One Piece 1125 Review: The Moon is a Star

One Piece, Chapter 1125: What Constitutes Death

So we're not in Elbaf yet. We start off picking up the pieces, and... I really like some of the things they did here, not so much the others. 

We first start off with a kinda-mystery, with Lucci and a very downcast Kaku returning to the other Marines and Cipher Pol agents, telling them that Stussy was 'killed in action'. Obviously that's not what happened, by simple rule of narrative economy -- they wouldn't show so much with Stussy and anticlimactically kill her off-screen. But we still, AFAIK, don't have a proper answer if she escaped on her own, or if she's offscreen somewhere in the Giant Pirates' ship. 

And then we cut to Saint Jaygarcia Saturn discussing the situation with all of the Vice Admirals (who recovered from Bonney's assaults), and Saturn rambles about how they obtained so many resources from Egghead... but there was the disaster of 'letting that message play out'. He's just mulling over stuff on his own, but then Vice Admiral Doberman asks him -- very very politely -- if this is a 'failure', is there a chance that some of it is true?

And we get a badass zoom-in to Saturn's eye, and Doberman is just blasted across the room with blood erupting from his... mouth? Head? Yeah, I would say that a lot of these minor Vice Admirals who has already been questioning orders throughout the course of the battle will probably be double-checking just how far up the command chain they want to trust. 

(We also get a brief flashback to 200 years ago, and apparently Saturn was the one who got a group of scientists to spirit away the Iron Giant and study it... with the implication being that Saturn went behind the other Gorosei's backs to do so.)

We get a little sequence of York reacting to clouds forming, which... probably is my least favourite part of this chapter. Mostly, if you probably can't tell from all the reviews I've done, I am not a big fan of fake-out deaths. Edison apparently survived, which... fair enough, I guess. He activates some cloud engines and essentially split Punk Records and took it to the sky. The rest of this Vegapunk scene happens a bit later on in the chapter, but let me just blaze through it here. We get a conversation between the other Vegapunk satellites with Edison as Punk Records floats around in the sky, which... really does cheapen their deaths, is all I'm saying. 

Edison's rebuilt a new body with random spare parts taken from Shaka, Pythagoras and Atlas, which looks ridiculous. They have a brief discussion about how they can stay up for 500 years, and they decide to call in one of their allies... Weatheria! Okay, that bit? That bit, I like, tying (heh, tying, rope, get it) the whole island clouds thing to another character that was introduced on an island cloud from a long time before. 

Anyway, I'm not a huge fan of this development. Can't be too broken up about it, though, because I kinda-sorta expected the Vegapunks to survive in some way... I just thought it'd be a bit more abstract than them being able to converse together like this. I dunno. 

I do like the scene where we cut away to Mary Geoise, where the Celestial Dragons are super-angry that the destruction of their food stores means that they are starving to death... I mean, mildly inconvenienced because they have to eat fish instead of beef, the gall, the sheer, unmitigated gall of these lowborn humans. The poor, poor slaves are paying the price, though, and while it's a necessary collateral damage from Dragon's strategy, it is kind of extremely unfortunate as we get to see a Celestial Dragon execute some poor chef for the aforementioned fish-beef gaffe. 

Absolutely love that none of the Celestial Dragons are even thinking about problem-solving, but 'who is responsible? Kill him, no, torture him'. That's where the level of their thinking stops. 

The cooler Celestial Dragons, however, are meeting in the Room of Authority. Interestingly, they are back sitting down on the chairs instead of going off to discuss the matter with Imu. Saint Figarland Garling shows up, with his glorious crescent moon hair. He drops a massive bombshell -- York will be under his care, because he is the new Defense Science Warrior God. Garling sits down on Saturn's old chair, and declares himself a 'fellow Gorosei'. 

And, in probably one of the coolest sequences in this arc, that room with the Vice Admirals has Saturn starting to choke as demonic miasma roils off his body. The Vice Admirals are panicking at the sight of one of the world's overseers imperiled, but they have no fucking idea how to deal with something outside of their expertise. The closest thing that they can guess is that it's a disease. Now most readers are familiar with other tropes of fiction, so this is obviously some kind of magical spell (or something equivalent). 

And we get a great series of panels as Saturn keeps choking and screaming -- with that half-dessiccated corpse face with the hollow eyes and gap-teeth in the bottom right of the page being one of my favourite nightmarish faces I've seen in manga in a while -- while the Vice Admirals look on in fear. 

Imu telepathically speaks to Saturn, too, telling him that he is being punished for his failure -- especially Joy Boy being behind that failure. At this point I'm not 100% sure if Imu means the failure of present-day Egghead in general, or if the flashback we saw earlier this chapter of Saturn hiding away the Iron Giant 200 years ago was the thing Imu is punishing Saturn for. Saturn tries to beg for his life, for mercy, for excuses... but the black shadows keep swirling around his body as it dissolves, as he becomes more and more mummy-like... 

And then there's a gigantic explosion in the ship, blowing away the Vice Admirals. All that's left are shadows and... a skeleton. 

Former Godhead of Science, Saint Jaygarcia Saturn, has died. 

So yeah, that's pretty fucking badass.

I also like the final scene that closes out this chapter, with the Revolutionaries recapping Vegapunk's message. One fun revelation, however, is from Ivankov, who tells us that Tequila Wolf is one of four different massive structures -- including Rum Wolf, Bourbon Wolf... and Vodka Wolf. Vodka, of course, being the kingdom that Kaidou hails from, so I really do want to see how that ties in to things. Dragon finally graduates from speaking in ellipses to giving a speech about how they must start doing something before the people of the world kill each other to secure habitable land.

So yeah. Some great, exciting stuff in this chapter, and if you can't tell I'm a huge fan of Saturn's death. Garling's ascension, the Revolutionaries being promised a bigger role, hints about Stussy and... well, I didn't like the Vegapunk stuff, but we can't win them all. I do feel like this chapter is a bit longer than usual? I do wonder if we're getting some more chapters like this in the next couple of weeks before we actually land in Elbaf. 

Random Notes:

• Yamato Inari Child Cover Page: Ignoring the kidnapping thing from last chapter (???) Yamato stumbles upon a construction project to rebuild Oden Castle. Which is nice and pretty logical, actually, this is kind of what I really wanted to see if we're setting this whole series in Wano. However, Minatomo the carpenter -- Franky's boss -- is missing! Oh noes!
• Still no real revelation on what happened to the Iron Giant in the present day, though. 
• There is a whole assembly line of spare, half-assembled body parts for the Vegasatellites. Edison decides to toss out York's spare parts, apparently. 
• Marcus Mars is back to standing behind the chairs, after being allowed chair duty previously. 
• As Saturn dies, he yells out Imu's name very, very loudly, which is probably not the smartest thing to do when you're trying to keep Imu's existence a gigantic secret. I think everyone's probably distracted by Saturn being killed by dark magicks, though, to be fair. 
• Things are very slow on the blog end while I recover and get my stuff together. I do have some half-written stuff like the What If that I can publish, but I don't think I'll be doing much 'live' post creation beyond the One Piece manga and the let's play of New Pokemon Snap.
• Other projects that you might expect in the future would probably be some rather not-so-time-sensitive shows... I'm not sure if I'll do X-Men '97, but I really did enjoy at least the back end of that show. Agatha All Along or whatever they're calling that show is short enough that I'll probably review it. I'm also planning to watch Jujutsu Kaisen's second season, but due to how it's a bit more recent and how slow things will be on my end, I might do episodic reviews of it.
• There is a video game 'reviewing monsters' series that I planned to do for the back end of this year once I realized I couldn't really do Final Fantasy XII... but that'll take some time for me to actually play the game up to the point that I can actually have enough monsters to review, and as you can probably see I'm kind of slow at the moment in that regard.