第36回：Ｈａｒｄ　Ｋｎｏｃｋ　Ｄａｙｓ！

GEAR FOURTH!

So how does it work? It’s easy to forget that Gear Third wasn’t just Luffy ’getting big’, he was directly inflating *his bones* giving them weight. On the downside, with the increase he tends to lose a bit of speed. Doflamingo addressed this in Chapter 783:

When Luffy needed speed he resorted to Gear Second and, while Gear Second is fast, it’s less powerful than Gear Third. Yet again, Doflamingo even mentioned this in the previous chapter:

When Luffy combines the two, as he first famously did in Thriller Bark, many people thought this might eventually become Gear Fourth but that’s not the case!

Gear Fourth sees Luffy expanding his MUSCLES! Just look at this awesome pose and the twisting Color of Arms designs across his chest! Makes me wanna go watch some kabuki!

As for this week’s color spread, some people might be wondering where this unlikely choice sprang from but if you’ve been reading Oda-sensei’s comments in Weekly Shonen Jump you should know what he’s paying homage to here:

One more point of interest though…

There’s a year on some of those graves and even a date! December 20th 944!? What Age was that, I wonder! Is it the Age of Kaien?? If so, that would mean this pirate crew found their demise more than 600 years ago. To put that in perspective, that’s 178 years before Noland arrived on Jaya and 142 years after the start of construction on Tequila Wolf!!

But December 20th…I wonder…Is Oda-sensei a fan of SKE48’s Yukiko Kinoshita or Babymetal’s Suzuka Nakamoto???

As soon as I read the panel with a woman looking desperately for her son wearing a ’bear’ shirt I slipped a bookmark in Jump, pulled out Volumes 75-77 and started scouring the pages for a five-year old wearing a bear shirt. After a great deal of effort, I couldn’t spot anything matching that description. Feeling defeated -certain that I must have missed some detail- I continued reading 785 only to find the ’bear’ shirt AT THE END OF THE CHAPTER!

And here’s something to gnaw on for the time being. It seems that we’ve met all of the high-ranking Doflamingo Family members with card suite themed nicknames: ’’Trebol’, ’Corazon’, ’Diamante’ and ’Pica’. At the head of it all is ’Joker’ which isn’t a suite meaning that there might actually be other Donquixote Family affiliates who carry card-based code names.

Does that mean this ’Jack’ mentioned during the climax of Punk Hazard is a yet unrevealed ’associate’ of the Doflamingo Family!?

I psyched myself up for opening 18 by watching all previous 17 openings. It took 40 minutes! For openings! That’s amazing. Anyway, here are some of the scenes from Opening 18 that caught my interest!

Zoro’s just about to get lost when Usopp rushes to save him!

WOOOOOOAH!!!

In one of the chapters corresponding to this episode, a Mingo underling shouts out an order to kill Moocy in order to throw Luffy off.

Well, okay, that might impede Luffy for a moment, but *then* what are you going to do? You, a nameless henchman, just killed Luffy’s mode of transportation and friend. Normal bullets don’t affect him, he has a four hundred MILLION Berry bounty on their head, and oh yeah, he’s a pirate known ’round the world for being reckless. Not exactly #21-level, is he?

Enter the animation!

Hench A: Everybody, aim for the bull! Give it concentrated gunfire and stop it!
Hench B: What about Straw Hat?!
Hench A: We’re no match for that jerk! If we can stave them off, that’s enough! Bring the bull down and get him bucked off, then he’ll just be a prize in the game!

Acknowledging that Luffy could eat him for breakfast helps the One Piece world feel a little bit more ’lived in’; Luffy’s name is out there, he’s a threatening figure to his enemies and the grunts aren’t *so* dense as to believe they’ve even got a shot against a beast like Luffy.

In other news:

#StopTryingToHitMeAndHitMe
(Interestingly enough, Franky did this to Donquixote Family members Baby 5 and Buffalo back on Punk Hazard.)

A new year means a new (set of?) key visual(s?) after the episode! Check it out!