第155回：Pineapple Man, Pineapple Man

What started as a fan joke has come full circle with Oda’s acknowledgement of Marco as a living breathing pineapple man via the name of his attack, Phoenix Pyreapple. What’s interesting is how the actual kanji name for pineapple suggests that Marco may have originally been designed with a pineapple-shaped head on purpose before fans even recognized the similarity. This is because the kanji for pineapple (鳳梨) includes the kanji for ‘phoenix’!

So was this a part of Oda-sensei’s plan all the way back when Marco first appeared onboard the Moby Dick? You’ll have to ask him!

Sanji seems to think himself in Heaven but most people might mistake the company of these horrors for being trapped in Hell! And…you can’t blame them! Via clever use of SMILE characteristics and physical peculiarities, it seems that each female here is deliberately based on an established yokai!

Ame Onna

Rokurokubi

Nure Onna

Yamanba

Taka Onna

Shitanaga Uba

And of course Black Maria is a classic Jorougumo. But there’s something interesting about her form. Notice how we’ve seen full-body depictions of her without any hint of a spider’s body which suggests she has control of her Devil Fruit similar to Sheepshead could technically be a Gifter. Either that or her fruit allows for a unique hybrid transformation that doesn’t alter her features like most hybrid Zoan forms we’ve seen throughout the series.

Kaido is…a fish???

Yes, Kaido is not a consumer of the Ryu-Ryu Fruit or the Sala-Sala Fruit! He is in fact a consumer of the Fish-Fish Fruit! How does that make sense?! It makes *perfect* sense. But before we talk about that…There are…’fish’ Devil Fruits? That seems *inherently* problematic, does it not? Unless a Devil Fruit user can swim, being a fish-person would be largely useless. Unless of course you were a perfect hybrid like…a fishman. Hmmm…hybrid species… Where else have we seen evidence of hybrids? The mink? Yes, indeed. Anywhere else? Sure! The sea beasts and sea kings are mash-ups as well! And just recently we’ve been bombarded by freaky human-animal mashups via the Gifters!

This begs the question…are fish people and minks the results of ancient near-perfect Devil Fruit experimentation?

That’s a question for another day so let’s go back to Kaido’s fish fruit. Kaido’s fruit is likely a reference to a famous Chinese myth, one that actually started this very same arc! The carp climbing the stream in order to become a dragon! We entered Wano with carp climbing up a waterfall and it looks like Kaido is the lucky one who became a dragon!