One Piece 873 Review: Big Mom's Pursuit

One Piece, Chapter 873: Trapped Like Sweets in a Cage

Bit sick, so you'll forgive me if I'm a bit less verbose and/or late in reviews this week.

The cover page's kinda whatever. Bartolomeo's advertising Luffy-senpai stickers when they meet a village with Shanks' flag waving atop it. Could be a cool foreshadowing to Shanks being reintroduced into the plot again? Certainly overdue. But does Bartolomeo even know about Shanks at all? I'm certainly curious. 

We get the members of the Big Mom family picking themselves up and Katakuri directs everyone in an attempt to go and hunt down the Straw Hats down. Pekoms also shows up and fills them on just what Jinbe's crew did to him. I do like how the likes of Brulee or Pekoms aren't suddenly buddies with the Straw Hats simply because of their alliances of convenience, I always feel that inferior manga who randomly decides that 'hey, these two fight alongside each other for a fight, so the life-long allegiances that these villainous characters are totally thrown away, right?' Yeah, no. Also, apparently Big Mom's crew is invading the Germa ships. Whatever happened to the actual Vinsmokes, though? That wasn't made entirely clear.

Of course, Big Mom is rampaging. Smoothie manages to get away from the smashy-smash, but apparently Opera got his lifespan sucked away by Big Mom. Is he dead? Doesn't really matter, honestly (and it's not like it's a particularly big loss, we just had another big goop-man not too long ago in Trebol). Streussen is unable to make the cake because he's injured during the fall. A lot of people, including myself, speculated that Sanji might just be the cook to cook up the cake and placate and/or make a brief alliance with Big Mom, but on the other hand, it's nice to see that particular 'obvious route' get thrown out of the window.

Perospero manages to trick Big Mom and tell her that the Straw Hats totally store the spare wedding cake that they totally made, and after a horrifying threatening panel, Big Mom hops on Zeus and flies off to hunt down the Straw Hats personally. 

Perospero is freaking out, but then Pudding shows up and says that, yeah, they can actually make the cake with the time that Perospero bought them. She wants to 'reward' Big Mom for getting rid of Sanji for her -- what Pudding's thinking right now is still kind of ambiguous and slightly all-over-the-place, but it's not particularly bad and ambiguity's always been the name of her game anyway. She's like doubling-down on the 'I hate Sanji' thing, I think. It's entirely possible that it's just going to be Pudding that makes the cake to placate Big Mom, and shows up to rescue Sanji? 

The Straw Hats, meanwhile, have a brief sequence where they hijack poor King Baum (who's like having some smoochie-smooch time with a lady tree of all things) but then Big Mom shows up on her cloud carpet, screaming "CAAAAAKE!" and intent on murdering them. So yeah -- disregard all my talk last week about this being an anticlimactic conclusion because clearly we're just starting to ramp up to the climax. Good stuff.