One Piece 1101 Review: Gear Third

One Piece, Chapter 1101: To Bonney

This is just a flashback that keeps giving, huh? I don't actually have a whole ton to say about this chapter, which is why it took a bit longer for me to write this review... and it's also kind of depression after depression. The events that take place in this chapter is a bit more predictable, but it's just another twist of the knife going into the readers' hearts. Because, well... it's pretty obvious that the bitch Alpha is not going to allow any of Kuma's letters to go to Bonney. Because the World Government's a bitch like that. It's just that cutting back and forth between kid Bonney being sad, Kuma losing his humanity but holding on to his love for his child... and the fuckery of Alpha ripping up the letters while the heartwarming messages flash in narration... it's obvious, but damn, Alpha, you absolute bitch.

I also am very, very thankful that we didn't have a hidden, retconned meeting between Luffy and Kuma prior to chapter 1. It's something that a lot of people speculated after the cliffhange last episode -- that Kuma might've met Luffy before the journey, and either Luffy forgot or Kuma uses some amnesia powers -- and I didn't really like either version because I actually really despise the trope of "oh, every aspect of your journey has been planned out by your mentors"... which, in a story that emphasizes the journey as much as One Piece does, would be terrible. 

Instead, Kuma just sees Luffy going Gomu Gomu no Axe on random wild animals, and pops away after seeing him and recognizing him as Dragon's son. 

Also, after more than a thousand chapters... we finally get confirmation that Monkey D. Dragon actually does care for his son in an explicit manner. And that he knows Luffy exists even as a child! I mean, it's always been very ambiguous with his minimal screentime on Loguetown on whether Dragon explicitly used his wind powers to rescue Luffy from Buggy, but Dragon admonishes Kuma for asking too much about his kid "because it'll get me killed", and noting that his child is going to be his great weakness. 

This gives Dragon an actual reason to be an absent parent, and one that's far, far more palatable. He's working to take down the evil, tyrannical World Government that's taken over the whole world, and he's already seen friends like Ginny be torn down by the World Government. He can't let his son fall prey to that. It's not just some generic wanderlust or a desire to chase a vague dream like Yasopp or the gold standard for terrible anime fathers, Hunter x Hunter's Ging Freecss. There's an actual reason, and while there's still a lot of questions I have about Dragon's character, all this work to contextualize Bartholomew Kuma has given me a giant, renewed faith that Oda can sail this story properly. 

And then we have the aforementioned montage, and... I really don't have much to say other than it's sweet to see Kuma's smiling face in the midst of ship warfare, his sappy dialogue that just screams 'good parent'... and the callousness of Alpha as she mocks and tears apart the letters. Bonney's connection to Grandma Connie and one of her pirates, Gyogyo, is also built up gradually through these scenes. We get a little detail that Bonney's actually already cured from Vegapunk's stem cell therapy, but Alpha, whose cover is that she's a nurse, is just giving Bonney some bitter syrup to make the villages think she's still under medication. 

We get to see more progress of time as Vegapunk has sliced off his brain and made Punk Records, as well as starting to create the Egghea that we know today. Kuma gets more and more robotic. We even get a brief appearance of Stussy, who says some cloning blues... though Vegapunk insists that Stussy is a real person, same as anyone else in the room. It really is pretty heartwrenching to have Vegapunk, Kuma and Stussy have a somber conversation about Kuma's impending robotification, the fact that Vegapunk's trying his best to make Kuma retain into a sliver of his humanity as long as he can... and then for Kuma to write a letter and then for Bonney, at the night of her birthday, crying because she didn't get a letter from daddy. 

It's also brief, but we get Sabo and Dragon discussing Kuma, who often comes in, helps the Revolutionaries take down their enemies, before disappearing without a single word. It's kind of interesting that even through all of this, Kuma's still doing his best to give a figurative middle finger to the government. 

And then the rest of the chapter revolves around Jewelry Bonney. It's her tenth birthday (which, by the way, would be the year of Luffy setting out to sea) and all the stones from the Sapphire Scale has disappeared. She argues with Alpha, who insists that Bonney still needs to be kept around for observation... but Bonney remembers what Vegapunk said, and she trusts old man Vegapunk more than this bitch. Meanwhile, Queen Conney, who secretly is one of the MVPs of this flashback, has figured out that Alpha and her cronies are agents of the government. Earlier it was also Conney who ensured that Bonney eating the Age-Age Fruit isn't something Alpha or the newcomers are aware of. 

Conney and Bonney both agree that it's completely out of character for Kuma to not send a single letter, or for them to keep Bonney around for another half a year... so Conney tells Bonney to take Gyogyo and the other fishermen and essentially go out to sea as a pirate. I love this origin story, by the way. All the Supernovas sail out to sea for a reason, and while some have less elaborate dreams than others, I really actually find it interesting to learn so much about how some of them found their way into the Grand Line. 

Alpha, realizing she got duped by Conney, uses the Six Styles' Geppo to fly through the air, ranting about how she's allowed to do anything short of murder to keep Bonney under World Government care. And as Alpha is about to swoop in, Bonney gets a brief flashback about Kuma telling her about the story and the powers of Nika, the Sun God. So Bonney uses her power, "Distorted Future"... to mimic what the stories descrbied Nika to be. A man who had a body like rubber, and fought as free as one can be. 

...And Bonney just summons a big-ass giant Gear Third fist. 

This is called the "Nika-like Future", and Bonney just clobbers the shit out of that bitch Alpha. I guess Alpha is the equivalent to the Lord of the Coast in Luffy's own journey? Did all the Supernovas have to one-shot a local threat within 24 hours of setting into the ocean? That's pretty cool, though -- this really does feel like a great origin story for Bonney. It's really what I feel One Piece, post-timeskip, did a great job of. Whether it's Law, Oden, Koby and now Bonney, we're really seeing characters that, had the story been following a different POV, could very easily been the main character. 

It does seem like 1102 would wrap up the flashback, and even if it's stretched a bit longer, the furthest it'd go would probably be 1103. I wouldn't mind seeing some scenes like Sabaody or Bonney reacting to Marineford or a brief montage of Bonney's adventure throughout the timeskip era from Bonney's perspective; and I do think it's imporant to see Kuma's full robotification. But I'm about ready to return to the present day, to see Bonney's confrontation against Saturn.

Random Notes:

• No cover story this time around, but we do get a cover page illustration that, I think, is the first time we get to see the Vegapunk Satellites in colour. I don't think there's any particular surprise about any of them other than Edison being green. 
• I like the little call-forward of Luffy fantasizing of using Gomu-Gomu Axe on a villain that kidnaps one of his nakama -- I don't know if Oda added this scene after the whole success around the Netflix series, but Axe, of course, is the attack Luffy famously used to take down Arlong. 
• I really need to wrap up reviewing the Netflix series, huh? I've been taking forever to write up that final episode. 
• Still, admittedly, for the leader of the Revolutionaries trying to hide his connection to his son, it's kind of stupid that Dragon and Luffy both run around with "Monkey D." in their name. Or that the Government didn't try to censor "Monkey D." when Luffy first gained notoriety.
• There was one very mean 'gotcha' as Alpha seems to put everything the News Coo sent into the church mailbox, before the bait-and-switch that she tore up Kuma's letter. What a bitch!
• Bonney's "muscle form" that she uses in Egghead makes a brief cameo when she's practicing combat against Gyogyo. Alpha almost catches her in the act! 
• Vegapunk and Stussy discussing about clones being real people makes the generic, non-Kuma Pacifistas and Germa 66's clone troopers even more tragic because their personalities have been suppressed since their creation. 
• Gyogyo and company are given the handwave that they're "no ordinary fishermen that strikes fear into pirates and beasts", which seems awfully convenient... but then you remember that they have been living in a wartorn country and fought in the original rebellion against Becori, so they've got that going on for them. 
• Two more members of Bonney's crew are name-dropped, 'Totts' and 'Potato'. 
• It's cute that Bonney's ridiculous pizza ship is actually decorated by the sailors to cheer up this little girl. Of note is that the ship seen in 1101 isn't exactly the same as the ship we see during the Marineford arc in the manga, which we can see more clearly in Stampede. But presumably Bonney upgraded the ship as she sails through the Grand Line. 
• The Viz translations use 'Conney' instead of 'Connie', which makes more sense. I guess Bonney is named after Conney? Ginny lived in Sorbet Kingdom for a while, it wouldn't be too out of reach for her to name Bonney a similar name to the queen dowager.