Captain M Entertainment

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s finally happening and it’s even bigger than we thought. It’s been a One Piece thing going all the way back to the very first volume to emphasise that treasure is in the eye of the beholder: family and personal keepsakes rather than silver and gold. How fitting then, that love, lust and family become the motivations for the conflict on which history pivots rather than money or power (give or take the mysterious thing that Garling found).

There’s tragedy in this as well. It’s hard not to imagine a timeline where Roger and Rocks found common ground in saving Shakky and a common foe in the Government instead of somehow ending up clashing. What if Roger had known Rocks’ family was on the line? He’s the pirate’s pirate at this stage of his life, but I don’t think Oda would play him as totally uncaring of something like that. In fact, the idea that Roger apparently sided with Garp over Rocks almost feels even more unrealistic given the stakes, which makes me wonder if there’s one more complication coming that we don’t know about yet. Imu, through Gunko (who we know is there) springing a trap on Rocks and getting him with the Domi Reversi maybe? But maybe that would be too much if we’re just going to see it done a second time to Harald in a few chapters.

Oda wastes no time after the opening montage of Shakky reactions and man, I was asking questions about Garling’s level of affection to this mysterious red-haired woman last week, but I was not prepared for him to outright murder her so coldly. That’s psychotic even by Celestial Dragon standards, but it goes to show how deep the ‘humans are insects’ mindset runs.

What I wasn’t expecting was a young Dragon to be here as well. We really are getting everyone important involved and setting them on their course to be part of the present day’s status quo. That said, ever since we found out Dragon was a former Marine, it’s been kind of a given he’d have witnessed some atrocity or genocide to set him on his Revolutionary path, and this is as good an example as any, if not better. Plus, it saves or at least shortens a future flashback to tie his origin into an established conflict.

Jumping around more, we even get a young Morgans. Even though he’s in bird form here, without showing his human face, knowing that he was already a journalist this early rules about a lot of theories about him secretly being someone we already knew. The balls on him, to already be blackmailing Cipher Pol though! How has he managed to stay alive 40 years operating like this? But it feels odd to me that the World Economic Journal is called a local paper here. I’d kinda figured it was a more long-running publication than that, one of those newspapers that’s been going since your grandparents’ days. For it to have gone from not existing to be a major propaganda arm and distributor of bounty posters in a single lifetime is pretty crazy. Like, the publication responsible for the Sora comic strip that cemented Germa 66’s villain status is younger than Vinsmoke Judge himself. Honestly, more respect needs to be put on Morgan for what he’s built how much impact he’s had on the world in a generation. Obviously other newspapers existed before this (we see a few of them in the opening pages of this chapter) but I thought the news coos were a Morgans invention, what with the bird powers. So how were these older papers distributed?

Neat seeing a young Big Mom scouting out powers for her children already. Wonder when she decided to commit to making them food themed. Come back in six months for hilarious SBS sketches of dragon, hormone and paw-paw Katakuri.

I felt for Rocks during his conversation with Harald. Such bad luck that his family ended up in the position they’re in. If he’d hidden them one island over. If Garling had stopped one island away on his mission. If Shakky had been the prize for any other game. Only one of those things could have stopped God Valley from being what it was and changed the course of history. But one way or another, they’re all conspiring to put Rocks in an unwinnable situation and bring his ambitions crashing down.

And the Davy clan? Davy D? I’m not quite sure where this goes on my corkboard yet, but it’s definitely important. One more point of data for ‘what does the D stand for’ as well. ‘Davy’ was a fairly popular theory for it, but now that’s out of the running. Or is it? We have a Tony Tony Chopper, why couldn’t we have a Davy Davy Xebec?

The competition doesn’t quite get started in the final pages, but it’s coming together quickly. I think it’s a little curious how Celestial Dragons distinguish between slaves and wives, at least when it comes to women from the lower worlds. But maybe it’s one of those distinctions without a difference. The ‘kept in pristine condition’ comment is obviously all kinds of icky, but I do feel a little relieved for Shakky that even in a year of captivity she was likely spared the Ginny treatment.

And finally, Dragon and the Figarland babies. Ain’t that something. Luffy’s father saves his mentor’s life. No relationship between Dragon and Shanks has ever been hinted at that I can remember, though they’d obviously be aware of each other. Does Shanks know? Whether or not the rescue is onscreen now or later, it fills in a big piece of the puzzle about how the twins ended up separated. I wonder if Dragon looks back and wonders if he could have saved both when he sees the person Shamrock was raised to be.

I feel like next week has chapter of the year potential with everything we’re building up to. Oda’s obviously passionate about this sequence and is firing on all cylinders to get it ready. The art feels consistently high quality compared to the handful of unfinished panels seen in recent weeks, so everything is set to make it pop. I’m hyped. It’s happening.

Okay so we’re definitely doing God Valley, huh? I wonder if it’ll be the full story, or if there’ll be one last POV to go through to find out how baby Shanks ended up in that chest. It’s agonising to have another setup chapter to get the pieces aligned to do that, but given the unfinished art this week, maybe that’s for the best. You want Oda to be firing on all cylinders going into such a vital sequence.

So the grave in the cover story is someone new? Or one of the bunch of lords who were locked up in that cave with a young Yamato maybe? What is this story doing bringing up new elements nearly 40 stages in? I like Ulti’s snow Kaido in the background though.

It’s really cool seeing how the Rocks Pirates actually worked together in the opening spreads. This era and all of these figures have become so mythical it almost felt like we’d never see the human side of them, only ever getting rumours and implications so that our imaginations could fill in the rest. It’s actually a wonder this crew stayed together as long as it did, especially with Rocks seeming mostly unconcerned by the toxic atmosphere he’s created. I said before and I’ll say again that he’s turning out a lot more likable than I could possibly have predicted as an individual. There’s a lot of truth in the man’s politics. But the thing he lacks that the likes of Roger and Luffy as pirates or Dragon as a revolutionary have is the ability to sway others to his beliefs and genuinely befriend them. These people are only with Rocks because power is part of his ambition, and he thinks that’s all he needs. They’re here because he won them in a game, not because he won over their hearts. I wonder if this distinction is going to be what makes him the loser at God Valley.

We also see Rocks’ ‘blasting’ sword attacks in action here. Visually, they remind me of the ‘Sovereignty’ duo attacks we saw Dory and Broggy and Kaido and Big Mom pull off. But here we see a telltale crackle of Haki around the blast to make it really clear what’s powering the move. So interesting that this particular technique only ever seems to come from people associated with or in admiration of giants.

Article 18 of World Law feels like the kind of thing that seems innocuous but gets brought back and explained in full later. But we’ll see.

Rejoining Harald, we get to see World Government cruelty and propaganda in action. Harald shows the naivety typical of a flashback sacrifice in continuing to work with the WG in any capacity after this, even continuing to buy into the idea of the Marines as a force of good. He’s even facing blatant hypocrisy as the World Government begins accepting Elbaph recruits to the Marines while reasoning behind his back that giants are too dangerous to let be citizens. To hear John Giant come up in this capacity is interesting through – I would have thought he and the wider Marine Giant Squad were all the result of Mother Caramel’s trafficking. It’s also weird Oda wouldn’t take this opportunity to show and name them in this flashback. There’s five spots in the Vivre Card Databook numbering around Marineford that’s still not filled and can really only be the guys from that squad, so there must be some kind of plan for them. When could it come up if not now?

And on the topic of characters the series is suddenly remembering exist, hi Kong! Bye Kong!

A few weeks ago I was really questioning the appearance of the Kujas in this flashback, how we could possibly have gone from Harald and rocks to them. The end of this chapter finds an unexpected way to bring it all full circle, seemingly setting up Shaky to be a pivotal figure to God Vally. I could not have seen that coming. It’s pretty crazy she and Rayleigh both live right under the World Government’s nose in the present. One high value target in that zone is a big deal, but two of them? What kind of system must they have for early alerts for Marine raids or Cipher Pol snooping.

The last line is a big of an odd one though. I mean, it makes sense for the World Government to want to test Harald that way, but it’s not a great cliffhanger when all contemporary evidence suggests Rocks fell at God Valley with Harald nowhere nearby. We know it’s not going to happen. I guess then, does Rocks dying before Harald can reach him lead to the more hands-on Holy Knight operation that ends in the massacre at the castle?

It seems then that the next few weeks are going to be big, and they’re going to make this flashback indispensable to the larger story. Hope Oda’s getting the rest he needs to give the big scenes the love they deserve.