At the start of this volume is a piece of artwork for the (at the time) upcoming film Gold. It took me a second to recognize the characters. If you haven’t yet, I would highly recommend you check out the One Piece movies. If you’re unsure where to start, I think Strong World is probably a good starting point. You can go back to the older ones after that, but there’s some cool moments in Strong World. Anyway, I digress, volume 83 is here!
We are deep into Big Mom’s territory now. Pudding seems like a nice girl. She does like Sanji, but she doesn’t want to marry him if he doesn’t want to be there. She can’t go against her mother’s orders, but sending the Straw Hats deeper into her territory so they have a chance to free him is no problem. Meanwhile Jinbe is saying his goodbyes to Big Mom, which she does not appreciate. She just recovered from one of her hunger pangs during which she will destroy everything in her path until she gets the specific food she craves. She even killed one of her children this time and she only has a few dozen of those, so she needs to be careful. Finally, we learn that the reason Pedro came here in the past was to try and steal the poneglyph, but he failed. Let’s hope he’s more successful this time around. He splits off with Brook and Chopper to go and steal it.
We meet Sanji’s family a bit more. It seems like his sister is somewhat normal in her behavior but the rest are proper sociopaths. Vinsmoke Judge, Sanji’s father and the king of Germa, seems to be a real piece of work. After dueling with Sanji, he has Reiju, his sister, put on handcuffs that will explode if he leaves. So much for her being somewhat more normal. But Judge sees Sanji as a failure and just wants to use him for this marriage so he can conquer the North Blue. What a small dream for a small man.
In the meantime we see Luffy, Nami, Chopper and Carrot in the seducing woods. This part of the kingdom is watched over by Brulee, a hag-like woman with mirror powers. She uses these powers to capture Chopper and Carrot, leaving just Nami and Luffy to deal with the homies, a bunch of weird creatures who have all been given powers by Big Mom. They can turn into Luffy and the others, making for a very confusing few moments before the Straw Hats manage to take back some amount of control. They find Lola and Chiffon’s father, Pound, here in the woods, and get along quite well as Nami and Lola are friends after all. Nami remembers that she had a Big Mom vivre card and uses it to intimidate all of the grunts.
Luffy on the other hand is busy fighting Cracker, one of the three sweet commanders, the strongest children of Big Mom. He is a cracker man (don’t ban me Twitch), who can turn cookie dust into crackers and freely manipulate it. He uses this power to create tough armor, soldiers and all sorts of things. Luffy doesn’t even seem to be able to hit his armor. I won’t sugarcoat it (get it, cause crackers can have sugar on them…), I do not like this fight. Luffy vs. Cracker feels like filler to me. It takes forever, none of the characters involved are remotely interesting and everything else that is currently happening is much more interesting. But that’s just part of having a long running show like this, there will always be moments that are a bit less interesting. You can’t alway run at peak quality, it would get exhausting. I’ll go into a lot more detail about all the subplots next week but until then, thanks for reading and enjoy what’s left of the summer weather!
Opal Kaharis 