One Piece 858 Review: Milk, Giants and Mafias

One Piece, Chapter 858: The Meeting

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A pretty cool chapter, even if it didn't quite go the way I expected it to go -- I expected to focus on the Luffy/Capone meeting, but it turns out that while that bit did happen, the focus on the chapter definitely wasn't it. That's not to say that the chapter wasn't full of revelations, mind you.

The first few pages wasn't too important, just a bit of a catch-up on some of our characters. We get to see the "Gourmet Knight" (no, not Aimaru) Streussen make Big Mom's cake. We get to see the rest of Jinbe's crew treating and also fooling Pekoms (quite unsuccessfully in regards to the latter). Pekoms is a bit in an interesting position where the Straw Hats like him and want to keep him alive, but Pekoms is still 100% loyal to Big Mom, so much that he was nearly killed by Capone. So it's going to be interesting to see how and where he'll end up next.

Very interesting, too, that Jinbe's Sun Pirates are in on this whole thing. Is Jinbe going to abdicate his post as captain of the Sun Pirates to join Luffy, or is he going to continue being a captain and just be a general, like Bartolomeo or Cavendish?

We get Luffy and Sanji arriving at the Firetank Pirates' base, and we get Nami taking a bath and conversing with Capone's wife and Lola's twin sister, Chiffon. There's a bit of a recapping of the Thriller Bark arc, and we learn some really important facts about the Big Mom/Lola backstory. Apparently Big Mom is hated by all the giants in the world, but there was one chance for her to make amends with the giants when the prince of Elbaf, Loki, fell in love with Lola. Big Mom saw this as a chance to basically take over Elbaf's military, the strongest in the world... except, y'know, Lola escaped. And they apparently even tried to marry Chiffon off to fool the giants, but that got them even angrier than before. And that's the reason why Big Mom is so obsessed with researching gigantification in order to make her own giant allies.

And perhaps to make things worse, Big Mom beat Chiffon up for many years because of her similar face to Lola, and, shit, yeah, Big Mom's a horrible person, isn't she? Chiffon notes that she doesn't see Big Mom as a parent any more, and how she's definitely happy to sign up with this plan to murder Big Mom.

Brook and Luffy recover from their injuries, even regrowing a tooth, by simply drinking milk. God damn this scene is funny. Nothing more I can say about that.

We get a pretty cool round-up of both the Straw Hats and the Fire Tanks, all dressed in fancy-ass new suits (Brook and Pedro in particular look absolutely cool). I mean, I watched the movies and I know Luffy and company can pull off looking like criminal bosses really well, but seeing it in the manga proper is awesome. Last chapter everyone noted that a member of the Firetanks with a huge explosion of a hair looks a lot like Caesar Clown, and he's prominently featured in this chapter... because he is Caesar Clown, and despite the disguise actually fooling me (I thought it was just a coincidence) even Luffy sees through it in literally the first panel.

Apparently Capone took Caesar under his command by using his position as a rook, forming a bit of an unwilling alliance. Caesar tries to lie by presenting himself as the gangster "Gastino", which fools absolutely no one but Luffy. He still has his 'CC' gloves, he even laughs the same way, and in a hilarious bit of using the media, the huge English words still introduces him as 'CAESAR CLOWN' while the actual name (that would be in Japanese in the original translations) calls him "gangster" Gastino.

And then Caesar goes all angry at everyone, Capone just wants to get down to business, Luffy wants to punch Capone once for shooting Pekoms... and Jinbe puts a stop to the chaos by noting that, hey, all three of them hate Big Mom, so kill Big Mom first before killing each other. So, um, yeah. That was that. Curious to see what Capone's big plan is. Really, while the revelation of Caesar Clown being gang-pressed into the Firetank Pirates is kinda cool, I think the backstory that really interested me the most was the whole thing about Big Mom and the giants. Man, fuck Wanokuni, I want to see Elbaf so much more.