What Were Playing

Sabo is back to being raised by his rotten royal family, and we’re left to hope he becomes a street urchin again. See, in One Piece, outlaws are often the good guys and the nobles, government, and marines are almost invariably disgustingly evil. What a wacky world.

Luffy and Ace join with the Bluejam pirate crew, and lay packages all around town. Sabo finds out from his adopted brother that thos packages are actually explosives meant to burn everything on the island except the nobles and their houses to the ground. This carnage is intended to leave a good impression on the visiting Tenryuubito.

The Bluejam pirates are doublecrossed by the nobles of course, and Luffy and Ace are stuck in the fire. The fact that this is a flashback kind of kills any suspense about whether they’ll get out, of course. Dragon pops up in the noble part of the island and is disgusted at what the place did to Sabo. He wishes he had the power to change it. I wonder if he ever managed to? What’s Goa like in the present? I like that they’re setting up some things for the present timeline in the flashback. I’m interested to see whether Sabo lives, and what the reunion with Luffy would be like if he does.

The flashback to Luffy and Ace’s childhood continues. Last time we saw that after Luffy was left with Ace and the Dadan bandits, he wanted to be friends with Ace. Ace was only interested in stealing enough money to buy a pirate ship with his friend Sabo. Luffy refused to give up on following Ace around, and he eventually got caught by the Bluejam Pirates Ace and Sabo stole from. They all assumed he’d talk in no time: apparently they didn’t count on him being literally made of rubber.

Which brings us this week. Luffy can withstand almost any blunt impact, so the pirates are torturing him with spiked gloves to try to recover their treasure. Luffy is crying, but there’s no way he’ll betray his friends. After that, we see that Sabo and Ace think Luffy will talk, and they’re more concerned with saving their treasure than saving Luffy. All the bandits of the area refuse to talk to the pirates about Ace and Sabo, who are busy moving all of their treasure when they find out that Luffy still hasn’t cracked.

Luffy is a bloody mess, and he doesn’t even have the strength to scream. Polchemi, a high-ranking pirate, is beating him up anyway. The people around can’t do anything about it; the pirates have all the town officials on payroll. Sabo and Ace then jump in and save Luffy’s life, beating Polchemi and all the pirates with him. Captain Bluejam kills Polchemi, and now Luffy, Ace, and Sabo will be hunted down. Luffy is crying from his wounds, but he finally earned Ace’s respect. Luffy needs Ace because he doesn’t have a family. Ace, in turn, needs to feel needed: nobody is supposed to care about the life of Gol D Roger’s son.

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The epic war is over, so now it’s time for some slower fallout chapters.

Luffy is a typical too-stupid-to-be-sad main character, so it’s odd to see him grieving like this. I just hope this doesn’t become Luffy’s emo phase, we have enough of that in other comics. Being depressed doesn’t fit Luffy very well. Ivankov is off to keep Sanji company in kamabakka (Lucky him!), so it’s up to Jimbei to cheer Luffy up. But before that happens, we have some flashbacks to get to.

We finally get to see who Dadan is: an ugly hag who’s the head of a crew of Bandits. Why Garp left the son of Dragon the Revolutionary and the son of Gol D Roger to be raised by bandits is beyond me; doesn’t he want them to grow up as marines? It seems like an odd choice. Either way, we’re probably going to see more about Dadan and a final farewell to Ace when the next chapter shows Luffy’s childhood.

Where do things go after that? Well, the crew still has to power up and reunite, and then it’s into the shaken up new world to compete with all of the Supernovas. Luffy still has a couple of crewmates left to recruit, before he finds One Piece, though. I wonder if he’ll recruit Hancock? The potential interactions with the crew would be endless. It would be pretty funny to see her punt around Chopper like she does kittens, and constantly turn Sanji to stone for flirting with her and Brook into stone for asking to see her panties. Add in Nami being jealous of her beauty and you’d have constant fireworks.