallows Covenant in his presence?
(Shanks not being here to receive his mark isn’t a surprise, but I’m so curious about his plan. Did he get what he wanted, or did he know the promotion would mean being trapped and had to bail when it was offered regardless of where his plan was at?)
Okay, so a thought I had when first flipping through this chapter is that when you get down to it, Imu and Rocks kind of had the same plan for the giants. Imu wants to recruit and control Harald and use his status as king to turn the nation of Elbaph into an unstoppable army that completes his dominion over the world. Rocks wants to befriend and recruit Harald in hopes the resurrected Galleila giants would follow his authority and fight to make him king of the world. You could even say that Rocks is dreaming bigger, targeting the legendary ancient giants instead of smaller modern ones. The difference between them is that Imu can’t even bring himself to wait five minutes before trying to remove Harald’s will with mind control while Rocks lashes out at Kaido for just suggesting that Harald or Galleila be brought to heel by force. And you have to wonder what would have happened if Imu was a bit more patient. Let Harald abdicate the throne but tell him his successor also needs a mark. Both Loki and Hajrudin are much more willing warriors that could be groomed in the direction of making a giant army before fully taking over. This now being the early years of the Great Pirate Era, maybe Imu was feeling the pressure to crack down hard on the pirates inspired by Roger, and that made him rush.
But thinking Rocks and Imu’s parallels also makes me think of the way Luffy and Blackbeard are often compared for pursuing the same goal by totally different means. It makes me wonder if Blackbeard has an additional goal for after he acquires “the world,” like Luffy’s secret objective that comes after being Pirate King. Or like Imu, does his ambition fall short compared to the grander vision of a true dreamer? Just a tangent…
I enjoy the posing of Harald trying to resist while being made to move against his will. The unsteady wobble perfectly conveys a puppeteered look in a still image. And Harald, to his credit, acts quickly and decisively when he realises he’s been betrayed. It’s unclear what his plan is, but I’m almost inclined to guess he might order his own death when he figures out he’ll lose control, and that’s the scene Loki and Jarul arrive to.
It’s possible we could be back in the present in as few as two chapters. Next week is all the massacre, the one after summarises the steps from there to Loki being locked up and brings us back to the battle for Elbaph. We’ll be lucky to even see spoilers for that by the end of the year, with the December breaks looming, but given the unfinished panels this week I’m happy for Oda to take the break he needs and recharge for the home stretch.
-
One Piece chapter 1167 review
We’re officially in a new phase of the flashback now, leaping forward by years at a time to reach the next pivotal beat. This week represents one of our biggest looks yet behind the scenes of the God Knights’ structure and organisation, providing a few answers and a whole lot of new mysteries. Oh, and the cover page is pretty cute. I’m wondering if this cat is intended to be the same one from the cover of chapter 736. It’s missing the tail stripes, but the resemblance is otherwise uncanny.
The opening pages make me feel pretty confident we’re at the start of a new volume here. They’re a cold open to this new era, building up to the reveal of where our now-central character is at. It’s a nice little bit of building tension – even raising then dismissing the Florian Triangle to keep you guessing – before we learn the results of Harald’s grand gesture. I don’t mind that we gloss over Kaido, Big Mom, Whitebeard and Roger making themselves the faces of a generation in the following pages, but I’m a tad disappointed there’s so little on Marineford’s Giant Squad. Those guys were set up to be a pretty big deal at Marineford, and everything we’ve learned about human-giant relations since raised questions about how they were recruited. There was even spaces left in the Vivre Card databook for more of them to be named! But Oda being Oda, you never know when or how he’ll manage to circle back and fill that gap in, so I’m not really stressed about it.
Learning about the three-tiered contract system used by the God Knights and Imu’s other direct underlings sheds new light on some of the titles used up to this point. Should make for a much clearer reread when the arc is finished. I have to wonder if the Devoted Blade of God title is fully synonymous with Shallows Covenant holders or if you can be either one without the other. We have to assume the Five Elders are the Abyssal Covenant holders and that this is the unageing immortality level and the remaining Depths Covenant holders are the God Knights. But are there other differences between those two levels? And why does Gunko have the agelessness of the Abyssal Covenant without being an Elder? Either way, Harald getting into the system is a pleasant surprise; I’ve wondered vocally how Oda would handle his turn to avoid feeling like a repeat of Rocks’ Domi Reversi, and a direct possession like what happened with Gunko in the present and Saturn in God Valley definitely would be that.
I don’t usually make this kind of comparison and judgement, but I have to say here, the official release’s choice for the names of the God Knight ranks is leagues better than the scanlations’ one. Glad not to be stuck with Dee-deep Sea Contracts for the rest of the series.
Garling orders secrecy over Harald’s work. It’s hard to tell if the God Knights are fully forbidden knowledge or not. I’m guessing they’re not a ‘kill everyone know knows’ secret, someone close enough to the Government would at least be aware of the name, or be able to read between the lines that there’s another force of authority not being mentioned, but the Government doesn’t advertise their existence. Which does make it more reasonable they’d choose to make a hero for God Valley for the lower world instead of giving it to Garling.
Harald and Neptune is an unexpected pairing. Did we get any hints they might be connected prior to this? And damn, how much would it cost to get a ship the size of Harald’s longboat coated for undersea travel? But I can see how they’d bond, both fighting to get their villainised peoples the relative safety of World Government membership.
But then we have the ‘hairy daughter’ joke coming up again. Wow, I’d not put a lot of stock in the theory that Shirahoshi was Loki’s Shaggy, but this is a big moment for fans of that. Lots of questions still to answer about how and why and to what narrative end, but it is a lot more on the table in my mind than it was a week ago.
And then the sequence that has everyone talking: Shanks in the Holy Land as a Devoted Blade. And Fisher Tiger! It’s really interesting that he’s shown as an escaped slave here rather than a warrior who scaled the Redline single-handed. Did he get recaptured when he climbed up to take revenge? Or did he go undercover with a plan to free himself and cause havoc. He’s already on the run before Shanks’s intervention, so maybe it was part of the plan. On the assumption that he failed and was recaptured, did he just go along with the mythmaking that turned his attack into a full-fledged success? Feels a little like a retcon. On one hand, with the Sun Pirates he takes pains to erase the stigma of being a slave, so does it make sense for Tiger have chosen to hide the truth or even spread the lie himself? On the other, Tiger had a hypocritical streak despite his many honourable deeds. He held onto enough hate to reject a human blood transfusion at the end of a lifetime of pushing for equality of races, so maybe it would be an in-character contradiction for him to feel shame over being a slave and let a grander story take the place of that one. Seems like a place where the SBS could shed some more light.
The interaction with Shanks is a little hard to follow, a rare failure in Oda’s choreography. Breaking up the moment of the clash into a couple of panels to make it clearer how Tiger only grazed him enough to rip a bandage loose would have done wonders. As it is, the impact effect for Shank’s hit on the collar reads as part of Tiger’s attack, making it look like he landed a much more solid blow than he really did. I appreciate Oda finding the page space to show us the Boa sisters and Koala though.
I’m very, very curious about Shanks’s time in the Holy Land now. There’s no question that everything he says here is an act, but why? What is he trying to gain from infiltrating the God Knights? What about the dangers? On the assumption that even a Shallows Covenant opens the way to Harald’s possession, that means Shanks is taking a pretty big risk here. How does he mitigate it after he flees, given that we saw the mark intact years after in Scopper’s hot tub. This is all stuff I don’t expect a good answer to for years. Right now, it’s just surreal seeing Shanks and Shamrock side by side like that.
God damn it, not Ida. It almost seemed like she was going to make it, but the odds were just too long for a mother in a flashback. The cruelty of Estrid’s family and the amount of petty hate that still lurks in the culture of Elbaph despite Harald’s attempts to connect and modernise it is stunning. But maybe the rot was concentrated mostly around that one clan and Loki’s rampage represents something like the end of it. I wish I could say I felt a little more strongly about Loki’s declaration that Ida is his mum. The building blocks are there, but they’re few, and in the context of a weekly read they were a long time ago. Seriously, Rocks and God Valley, as amazing as they’ve been, have waylaid Loki’s journey since August, and that makes his emotional arc feel a little disjointed. The reread will soften this blow, but there’s still going to be almost a whole volume between this scene and the last time we saw Loki and Ida interact. Just a consequence of Oda trying to a little bit too much at once.
That said, I like the art on the last page. Estrid’s relative takes a pretty gnarly broken arm there, but the centre panel of the spread, with the large amount of negative space with vignettes of burning houses as a frame, that’s a great bit of art.
I’m hoping from here we’re squarely back in Loki’s zone for the climax of the flashback. Seems reasonable the rest of the God Knights stuff and Shanks’s departure might be saved for a future Shanks flashback. It’s been fun, but it’s time to start getting back to the present. The coming December breaks are going to make sure that takes a while, so I’m glad we have the focal shift now, as a reassurance we’re on track.
-
One Piece chapter 1166 review
Oda takes a chapter to put a bow on the God Valley storyline and ease us back to Harald. And it feels like a reasonable ending for volume 114. It’s always nice getting that Jump cover/colour spread combo as well. The spread has some nice, autumnal vibes with some pleasing new outfits for the characters who made it in (Nami in particular), buuuuut I don’t think we really needed to go back to the Wano cast so soon after Yamato’s cover story. The Jump cover is simple, but it gives us Rocks’ colours, so that’s a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. I like the look, but I’m not looking forward to the amount of Buggy theories we’re going to get from the blue hair. It also looks like Oda is picturing a red shirt for Garp in this sequence – that means the anime already has this wrong in Kuma’s flashback, but maybe the long-dormant digital colour manga has enough of a gap to get it right when they get there.
It’s very interesting that Rocks appears to legitimately be back to normal in the opening pages here. Conqueror’s Haki being able to do that lines up with it banishing the Elders from Egghead, and it gives Oda an out for saving Dorry, Brogy and anyone else who gets taken over in the present. Going with understated final words instead of a big speech is a common Oda choice for beloved characters – see Merry and Ace – which makes it feel more deliberate that Rocks has come off as a lovable rogue rather than the outright villain he was built up to be. And the knowledge that Rocks could likely have been saved if Rayleigh and Scopper had arrived before Garling’s squad did makes the tragedy complete. The world conspires against the man to the end.
Not sure what to make of God Valley’s apparent implosion into the sea. That’s not anyone’s power that we know of, and it’s a crazy thing for a normal fight to do. I guess knowing that most of the One Piece world is mountaintops, it could make sense for the ceiling of a chamber inside the mountain to be shaken open, letting the top of the mountain (and the sea) collapse into it. Maybe a bit of a reach, but it could be.
The following spread is a real winner though. That’s an awesomely dramatic sailing scene. Seeing pirate ships and Marine ships flee equally from the destruction while lightning splits the sky and a new era begins.
Cool to see the storyboarded page from the Film Red promo material finally making it into the series. Not much else you can say about it.
If I’m honest, I still don’t quite understand how Garp game away from this thing shining like he does. The God Knights don’t seem to be so top secret Garling couldn’t be given all the credit. For him to have attacked Saturn/Imu directly and to wield at least 50% of the conqueror’s power to undo a Domi Reversi feels like it should be grounds for execution. And at the same time that his son turns traitor? Remember how the top dogs of the WG believe that things like being a god or a criminal get passed along in the bloodline? We know from things like Smoker being given credit for Alabasta or Koby and Rocky Port that the WG likes to make heroes of its Marines for the propaganda, so earlier in the series it would have been easy to roll with Garp being propped up that way. But we’ve seen too much of the Government’s hard lines now, and we know Garp has crossed to many of them.
I’m not quite sure what to make of Sengoku’s philosophy in his chat with Garp either. Does the size of the oranisation really give cover to any of this, acting like the top dogs might just be making weird choices because they legitimately can’t keep track of everything below them. But it wasn’t insanity in this case, it cold, calculated cruelty in an attempted grap of resources, and it came directly from the top and kept out of sight of the lower levels. It doesn’t really hold water, and it does feel a lot like, as Garp says, Sengoku turning a blind eye to keep his career going. Sengoku implies he wants to make change once he reaches the top, but I wonder if in the present day, now that he’s retired, he thinks he succeeded. With Sakazuki in charge, the Marines are at least as bad, if not worse than when Sengoku came in, I think that’s inarguable. And does Garp truly believe Sengoku made it through his career without being corrupted, or did he have one of his trademark internal conflicts and couldn’t find the courage to kill Sangoku like he says here? It would be interesting to see some vignettes of how this relationship and their goals changed over the decades, how the morality slipped one compromise at a time.
The talk with Rocks Loki remembers raises a few questions about their relationship and Rocks’ morality as well. One strongly inferred feature of Rocks’ plan is the legendary Elbaph Devil Fruit’s ability to revive the sleeping Galleila (what power could that be), and the reason he wanted Harald is to have the current king of the giants to give them an authority they would recognise. This was all laid out ten chapters ago and reinforced here. So it would actually have been an easy win for Rocks to take on the prince of Elbaph. Loki is ready and willing to be groomed as a tool in Rocks’ master plan, and just as royal as his father. So what stops Rocks? Doesn’t want to use a kid that way? Or is he so enamoured with Harald he needs to have the man as a partner and equal, a point of pride to have won him over rather than subjugate or bypass him?
And while we’re on that doomed friendship, I actually do feel sympathy for Harald here. Rocks must have seemed so invincible to him. We’ve talked already in recent weeks about how unlucky Rocks was at the end, the wrong person on the wrong island at the wrong time; the wrong additional hostage bringing extra attention; the wrong people arriving first after the fight. Just one domino falling a different way would have changed Rocks’ fate, and Harald knows it could have been him. I don’t agree with many of Harald’s choices, this one included, but it’s a sharp pain to live with the loss of a friend because you didn’t realise how desperately they really needed it when they asked. He’s a well-written character with layers of internal conflict to peel back.
The pair actually have me thinking of the Guts and Griffith of Berserk’s Golden Age Arc. One has too great a respect for the other to stand being anything less than an equal, the other has ambitions that leave little room for friendship. The conflict between these motivations ultimately dooms the relationship. If I’m drawing Berserk comparisons, you know you’re doing something right.
And speaking of nuanced characters whose choices I wouldn’t have made, Garp and Dragon’s scene is great. So much said with so few words and one action. I’ve raised issues in recent weeks about Garp staying in the Marines and how much he has to overlook about them and how much the WG has to overlook about him to make that happen, but scenes like this make him such a compelling character. Since Marineford, the constant internal conflict between duty and family have made him one of Oda’s best written characters.
Finally, such an ominous scene to end on. The grand gesture of a man repenting, but it’s not really about the sins of his ancestors, is it? You can feel the weight of choosing propriety over friendship and regretting it driving Harald now; from shifting the family dynamic away from the traditional, to grovelling to the WG. The former would be a pretty clear positive if he was going to be around to integrate his families, but the latter ends on such a grim choice of words. And Oda puts Imu’s eye in to make sure there’s absolutely no missing the point. (And if we wander back to the Berserk comparison, losing Guts also spurs Griffith to take a series of rash actions that will ultimately undermine the kingdom he’s been working towards and end with his transformed into a demon. Hmm…)
Often in One Piece, it’s the bits between arcs that are the most exciting. Seeing a big even ripple out and change the world is where the extensive worldbuilding a massive cast pay dividends. Never thought I’d see one of those sequences inside a flashback, but Oda pulls it off for an unexpected hit of a transitional chapter.
-
One Piece chapter 1165 review
Well that’s definitely more actual fight choreography than I expected from a flashback. What a pleasant surprise as we say farewell to a legend. If anyone deserved this special treatment it’s Rocks.
I like that the fighting is set up so that every move comes as a one-two punch. Oda doesn’t let Roger or Garp dominate the fight, they work as a sword and shield, forcing you to wonder what could have been if Garp had taken Roger up on his offer to be a pirate. Generally, I would say I’m not here for the action. I’ve seen all the shonen fighty stuff over the years and its tropes don’t motivate like they used to. But the bits where two rivals end up in an unlikely alliance and are immediately completely in sync with each other because of the years they spent getting to know each other’s moves? Those ones are always bangers.
There’s a little bit of wrapping up of loose ends through the middle of the chapter, mostly watching the Rocks Pirates go their separate ways. Marco’s father being called Polo is a 10/10 move, no notes here. But the standout is Dragon’s departure from the island. I’d been wondering how that might happen, and what a power move from him. The respect I have for him and his cause, having now seen its origin. You have to wonder if any members of his squad were convinced to defect with him, or if any of the God Valley survivors he rescued were founding members of the Revolutionary Army (or its predecessor organisation the Freedom Fighters). For being such a minor character in this flashback, Dragon comes out of it shining as a hero.
Garp, I’m not so sure of. He rejects the chance to leave the World Government and its corruption behind, staying because he thinks he can ‘protect the rank and file.’ But how? Garp’s career is definitely doing well at this point, but he’s not the hero of the Marines yet. What power does he have to save multiple battleships’ worth of sailors if the WG decides every witness gets executed? He knowingly struck a Celestial Dragon! Is he just thinking of getting close enough to Dragon to warn him off before the consequences come down? In which case, there’s a kind of irony in that choice being made right as Dragon defects, but then Garp stays for another 40 years, so who even knows what he’s planning at this point. I wanted more from this, but the way it’s framed gives me a nasty gut feeling that I probably won’t be getting it.
There’s some interesting talk about Haki and how it can be used toward the end. Not much that couldn’t be intuited, but it’s cool to see it put into words by Oda. Interestingly, I think this is the first time we’re seeing characters other than Luffy speak of the kind of disabling Haki burnout that comes at the end of a Gear Four fight, let alone actually suffering it. Will we see more of this going forward? Will powerscalers come to realise that Haki isn’t an infinite resource that can be endlessly tapped by any who awakened it, but also that for storytelling reasons we’ll never see a gamey percentage bar showing how close to running out they are?
The final stage of the fight stuns visually. Not just the combo attack spread, which is awesome – the sword slashes doing damage makes sense, but Garp is literally punching holes in the guy is completely savage – but the expression work done on Rocks’ face leading up to it. He must really believe he killed his family to be showing so much pain. And if their escape was narrow enough that Rocks, at ground zero, couldn’t detect it, that must mean Imu doesn’t know either.
We’re in the ending zone for vol 114, and with that narration I could definitely see it wrapping up here, but let’s just see what the next two chapters bring before we lock in any guesses. With so much Loki’s life leading up to Harald’s death, plus maybe glimpses of his pirating career after, all still to cover, I have zero hope of seeing the present before vol 115. A couple more chapters and this sequence will outstrip Oden’s flashback to become the series’ longest. But what could Oda possibly have in the tank that could surpass God Valley?
-
One Piece chapter 1164 review
Well, the end has come. God Valley is wrapping up. Rocks is on his last legs. Volume 114 is now on its ninth chapter, so I guess we’re not going back to the present before the flashback is done, even if we stretch to 12 chapters. If the cover story hadn’t finished when it did, Oda might not have drawn Luffy at all for the whole book. I wonder if he’ll still be on the cover.
There’s a lot of trademark Oda vagueness in this chapter. Davy Jones as the previous king of the world? Him and Joyboy being separate but comparable threats to Imu’s order? Davy’s dream, not to be confused for the Will of the D (probably), and that promise that was also mentioned last week? Rocks being ‘too early’ to face Imu and that’s why he lost? (Is this related to it being ‘too early’ for Roger to properly use the One Piece as well?) Yeah, we’re going to be looking back to some of these lines for years. For now, the idea of Davy Jones and Joyboy both scaring Imu is something that’s sticking with me. Obviously Blackbeard represents one and Luffy the other. Could they be forced to team up to topple Imu (or just race to be the one to take him down) and then Blackbeard makes his play for the world, turning into the real final boss?
Just when you think Rocks couldn’t endear himself harder, he defends Harald to Imu in his final lucid moments. After everything that happened between them, it takes integrity from Rocks to this. What a way to go out. And while it’s obviously a very bad thing for him, it does have to be said that he absolutely rocks the fangs, and wings forming out of his cape is a fantastic visual touch.
I’m awed by the clash between Rocks and Whitebeard and the sequence of the mountain toppling that follows. Holy shit that is cool. The scale. The power. I have to believe Oda knew he was going to do this from the moment he first drew those spires, it’s such an effective escalation. You really get the feeling that things are over for this island. It’s most prominent landmark has been savaged; the following pages show how far fire has spread through its forests as all but the strongest flee to save themselves. How much of the landmass – how many fleeing people – were obliterated under an unfathomable weight of solid stone just now? Almost like a sinking ship, the structure and safety of the place fails zone by zone, making it uninhabitable by the living. Get to the lifeboats, the end only accelerates, and you don’t want to still be onboard in the final minutes of the cascade.
And right when you thought you couldn’t love Kuma more, he puts himself in harm’s way for Eris and Teach. What a clutch move! But this means Eris both survives and never sees Rocks’ ultimate end. Will she depart from Sorbet and make it to Lulusia expecting him to be there? How does she meet her end, and how much of this is conveyed to little Teach before she does? Questions for a future Blackbeard flashback.
This sequence also closes off a question that’s spurred a lot of debate in recent months: why didn’t the World Government kill Blackbeard when they had the chance, in his warlord days? I wasn’t massively bothered by this – with the fake Marshall name there’s only a loose family resemblance to go off – but it’s still nice to see an answer. All signs suggest Imu genuinely believes Eris and Teach were killed by Rocks. From a distance, he sees the explosion rise and knows he can’t sense the Voices of the pair on the island anymore. He doesn’t curse that the Davy clan slipped away again or chastise Rocks for failing as a tool, he just calmly assigns the next task. Why hunt for a bloodline you’ve already extinguished? And even if you want to take no chances on every dude with a similar nose to your old nemesis, that’s a long enough shot you can probably let him fight a war for you first (and not demoralise your other Warlords by killing one of their number in front of them right when they’re about to fight). Case closed. Ah, the rollercoasters of serialised reading. The time it can take to see apparent holes closed up in easy and satisfying ways like this is why I try to take a wait and see approach to developments that get a lot of the fanbase riled up.
Expanding on the above, it’s harder to say for sure because he would have had the chance to see Kuma, but I wonder if Rocks also believes he succeeded in his mission. The pained expression, tears and begging for death aren’t just about losing to Imu or turning on his crew. They only start after Eris and Teach disappear. The kind of guilt Rocks must be taking to his grave in this case…
I think next week is the last we see of God Valley. Oda doesn’t like to linger on a fight with a foregone conclusion, so I’m keeping my expectations reasonable for the amount of battle we get to see. One or two showcase moves, teary final words from a wounded Rocks, then a transition into the aftermath leading back to Loki and Harald’s story. That’s my prediction. But damn, even knowing, it’s going to hurt to see the last of Rocks.
-
One Piece chapter 1163 review
Oda may make us wait, but he rarely fails to deliver when the time comes. And this week, he has delivered. My god, has he delivered. It’s a hype chapter, but it’s also a ‘more questions’ rather than a ‘some answers’ kind of installment.
Imu rising out of Saturn is something that has the potential to look goofy, but he pulls it off to surprisingly intimidating effect. Man, I have so many questions about how his powers work – why didn’t this happen at Egghead? Why does this also make Saturn so much bigger? Is Saturn even conscious while this happens – he was pretty chatty on Egghead but doesn’t speak a word while acting as a portal here. Look at the way the swirls on his legs come alive to attack; the other Elders don’t have swirls in their monster forms, so is there an equivalent for them? Roger’s wounded crewman doesn’t seem to have been hit with the same corrosive poison Saturn coated his talons with on Egghead, so does an Imu possession limit some of their powers as well as adding all this weird new stuff? Does the wound being ‘fascinating’ hint to something around Domi Reversi? So many questions I can’t wait to see answered.
Fascinated by Garp this week. These are not the words and actions of someone planning to keep his Marine career going. Full disillusionment and a Luffy-level willingness to take a swing at the world’s highest power. So what happens next? The fact that he’s even allowed to live and that he’d stick with this side after everything makes me feel there has to be some kind of memory manipulation involved in making him into the Marines’ ‘hero.’ I think Oda would have to work to make a long-con ‘bring them down from the inside’ play work for a guy like Garp, even if Sengoku pressures him into it. And to be committed enough to that kind of plan to let Ace die? I don’t think Garp would do that unless he really believed he was in the right, and that would mean not having this incident in his mind at that moment. I’ll be very curious to see how this gets played, and how it could connect to a present day story with Garp captive at Fullalead.
Rocks and Imu’s exchange about a promise is for sure one to stick a pin in, probably for when we get more from the Harley mural. Seems the Davy clan set themselves a purpose that’s at odds with Imu’s, but what, and when? Questions, questions.
I enjoy seeing known Devil Fruits in the hands of unexpected users in these flashbacks. And I like how John getting blown away in the middle of his Big Eater move naturally scatters treasure across a wide area of the island. When the time comes for a frantic retreat, it’s going to make it easy to justify random pirates grabbing what they can see without looking too close, helping Shanks end up where he ends up. Also as a way to separate Dragon and Shanks without Dragon having to abandon the child.
The main event is a truly killer spread. It feels like an event, and not just because we’ve been told all of these guys is a big deal, but because each one has hundreds of pages of setup making them into characters that matter to us. I can appreciate a brief, efficient story when I see one, but this kind of epic-feeling scope is the domain of the long-form narrative. It just hits different. And holy shit does it look cool.
This attack even gets a bit of unique rendering unlike much else in the series. Look at the grey around the explosion in the main spread and covering the middle panel of the following page. It’s not the even halftone pattern Oda usually goes to for shading, it’s a smudgy and uneven shade with something of a canvas texture to it. It feels similar to the shading used to give the Sleeptid monsters the feeling they were drawn and coloured by children, but not quite the same. The canvas texture even impacts the black inking that runs through it, strangely enough. I wonder if it’s just a new tool Oda recently added to his kit after first starting to change up his shading with the Sleeptids and the Harley mural.
And, of course, more questions for the final pages. How does Domi Reversi work? Who can resist it and how do they do so? I’m pretty surprised to see Rocks get taken. If it was just willpower or some innate ability of a big-name clan that provided resistance, you’d think he’d be in the clear. I also thought because we’re likely to get Harald’s Reversi in the near future, Oda wouldn’t want to stack up the same twist too many times. And even if Rocks does go rogue and chase his family, would that really be enough to make the others here give up on Imu. A chapter or two ago I was saying we’re mostly just watching foregone events play out, but Oda’s managed to throw in enough unknowns to really get me wondering about the coming weeks.
-
One Piece chapter 1162 review
Illness or not, Oda is delivering hard on God Valley. Now on the seventh chapter of volume 114, I’m wondering if he’ll be able to wrap the flashback up before the book ends, or if we’ll really go a full volume without any contact with the present – or Luffy. Never too late for a first.
Yamato’s cover story draws to a close at last, and I gotta say it’s one of the biggest misfires of the cover story set. None of them are fast-moving or actually that heavy on lore, but the good ones have the hook of showing a familiar character in a new context. We see supporting villains like Hatchi or Gedatsu show their kinder sides without the influence of cruel leaders. Or we see villains that first appeared in positions of power, such as Wapol or the CP9 squad, have to rebuild themselves from the ground up. While they will be mostly fluff, plenty have ended with a change to the focus character’s status quo – generally an alliance that puts a new faction on the map for later, such as Buggy with Alvida, Koby and Helmeppo with Garp, or Germa and Caesar’s reformed MADS. Yamato’s cover story gives us a character that was already heroic, in a setting surrounded by allies, having zero fish out of water experiences despite their isolated upbringing, and while it results in some new friends they do not leave Wano to put themselves into the world as a force to someday meet up with.
It had its moments. I liked seeing Tama’s ninja skills, and a redemption for Ulti and Page One is a reasonable outcome even without them going anywhere. But this story had made 99% of its point ten installments ago, dragging the end out until it hurt. Maybe, if Oda was so committed to revisiting all of the Scabbards, it should have been a Decks of the World or Grand Fleet Stories style anthology cover story instead of a continuous narrative. Either way, it’s over now. My guess positive for the next one is either Stussy or Sentomaru, or both of them together. The negative guess is 40 chapters of the omni-Vegapunk screwing around in the drifting Labophase.
Getting into the action, we get one of Oda’s trademark battle maps, but in this case it combines with some murky dialogue to lessen my understanding of where everyone’s coming from and going. Roger talks like he’s encircled by the Rocks Pirates and the Marines, even thought they both should be coming from the same place. Rocks himself is technically at their rear, but would Roger have the intel to know he’s there but not that he’s been intercepted by Garling? I got the impression the Roger Pirates were going to try and fight straight through the corridor, but the group of them reaching the treasure store later implies that they instead fell back the way they’d come. And who’s talking when the order is given to move the ship to the southwest? Context implies Roger, but that move doesn’t make sense for his vector of escape, which is northwest out of the middle passage. It wouldn’t makse sense to be Marine chatter, given that Garp already landed on that corner. But there’s no real reason for the Rocks pirates to be making that move either; you’d more expect them to go around north to pick up their captain. And then at the end of the chapter, Whitebeard suddenly joins Rocks in the northwest, despite having the whole Roger crew between him and there last we saw him. Kaido getting there makes sense, he can fly. But Whitebeard getting past so many high level combatants who would want to stop him should have warranted at least one or two onscreen interactions.
We get a somewhat redemptive Garp scene as he confronts Sengoku about the massacred civilians. So he didn’t know coming in. But he’s going to choose to stay after. And Sengoku comes across very calm despite the level of atrocity being reported. Does he already know?
Despite only getting a couple of panels to do it, Eris makes a strong impression. The wild hair in her design feels different, even if her face doesn’t, and she takes a brave and practical approach to her tough situation. I’m curious about her past as a pirate and how Rocks managed to keep her so secret from his crew, assuming they met at sea. Maybe we’ll get a little more of her for Blackbeard’s flashback later on. I hope so, I’d love to see what this relationship is like in more normal circumstances. As a couple though, man, can these two choose hiding places. He stows her at God Valley, she says meet at Lulusia. Exclusively the doomedest places on the planet. I’d put money down on Fullalead getting nuked before the series ends purely on the basis of Rocks making it somewhere important to him.
We get a little more about God Knight powers in this scene. Garling complains about it taking a while to heal after Rocks hits him, but is that an innate thing, just from the amount of Conqueror’s Haki Rocks is able to emit or has Rocks been developing the specific technique for it since his attack on Marie Geoise? And I’m very surprise to see people Reversi’d before Imu’s arrival. Can Garling just do that? Can the others? We need to know more about the rules of this ability.
Kaido and Linlin’s scene is a fun moment among all the darkness. I enjoy how it recontextualises the conversation about him owing her one for his fruit on Wano. And that smug face he makes as he eats it, that’s a new expression for the big ogre.
Oda makes a very obvious and deliberate parallel between Shanks and Blackbeard towards the end of the chapter, juxtaposing panels of each of their rescues from God Valley. Many have speculated over the years that Blackbeard could cement his status as a final villain by taking out Shanks and robbing Luffy of their long-awaited reunion and hat return. I’m not saying this is any kind of direct evidence for that, but it paints a picture of some kind of important connection between the pair.
There’s one last little shock show of the brutality of the World Government when the Marine ships fire on the fleeing slaves. The cruelty truly is limitless. It calls to mind Sakazuki’s actions at Ohara, but with even less sense. At least we get the Kuma scene after for a sweet spot of hope.
The final spread generates incredible hype on a bunch of levels. Kaido’s dragon form? Man, I’ve been saying since the start of Wano how impressively intricate that thing is, with all the painstakingly inked scales, and how cool it is the way the snaking body fills in space. I never thought we were getting that again. Rocks, Whitebeard and Kaido fighting side by side almost feels like a bigger event than the Garp and Roger team we were promised. And then there’s Imu’s arrival, seemingly using Saturn as his portal. This leans even further on the idea that the Elders’ powers are extensions of Imu’s own. And then Rocks’ description putting a new angle on Blackbead’s present day goal. How will Rocks fall? What do Kaido and Wihtebeard see as it happens? What unites Roger and Garp? Did Garp see Imu? Oda knows exactly how to end a chapter to keep the readers coming back.
-
One Piece 1161 review
A lot of interesting things happened this week, so obviously the thing to talk about is cover pages.
Chapter 1161 uniquely has two of them – a colour spread and a cover story. And yes, this is actually unique, though some may think otherwise. We have to distinguish between magazine colour pages and actual parts of the chapter. Maybe you remember chapter 1019 having two colour spreads, but the Where’s Wally collaboration wasn’t part of the chapter and didn’t get included in its volume release. Did chapters 1023 and 1025 have two covers then? Actually, in the volume, all three parts of the WT100 illustration are presented together at the end of the book instead of with the individual chapters they were first published alongside in the pages of Jump. Chapter 1145 was published alongside special illustration for the anime’s return as well as a normal cover page, but hasn’t been placed in a volume yet, so we don’t have the final word on what is actually included in its pagecount, though my guess is that the anime illustration will be at the back of the book. Jumping way back, chapter 217 was published with a colour page that even featured the chapter’s title and number on it, alongside a cover story page, however in the volume, the colour page was moved to the front of the book and the cover story got the number and title like normal.
And a weird outlier case, while we’re on the topic chapter 304 was published with colour pages featuring giant rainbow-coloured eels and two pages of manga showing the Strawhats putting together a band to summon them. These pages are usually considered the cover of that chapter, and yet in the volume, the four-page sequence has its own place in the table of contents labelled ‘Straw Hat Theatre,’ leaving chapter 304 to be one of very few with no official cover at all. It shares this honour with chapters 4 and 6; chapter 817, which is fronted by Oda’s illustrated Film Gold poster in both the magazine and the volume, but the title placement and the volumes table and content confirm that the poster is not part of the chapter; chapter 999, due to the two part colour spread being collected together as part of chapter 1000 in the volume; and 1024 which had the middle segment of the WT100 illustration and was the only one of the three chapters it appeared with not to have its own cover.
The opening pages of the six coverless chapters, featuring chapter numbers and titles alongside regular panels. But chapter 1161 has no such caveats or special conditions like any of the above. There is no collaboration or special event. It’s just two covers. No reason to think the colour pages will be collected separately. Wild.
Okay, so why and how has this happened? I’ve seen it speculated before that Oda does colour pages in bulk in advance so he can throw one in as often as the magazine needs it. Maybe another author had to miss their colour pages at the last minute so they brought in one of Oda’s reserves. Or it could have been his own choice to handle issues with the structure of the chapter and the layouts of the page. See, because of how the magazine works, the actual black and white portion of the chapter has to start on a left-side page of an open book. Which means you don’t get to follow up the colour spread with a regular spread in normal circumstances. If Oda had the first spread of this chapter planned out, with that wide establishing shot of the island and the other scenes happening around it, knowing the page space for each moment would have to line up to give the Rocks Pirates heavy hitters their own spread in a few pages, he might not have seen a way to make that single first black and white page work in the layout, and just wrote it off with a part of the cover story instead.
The final thought is that maybe the cover story needed to hurry along to coincide with some upcoming event or drop some info before it becomes relevant in the main story, but I don’t really see where that connection would be with things sitting as they are.
All that said, this is the best colour spread we’ve had in a while. What a beautiful and charming work of art. There are so many little stories playing out at once – Chopper stuck in the machine, Brook’s rescue attempt, Franky apparently struggling so hard to save him that he’s running out of coins (you’d think he’d be the best with a mechanical arm), and everyone else trying to collect the plushies of their favourites (but wait, who pulled Buggy?). The chibified toys of all these big names from everyone’s backstories and training arcs are adorable and I want one for every character. It’s perfect.
A side note about shifting colour schemes, we have Gaimon drawn in colour by Oda himself for the first time. What’s different? The frame of the chest is gold instead of steel grey, and his beard is green. Gaimon was actually coloured with a green beard in the digital colour manga, but the anime gave him a brown beard and the Vivre Card databook and WT100 renders altered the digital art to follow the anime. But now it seems the colour manga was right from the start. Or at least until Oda changes his mind/forgets what he established again. I know colour isn’t a priority for the man.
The other cover is a pretty standard Yamato cover story thing. Hyogoro’s wife being memorialised with the fallen retainers is a deep cut, and I’m curious about the obscured Kurozumi lantern. Is it for Kanjuro, or a general memorial for the members of the clan who were unfairly persecuted? It maybe should not be ignored that Yamato has rejoined Kin’emon and Momonosuke for their prayer, truly bringing this story full circle. Ending next week? Please?
Well, that sure was a chapter. What? I’ve only talked about the covers? Alright, let’s keep going. Actually, for most of this chapter, we’re just watching fights that we knew were coming play out, so there’s not a ton of analytical work really to do. It’s all enjoyable, but unless you’re the kind of person who’s deep in the powerscaling discourse, it’s not giving you much you didn’t already know.
I’m glad we get to see more of Dragon’s mission to save the kids. It seem like he was getting away a little too easy last week, and it makes sense someone would have been put on them. I’m sure the misunderstanding on Maffey’s part of it being a single child instead of two makes a lot more sense in the original Japanese, where plurals aren’t as certain in casual speech. That said, I like the official translation’s attempt to play if off in the radio chatter toward the end of the sequence. Clever wording there. Maffey is an excellent character design though, and adds another to our list of known Celestial Dragon family names.
The showcases of all the heavy hitters’ powers here are awesomely drawn and great to see. I wonder why we never saw Big Mom’s Heavenly Fire Blitz at Wano, or was the Maser Cannon meant to be the upgraded version of it?
As the action moves into the middle of the island, I can’t help feeling there’s a missed opportunity in not finding space for a taller panel that really sells the scale of those mountains and the way they create a tight corridor of carnage. Maybe it’s being saved though. We still have to see Roger and Garp teaming up against Rocks.
Sommers is being set up for a truly spectacular downfall in the present. What a bastard. Man, the moment he grabbed Shakky’s leg and raised his club, I thought he was going to break it at the knee, but maybe that would have been too visceral for One Piece, even with Oda in ‘show the horrors’ mode.
Rayleigh making the clutch save and getting the ‘treasure’ puts a bow on the flashback’s Kuja arc, setting him and Shakky up to go into the present. So my question is, what happens next? Roger is ready to go, as he says in the last panel. While the Rocks Pirates might care about that, Rocks himself will want to prioritise his wife and child. So what puts them head to head with each other? What move could Rocks possibly make that would Garp and Roger put their differences aside? Perhaps Rocks witnesses Eris slain and goes on a mad rampage, hurting friend and foe alike? A little cliche, but it could work. Will the God Knights stay involved, or will they prioritise leaving with the Celestial Dragons? And how does this result in the island being literally wiped off the map?
I’m very excited to see what answers we’ve got coming up next week.
-
One Piece chapter 1160 review
The main event is here. This chapter takes the time to revel in the brutality of it and the weight of the crews who have shown up to fight. It turns out light on plot progression, which is something I’d normally be hard on. But with all the hype, lingering here gives the scene appropriate gravitas. All that to say, I’m satisfied, even without much plot-wise to talk about.
I’m curious about how Garling found out Blackbeard was part of the Davy clan. Were hospital records leaked to him, like how Kuma’s lineage was discovered? But then, everyone seems convinced that both mother and child carry the bloodline, when it would probably should be only the kid. Well, however it happened, you can see the kind of impression being left on a poor, young Blackbeard. I wonder if we’ll see any more formative events between this and his begging to be taken in by Whitebeard that helped turn this trauma into dark ambitions. Actually, will he get to witness his father in action before getting saved from the island?
The start of the games brings a truly uncharacteristic amount of carnage and cruelty to the pages of One Piece. It’s a genuinely horrifying and harrowing sequence. We know there are systems of suffering in place, but unless it’s for tragic backstory reasons this kind of wide-scale slaughter would normally be inferred (contrast the genocides of Ohara and Flevance). Sommers’ scene is particularly horrible. I can’t wait to see what punishment is waiting for him in the present. Also hey, Gunko’s wearing a skirt. We can put to rest the theories that she goes pantsless in memory of Brook. A bare-legged look can just be a bare-legged look, even if it is still a weird design choice. Why are they calling her a pet though?
I think brutality is often self-sabotaging. The death of an entire platoon for the actions of one soldier is an iron-fisted way to run an army, and seems like a strong disinsentive for disobedience. But what are the others going to do when one goes rogue, knowing they can’t be saved? They’re going to lie. They need to have as little to do with him as possible and hope he turns up having done no harm, rather than drawing attention to his absence. Maybe Dragon could have been stopped before he attacked a noble or stole a noble’s children if his absence was reported. But no one’s going to learn that a single Marine is loose on the island, witnessing the elites’ top secret human hunting game. And in this way, the World Government creates its greatest enemy.
It’s really interesting putting this chapter side by side with our previous glimpse of God Valley and looking at all the snippets of dialogue between the Roger and Rocks pirates with a whole new context. There are some really telling lines in there that show Oda’s been cooking this one for a while. It’s actually amazing Kuma’s version was so coherent considering how much was left out. Is there anything more hiding between the cracks even of this version? Say, how Dragon got his hands on those kids when they would presumably be safely tucked away at the hunting game’s headquarters, or how he got separated from his platoon in the first place?
So “Knights of God” is coming out as the seemingly official romanisation for the Holy Knights’ name via the raws for this one. I’d like to temper that with the knowledge that word order and the need for that connecting ‘of’ in Japanese can result in weirdness when translated so directly. Remember when Law’s crew were introduced as the ‘Pirates of Heart’ in Zou? That’s because these signs are written for a Japanese-speaking audience using conventions that would make sense for them, not as a direct guide for the English speaking world. In English, Law’s crew can remain the Heart Pirates because the ‘of’ is inferred by the words existing together as a proper noun, and because we put the descriptive word first. Following logically, I would choose God Knights as the name for our ‘Knights of God’ based on the info we have now. The scanlations’ ‘God’s Knights’ lands close at a glance, but misses the mark with the possessive. Firstly, why they made ‘god’ singular when we know there’s a 19 families worth of people who are self-proclaimed gods is beyond me. And secondly, the possessive implies ownership or subordination. But these aren’t knights who are in service to the gods of Marie Geoise, these are gods of Marie Geoise who are also knights. So the God Knights. Viz’s original ‘Holy Knights’ actually leaves itself more open to the correct interpretation despite feeling like a bigger leap in word choice. Their new ‘Holy Knights of God’ is both redundant and a tad awkward, but I assume they’ll be shortening back to what they originally had for most usecases going forward.
Splitting of hairs done, these guys have some really cool designs. I hope more of them show up in the present. But how many will be able to? Garling and Sommers have aged, but Gunko hasn’t. What decides who gets the agelessness treatment to go with the immortality?
It’s never not a bad time for a break week, but this is a particularly bad one. We haven’t seen this many world-shaking players come head to head since Marineford, and even in a flashback with a foregone outcome it’s impossible not to be excited. I’m here as much for the clash as for how Oda could portray it. Remember back at Marineford where we got two chapters in a row where every possible pair of pages was a spread? That would be an awesome trick to repeat.
Captain M Entertainment
Reviews, news, retrospectives, thoughts
Captain M Entertainment 