Wano has been structured like a three act play, and in volume 92 we reach the end of the first act. The crew finished their conversation about the past on top of the mountain where Oden Castle stood. I’m saying ‘stood’ because within a handful of chapters, Kaido demolishes the entire building and mountaintop in a drunken rage. This infuriates Luffy, who believes his entire crew was still on top of the mountain with no chance to escape. Luffy then gets into a fight with Kaido, dealing some major damage to the dragon. Except, not really. It seems like Luffy is doing a lot, but once Kaido sobers up even the littlest bit it turns out that none of what Luffy did even inconvenienced the Emperor of the sea and with one good hit of his mace, Luffy gets sent into dreamland. We end act one with the crew luckily being safe, but Luffy getting locked up in Kaido’s prison alongside the familiar face of Eustass Kid.
We have a quick interlude before we move on to act 2. Things in the world have always advanced alongside the journey of the Straw Hats, but one thing that has changed a lot after Whole Cake Island is the pace at which we learn about things happening in the world. We started this arc with the ever important Reverie, and we just learned that the attack of the revolutionary army was successful. They managed to free Kuma and now with the kingdoms panicking they might start doing crazy things. Mihawk thinks it’s probably best for Perona to run off now and go save Moria who was busy attacking Blackbeard on his pirate island. You see, Blackbeard has been gathering devil fruit powers like infinity stones and one of the powers he was after was Absalom’s invisibility fruit. It seems like Shiryu – the former impel down jailor – is the one now using the fruit, which means Absalom is very much dead. It also means that the method that Blackbeard used to steal Whitebeard’s fruit during the war can be replicated and used on other people. So it’s not a unique power to his body, but so far he has still been the only one with two fruits.
Back on Wano, Luffy and Kid are hard at work in the prison mines, earning their food and causing mayhem by attacking jailors who get in their way. They also meet someone called old man Hyo, I’m sure he won’t be important later on. While Luffy is imprisoned, he also meets with Caribou again who wants to be his friend now, but Luffy isn’t buying it. We flash on to get some insight into what is happening to Tama, who was hurt during Kaido’s rampage. Chopper has patched her up as best as possible and they have joined up with Dogstorm and Cat Viper, who have failed to convince Shutenmaru – Asura Doji – to rejoin their team. Lastly we meet a new character called Toko. Or ‘Otoko’ with the honorific, which is the Japanese word for boy. Toko is a girl, but she seems to find this joke hilarious and it does make the straw hats laugh. She is a personal assistant of the Oiran, Komurasaki who seems to be a bit of a bad person. Now I ain’t sayin she a gold digger….
Meanwhile Momo and Tama ponder upon the idea that Momo’s sister Hiyori might still be alive somewhere on Wano.
While all the chaos is going on and Sanji gets dragged into a fight with Page One, one of Kaido’s headliners, we also see some other interesting things happen. Zoro meets some strange folk – including a man named Yasu – and gets to the town of Ebisu where everyone seems to be happy and laughing all the time. Sanji puts on his Germa raid suit to fight Page one and last but not least, the Big Mom pirates show up to join in on the fun. Lucky for everyone, King – one of Kaido’s quartet of king, queen, joker and jack – kicks the entire group into the ocean. Only later do we find out that Big Mom has washed up on the shores of Wano anyway, and seems to have lost her memory. We’re well into the second act of Wano now and already it feels like things are progressing a bit slowly. And that’s not even taking into account that Wano doesn’t finish for at least another 10 volumes! That’s right, we’ve done 2.5 volumes of Wano and we’re not even a quarter done. So I hope you like Samurai a lot. I will say, the last act is definitely my favorite of the three, so we have things to look towards. Thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 