One Piece, Chapter 922: Beast Pirates Governor-General: Kaidou
After the huge HOLY SHIT reveal at the end of the previous chapter, you'd think that this chapter would try and establish the status quo. Maybe Kaidou will give Jack some orders, maybe he'll take out some of the stronger characters as a show of force, and then bug off. But certainly at the bottom of my list of "things I expected will happen for this chapter" is... Luffy punching Kaidou in the head. Honestly, at this point it's a coin flip on whether Luffy is just super-confident in his strength and is uncompromising in his own weird code of justice, or if he's just a moron. Probably the latter. I'm honestly not particularly liking the Moron!Luffy we've been seeing for a while now, although at least this time around he has a bit of a more justifiable reason to lose it.
The first half of the episode is just everyone reacting to the huge dragon that is Kaidou, as well as a brief recap from Law and Kin'emon about how much they've fucked up by not keeping a low profile since Kaidou really, really hates the Straw Hats and Heart Pirates due to the whole Dressrosa arc.
And then we get to see a bunch of two-page spreads of Kaidou just coiling in the sky, and apparently the dude's drunk? It's kind of the silly thing you'd expect from a One Piece character, although this time around it's not quite as hilarious as, say, Pica's voice or whatever, beyond one panel of Kaidou making a dumb-looking face. We also get confirmation that Shutenmaru fought Kaidou in the past, probably lending credence to Shutenmaru being Ashura-Doji like it's implied in the last chapter. To which... yeah, whatever.
Meanwhile, Hawkins tells Kaidou that the conspirators are at the ruins of Oden Castle, and I'm not 100% sure if Hawkins was telling the truth in that he's just trying to make up a conceivable lie to stop Kaidou's rampage and to get rid of potential rebels, or if he actually does know.
Kaidou does unleash a gigantic fire blast that completely annihilates the entire castle and a chunk of the mountain, while apparently a good chunk of our cast is there. Judging by the laws of narrative telling, they're obviously still fine and probably managed to escape from one way or another...
But the thought of half of his crew dying in one show managed to cause Luffy to get so enraged that he jumps to the sky and unleashes an Elephant Gun straight onto Kaidou's forehead. And, well, Gear Fourth or no Gear Fourth, I honestly don't buy Luffy being able to take down Kaidou at this point, not when he barely managed to hold his own against Katakuri, who is a mere son of Big Mom. We'll see, though -- Luffy immediately revealing his existence and presence to Kaidou, and even picking a fight with the dragon, is definitely not something I expected to happen so early, so I'm definitely excited and curious to see what's coming next.
To be fair, Kaidou being a lush was shown awhile ago in one of Oda’s “What’s happening around the world” chapters. He got pissed about the Straw Heart alliance, had been drinking excessively, murked an underling, then yelled at Kidd’s bloodied and beaten body.
ReplyDeleteThat's fair. Forgot about that. Certainly didn't expect like the third or fourth line out of dragon Kaidou's mouth to be him being tipsy, though.
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