#ch 1110

[kaizokuou-ni-naru]

[chapter 1110 spoilers!]

chapter 1110 reveals to us the mythical zoan forms of all five elders- as some people theorized, they’re all youkai of various sorts.

saturn is a gyuuki or ushi-oni (牛鬼), a type of ox-demon with clawed spider legs said to spread illness and spit poison.

mars is an 以津真天/itsumade, a type of ‘monstrous bird’ said to repeat いつまでいつまで/itsumade, itsumade (‘until when? until when?) during times of plague in myths dating back to the kenmu period. its name is also pronounced itsumade, but spelled with four different kanji.

warcury is a 封豨/houki, a boar monster said to be prone to violent rampages, destroying livestock and fields and killing and eating people. it also has a very tough hide which regular weapons cannot penetrate.

nusjurou is a 馬骨/bakotsu, ‘horse bones/skeleton.’ on a quick look i couldn’t find a good source with much more information about this one, but this blog post, citing the edo-period youkai book tosa obake zoushi, refers to it as a spirit of a horse that burned to death.

and then jupeter is a アンドワーム/sandowaamu, ‘sandworm’, a youkai famously originating from frank herbert’s dune.

[pardon-my-scifi]

Dude had his scars scared off, then slapped them back on.

[larkreadsop]

And this is obviously a call-back to Luffy being eaten by that dinosaur on Little Garden and being saved by the giants, so that’s cool, but at the same time I doubt that one of the Gorosei is going to die from that the way the dinosaur did. So far the giant worm is my least favorite of the designs but I feel like he’s got some sort of regenerative ability so this certainly isn’t over…

[beaulesbian]

[egghead spoilers, up to chapter 1110]

Sanji's humanity & Zoro's strength

(or lack thereof) - a theory of possible conflict between Luffy's wings before the end of Egghead arc. Long post ahead. Like.. very long post.

So the new chapter had a very interesting new "banter" between Sanji and Zoro, but no, actually just Sanji, because there was no usual back and forth quips followed after.

Yes, this whole post started because of these few panels: (" ...!!")

After rereading the chapter more times I realized, Sanji's not even speaking to Zoro or knows that Zoro can hear him. He's talking about Zoro, and calling him a burden to the team.

Which is just baffling to me? (fair, maybe I'm looking too much into it and next chapter it would be explained in different way) but for now, I need to put this out there and make my own small (long) theory on this.

There's lot to be said about the word burden here, and I will get to it later in the post, but for now, let's start with Sanji and his eyebrow!

It wouldn't be a perfect story if Oda didn't tangle threads of each respective characters from multiple arcs before and brought them up together later on during one of the most difficult times when Strawhats and Luffy are facing off with so much danger (reminds me of Sabaody but in a very different way).

In this instance Sanji's past could be brought up again, something that started worrying him since his fight with Queen in Wano, and especially given that his left eyebrow has been changing its shape quite a lot during the run of the Egghead arc.

Here's just few panels throughout end of Wano up to current Egghead chapter, where Sanji' left eyebrow is in the focus on the pages:

Chapter 1029 was the first part where Sanji was thinking his body might be undergoing some changes he couldn't control -broken bones insantly healed, stronger and faster than ever before, due to him beforehand using the Germa suit which possibly triggered this sort of superhuman modification he wasn't really aware of until then. When he realized he couldn't remember certain memories, he panicked, thinking he might be changing into something similar like his brothers, a scientific weapon created by his father. The worry and panic was all the more present because he thought he hurt someone without his knowing, and that'd slowly take away his kindness and sense of humanity. (Too bad I hoped the changes his body might be undergoing would only be realization of his non-cis gender status, but maybe that's still on the table for sometime in the future.):

^In this second panel his face is on purpose shadowed, which was the last time he was shown in that chapter,

and only again was in chapter 1031 - where his eyebrow changed:

and it takes him to think about Luffy and what his purpose would be if something so important of him would change. He knows why Luffy went after him in WCI, he knows what values are important for Luffy and his crew, and of course he doesn't want to be reminded of his family and his brothers and act as they did. He chooses the humanity, the kindness that Luffy loves in him.

Even to the extent to call Zoro and make a deal with him - to kill Sanji if anything would go wrong with him. "If I'm not in my right mind, I want you to kill me." That much trust he has in Zoro to protect the crew and Luffy!

Of course Zoro wouldn't do anything reckless without a good reason, but part of their banter and understanding each other would be to promise something like that - echo of Thriller Bark and the range of how far Zoro would go to take on someone elses pain. It's a promise to win their separate fights, but also this was something that Sanji put out there for Zoro to take notice of. (I will come back to that later.):

(still the "bad eyebrow" - he had that the whole chapter 1031).

After his fight with Queen (where it was also cleared what his actions were and weren't), he was only shown two times until he woke up, and both times he had his eyebrow back on good side.

1036 & 1044 (hearing Luffy awaken his powers):

All the way up to Egghead he seemed to have his eyebrow drawn this way, and it started to change only during fights -

ch 1075, still good eyebrow, tho.. ehh this behavior.. whatever:

ch. 1078, protecting his crew from Seraphim, bad eyebrow:

in between chapters 1090 - 1105 (most of which were flashbacks and Sanji nor Strawhats were shown) he appeared with his typical eyebrow:

and it changed again in ch 1107 - when he was again protecting Bonney / fighting against Kizaru:

interesting was chapter 1108 where he's standing between Saturn and Vegapunk, and he's describing Saturn with "he's less and less human by the minute" while his own face was obscured, (I mean.. interesting choice of words and what character said it, huh?):

and the next page he still has the bad eyebrow:

in chapter 1109 it's back on his typical side, where it continues from previous chapter of Sanji carrying Vegapunk- so at some point it must have shifted back (and I'm curious if these changes would be noticable in the animation). At this part he's watching how Saturn is summoning the other Gorosei to Egghead:

Which leads me to the point from above with Zoro.

chapter 1110 and their interactions (for me) was just off. I like their usual banter and bickering, it's funny (if it's in the manga and contained to few panels to make sense, not so much in the anime, but i'm not going into that now), but the thing to call anyone of their crew a "burden" just doesn't fit right. (Especially after WCI... c'mon Sanji, and especially to someone like Zoro, who's always the first one to think about the crew.)

I would understand it if he laughed along with the words to elevate their seriousness, or said something like "Finish it up, Mosshead, we need to get moving." but no. He calls him a burden. And again as I mentioned, it pretty much could have been even Sanji not realizing Zoro can hear that.

These words (in my opinion) were chosen on purpose for multiple reasons:

First we have the Zoro vs Lucci fight that goes on for a while in the real world - in the One Piece world it might be just few minutes - plus we don't know how tough were the fights with the Seraphim which let others be injured.

When Lucci attacked, Zoro immediately thrown himself with him away from the rest of the crew. Zoro was possibly stalling with the fight for time to leave. I feel he could have finished that fight earlier but that wasn't the point. The point might have been to hold him back from his crew.

also this was possibly the only fight after King where Zoro could test the limits of his powers and haki, just like Luffy in the Udon prison in Wano was basically training, this (and the Seraphim fights we haven't seen) could be something similar for Zoro.

Some people think that just because of these characters getting new powers it means they already understand how to use them/how it works, but that's usually not the point of how stories go - there can be progress and there can be setbacks, growing up but also falling back down, which makes the stories more interesting.

The words that Lucci used against Zoro were basically the same thing that Sanji said to Zoro few chapters later:

Amongst them he pointed out the Strawhats inability to cut off one of their own out of their crew to save others - like Lucci left Kaku behind just chapters before this fight when he attacked Vegapunk and Stussy (and Sanji trapped Kaku in the bubble prison). It's a play on very different characters and how they think and act to show clearly how they different they are.

The words burden or dead-weight really stood out, already when Lucci said it in chapter 1107, and the fact that they were targetting Zoro - someone who always blames himself (in his mind, not usually out loud) for not being strong enough, and someone who always has protecting his crew at the first place, was interesting in the connection to Sanji repeating basically the same words in the latest chapter.

I will probably make a different separate post only focusing on Zoro and his fear of being weak, but for the purposes of this post, just to pick a few moments where it's important in the manga:

One of the first time I've noticed how much Zoro keeps berating himself with words like "not strong enough" "too lax" "still too soft" "if I'd been stronger/ faster/ better..."

was just after Little Garden arc, where he almost cut off his ankles just to keep fighting. Time after time the crew encounters strong enemies and Zoro gets a new understanding how far up is the limit that he has to reach to keep the crew safe, so he keeps training. ch. 129:

When Luffy went to fight Crocodile and Zoro was worried and kept training on the way to Alubarna, this banter between Sanji and Zoro felt typical between them - it's about the two way street, the back and forth (that's why that new chapter and insult from Sanji feels so foreign, there's no reply, not quip back - only silence and some sort of determination, which isn't good nor bad, just.. weird.) ch. 179:

and after the final fight of Alabasta, possibly one of the first times I really started paying attention to how much it gets to Zoro, this question of how strong he needs to be. (along with what possibly was one of the first introduction of his haki and how he began training the Observation haki, disguised as meditation in the terms of the early manga) ch. 213:

Thriller Bark was one of the biggest arcs in this sense of Zoro and his protectiveness towards the crew and Sanji knows that - he knows what happened there, he even wanted to sacrifice himself in stead of Zoro for Luffy (but this is beside the point here, and I talked about it in other post before).

Zoro took on himself Luffy's pain, and after that arc he still went right to train as soon as he could despite being still injured, ch. 490. "still too weak!"

which goes through to Sabaody arc.

Chapter 510 until the end of that arc is just painful to go through again. Luffy was worried for Zoro and didn't know the scope of his injuries, while Sanji knew and was concerned in his own way too - that is another thing of how they care, sometimes wordlessly but there is that understanding of what to mention or not. ("Burden" still shouldn't be one of the words to use between them, not that far into the story.)

Now - fast forward to Punk Hazard where one of similar moments played out - Zoro telling Luffy not to goof around because they got in the New world and needed to take things seriously.

It was one of those small moments where Sanji was actually one of the few people shown with reaction to Zoro's words and his urgency, ch 678:

Sanji saying "He's so tough on himself" really puts into perspective how he sees Zoro - he knows what he's been through, and knows to what extremes he's willing to go to protect his crew.

He's definitely not someone who would carelessly call Zoro "a burden" even in the time and place and situation they found themselves on Egghead, if anything, he was supposed to be one of the first ones to know how serious is Zoro always about protecting the crew. (Even in the beginning of Egghead, Zoro stayed at first on the Sunny because "who will save them when they will need saving.")

There's few others scenes and parts where Zoro questions his worth and strength, especially in later Wano, calculating what needs to be done so they have strength to face off with Kaido, ch 980:

and later against King, ch 1033 "it was my strength that was lacking!" while unlocking his Conqueror's haki, still unknowingly:

The fact that it's been happening pretty much since the beginning of the story - how Zoro views himself as not strong enough, yet persisting in always getting stronger and protecting his crew - means so much for what character Zoro is and how much he values and loves his crew (just like all the other Strawhats in different ways), and also, as I've been catching up so quickly with the manga, there's been that hope for some call out of this behavior, to poke it where it hurts, to see what would happen if someone turns those words Zoro possibly feels in his mind against him out loud. And that's kind of what's been happening lately - and I'm curious what impact will this have on both Zoro personally and on the other Strawhats, depending who will be around for the conclusion.

Zoro is one of the few strawhats really thinking about the future, plans and what they need to still fight through, carefully calculating what his opponents might be doing, how strong they are and how much of a problem it would be to go through them.

And Sanji normally understands that, he knows how Zoro works and the other way around, that's why he still protected him when Zoro was injured, (if anything, in this moment Zoro could have been something like hinderance or annoyance to Sanji, yet he never said something like that), ch. 1015:

Even on Egghead, where there was temporary truce with Lucci and Kaku, Zoro pointed out how to recognize the Seraphim's weaknesses, and apologized for 'wasting their stamina' - again, calculating on his strength, ch. 1077:

Zoro isn't just fighting for the sake of a fight, he does have his dream and does know what's important to focus on (he himself always keeps the crew in focus when it's important!)

So it's difficult to have a conclusion about the whole Zoro vs Lucci fight without knowing what is Zoro thinking - hopefully in next chapter we will have more info on it (that is number 1111 - Zoro's birthday and bounty! so I hope it will be a big focus on Zoro again). But even beside that, it was obvious in such short time two people around him suddenly called him a burden to his team - something he takes very close to his heart and mind, something that will hopefully have some consequences for us to see and read, because as Oda is choosing words definitely carefully to have the right impact, two very similar words like "burden" don't seem like a coincidence.

To wrap this up - with Sanji telling this to Zoro felt different than their usuall banter, and as I said before - maybe because Sanji wasn't even speaking to Zoro. At the same time, on Wano Sanji gave Zoro a clue that somehting was happening with him, the fact that there was a panel with just Zoro's ear twitching and then being silent, thinking, and not replying to Sanji with anything that would hint to us about his state of mind, and it could mean he's also aware of some difference in Sanji's acting.

The way he says this reminds me of the what Sanji was thinking during his fight with Queen - "what would be more useful to Luffy, regular flesh-and-blood body? Or a cruel, cold emotionless warrior of science." Even for this small part of seeing him speak with Jimbei and hearing what Zoro was up to until then, he speaks without almost any emotions beside anger? Even with his eyebrow not indicating the change, precisely, it doesn't have to be connected in this way, except physical fights, but there could be something still changing within Sanji to make him act this way, a way that really isn't something we've seen before. I think if in next chapters he speaks to Nami, Robin or some other woman without his typical over-the-top pleasanteries, it could indicate how much of a problem this could be for the Strawhats.

So we have Sanji's need to stay human and kind, the pact created with Zoro to kill him if anything felt wrong; and we have Zoro - someone who's biggest purpose from the beginning was to protect the crew and Luffy, while many times we've seen him question his own strength, and now two people in the span of like 5 minutes in the One Piece time are calling him a burden.

It will be interesting to see if this is heading towards a clash or conflict between Luffy's wings while Luffy needs the support to fight / flee from the Gorosei.

To end this too long post, I feel it's very on point for One Piece not to have a sole focus on just one character going through it™ in one arc, but it's always a few crumbs here and few hints there. This sort of conflict would be perfect to deal with both of Zoro and Sanji's respective fears - because this is very much about fears in their minds, while at the same time if they can resolve this, it would only strengthen their crew once again.

[joy-girl]

One Piece 1110 // Gear 5 Luffy

[wolfbrotherzach]

SWEET PISSING FUCK THEY’RE HORRIFYING.

They almost look like they don’t BELONG in this series. They’re more like Apostles from Berserk who took a wrong turn at Falconia and wound up in One Piece.

[oh-warizoro]

Oda, during a very intense chapter: Btw Vegapunk invented instant coffee. Figured yall would like to know that.

[starry-kattz]

Oda is really poppin' off right now, holy shit.

[grainjew]

Nikaposting Pt 4: Sun God Tropes

This is the fourth of a series of posts about Nika & associated religious practice in the One Piece world. As I write and post the rest of the series, I’ll add links to this header.

Pt 1: Crypto-Religion | Pt 2: Symbology & Syncretism | Pt 3: Joyboy was Shandian

Enormous credit to @oriigami for being my discussion partner through all of this and having a substantial influence on the final product. Check out our ao3 series Joyful for a narrative rather than analytical take on the Nika tradition, and definitely go read her OP blog @kaizokuou-ni-naru for meta and translation fun facts.

-

#JustLittleSunGodThings

So Luffy’s a sun god, or the embodied power of the wishes for one, or whatever. But does he do mythological solar deity things?

Yes actually.

This post is the fourth and last (as of now) in this series, and it’s entirely for fun. I’ll almost certainly miss things as I go down the list here- if you can think of other solar or dawn deity things he gets up to, please add them in the replies!

With no further ado, here is a list of sun god things Luffy has been known to get up to, & which will no doubt inform the mythology developing around him in the One Piece world. (How many people were deifying this guy even before he awakened his devil fruit? Like it was definitely not zero is all I’m saying.)

Getting eaten by snakes

What started this whole list was me turning to @oriigami in the middle of the night after we’d been rewatching Little Garden and trying to make an accurate count of how many times Luffy’s been swallowed whole and going “you know what’s sun god shit? getting eaten by snakes.”

Sun gods are often doing this. Take Apep in Egyptian myth, who tries to devour the sun god Ra every day. Or Rahu, the Hindu shadow planet and serpent, who swallows the sun to cause solar eclipses.

Luffy is also often doing this. The most notable example is of course the Nola Incident in Skypiea arc, but if we expand the definition of snake to include generally snakeish sort of guys, he also gets briefly ate by Kaidou very shortly after awakening, and just now by Mister Sandworm in ch 1110. (And by Kaidou fish-fish fruit equivalency I’d argue we can also count the Little Garden goldfish and the crocodile that ate him as a kid here but obviously that’s more tenuous and mostly just funny.)

Slightly more tenuously as well, there’s Amaterasu of Shinto lore retreating into her cave (a cave is a kind of snake), as well as the Norse wolf that chases the sun Sköll (occasionally merged with Fenrir), the Javanese god (described as an ogre) Batara Kala who eats the sun and moon to cause eclipses, and the alchemical Green Lion that devours the sun.

Storm and sky gods are also often interacting with, killing, and being eaten by snakes, which is less relevant here except that Nami is storm god coded and she also got ate in the Nola Incident. So that’s fun!

Having a chariot that circumnavigates the world

Many sun gods, especially in the Indo-European sphere of traditions, have some sort of chariot or boat that they ride from east to west each day to carry the sun across the sky. Often they have attendants (sometimes dawn and dusk gods; or sometimes these gods have their own chariots or horses as well) to help them with this.

If you want a list of sun vehicles the wikipedia page for solar deities has a whole bunch of them. Have fun.

I think Thousand Sunny speaks for herself on this front: not only is Sunny a ship designed, destined, and dreamed up to herself circumnavigate the world with Luffy as her captain, but she also has the Sun on the front as her figurehead in a manner that does kinda remind me of some depictions I’ve seen of the sun being carried across the sky in such a chariot. Also, she can fly!

Association with royalty

Kings and emperors love to use sun gods to give divine legitimacy to their rule. This is in no way universal (there’s lots of storm gods out there who also do this, just off the top of my head) but take Amaterasu (Shinto), Inti (Incan), Amun-Ra (also Aten) (Egyptian), Sol Invictus (Roman), etc.

Obviously Luffy is going to be King, and is currently an Emperor. But also, he tends to go around and toppling kings and gods and tyrants and vaguely lending legitimacy to whoever is stepping up to the throne in their place. He’s got the Mandate of Heaven (this is a joke mostly but we HAVE all read Loguetown)! And also distributes it to people he likes. Thanks Luffy.

Solar discs, radiate crowns, and beetles

A solar disc is a flat circle, sometimes with rays, that symbolically represents the sun or the sun personified. If you have read pt 2 of this series, you will recognize the Nika symbol in this description.

In the same vein, when applied to a personified depiction of the sun, the solar disc has the habit of becoming a halo or a radiate crown (such as the one worn by the Statue of Liberty - the radiate crown used to be an emperors and sun gods thing and has since become associated with personifications of liberty. So That’s Fun). Obviously Luffy is not in the habit of having either of these representationally, except of course for. The hat that encircles his head in gold.

The final note on symbology I have here is that the Egyptian god of the morning sun, Khepri, is associated with scarabs/dung beetles. A fact that I think known beetle-lover Luffy would appreciate. Get this guy some scarab symbolism stat. Check these bugs out!!!

Bonus: descending into the underworld and eclipse stories

Katabasis, that is, a descent into the underworld, is in no way a sun god exclusive, although solar myths do often involve the sun god, having traveled across the sky by day, needing to find their way through the ocean, the underworld, or some other sort of nether realm to return, overnight, to their morning home in the east. And it’s very fun to look at in the context of Luffy, eclipse myths, and the Marineford saga.

So obviously the Impel Down arc is is a very literal katabasis. It’s Hell, it’s got all the Dante’s Inferno theming, and, like in so many katabases, Luffy descends to the depths in pursuit of some goal, eventually emerging miraculously alive but unsuccessful (see, for a very quick shortlist of katabases of this type, Orpheus & Eurydice, Inanna, and Izanagi & Izanami).

So that’s delightful. But I think it’s even more fun to think about the Marineford saga in general, eventually culminating in the timeskip, as a prototype for an eclipse story.

Solar eclipses, though predictable, are something like a rarer and more frightening form of night, and so their associated myths have a general tendency to involve a more dramatic and/or violent symbolic death of the sun- see, for example, the various devourers of the sun mentioned in the first bullet point of this post.

So, we have the timeskip. The fire goes out. The sun, having descended into the underworld and pushed himself past his own limits, is defeated, disappearing completely from the world for two years. Until- In a way that was, technically, predictable, if you had the correct sphere of knowledge, he returns, miraculously renewed.

I’d incorporate that into my belief system, is all I’m saying.

-

Thank you all for reading! This is all for the series so far, but not, I hope, forever. Many more thoughts to have and webs to weave!

Have a lovely week!

[maximumqueer]

Ch. 1110 has me gnawing at the bars of my enclosure. Like obviously everything with the rest of the Gorosei showing up, but that scene between Zoro and Sanji?????

Sanji calling Zoro a burden/liability (depending on translation) feels so cruel and removed from their usual bickering. And I think it shows with how Zoro reacted. He doesn't fire back an insult, doesn't say ANYTHING to Sanji in response and instead just quickly finishes the fight with Lucci.

I desperately need something to come from this moment, and not have it just be played off as a gag. I need this to be something that sticks with Zoro - for a little while at least. First Lucci called him dead weight, which he just shrugged off. But then to have Sanji say a near identical thing with no indication of him joking clearly hit some kind of nerve. (I also don't think that this is the kind of thing Sanji would even joke about, considering his own past with being called a burden and a failure.) I need a confrontation between these two for this moment so bad.

Maybe we could finally get a Zoro centric arc that deals with his feelings of inadequacy. His feeling that he isn't strong enough, and the fact that instead of actually confronting that feeling has instead tried to bury it under hours upon hours of training.

And maybe we could also get some payoff on Zoro's promise to kill Sanji if he ever becomes a monster like his brothers. Because Sanji's cruel words could very much be hinting at him beginning to loose his emotions.

[chromatic-lamina]

Artur's analysis on 1110 is the stuff of gold, as always. Go give it a read and leave him a comment! Good stuff about Zoro's swords and that of St. Ethanbaron V. Nasujuro (one of the Gorosei).

[kaizokuou-ni-naru]

apparently japanese fans were saying after 1110 that the "burden" comment comes of as arrogant and they tied it to some other weird phrasing sanji used this arc, like the way he talks to s-shark in 1065 and 1077, and how he called vegapunk something like "you insolent man" at the end of 1070. have you noticed anything like that during this arc? would you say that those phrasings are different from how sanji usually talks and are there similarities there to the arrogance with which his brothers talk?

i saw a few theories about this, and honestly, not really? nothing about the way sanji talks in this arc has stood out to me as like, more rude or arrogant than he has been previously in the series. i honestly think that maybe sanji's excellent character writing in whole cake island has just made some people forget that he has always been (and i say this with a lot of love) a huge asshole. it really surprised me that him saying something bitchy to zoro and zoro getting competitive about in return set off such a big controversy, because to me it honestly seemed entirely normal for the way they typically interact?

more seriously, i think a storyline about sanji actually being, like, somehow ontologically evil would go pretty directly against both his character development in whole cake island and wano and the broader themes of the story. sanji's personal subplot in wano was entirely about driving himself insane with anxiety over whether he was secretly evil or not; that really doesn't seem to me like something the narrative would turn around and validate after all that. i think sanji's terror about losing his capacity for emotion is likely way more grounded in his personal mental illnesses than in, like, any realistic possibility of that actually happening.

[pardon-my-scifi]

Who the hell is this dude?!

[larkreadsop]

Sanji’s immediate thought being to warn the others and make sure they get away even if it means leaving him and Luffy behind is so perfectly in character. And while of course he asks for the girls first, he includes everyone else because that’s what he really meant from the start.

[beaulesbian]

ONE PIECE ep. 1110 // ch. 1077 || Zoro being a great observer of details.

"The Seraphim were indeed augmented with [King's] Lunarian blood." "Then watch the flames on their backs carefully, guys! Your attack only works on them when the flames are out. When it's burning, they're almost invincible."

[joy-girl]

I don't know what's funnier: the Sunny's position or Lilith kicking Brook on the knees