One Piece, Chapter 820: Cat and Dog Have A History
Well, let's try to catch up on last week's manga reviews. Lord knows I've a crapton of outstanding ones. This chapter of One Piece doesn't really pick up on the big cliffhanger last episode that Jack was going to shoot Zou the giant elephant with cannons and shit -- in fact, the chapter ends exactly the same way, except this time Luffy and buddies are aware of the attack... which kind of ruins the momentum somewhat. Oh well. We get a crapton of information!
Also, last week's cover chapter had Franky snow-robo town that he hung out in during the timeskip, and this week's cover chapter had those tribal people that Chopper hung out with. Damned if I remember what any of them are called, though -- I mean, it's not like they're actual properly important characters like Dracule Mihawk or Emporio Ivankov.
This chapter starts off with some 'oh, you know so-and-so too, who is connected to Gol D. Roger's crew? How quaint!' in regards to Shanks, Tom, Rayleigh and Crocus. I did love that moment where Nekomamushi is all like 'oh, yeah, Crocus was looking for this one pirate crew' and Brook just interrupts him with a very deadpan and hilarious 'that would be me. We all died.' We also get some confirmation that while Inuarashi and Nekomamushi did sail with Roger's crew (in the capacity of crew boys a la KidBuggy/KidShanks), they did not reach Raftel. What they did, though, was also sail alongside Whitebeard's crew in the Moby Dick.
Nami interrupts this bit of interconnecting with a question. What about that pre-established thing where the New World has three Log Pose routes which will converge at a point that we assumed was Raftel? Inuarashi reveals, that, well, it's not that the writer forgot about this plot point -- it's just that, well, the Straw Hats had, unbeknownst even to themselves, found a shortcut. The island at the end of the Log Pose route is supposed to reveal the existence of the Road Poneglyphs... which our heroes have learned about throughout the Zou arc. Plot progression and introdump in the same arc! At a first glance this might be similar to how Toriko is bullrushing through some of its subplots, but it's actually far better here -- the audience is far, far more invested in things like Big Mom, Sanji, Kaido, Jack, Wanokuni, the Shogun, Whitebeard Jr, Blackbeard, the Revolutionaries et cetera to really care about this bit of a plotline that everyone kinda forgot after Dressrosa, so yeah, it's a good thing that they didn't ignore it, but rather elegantly sidestepped it for a far more interesting option -- and, yes it's a fetch quest, but it's a fetch quest that involves the Yonkou.
Also, apparently Nekomamushi and Inuarashi is looking for an old acquaintance of theirs, Marco the Phoenix, a.k.a. Whitebeard's second in command. Luffy and the audience is made aware of a gigantic war that happened during the timeskip during the remnants of the Whitebeard pirates and the Blackbeard pirates, known as the Payback War... in which the big names like Marco went missing. Evidently the Whitebeard remnants are not completely destroyed, since we see Whitebeard Jr going around hunting for them, but apparently the ones that matter like Marco and Jozu and Vista are missing. The existence of a Payback War makes complete sense, because, y'know, Marco and company seem to be as hot-blooded as Ace and the rest are, so it wouldn't really make sense for them to let Blackbeard just run around becoming a Yonkou after he killed Whitebeard.
We get some rather needless dialogue where Luffy brings... well, basically the ones that didn't go to Dressrosa off to save Sanji, which is cool. Zoro, Usopp, Franky and Robin (rather oddly since poneglyphs are involved in Big Mom's end) elect to go off with Law and the samurai to Wano. There was an annoying scene where Luffy seemed to want to defer to Kin'emon... don't ask permission from him, those are your crew members!
Then Jack attacks, of course. We get Luffy hearing the voice of someone (the elephant, no doubt). Also another point of discussion which may just be a joke is that Momonosuke claims to have met Roger himself. Everyone dismisses it as Momo making a stupid joke because of his age, but, y'know, One Piece.
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