One Piece 919 Review: Lost

One Piece, Chapter 919: The Ruins of Castle Oden

Time travel stories are very, very tricky to write. Be it Dragon Ball, or The Flash, or Legends of Tomorrow, or Terminator, or Back to the Future, or Lost, a vast majority of time travel stories tend to kind of fall into different sorts of problems. Are the characters that travel into the past going to cause a stable time loop, a la Lost or the first Terminator movie? It's going to rob tension of what our characters do in the past, since the preservation of the timeline is sort of assured. Are we just going to have branching timelines caused by the time-travel causing an aspect of the past to change, creating alternate timelines a la Dragon Ball? Or is time super-fluid, and any slightest change (except those the plot determines is important enough) is going to cause a multitude of changes? Less well-written sci-fi stories, or ones with a clearly more light-hearted tone (if we're feeling charitable) tend to go for that, treating time travel as more of travelling to another location at best, or just an utter lack of understanding of the meaning of time travel in the first place.  Or handwave any inconsistencies with "magic", in some cases.

And, of course, the reason why I just went into a brief rant about time travel is how apparently Momonosuke, Kin'emon and the rest of the retainers are apparently time travelers of some sort, coming into the future from the past. There have been hints about this, of course, like the discrepancy of how Momonosuke was somehow able to remember Gol D. Roger when the timeline doesn't sync up with his age, and the usage of Wano's secularism as an excuse for the author to sort of handwave their ignorance is also kind of neat. So this plot twist certainly didn't come out of nowhere. 

What worries and excites me, though, is how this is going to be. Is the time-travel just one thing, and just part of Momonosuke et al's backstory? That's definitely the ideal one, and maybe the time travel plot device is going to be involved in some way with the void century or the stakes of the Wano storyline. We'll see. For now, though, that is one hell of a huge bombshell that was built up amazingly well ever since... shit, the Punk Hazard arc? Honestly, while the earliest foreshadowing to Momonosuke's gang being more than just "Wano people" came a bit later, around the Zou storyline, it's honestly pretty damn impressive of a long-running buildup. I don't think I've really ever gotten as excited for the Wano storyline until now -- all of the previous chapters honestly felt neat, but not much more neat than your average well-written anime filler. This is the first real development that promises some sort of bigger story down the line, which I like. 

Also I do love how the buildup to the revelation ended up having Luffy go "what, are they ghosts?" and that bit of trolling actually is pretty well-done. 

The rest of the chapter is pretty low-key, and apparently poor Speed has sort of been brainwashed, Zeus-style, to be an ally of O-Tama. We get a brief glimpse of O-Kiku hiding stuff (we later get the revelation that she's part of Momonosuke's group) and a couple of fun bits of Trafalgar Law sulking over them being good people -- as well as hints that apparently Law is this mysterious "Shutenmaru" thief dude? We all know Law's a big softie, despite his grumblings about how "despicable" pirates that help people are. I like Law. 

We also get to see the very isolationist mentality of Wano, even the children, who are taught to shun outsiders, being taught by a Rokurokubi teacher. And as a storyline based on feudal Japan, it's actually very interesting for One Piece to deconstruct the mentality of an isolationist country. We also get a brief little hint that Shogun Orochi is a swordsman in his own right, and a usage of the two-sword style. We also get introduced to a punk with a pompadour, one Inemuri Kyoshiro (who's being observed by geisha!Robin, I think?) who notes how as Oden died, he proclaimed a curse about how 20 years later, a bunch of samurai will come to avenge him and save Wano. 

Overall, easily the most interesting chapter of Wano so far. It did spend a wee bit too much time on trolling. We'll see if the expected revelation next week is going to be as interesting or not, though.