One Piece 921 Review:龙

One Piece, Chapter 921: Shutenmaru

Holy shit, that was unexpected. This chapter of One Piece starts off seemingly like another generic build-up chapter. And it kind of still is, since I don't think we're going to have Kaidou actually do much at this juncture of the storyline... but god DAMN that last panel, though. 

The first chunk of the chapter has the samurai talk a bit about how they will attack the Shogun and the Beast Pirates while they're in a drunken stupor after a royal procession, as well as the logistics of contacting their allies and what the other Straw Hats' roles in this are going to be. Also, somewhere in this discussion, apparently Kin'emon's wife is... O-Tsuru? And she never made it through the jump in time, or something? We get the non-Luffy members of the Straw Hats dressed into disguises, with Brook similarly done up as a homage to the "samurai that died standing up" bit, while the rest are ninjas. We get a joke about Nami being pissed that Kin'emon gave her a revealing outfit... jeez, Nami, some of your post-timeskip outfits are far, far more revealing than that! We're introduced to one of Kin'emon's allies, an elderly kunoichi, Shinobu. 

And then Kin'emon tells the rest that we're going to have to recruit three powerful samurai that are more wildcards at this point -- Ashura Doji (which was mentioned in Oden's backstory last chapter), Kawamatsu and Denjiro. In other words... side-quest time. 

And then we cut away to the village Luffy saved, where they are attacked by this huge fat dude, Shutenmaru... who isn't actually Law or Tengumaru like I had thought before, so I guess last chapter was a mistranslation? And then JACK shows up, riding a goddamn land-shark creature, and I thought that Jack was going to be the big reveal of this chapter.

And then Shutenmaru slices Jack through his chest, which is... certainly unexpected! I guess the top-tier samurai in Wano are more Zoro-level other than just chumps without Devil Fruits. It kinda sucks for Jack, since he's really never felt quite as much as a badass as the manga probably wants me to think he is -- but hey. Jack is far from being down, though, but he and Shutenmaru begin to fight and clash.

And then the sky turns dark, everyone literally pisses their pants as a whirling vortex appears in the sky... and we behold Kaidou's true form -- a goddamn DRAGON. And honestly, with how oriental dragons are often portrayed with these sort of facial hair and Kaidou himself having a dragon tattoo in his human form, I genuinely had no idea why it never crossed my mind that Kaidou himself is a dragon. It's even foreshadowed when Kin'emon displayed intense hatred towards the artificial dragon in Punk Hazard, dragons feaetured in Ryuuma's backstory, and I'm curious if the whole "strongest creature in the world" deal refers to Kaidou being a dragon that ate a human-human fruit variant, instead of Kaidou being a human that ate the dragon fruit. 

It's definitely an intense, unexpected revelation and one that got me hyped up to unbelievable levels. Honestly while the writing in Wano hasn't been the most agreeable with me, what with the constant addition of side-quests and side-characters that sort of felt redundant... this Jack/Shutenmaru fight is pretty cool, but they quite literally pale before Kaidou's true form. Great stuff .