We’re now 25 volumes into the story and we’ve firmly made it into the 21st century. This volume came out in 2002 even, but I’m confident the chapters were earlier. This volume is a great combination of funny chapters, action panels and an unholy amount of new lore. So without wasting time, let’s get right to it because I worry this post might become a long one.
The crew finds the house of Mont Blanc Cricket, a diver who’s been working with both the monkeys that the crew encountered in the previous volume. Cricket is trying to prove if the story his ancestor, Noland, told everyone is true. They’ve found some signs of the existence of the golden city, but not enough to be proof. During these interactions Oda slips in a little bit of extremely important information that won’t become relevant for much longer. Sanji apparently didn’t grow up exclusively in East Blue. He’s originally from North Blue, which is why heard the story of Noland the liar before. All of Bellamy’s folks are from North Blue as well, by the way. The reason this bit of information about Sanji is important will become relevant much, much later on, but it is interesting that Oda has been laying groundwork for some late stage reveals this early on. The crew decides to go find the knock-up stream, a current that shoots off into the sky, and use it to find the sky island. Cricket and his friends help them out. There’s a lot of great jokes in this volume, like when Nami adds into the Noland story that the liar died without ever finding any of the gold while staring at Usopp. It’s good that we start off light because it gets a lot more serious soon.
The crew gets sent into the nearby forest to find a South Bird. This creature will help them go in the right direction on the unpredictable sea. They encounter a whole bunch of strange creatures including a terrifying mantis that slices trees to bits and a bunch of spiders. Funnily enough, Usopp has no fears of bugs and spiders, contrary to Sanji and Nami. That makes for a funny scene as well. Robin being completely unfazed by everything is pretty funny too, and she’s the one that ends up catching the bird with ease since her devil power is insanely powerful compared to most of what we’ve seen this far into the story. While the crew is off finding this bird, Shoujou, Masira and Cricket get attacked by Bellamy and his pirates. They get brutally wounded and Bellamy runs off with their gold. When Luffy finds out he’s obviously furious and he goes off to find Bellamy. One of my friends really likes this fight. I do like what it represents, but he destroys Bellamy with only one punch.
After the conclusion of this arc, we see Blackbeard and his crew make short work of Sarquiss, one of Bellamy’s underlings, before they go after Luffy and the gang. The Going Merry has been turned into a flying ship – more or less – and the crew is ready to fly up to the sky. Blackbeard is close behind though, unbeknownst to the crew. Unfortunately he’s moments too late as the knock-up stream appears and shoots the straw hats up into the sky, leaving Jaya behind.
Speaking of leaving Jaya behind, we get a lot of world information during this volume that I have so far skipped over. Of course I’m going to mention it all, don’t you worry, but I wanted to put it aside for the later part of this post. The crew hasn’t seen any of this, but they’re up in the sky right now, so none of it really matters to them right now. To us it does, so let’s talk about everyone that got introduced in this volume.
We’re reintroduced to a strange coalition of people. Ace is on Buggy’s ship just hanging out. It is revealed that Buggy is still hunting after Luffy. We also hear that Buggy once knew Whitebeard and he tells his crew not to mess with Ace because of it. Buggy isn’t stupid. We move on to Mariejois where we see the Gorosei for the first time. The rulers of the world government and the highest position in the world. We’re then informed that two of the seven warlords: Doflamingo and Kuma, have arrived. Shortly after we watch as Mihawk appears as well and we even get a special guest in Lafitte, one of Blackbeard’s men. He vouches for his captain as an option for the now empty seat of Crocodile. Sengoku is also shown here, the Fleet Admiral. He has no patience for Doflamingo’s antics. It’s kind of crazy from the perspective of optics that Lafitte was able to infiltrate Mariejois so easily. Security must be pretty bad.
Next up we get our first look at one of the strongest pirates in the story: Whitebeard. Not only him, we also see Marco and Jozu in this scene although they’re not named. Shanks has sent one of his members, a pirate with a bounty almost as high as Luffy, and no one on Whitebeard’s ship is even remotely impressed by the guy. That says a lot about what a powerhouse Whitebeard truly has to be. Shanks isn’t too surprised by this and commits to visiting the old man in person. We end the volume with the start of a new cover story, except we don’t get told much about what happens in this one. We do see that someone or something eats everything in their path, I wonder where we’ve seen this before?
This volume is crazy in how much it tells us about the world but it makes sense in retrospect seeing as we’re about to blast off into the sky and kind of disappear from the radar for a while. It’ll be a while before we go back to the regular world so setting up some big events ahead of time is a good thing to do from a narrative perspective. One small thing I’m just now realizing I forgot to mention is the waver. This is a weird one-person boat that is mentioned by Mont Blanc Noland. We’ve also seen a weird sort of jetski in the previous volume when diving into that shipwreck. I wonder if there’s a connection.
I’m struggling more and more in not reading further ahead, but I’ll have to manage. As of writing this, Oda has also started a month-long hiatus on One Piece for an eye surgery so the wait will feel even worse. But I’m glad he’s taking time off where he needs to, he’s been writing this story for so long without proper breaks that we often worry about his health.
There you have it, thanks for reading along up to this point and see you all next week!
Opal Kaharis 