One Piece 876 Review: Cake Making

One Piece, Chapter 876: Coincidental Apperance of Pudding

I'm...  not a super-big fan of this chapter? The whole Big Mom pursuit part of One Piece, while a decent story plot point, has always been paced strangely, feeling like it would come from a manga like Bleach where they care a bit less about pacing (i.e. not at all, with characters running around aimlessly in 75% of the later arcs). It's still readable and enjoyable, but I honestly could do without Big Mom taking forever to catch up with the Straw Hats, especially now that Zeus is back under her relative control. The first two pages were particularly bad, with the Straw Hats literally standing there and discussing "should we run? Is Big Mom dead?". Literally standing around. Yeah. And then there's the constant suspension of disbelief that Big Mom's attacks all miss the mark, Zeus and Prometheus just don't go and attack the Straw Hats, and Big Mom despite her immense strength can't catch up on the Straw Hats on leg. 

 Also not a big fan of the constant split-personality ultra-tsundere Pudding, though at least it's finally made clear that Pudding is genuinely in love with Sanji instead of trying to put on a mask of pretending to love Sanji or whatever. It's... it's not horrible, but at the same time the execution is so muddled in a lot of fake-outs and 'plot twists' that Pudding ends up being a huge mess of a character with split personality, and I'm not a big fan of that. Such a huge chunk of the chapter, nearly half of it, is devoted to Pudding trying to keep her dual  personality in control as she and Chiffon attempt to recruit Sanji to bake the wedding cake with them, something that everyone has seen coming from a mile away -- though I wouldn't say that this is a disappointment per se. It felt kind of earned, and this being a Sanji-centric arc, he does kind of needed a 'win'. I just wish that the Sanji-needs-to-bake-a-cake plot twist didn't take so long to pop up. 

We did get a badass scene from Pudding, with Pudding taking away the memories of all the Homies with her memory fruit powers (use it on Big Mom!) which... returns the memories of the souls' original owners? Huh, that might prove interestingly useful against Big Mom's homies. Meanwhile, Brook and Chopper are keeping up against Perospero and Katakuri's forces (the two aren't actually fighting) and as Sanji passes them, he decides to leave them alone, saying "they can handle themselves". If Sanji's team is going to pacify Big Mom, I think Katakuri being the 'final boss' for this arc for Luffy to defeat kind of makes sense? I dunno. 

Oh, and the cover story switches away from Bartolomeo burning Shanks' flag to Sai and the Happo Navy returning, something that I am genuinely surprised about. I like Sai, so I don't mind seeing him, but that Bartolomeo cover story sure ended rather abruptly, huh? (... I also just realized that every single fleet general in Luffy's Grand Fleet were responsible for defeating a member of Doflamingo's executives. Huh.)

Overall it's not a horrible chapter, I just feel that the pacing and general plot development could've been done better.