第122回：Love Hurts

Queen offers Luffy an interesting choice at the start of the sumo match to be spared if he joins Queen’s pirate crew. Kind of makes you wonder, how did Drake end up joining Kaido’s crew?　Does he have a shared goal with Kaido?

Nah, I don’t think so. Drake seems like a standup fellow on a personal quest. Whether he willingly joined and is just biding his time or if he was forced into the position -via torture, hard labor or one of Queen’s sumo matches- I’d bet that Drake only took up the pirate flag in order to get closer to Kaido for a very specific reason. If he’s not on a personal quest, is it possible that he’s undercover like Rosinante?

Aha. Okay, now I get it. I was a bit confused by what ‘Waiters’ were last chapter but evidently they’re a division of Kaido’s subordinates similar to the ‘Pleasures’ ‘Gifters’ and ‘Headliners’. In terms of strength they look like lightly armed normal humans who aren’t required to wear the one or two-horned oni helmets donned by Pleasures and Gifters.

Queen’s eating that shiruko like it’s his job and if he eats that all before Mom arrives I don’t think she’s going to be happy. Do you think she might ‘deflate’ the ‘Balloon’?

Some very juicy details on the secret of One Piece’s ‘black blades’ like Mihawk’s Yoru and Ryuma’s Shusui. It’s a blade that was ‘completed’ by Ryuma’s experience in battle. This suggests two important things:

1. Not being Ryuma himself, Zoro may not be able to utilize the full potential of Shusui.
2. Zoro may be able to create his own ‘black blade’ by filling it with the experience of his battles.

And as we all know, there’s only one blade that has been with Zoro throughout his ENTIRE journey, Wado Ichimonji. Even more intriguing, the hilt of Wado is a shining white. What if Zoro changed the sword black? How about that for a level-up?

Ooh! One last bit! This cover features a load of half-hidden words and some are easy to read while some are almost impossible to fully decipher but I think I might recognize one! Brook’s shirt seems to read ‘SEA FREAK’ which was the tagline for Chapter 809’s color spread artwork.

Sanji using Sky Walk to finish the cake decorations is certainly impressive. I mean, I can’t do that on solid ground let alone kick-jumping through the air. But here’s the thing, couldn’t they have just used Rabian to fly around up there? Nah, I guess that wouldn’t have been half as cool, eh? Betcha Sanji just wanted to show off ;)

Here’s an interesting detail added by Oda-sensei that visually depicts the severity of the villain Luffy is up against. Check out the contusion above Luffy’s left eye. This kind of damage being inflicted on Luffy during a battle is *significantly* different from most of the damage we’ve seen Luffy take in boss battles throughout the series. Normally, Luffy’s rubber body is naturally resilient against blunt force attacks. So his forehead swelling up suggests that Katakuri’s punches are hitting hard enough to damage Luffy’s rubber! That’s an incredible amount of force!

Broadly speaking, the only way we’ve seen Luffy regularly take this kind of damage is from crew members or Garp’s fist of love. So either Katakuri is mad strong or…*sniff sniff*…do I smell a bromance!?