The One Piece manga just PROMISED THE MOST satisfying punch in the history of One Piece
because KUMA.
IS.
HERE!
The man who has given us tear jerking after tear jerking moments during this last flashback
has finally arrived on Egghead to take his revenge on THE MOST EVIL PERSON in all of
One Piece, so far.
And wow, even though I knew it was coming, Kuma saving Bonney at the end of this chapter
still brought tears to my eyes.
I mean this is Bonney’s true father, the man who sacrificed EVERYTHING for her, and
she hasn’t seen him in YEARS.
Plus she truly is a little girl, as we saw when she hugged Vegapunk at the start of this
chapter.
So how can you not ball your eyes out along with Bonney when Kuma protects her from Saturn’s
deadly stomp?
But now that this is here and this fight is happening now, we just have to ask what is
going to happen between Kuma and Saturn?
Please, Oda, give me a new version of this punch right here It would be so fitting for
Kuma to just absolutely beat the life out of Saturn after all the cruel and evil things
the Celestial Dragon has done, and while I have a terrible feeling that it isn’t going
to go all that well there is some evidence we could use from past arcs to justify how
this may happen.
For context though, we all know Luffy is usually the one to defeat the final boss or opponent
at the end of each arc, but one of the few cases where this didn’t happen was Thriller
Bark.
Sure Luffy defeated the shadowy Warlord Gecko Moria, but the true secret boss at the end
was none other than Kuma himself.
And while Luffy was knocked out cold, Zoro convinced Kuma to let the crew live by showing
his unshakeable loyalty to Luffy.
So to bring this back to Egghead, from the recent flashback we have also seen Kuma start
to truly believe in Luffy the same way his crew believes in their captain.
So it could be a fitting way that Luffy is saved once again by someone who has absolute
faith in him.
Now, while we all want to see Kuma absolutely destroy Saturn after the heartbreaking flashback,
I’m not sure that he could win a straight up fight right now.
Of course, Kuma is an INSANE FIGHTER with one of the most broken devil fruits in the
story, but his body is also basically trashed even though somehow his face got fixed after
being melted off by the fleet admiral a few chapters ago.
Maybe Oda made a mistake with the drawing or maybe there’s a scientific explanation
for it, but the point is that Kuma is far away from his prime fighting form.
On top of that, he is technically not even supposed to be able to disobey the Gorosei,
so I’m actually not sure how he is even showing so much free will.
Did he finally overcome his programming, which would have a ton of thematic importance?
Or maybe Vegapunk programmed a way for Kuma to come save Bonney when she truly needed
it.
Either way, there is very little chance Kuma straight up wins a fight because keep in mind
we don’t even fully understand Saturn’s full powers yet, but more on that in just
a minute.
However, there are a few ways Kuma could still save everyone else, and of course that involves
sacrificing himself, as we’ve seen him do basically his whole life.
One way is for Kuma to literally grab onto Saturn and push them away somewhere else.
Maybe the middle of the ocean or into a volcano or something, but somewhere that Kuma could
make sure that Saturn goes down with him.
However, while it certainly seems possible it also seems like a really convenient way
for Kuma to take down Saturn, so I’m also wondering if something from that last chapter
will come back into play.
Because in case you forgot, in chapter 1102, Saturn forced Vegapunk to install a self-destruct
kill switch into Kuma during his last phase of modifications, so it seems highly likely
that will come into play since it was focused on so recently.
And if Saturn does force Kuma to self-destruct, I could again see Kuma forcing himself on
Saturn to try to take down the Gorosei with him.
However, as much as I would love for this to happen and Kuma is able to defeat Saturn,
the much more likely scenario is that Kuma will fight Saturn long enough for Luffy to
eat his food, regain his energy, and then stand up to defeat the demonic Celestial Dragon.
Which just makes a whole lot of sense on soooo many levels.
Saturn is literally the darkness that has oppressed Kuma and Bonney’s lives since
almost the day Kuma was born.
Then we have Kuma and Bonney’s faith in Nika, which of course is also Luffy, so it
would be the perfect end for Kuma to sacrifice himself to help Nika save his daughter.
He could literally light their way to a better future.
Man, I’m starting to tear up a bit just thinking about it.
And of course Sun God Luffy would have to do something truly incredible to take down
Saturn, and we don’t quite know what that is yet, but before we get to the terrifying
and straight up evil powers we learned about in this chapter, I want to throw out another
parallel to a past scene with Kuma.
Because Kuma’s most memorable scene before this arc was without a doubt when he separated
the crew in Sabaody.
But as we recently saw in the flashback, Kuma 100% did this because he knew the crew wasn’t
ready for the New World, so it would make a lot of sense to me if Kuma’s final moments
served to give Luffy a similar message.
Maybe Luffy can’t defeat Saturn here and they have to be saved by Kuma somehow, and
this shows them that even though Luffy is a Yonko, he was awakened Gear 5, and the entire
crew has leveled up, they still need to get even stronger to face the true evils of the
World Government.
That’s one way you could take it.
The other is that this scene could show that Kuma’s message has come full circle.
So instead of Luffy and the crew not being ready in Sabaody, now THEY ARE READY to face
the strongest enemies in the world.
No matter what though, someone is going to have to defeat the monster that is Saint Jay
Garcia Saturn.
And wow, literally every time that we learn something new about him he just becomes worse
and worse as a person in my eyes.
Seriously, in this chapter we see he is going to stomp on a literal child AND we learned
that we experimented on Ginny to test his twisted desire for people to gain devil fruit
abilities without even eating the fruit.
And more on that in a moment, but first, can we just talk about how disgusting this practice
actually is?
First of all, they kidnapped Ginny and made her marry a world noble, who could have been
Saturn by the way.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, they conducted experiments on her which ultimately made her
catch the Sapphire scale disease.
And worst of all, this deadly disease was then passed down to Bonney once she was born.
Man, what a scumbag.
However, these experiments do bring up some interesting questions such as, could Saturn
have many different devil fruit powers?
I mean, obviously, the experiments were somewhat successful since it is implied that Bonney
inherited her devil fruit powers from her mother.
But this was at least ten years ago, so who's to say that they didn’t perfect these experiments
since that time and Saturn has gained one or more of these artificial devil fruit abilities?
Beyond that though, we also had more clues in regards to Saturn’s strange ability to
paralyze people.
Because clearly Bonney was not affected by this since she was able to move and attack
Saturn.
Kuma was also unaffected, so we have to ask was he just not used his powers at the time?
Or was he just surprised by Kuma?
Or is there a power limit where when people are too strong they are unaffected?
Although I can’t really see this last one being the case since Bonney is not paralyzed
and I think we can definitely say she is weaker than Sanji who IS paralyzed.
So still unsure about this one.
What’s even scarier to think about though is what would happen if Saturn actually DID
PERFECT his devil fruit ability science.
Seriously, just consider this for a moment.
If they can do this, we could be seeing a whole army of super strong ability users when
we finally get the final clash against the world government.
And even if they can’t mass produce this science even if a few people were able to
gain special devil fruit powers it can completely change the game when it comes to end-game
battles.
And I just can’t stop thinking about if there are others out there who have already
been affected by this, like maybe Boa Hancock and her sisters who were slaves at one point
as well.
However, I have to be honest, there is a real possibility that this science was never perfected
and so it won’t really come up again in the future.
One thing that is a bit confusing though is if I am understanding all of this correctly
and Bonney did get her powers from her mother, then that means she should have had her powers
her entire life.
What makes it weird though is that she only first used them back in chapter 1099, which
is when she was around eight or nine years old, if I remember correctly.
So maybe she had the powers and just didn’t know she could use them.
On the other hand, maybe the powers only activate at a certain age.
It also makes me wonder if all of this experimentation has happened before in the past.
Because as we just learned, the Sapphire Scale disease was a side effect of all this experimentation,
but this isn’t the first time it has appeared in the One Piece world.
Clearly, since they were able to research the disease back in chapter 1098, it has shown
up before.
So I’m wondering if the Gorosei or someone else tried this experiment in the past and
it also caused Sapphire Scale disease at that time.
That is truly heartbreaking if it is true, but almost nothing is as tragic as Bonney
losing hope near the end of this chapter.
Because clearly, she is trying her best to take down the monster who ruined her father’s
life, but she just isn’t strong enough.
Even her powers started to lose their strength as she began to doubt that she or the mythical
Nika could save everyone.
What is interesting though is the somewhat of an explanation we got regarding her powers.
And we speculated some of this when she first showed off her Nika-like transformation, but
apparently, her devil fruit powers allow her to transform into futures that they can imagine.
Such as when Bonney imagined herself as Nika.
However, this is limited by the user’s knowledge.
For example, since Bonney thought Nika was just made of rubber, that is the only ability
she gained by imagining that future.
However, there is another limit to these abilities because I can imagine as Bonney grew older
she probably learned a lot about the world and what is possible in reality.
And I'm sure that the more she learns the harder it becomes to imagine impossible futures.
So in a way, by learning more about the world and more truths about herself, she is nerfing
her own abilities.
Which makes it perfect that we have Luffy, the true Nika and a living, breathing bundle
of imagination, who will surely smash through whatever limitations Bonney might have on
herself and show everyone that anything is possible.
Speaking of Luffy though, we actually have somewhat of a new mystery on our hands because
in this chapter we see a shriveled up Luffy desperately asking for some food.
Someone please feed this man!
And that’s just what happens because a few pages later we see Luffy chowing down on a
huge assortment of food.
We aren’t exactly shown who got him this food though, and thinking about it brings
up some interesting possibilities that could change the course of this battle.
But to start with some more basic options, there could of course have just been one of
these food vending machines nearby which Luffy was able to reach and order a bunch of food.
Not likely, but certainly possible.
The next option is even more interesting though because Luffy may have his own personal food
carrier now.
Because remember during the final battles of Wano, Luffy had a similar food recharge
thanks to Caribou.
So since Caribou was also brought to Egghead and later let go by Zoro, it is possible he
could have given Luffy food.
And at this point that food would be two life-saving pit stops from Caribou, so is this slimy villain
actually be a straw hat candidate?
However, the last option here is super interesting because we were also shown a panel of Kizaru
who apparently was devastated thinking that his friends might really die.
And of course we’ve been thinking almost since the moment he showed up that he would
somehow switch sides and fight the government.
And while that has not happened yet, I do wonder if he could have done this small thing
to help Luffy recharge so he can take down Saturn.
Plus, the admiral can move at light speed, so who else would be better to quickly gather
a bunch of food for the hungry straw hat captain?
And right after we see Luffy eating, Kizaru is in a different location from before, so
it is definitely a possibility that the light man helped Luffy.
Now, while we’re all excited to see what Luffy will do next, another character has
been receiving a ton of hate because of all the things he hasn’t done, and that is Luffy’s
father, Monkey D. Dragon.
In this chapter we even see him considering where Kuma went, which could mean that he
is finally ready to act and move against Mary Geoise with the revolutionary army.
And he’s going to need all the help he can get if that is his goal, but one thing that
I bet he wishes he would have done is actually raised Luffy to be a Revolutionary.
Because if he had, things would have been so much different, and if you want to see
exactly how that mind-blowing scenario would play out, you can watch this video right here.
Shanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next one.