Captain M Entertainment

This text was originally written for Arlong Park forums’ discussion thread.

Just gonna throw it out there, Solitaire and Daifugo are probably the best smile users so far in terms of appearance/powers. It’s good to see they aren’t guaranteed to disadvantage the users. Babanuki is also interesting. At a glance, I thought the elephant’s lower jaw on the page where it’s shooting was a neck leading out from Babanuki’s belt. Figured the belt might have been some kind of device that helps him control the animal parts and hide them when they weren’t needed, which would have been cool tech. But no, it’s just fixed to his chest like normal.

I wish we could have seen more of Luffy’s breakout attempt. It feels like we cut very quickly from it starting to him being caught and served up for judgement by Queen. I’d even have sacrificed a page of the bathhouse (blasphemy!) for a bit of that.

Queen is… interesting. I hope now that we’ve seen a bit more of him people are going to stop saying he’s an okama. I’ve sung the praises of okama on here before, I’d love to see more of them and have Oda doing different things with them, but Queen seems to have got the reputation of one via the name alone. He doesn’t dress feminine, he doesn’t have different pronouns, he’s apparently straight. It’s like people around the place and out on reddit totally forgot about the deck of cards theme. Overall I like him, the “top three things you’re worried about” bit was hilarious and I’m sure there’s some good backstory behind the robot arm.

Zoro’s sword being stolen again as a way to hook him into a plot thread is meh. I”m sure he’s getting involved in something good, but the setup is meh.

Not sure how I feel about the many pages of bathhouse in the chapter. On one hand it’s easy, shallow fanservice of a kind Oda easily dips into. On another, it was a kind of fanservice I enjoyed, even if it’s not really necessary and not what I come to One Piece for. And Oda wouldn’t be the first fantasy author to use characters discovering another culture has different taboos/lack of taboos about nudity and gender mixing as a worldbuilding thing. Plus it does feel accurate to how Japan was in the period Wano is based on, based on things I vaguely recall reading once. That is an experience that can happen when you travel. Eh, even with the best possible interpretation, I’d say the scene outstays its welcome just a little. Like I said above, I think at least one page of the scene should have gone to the prison instead.

Not much to say about Hyogoro yet. Wait and see if and how he lives up to his reputation and how he fits into everything. Offering up his own life to save Luffy is a great start.

Good to have the fishbone prisoner confirmed at last. If I never read the words “lurking legend” again it’ll be too soon. It’d be just like Oda to subvert expectations with a really weird looking otter monster for Kawamatsu, but I think this time I’d prefer he go traditional and just let a cute otter be a cute otter. And I really hope the actual reveal is next week. After all this build up, it’d be painful to wait any longer now we have the name.

This text was originally written for Arlong Park forums’ discussion thread.

Holy shit there’s a map of Wano. I’ve been waiting so long. Interesting how broken up it all is. I wonder if we’ll learn it’s all connected underwater like Long Ring Long Land, or if the different climates mentioned infer that it’s an archipelago of separate islands. Possibly separate islands moved together by a certain ancient giant…

We also don’t really know yet how large Wano is meant to be. It’s implied the journey between Okobore and Udon is far, but the Northern Graveyard is apparently a close and easy spot to escape to after the chaos at the palace, and that map definitely isn’t to scale, so who knows how it all really lines up.

As for the chapter overall. It was short, but the map alone makes up for it. The Sunach thing is… strange. I wonder where all that’s going. But it does hint at what was expected for a while: Koshiro is of Wanonian (Wanoese?) descent. Possibly his family left before all the unpleasantness with Orochi and Kaido, or fled from it. We know this Sunach line hasn’t been used before in One Piece, but does anyone have the raw Japanese text of it to do some searching with? I’d like to see if maybe it was used in the old Monsters oneshot somewhere, making it a Ryuma related thing. Kiku doesn’t seem to think that Sunach is inherently a bad thing, just not something Momonosuke, as a young lord, should be saying, which is interesting.

The rest of the crew mainly take some time to cool down and debrief. It’s good in the long haul, since the story seem to be about to get hectic again, but can make an already short chapter right before a break feel slightly impotent. Still, Robin’s hypercompetence was hilarious. Does she even have to ask if they should worry about the little girl they left back at what I understand to be a brothel though? It should be obvious she’s not!

Nami might be in for a rude shock if they do go on that bathhouse trip; what will the locals say about her tattoo?

The way I see it, this has tow outcomes. The first, she gets turned away and Sanji’s infiltration mission ends in disappointment. Second, she gets drafted into the yakuza because of the assumptions they make. They would be looking for another pretty girl to take in, what with their oiran just being slain. Too bad for Robin, after all that time she spent getting into the role, even if her cover was blown anyway. They can trade places!

I wonder if Oda means to show Komurasaki’s funeral. Closed casket, I assume, to hide how obviously faked her death was.

Luffy in the prison was mostly a setup scene, but I love, love, the scorpion guy’s design. I hope he gets a name and at least a little skimish with Luffy before he bites the dust next week. The old dude being someone important from the good old days is likely to be a big thing in the future, but we just don’t have enough info on the old Hyogoro for it to really have an impact immediately. Just more of an “oh, cool,” development. Queen arriving, Big Mom coming, Kid possibly hanging around, still looking for the handcuff keys, I think the next few chapters will have a lot of fun scenes in the prison.

And that’s basically the chapter in a nutshell. Setup. Lots of little things to make you excited for bigger things later. A breather that feels slow reading weekly, but will be a vital change of pace when reading the collected volumes. It’s a good chapter technically, because it does what it needs to, but it’s not exciting in the way the last few were.

This text was originally written for Arlong Park forums’ discussion thread.

Straight up, I loved this chapter. It’s the exact kind of chaos that Oda does best, with so many characters and so much action happening all at once. I wasn’t expecting Wano to get this crazy this soon, even if it’s just a skirmish before the main event, but damn.

So Orochi’s fruit is actually an Orochi model. I really thought Oda would try to avoid that. We’ve seen really on the nose names relating to a character’s powers before, but never anything on this level. That said, I can’t believe that even speculating it would be a hydra model, I guessed dino dino instead of snake snake for the fruit type. That said, I love how the eight heads look on the page. They feel like they’re constantly in motion, slithering around each other and lashing out about the room. They’d look great animated, but I doubt the anime will be able to spare the budget for the kind of constant motion the art infers.

I really wish Oda had taken the time to show the layout of the Shogun’s palace in more detail. It was pretty hard to tell where the stuff with Robin and Brook was taking place relative to the bits with Orochi. Sometimes they seem to be on the outer edge of the same room, sometimes in the adjacent room, and the only shot with both Robin and Orochi makes it look like she’s been on a balcony overlooking the floor Orochi was on. I think I got it by the end, but it just didn’t read clearly throughout the chapter. And while we’re on the topic of things not totally clear, I wasn’t sure at a glance if Brook was physically there or just projecting himself, since we’d never seen a full body apparition from him before.

Kyoshiro and Komurasaki was a surprise. It’s not really clear if the Koizuki plan card is something Kyoshiro had on him, or something he picked up from Komurasaki’s “corpse” (yeah right she’s really dead), is it? Really not sure what to make of Kyoshiro’s alignment at this point. He certainly didn’t seem too invested in a Koizuki Family return back in his intro scene. If he was a sleeper agent, or a protector of Hyori from the start, his whole attitude towards Toki’s curse seems out of place. That said, he seems pretty drunk in that scene, which makes his true feelings hard to read…

Nami using Zeus is something I’m happy to see. Actually, between him and the raid suit, the new stuff the crew picked up from Tottoland are all getting used really quickly. Glad they’re not gonna go to waste or be saved purely for finishing moves, because they do change up what we can expect from Nami and Sanji in combat going forward in some fun ways.

Big Mom plot is running basically as expected. The idea of a prison break, especially Luffy’s reaction, not knowing that she’s turned, is pretty hype. Hey, what he he attacks her on sight and knocks her memories back into place with a blow to the head, messing everything up? It’s hard to imagine the amnesia plot being over that quickly, but it’d still be a fun idea. Big Mom = Carmel theories are dumb and I have no time for them.

This text was originally written for Arlong Park forums’ discussion thread.

This was a pretty great chapter. A little recappy in places, but it’s almost to be expected as it’s probably the first one of a new volume, but otherwise really solid. Robin’s been underutilised since the timeskip, and really just in general, so it’s great seeing put all her talents to use. I really hope that Komurasaki turns out to have coloured hair despite it being filled in black, like Tama did, just so future rereads in the colour version become a little less confusing than this was. I’m leaning strongly to the idea of her being Hyori at this point, but we’ll see.

I’m a big fan of Orochi’s design. I can’t decide if it’s too ridiculous to be intimidating, or just ridiculous enough to intimidate; pretty classic Oda work. It would be too on the nose for his devil fruit to be an “Orochi Orochi Fruit” or an “Orochi Model” of something, so I’m gonna go out on a limb and say Dragon Dragon Fruit: Hydra Model. Which does raise the question of where the ninth head is meant to be…