One Piece 1029 Review: Tower of Gray

One Piece, Chapter 1029: The Tower

A fun chapter, this one. The first half is kind of a follow-up on the Sanji-vs-Queen fight that was the cliffhanger for 1028, and it's basically letting the revelation that Sanji is an 'modified human' (or cyborg, or enhanced human, or kaizo-ningen, whichever translation you prefer) and Queen keeps basically mocking Sanji unknowingly, talking about how Judge's plan has always been to create super-soldiers with hearts of ice. And Sanji just... he just freaks out. He thinks about how he might turn out like his three jackass brothers, and he just runs the hell away, pursued by Queen and his Dr. Octopus robo-tentacles. Queen just wants to see the power of Germa's science, while Sanji is having a bit of an existential crisis -- pretty cool scene of him getting shot in the head to no damage, too. 

And... I kind of get it. I really do! Anyone in Sanji's position would feel the same. Someone with so much loathing towards his family, someone who prided in his humanity and his love for his friends, to his love for other people and caring for them as a cook... the prospect of being turned into a callous machine like his brothers would scare Sanji a lot. But, well, let's just say that Zoro's cutting up Kaidou and King, and Sanji's been kind of running away from fights. I don't particularly care about the rivalry between the Zoro/Sanji fandoms, and I trust One Piece's writers to give us a payoff, but that payoff better be awesome. 

Speaking of payoffs, this chapter wraps up the Killer/Hawkins fight, primarily, but we also get to see Kid being absolutely manhandled by Big Mom in the part of Onigashima where they're fighting. No one in that battlefield actually knows why Kid's suddenly having a migraine, so Law, being teh good doctor that he is... teleports up to Big Mom and Counter Shocks him. A lot of fun attacks here and Big Mom really just seems to still be unstoppable, burning Law with 'Stolen Fire' and beating Kid with an electrified sword attack called 'Mama-raid'. A pun on 'marmalade'! I get it!

Interestingly (and I think Sanji might go through a longer version of this in future chapters) we actually get to see Kid's internal monologue. Kid's been very unimpressive all throughout this arc, and he actually thinks about how his entire career would be an entire joke if he died there like a bitch. 

Meanwhile, instead of killing Kid like a pragmatic person, Hawkins does the comic-book supervillain stupidity of tormenting Killer -- bashing his head against the wall to give Kid those migraines; mocking Killer's devil fruit, and... and Killer actually feels straight-up desperate, begging and pleading on the ground for Hawkins to stop., offering his life in exchange. I like that extra panel showing the rest of the Kid Pirates showing up and baffled that their mighty second-in-command is doing this -- they're not going to matter in the grand scheme of things, but I really like these panels that remind us that Law and Kid have their own pirate crews and nakama and units of close friends in the background. 

Hawkins gives a monologue about how pirates like them stand no chance against the might of the Yonkou, and it's much better to just surrender and bow down to a great beast like Kaidou... but Killer sees quickly through Hawkins' bullshit, pointing out that he clearly regrets the decision he made to blindly obey Kaidou because of his prophecies of doom, while Killer and Kid are still standing. 

And after Killer says that thing, we get Killer asking Hawkins the obvious thing that the fandom pointed out the moment it's revealed that Hawkins has Kid's soul -- what happens to all the voodoo-doll damage if there's nowhere to go? And Killer goes straight for Hawkins' left arm, successfully amputating it while only mildly inconveniencing Kid. 

Also conveniently, Kid's strawman 'soul' is in that detached arm. Hawkins resorts to the other powers of his Wara-Wara no Mi, while doing his tarot readings. It's always so fascinating that Hawkins' powers like this -- fortune-telling while summoning a Stand-esque power -- is just something that we see so little of. But Hawkins at least monologues enough for us to know what it means. He draws the "Death" card upright, saying that it's a card that allows Hawkins to end Killer's life himself... only for Killer to easily decapitate the Strawman.

The next card is 'the Tower', and Hawkins barely has time to process the meaning before Killer does two massive "Spin & Sonic" slices across Hawkins' chest, finally taking him down. Elsewhere in Onigashima, Kid stands back up, and I think he guessed what's going on. The narrator informs us what happened -- the Tower means either 'the collapse of the old and brittle', or 'a new way forward'.

(Wikipedia tells me that the Tower can mean 'danger, crisis, sudden change, destruction, higher learning, and liberation'; and another source says ' Misery, distress, indigence, adversity, calamity, disgrace, deception, ruin. It is a card in particular of unforeseen catastrophe.' But I'm nowhere qualified enough to talk about the symbology of Tarot cards.)

A surprisingly great chapter. We don't really get any new insights on Killer beyond really reaffirming that he's super-duper loyal to Kid. Hell, even the way that Hawkins is taken down is more or less what the fandom has deduced a half-dozen chapters ago when the fight was set up. But it was still done pretty damn well. Hawkins mocking Killer, Kid's monologues, the two great action shots of Killer slicing up Hawkins... having never really cared for Killer at all (or Kid too, if we're being honest), it's actually quite great to see how this chapter suddenly made me realize that I was pretty invested in Killer beating Hawkins just to protect his captain. Pretty fun stuff. 

And... I'm curious where do we go from here. I do think that we're going to wrap up one of the secondary fights, which is increasingly dwindling in number. Maybe one of the Zoro/King or Sanji/Queen fights? We do still have Big Mom/Kid/Law to wrap up, plus whatever's going on with Orochi (I think it's going to be a Denjirou thing, the man hasn't really done anything). Oh, and Raizou/Fukurokuju, that's also something that hasn't been wrapped up. EDIT: Also, Drake and Apoo! Although I wonder if Drake's big moment will wait until when the World Government ships arrive and he's supposed to make a big choice?