I know I’ve mainly been talking about the older volumes of One Piece on here. I’m not great at looking at every small detail of a manga and making an interesting post out of it, so I mainly just look at bigger pictures and pick out a few interesting details to talk about. But after a string of very interesting manga chapters for this series I feel like this particular chapter gives us so much that it’s worth spending a little bit of my time on. So with that established, this post will contain spoilers for One Piece up to – and including – Chapter 1085. If you don’t want to be spoiled, please do not read this post. With that all clear, here’s a picture of Luffy as a barrier between this and the rest of the post:
When Cobra was being portrayed as old and sickly in previous chapters I kind of expected him to die before the story ended, but this is not the way I expected it to go. Cobra reveals that he already knows the name Imu from the first 20 kings. This presumably hints at the fact that Imu has been around since the void century or is descended from someone from that era. Imu wants to know something about Queen Lily Nefertari. She was the only one who declined becoming a celestial dragon and after giving up power with everyone else returned to Arabasta and oversaw the poneglyphs.
Imu asks Cobra about Lily, and in particular about her intent in spreading the poneglyphs around so pirates could find them. Imu also explains that the D is a group of people who opposed them in the past. This is all kept vague but there’s a lot to infer, so let’s do just that. I’m guessing that there was a group with D in their names that opposed the new world government and that Imu might still be from this time. Perhaps these people used the poneglyphs that were spread out by Lily to find out the truth and try to fight Imu and their people. We know next to nothing about the void century but there’s a good chance that the previous Joyboy was leading the charge in such a clash.
Cobra also reveals that his ancestor’s name wasn’t Nefertari Lily but Nefertari D Lily. Pretty big difference if you’d ask me. Upon revealing this, Imu knows that Lily’s “mistake” was in fact a betrayal. There is so much lore being partially uncovered in these last few chapters that I really, really hope we get to go into much more detail. Perhaps through novels or spin-offs since I can’t see Oda putting every small little history detail into the manga before its runtime ends, but I’ll also gladly be proven wrong.
We get a scene of Sabo attacking the Gorosei and Imu in an attempt to save the dying Cobra. We get a touching little moment between Sabo and Cobra where they bond over Luffy being Luffy. At this point it’s also revealed that all 5 of the Gorosei seem to have some sort of ancient looking zoan fruit. This is speculation, but they look like ancient zoans by the wild shadowy shapes they take on in these panels. I’m normally not a big fan of dead characters showing up in later chapters but I’m so glad that Sabo actually lived to be a major player in the story after what happened in their childhood. It was hinted just enough for it to be fully believable as well. Him casually saying he would have liked to take them all out right there is so badass. Unfortunately saving Cobra seems to be a task that’s too difficult to achieve, which is why we get the news stories and Sabo arriving alone at the rest of the revolutionaries. But Cobra didn’t send him away alone.
We get a funny little panel with the boys calling Sabo Sa-d-bo which is likely much more significant than it seems. It feels like a joke moment but it’s probably indicative of the actual meaning of ‘D’. It most likely shows us that ‘D’ isn’t so much something you inherit by blood but more likely a code of sorts. It’s a found family. One Piece is all about Nakama and the family you make on the seas. It would make a lot of sense for ‘D’ to be something similar. That would explain why Lily signed her letter with a D whereas Imu was not aware of the D being a part of her name. Sabo will probably end up being a part of whatever ‘D’ actually is.
Cobra’s last words were some more information on Lily’s letter which has probably been relayed to the revolutionaries at this point. It’s really quite insane that they let Sabo escape, this jeopardizes the entire World Government. I think Sabo is probably much more powerful that we might think. We know that he’s been training with Dragon from a very young age and I would actually not be all that surprised if he’s on par with people like Kid and Law at this point, if not stronger. But I also thought those two were much stronger than they ended up being so what do I know.
There’s so much to talk about this chapter I don’t even know. We haven’t even mentioned the prying eyes on this whole encounter yet. There was a snail taking pictures. I wonder if this belonged to Sabo and he managed to pick it up, or if this was Morgans doing. I would put money on this being Sabo or maybe even Stussy but she’s probably busy. I think someone else knowing this meeting was going to take place and managing to set up surveillance is a little bit far-fetched. The second pair of prying eyes belonged to Wapol, who managed to stumble across all of this.
We then go quick-fire through some major events happening right now. CP0 (The artist formerly known as CP9) has taken Vivi captive. Glad to see that they’re still pieces of shit. Kalifa even offered to sell Vivi to be someone’s pet. They also give us some great insight into what else is going on. Apparently the square’s still recovering from the fight over Shirahoshi and they claimed it to be an act by the Straw Hat Pirates followers. Pretty sure Luffy would approve of this. We then learn that Fujitora helped the slaves escape which enrages Ryokugyu. Fujitora really ended up being the cool guy we hoped Aokiji would be. Speaking of Aokiji, I still wonder what his endgame is. If he just got disinterested in the World Government and joined Teech to be a generic bad guy. Makes you wonder what Teech’ endgame is.
Finally, we learn how Wapol and Vivi got together. This is the part that makes me wonder if the picture snail belonged to Morgans since he sheltered the two of them. Wapol charges through Pangea castle and Vivi takes her chance to escape. This once again establishes just how stupidly incompetent the Cipher Pol agents are. I don’t think their constant failures are bad writing though. We’ve established how political this manga is and there’s no chance that Oda made the corrupt government painfully incompetent by accident. I’m pretty sure he knows exactly what he’s doing and he wants to make a point out of the fact that they are systematically failing. That’s why two admirals are butting heads outside while the spy agency is failing indoors. It’s a way to represent the fact that this corrupt structure is on its last legs and it’s about to collapse.
Either that or I’m looking far too much into this and he just made them dumb for no reason. This was a lot to unpack and I still skipped a bunch of stuff to make sure this post doesn’t become stupidly long. Let me know if there’s anything you want my thoughts on and if you like this kind of content. I absolutely loved this chapter and everything it told us about the world of One Piece. I hope we learn even more next week but until then, thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 