One Piece 909 Review: Land of the Rising Sun

One Piece, Chapter 909: Seppuku

A pretty decent chapter, although I definitely feel pretty blue-balled that we basically left the Reverie arc at such a cliffhanger. The brief chapters we saw at the Reverie were some of my favourite in One Piece for a while, and unlike the vast majority of the fandom, I've not been chomping at the bit for Wano. Sure, I'd like to get to Wano eventually, but not any more than, say, Elbaf or any of the other countries we haven't been to. Honestly, I think I might be in the minority in saying that, shit, I really wanted to know what the fuck's going on in the Reverie with Im and the Gorosei and everything they've hinted to us. 

But Wano we got, as much as I personally felt like we could've easily delayed the beginning of this arc until later. 

Anyway, I suppose since I don't actually have much to say about this chapter beyond "new costumes, pretty locales, it's neat", I guess I'll try talking in more detail and discussing about the whole Rocks Pirates that we've been hinted at in the past couple of chapters? Oh, and the Orlumbus cover story -- which I've been ignoring in the past couple of chapters due to the sheer amount of content in them -- is surprisingly going on, and Orlumbus is apparently raiding some town? It's a bit weird, considering how the Orlumbus cover story arc have been weirdly just flip-flopping about the mundane bits of a pirate's life? Eh. 

The first half of this chapter has Nekomamushi and his Mink crew apparently going off to recruit Marco, who is apparently acting as a doctor and healing giant manticore beasts living in a secluded village in the New World. We get confirmation that Marco can actually use his phoenix healing flames to heal other people, and we get this long backstory from Marco about how Whitebeard's spent a good chunk of money to support this one village that he originally came from, and despite no one in the village knowing about it, Whitebeard's money has been supporting this village that refused to pay tribute money to the World Government. Marco then points out about how Blackbeard and Weevil have been making a fair amount of trouble for the remnants of the Whitebeard Pirates... wonder what they're doing with Marco guarding Whitebeard's village? Is someone else in charge?

Marco notes that it's a matter of time until Weevil finds him and/or this village, but then also notes that, far more interestingly, Weevil's mother Bakkin (Bucking?) served on the same pirate crew as Whitebeard did 40 years ago. And '40 years ago' is the specific line that is used by Kaidou and Big Mom in one of the Reverie chapters, where we get the implication that Big Mom and Kaidou served in the same crew some 40 years ago, heavily implied to be this mysterious "Rocks" crew that wreaked havoc before Gol D. Roger. Throw in some people with very impressive memories remembering that Shakky (Silver Rayleigh's girlfriend) also notes how Garp hounded her 40 years ago when she was a pirate... yeah, this whole 'pirate crew 40 years ago' storyline is starting to get even more intriguing as we get the revelation that Whitebeard is also part of that crew. 

Meanwhile we then cut to Wano, and as much as I'm not the type of person who gets excited by a prolonged updated-character-model showoff, it's a pretty damn pretty series of splash pages. We get to see Franky, Usopp, Robin and Zoro basically hiding out with stereotypical Japanese names and jobs, under Kinemon's instructions, and we get to see their brand-new designs. Again, they're well-drawn and quite cool, but not something that in my opinion could hold an entire chapter on its own. We do get a slight bit of worldbuilding, I suppose, but beyond "it's like Japan"... it's something we already know and there's really not much beyond that. We get the name of the shogun, Kurozumi Orochi, and that apparently the Straw Hats' plan involves having Robin sneak in as a geisha or something? 

The Zoro bit is clearly a spotlight, where his possession of the sword Shusui has caused people to accuse him as a graverobber that robbed Ryuma's body, and also accuses him as being a manslayer, forcing him to commit seppuku. And then Zoro just slices a whole goddamn palace and slits the real killer's throat with nothing but the tiny seppuku blade, and that's pretty damn awesome. If nothing else, the fact that we're going to get a lot of Zoro in this arc is a bit of a consolation prize for ending the Reverie arc abruptly.

I'll catch up with Boku no Hero Academia, Attack on Titan, Nanatsu no Taizai and JoJolion sometime in the next week, because I've not actually been keeping up with them for one reason or another. Also, apparently the writer of Fairy Tail made a new manga? I'll read the first chapter and see if I have anything to say about it.