Kaido's END? Is This the Flashback We've been Waiting For?! | One Piece Chapter 1049 Review

[@sebastien-loikntsangou-kan5264]

I'm never unimpressed by the level of thought and care you put into these chapter reviews.

[@donnig5053]

there’s no way Kaido isn’t awakened btw. i do think Luffy has endless potential in Gear 5. He can manipulate and bend lightning, fire, im sure he can do the same with wind, liquids and maybe even water lol. Not only is Kaido strong but all the Yonko have other reasons why they’re hard to take down besides combat strength. Great video btw

[@emperorluffy6001]

Also my gawd man your videos are top tier. You make these highly entertaining videos with such depth and insane production quality I am utterly baffled at the notion that you're not well known.

[@sebastien-loikntsangou-kan5264]

I feel like that this wasn't Momo's big moment like we think it is. I think when Kaidou gets up for at least one more round, he'll take back control of Onigashima to plant it on the Flower Capital (as was his plan for the New Onigashima Project). This forces Momo to hold up Onigashima in front of the Wano citizens, who are currently unaware that Onigashima has been up in the sky, let alone that Kaidou fell. This is hopefully the more impactful moment that Oda has setup for Momo for the actual Act III climax.

[@StrawHatJedi]

I could definitely see Momo having a bigger moment in clearer view of the people of Wano and I like your suggestion. Most important, I think when you compare to say, Dressrosa, you can see that Luffy earned the trust and respect of its people by fighting for their liberation. That's where, it's a nice idea on paper that entire raid will happen without the people being aware - as if they're waking from a nightmare. But it's hard to imagine them having the same degree of respect and reverence for the Straw Hats without knowing anything about them.

[@nikolasgerousis5143]

Wow, you put a lot of work into this

[@sebastien-loikntsangou-kan5264]

This chapter has sort of encapsulated my relationship with the Wano arc. It's like reading a great book only to realize your nearly at the end and there are way too many loose plot threads and unresolved character arcs for the author to possibly resolve them in a satisfying way. It has some the series greatest moments and the stakes are higher than ever, but it seems to be lacking in tension, heart, and overall a lot of what makes One Piece so great. Not to mention the alarming amount of things that are still unresolved in this stage in the arc. It seemed like Oda has been working with half of his usual toolbox throughout Act III, which I'd like to mention is a huge display of skill from Oda for the arc to still be as good as it is. If this is the end to a conflict a decade in the making, it would honestly diminish my faith that Oda could properly handle something like the inevitable Final War, which is safe to say will definitely exceed this arc in length and scale. That's not to say that this arc is bad or that the problems can't be addressed by arc's end, but it's going to take a drastic change in direction in order for it to live up to what this arc has been set up to be, at least to me.

[@emperorluffy6001]

Facts. I honestly think if people don't care about this then they don't actually care about One Piece. Straight up.

[@grimtwin5581]

Kaido better get his ass back up!

[@zisanzero4052]

Legend says Zunesha still waiting for order from momo or did he forget lol... Zunesha : "uhh guys there's bunch of enemies ships here.. Hello??"

[@emperorluffy6001]

This chapter only made me 100% certain that the raid will fail.

[@sebastien-loikntsangou-kan5264]

I have to agree.

[@burninghammer4765]

I'm still skeptical but it feels like either this or the arc (and series) ends up a mess of underdeveloped character arcs and dropped plot threads. I'm baffled that the majority of One Piece fans (including a lot of the so-called analyst) seem to not care about anything other than whether or not Luffy punches Kaido in the face.

[@ReiseLukas]

The complete opposite for me

[@burninghammer4765]

Fashionably late as always! I was looking forward to dumping my thoughts here...and I must say I'm actually somewhat surprised by your review. For me this chapter changed my thoughts drastically on the arc going forward, so I'm surprised to see that it didn't seem to have any effect on you. I should say if anyone is scrolling through reading this, this comment is meant purely for Straw Hat Jedi is absurdly long and contains references to other comments on the channel that no one else will get. So you should probably stop reading here. Anyways I always thought there were three possible endings to the raid: 1. Fake-out victory in Onigashima leading to full-war in the Flower Capitol. 2. The flower capitol section of the story is completely dedicated to CP0. 3. Act 3 concludes with the raid failing in the flower capitol. I ordered these in what I thought were the likelihood of their occurence before reading this chapter but there were so many things in this chapter that I didn't expect that I think it would be best to go through and re-examine each of these, focusing on the reasons why these may happen and both the potential positive and negative outcomes of the story moving in that direction. I want to start with the boring one, that this is truly meant to be the finale of Luffy vs. Kaido and the main antagonist for the rest of the arc will be CP0. Previously I would have had this trailing pretty far behind the first theory in possibilty but now I think it's shot up to about a 50% chance despite not liking it. The main reason for that is that it is perfectly set up for an act ending scenario. As you have noted Wano has made many references to Kabuki Plays. I've noticed you've generally stopped short of mentoining the act structure ever since the dumb generic theory of Kaido killing a scabbard or two in Chapter 999 would be the end of Act 3 was debunked. With that theory being debunked and Act 3's lack of an ending many people have just kind of started to ignore the existence of the acts or even challenge the notion of them. I first want to make clear that there is a 99% chance that Wano has five acts. There are Kabuki plays that have less than 5 acts and Kabuki plays that have more than five acts but the vast majority of Kabuki Plays have five acts. It wouldn't really make sense for Oda to reference Kabuki Plays only to pull out a 4 act play, as that would be weirdly going against the general spirit of what he invokes. As for the idea that the arc is meant to be three acts...that's just non-sensecial at this point. The three act structure is more of a western idea, in Japan the five act structure is more popular. This idea isn't just Kabuki centric either as the concept of Jo-ha-kyu is applied to a large variety of traditional Japanese arts. So not only is culturally non-senscial but on top of that we are already past the point for the story to have a three act structure. A story with three acts doesn't have to have every act be the same length but they do generally compose of about a third of the story each. If the final act of Wano started all the way back in 958 that means over 80% of the entire story of Wano was shoved into the third act, making the act structure meaningless. Another thing I want to focus on about the act structure that is often crudely ignored in fan theories is how they are presented. One of the reasons the idea that Act 3 would end with Kaido killing a scabbard only to have Luffy face off against him was stupid was that it completely ignored everything Oda does with the acts to just stitch it onto a chapter. All three acts of Wano so far have not only been highly distinctive, they each have clear definitive endings to a section of the story - NOT cliff hangers. They even go so far as to have attempts to set the scene in more film-esque fashion, have contexutalized musical performances from characters inside the One Piece world and often jump forward a small bit in time as well as change character prespectives from the end of the act as each act represents a fresh section of the story. Putting all of this fanfare and the closing/opening of the curtains on any random old cliffhanger that would have been written the same way in an arc without acts is absurd. With that in mind we have all the elements for an act-ending here. A distinct section of the story has seemingly concluded and a festival is ending in town, giving belivable reasons to cut to musicians performing. On top of that the fact that Onigashima just barely missed the Flower Capitol and the Flower Capitol was uninvovled in the battle means we have fresh locations and characters to make a distinct act 4 (addmitedly not quite as distinct as the first three acts were from each other but still distinct enough to feel like a different act). I could easily picture narration about the closing of the Fire Festival and 20 years of wishes while an even larger enemy waits on the horizon as CP0's ships start to come in. If act 3 ends next chapter I could even picture 1051 starting with cut prespectives to the Gorosei discussing secrets about Wano or the Nika Fruit as CP0 recieves news of the battle outcome and starts to move in, mimicking the more film-esque techniques Oda used when introducing Act 3. Of course I said I would tackle the positives and negatives of each theory so let's switch to focusing on the reasons why Kaido isn't down.

[@burninghammer4765]

One of the things that surprised me about this video is that Kaido's flashback didn't seem to change anything about this video for you. You acknowledge that we could learn about the Oni from Yamato's prespective instead of in Kaido's flashback but you really stressed on two things we don't know about Kaido - why he said Wano was special and why he wants to die. However we do technically have a reason why Kaido thinks Wano is special - he knows that Joy Boy is supposed to come there and that Joy Boy is supposed to be a man who can defeat him. We also got a reason why Kaido came to Wano. It's a bit of a reductive answer but you can just assume he was staying for a bit to build his army and use Wano as a base before deciding to permenantly occupy it after the incident with Oden and figuring out the Joy Boy connection. Like wise you can make a reductive answer to the "life isn't a series of simple questions with simple answers". That Kaido was merely setting the stage for Joy Boy's return, knowing from what Oden said that sticking in Wano, keeping the borders closed and contuining the suffering that was started there would one day lead to Joy Boy liberating Wano. The quote from Kaido implies a degree of moral complexity that isn't really here in this answer, but that could just be a case of Oda doing a poor job at handling audience expectation. Maybe the goal was just to imply that Kaido had a goal beyond just making weapons that he could make anywhere else. This does technically answer that even if it is the most boring answer possible. There is one thing I can't devil advocate away however. The flashback doesn't explain Kaido's obsession with death at all. That said one of the big assumptions in the video is that these things will come before Luffy defeats Kaido which doesn't really have to be the case. It is more dramatically effective to have a villian's motivations laid bare before being defeated but if my above reductive takes are correct, we do have the motivation for fighting Luffy before being defeated by him. We even got the Joy Boy answer of what world Luffy wants to create in contrast to the world Kaido wants to create right before the big blow. The stuff is there, it's just boring. I could easily see a scenario where either the death obsession is an tied to Oni ideals (which is similiar to Wano's Samurai) or it will be fleshed out a bit right before he is killed by Blackbeard or someone. I could also see a scenario where we get enough of an idea of it to feel satisfied with his death but it gets even more fleshed out in the Rocks flashback, making it a better scene on re-read. There is one massive red-flag I am ignorging and that is awakenings. Awakenings have been explianed as mastery of your devil fruit, so just the idea that a Shonen manga would make "weaklings" (Kaido's words) like Doflamingo have an awakening but wouldn't even give Doflamingo's boss who has had his fruit for 40 years and is the strongest "creature" in the world an awakening is non-sense. A lot of people have tried to bandage this in two ways, 1). By saying that Kaido just awakened without Oda telling us and 2). By saying Kaido was originally a fish and awakened into a Dragon. The second one is just pure ignorance of the series, as plenty of Zoan fruits have model classifications. If you believe Kaido awakened from a Fish into a Dragon, I guess Page-One with his Dragon-Dragon Fruit Model Spinosaurus is also an awakened devil fruit user. Let's also just ignore that we've seen Zoan users with modeled devil fruits eat the fruit for the first time in Kaku and Momonosuke and neither of them had to awaken to become the specific model. The first one is just the equivalent to saying Oda is bad at writing shonen manga. He tells us when people use future sight, has visual short hands for Conquer and Armanent Haki and has announced every other Awakening in the series. There is no reason to assume that he wouldn't do that here. So you would think that this argument is basically a slam dunk to the fight not being over, right? In any other arc it would be but this is unfrotunately the Wano arc, where dropped plot points are more the norm than the exception. This arc we have Queen and Who's-Who declaring intent to murder each other only to never interact again and both be swiftly defeated. We have the beast pirates hunting Tama...for an act only to never bring it up again until she's completely fucked them over. We have Toki being from the void century...for no apparent reason. We have Zoro declaring his desire to get revenge for Yasuie and take out Orochi...only to never even meet him. We have repeated mentions of Hawkins not wanting to be the traitor, not being satisfied with being Kaido's underling, he's giving timelines that don't even match up with the actual timeline of the plot which makes me wonder how in control of things Oda is and he has an ability that lets people/himself(?) fight beyond their natural limits...and then gets defeated in a lame 1 chapter fight so fuck all that stuff I guess. We also get Usopp saying he's going to take down two tobi roppo...only to do literally nothing for the entire arc after over seven years of being on the sidelines of the manga. Kaido monologues about shit like breaking spirits and how the alliance needs to see Luffy be defeated to truly test them but you said you don't expect Luffy to be defeated again so I guess that's pointless. The numbers have literally no impact on the plot despite having an entire spread dedicated to introducing them. King and Shiryu have almost identical clothing and both love torture, but apparently despite drawing Shiryu for the first time in nearly a decade (meaning he almost certainly used a visual reference) in the same chapter he drew King for the first time he just either didn't notice that he gave them the same get-up or was too lazy to bother re-designing King. Perospero's expressed desire to betray the Allaince, which Big Mom hinted at agreeing with, seems to have no room left in the story to have any impact. The whole thing with CP0, Orochi and Vegapunk went nowhere. Kaido and Big Mom's declaration to find the ancient weapons doesn't seem to have any meaning to the story, tie-ins to lore or any sort of importance what so ever. Which reminds me Caribou apparently got an entire cover story dedicated to putting him in Wano...just so he could give Luffy some meat at one point in the story? Yeah that was totally necessary. It would be one thing if it was just this long list of seemingly dropped plot points that I rattled off the top of my head (meaning there is probably more I've forgotten) but a lot of the subplots have been so half-assed that they basically feel like they've been dropped as well. What the hell was the point of the whole Kanjuro flame demon thing? It literally accomplished nothing in the story other than briefly destracting Yamato...who just sat there and cheered on Momonosuke after Big Mom dispoed of him instead of going around and making trouble anyways. Sanji's Germa transformation plot was dropped so hard that I'm legtimately worried instead of being a future plot point it was just Oda's way of handwaving Sanji getting a power-up from Germa tech. The Drake and CP0 plotlines feel so half-assed and all over the place I can't even make out what the point of it all was. Which reminds me were we ever given a reason as to why Drake would expose his cover and help Law? If there is no reason behind that Oda is really losing it on making characters seem, well, in-character instead of just plot devices. Speaking of plot devices Ace was foreshadowed to be in Wano for 400 chapters...just to be a plot device that didn't add much to the plot other than become friends with Luffy quick schemes. I could, sadly, keep going but on practically every level of writing you can analyze on this arc is a fucking mess. Combined with the fact that Luffy's zoan awakening is completely different from other zoan awakenings, if there is any arc I could see Oda quietly dropping his old ideas of Zoan Awakenings from...it's this arc.

[@burninghammer4765]

One thing I want to touch on regarding awakenings is a popular theory going around that Zoan Awakenings require the user to die. This will explain why Luffy awakened when he did (am I the only one who expects the answer to be because it's cool and plot convinent?) and can work as an explination for why Kaido wants to die. First off that may explain why Kaido wants to die but it doesn't explain why he's a weeping alocholic. More imporantly however the Gorosei knew that Luffy had a Zoan fruit and yet ordered CP0 to kill him. That pretty much debunks the theory right there as there is no way they don't know about Zoan Awakenings. While still touching on awakenings I want to switch to something I will do with all three potential routes of that arc, which is to talk about the shortcomings of going this route. Which I guess means I'm not even a third of the way into writing this? Jesus. Anyways I want start with why I presumably don't like Zoan Awakenings. If Zoan Awakenings are simliar to what we saw in Impel Down, that implies that in exchange for a boost to offensive and defensive powers the users go into some kind of mindless rampage where they basically have animal-level intellect. Oda's strength as a battle shonen author lies in his ability to tie fights in with the broader emotional/narrative themes and create symbolic endings that tie tons of plot threads together. To me turning Kaido into a mindless rampaging Godzilla, while cool visually, just doesn't play into Oda's strength as a writer. He's good at the characterization, themes and plot aspect - not so much the panel flow, strategies and cool action pieces. With that in mind I would be fine with some ret-conning. I think a good scenario would be the different type of Zoan Awakenings having different attributes. Unfortunately the ones that explain why Kaido is waiting so long are the boring ones. The biggest issue for me is quite simple - having CP0 be the antagonist of Wano is a fucking terrible idea. I see so many people call them the "Kuma" of the arc - which is such a stupid comparison. For starters Moriah wasn't built-up to for hundreds of chapters as the strongest in the world, so having him get upstaged in his arc wasn't a big deal. Secondly there is a big difference between Kuma and a literal fleet of CP0 officers - Kuma is small enough to act as a bonus. He was only in the arc for like 2-3 chapters and his goal wasn't a fail state for the arc, meaning that it was easy for Oda to tack him onto the arc. A fleet of CP0 officers is not a group that can be dealt with that quickly and their end goal is a fail state of the arc, meaning they have to be actually defeated in a prolonged battle. This is less of a bonus round and more hastily sewing an entirely new arc and antagonist onto another arc at the last minute. And unfortunately CP0 just doesn't work as the final antagonist of this arc. Absolutely everything about Wano has been closely tied in with Kaido's character and Kaido's character alone. Oda has made absolutely no effort to tie in Big Mom or the World Governemnt into the broader Wano narrative and themes. To have either the Big Mom Pirates or the World Government supercede the Beast Pirates as the antagonist for the final stretch of chapters, especially the stretch of chapters the actually involves the people of Wano, reduces the emotional weight of the story beats that Oda would hit. The people of Wano finally rising after twenty years of submissiveness and fighting against Kaido even when they don't think they can win? Beautiful. Fighting against a bunch of nameless goons of the government after Luffy shows up and goes "oh hey guys we beat Kaido while you were sending lanterns into the sky"? Meh. Yamato leading the people of Wano against Kaido, showing the citizens of Wano breaking the cycle of blaming children and Yamato breaking the cycle of Onis being unable to befriend humans to Kaido's face? Beautiful. Yamato leading a bunch of people mob attacking some governemnt officals? Meh. Momonosuke confronting Kaido as the sptting image of Oden? Beautiful. Momonosuke confronting some dude as the spitting image of Oden? Umm OK. The story of a bunch of random CP0 officers fighting against the alliance and a bunch of citizens that have no relation to them just has no weight. I fail to see how people are manging to get excited over this. The emotional weight, the themes, the foreshadowing, the build-up...it's all centered around Kaido. If it isn't Kaido despite that...there just isn't much left. So that leaves us with the last two theories which are pretty closely tied together. That this is all a fake-out but with different endings in mind. A few chapters ago my order was as outlined above, with the same theory as you as the most likely scenario. Now I think your scenario has basically no chance of hapening and that the raid failure is the second most likely scenario after this just being the end of act 3. Before I explain why this chapter made such a drastic change I want to ask these things that I don't understand about your theory: 1. Why did Oda feel the need to do this fake-out? I think I already disporved the death=awakening idea, so what reason is there to go through all this shit instead of just having a good traditional One Piece battle? 2. If the entire Alliance is going to have to give it their all just to beat awakened Kaido...how in the world do you expect them to then proceed to defeat the Big Mom Pirates and the CP0 ships afterwards? We even have a scenario where Kaido's false defeat mirrors what happened to Big Mom, King and Queen. All of these were characters everyone expected to have Awakening who were suddenly blasted off to a different location before doing so. King and Queen even have the excuse of underestimating their opponent like Big Mom - Queen was defeated while doing something stupid and even at the end when King got cut he was saying Zoro was a "slightly strong" swordsman (though that's more of a tsundere thing I guess). We even have King and Kaido both getting a part of their body clipped (Kaido appears to have lost one of his horns while King has the top part of his wing clipped) further driving home the similiarties. I feel like if Kaido awakens the other three are pretty much guarranted. Making the question all the larger of how the hell they are supposed to win here. 3. How do you incorporate distinct acts into your theory? Seems like you're kind of imagining everything playing out as one scene but this is still act 3 of 5. If you're going to make a video on this you can ignore these questions. So what in this chapter made me go from putting raid fail at the bottom and a similiar theory of yours at the top to thinking the previous top theory is basically impossible? It's mainly two things. 1. Kaido's Flashback: I don't see any reason to believe that Kaido's flashback will continue soon. I've seen some people try to compare this to Oden's flashback but that's ignorging the context of Oden's flashback. The tease we got at the beginning of act 3 was used before the curtains raised, it was an attempt to set the scene and mood of the act. It's not something Oda would normally do without the act structure. On top of that Oda teased it because Oden's flashback was a massive flashback, like 14 chapters long. No way will Kaido's flashback even be half as long. The flashback even in it's brevity did give the impression of covering Kaido's whole life. It gave surface level answers to every question except why Kaido wants to die, which is fine since Kaido obviously isn't dead yet. And Oda is clearly, at the least, trying to make the reader beleive Kaido is defeated. Given all those things...don't you think it would be really awkward for Oda to suddenly spend even 2-3 chapters on a Kaido flashback? Like just with no additional contexutalization for re-starting the flashback for a character who Oda wants us to believe is defeated we are suddenly spending an entire chapter on 5 year old Kaido and his oni dad? It's just clunky and weird, doesn't fit the pacing of the story and doesn't really fit with what Oda's intentions seem to be. I think best case scenario we get either another brief 2-4 page montage teasing an Act 4 flashback or we get a brief page or 2 directly related to Awakening leading into a dramatic cliffhanger visual. I think Kaido's flashback will likely be split into three parts - 1. Yamato flashback done Law/Doflamingo style with Kaido having a flashback within the flashback, 2. More clarification on Kaido's character leading into/during the fight and 3. Final clarification as Kaido dies/loses.

[@burninghammer4765]

2. Momonosuke. I must say I was surprised at how little you had to say about this. You really downplayed how insane this was. Oda created the perfect situation for the perfect parallel to the hour of legends, even going so far as having Momonosuke aged-up and identical to Oden. He then spent like over half a year building it up and really druming it home that Momonosuke must do this! And then at the last minute he said...yeah nope and gave it maybe one page out of the entire chapter ALL TOGETHER. That is such a fucking insane level of anti-climax that I'm really shocked you didn't have any theories coming off of it. Like seriously I'm used to shitty anti-climaxes after reading this arc for the past year and even then I was shocked to read this. I find it very hard to believe that Oda wouldn't re-create the Hour of Legends after making such perfect set-up for it and basically telling us what he was doing with it. He created the set-up, he built up the anticipation and then he robbed as at the last moment. If the robbing us is just his end goal...then combined with the big punch that he knew would dissapoint people and the "let's just pretend Awakenings don't exist" in regards to Kaido I can only theorize that Oda is actively trying to piss off his fanbase. So if Oda isn't trying to fuck with us what is the end goal of this Momonosuke sub-plot? Well if Kaido is geting back up there isn't anything stopping him from just picking it back up and finishing what he started. I think Momonosuke will still get his hour of legends moment, just knowing that he already succeded at holding off Onigashima successfuly once paints things in a very different light. To me the set-up seems more likely now that he will get his moment of holding it up, but only long enough for people to get out of the way so that Onigashima doesn't actively crush a bunch of citizens. Combining those two points with the similiarties between Kaido being taken out with the other three characters that should be awakened, the fact that the Big Mom Pirates are much further ahead of the World Government fleet and should be arriving a lot earlier (when we saw the CP0 ship just approaching the waterfall Big Mom's ship was already nowhere to be found meaning they've sucessfuly climbed the waterfall for the third time), the Kabuki Act Structure and some of the other general arguments (I'll get to that later) I feel like the arguments for it are starting to vastily outweight the arguments against it. I'm gonna start by tackling the flaws in the false victory theory however, as I think those are also arguments for the raid failing. One of those is just time allocation. Even if we assume that a lot of the things I listed back when I was pointing out how many loose/dropped threads are in Wano will remain loose/dropped, even with that reductive view there are still so many things left do in the plot. Zoro vs. Grim Reaper, Kurozmi family plot (I doubt not burning Orochi to death was Kanjuro's finale), Apoo/Inbi, Tama, Yamato, Scabbards, Toki, Hiyori, involving the Flower Capitol in the fight, involving both Yamato and Momonosuke with them, kaido flashback, wano borders/lore importance, Big Mom Pirates (including that weird shit she said about part of the one piece being in wano), Caribou, CP0. This is not counting potentially dropped plotlines and ignorging stuff like King, Queen, Tobi Roppo. You're asking for all of these elements to play out in the middle of a high stakes final boss rush part of the storyline? Like I don't see how that would even be possible for Oda to juggle all these things without having any downtime out of battle. If Kaido awakens or flashbacks at the end of the next chapter...where the hell are you fitting in all this stuff? And how the hell are you doing it in a way that doesn't completely ruin the pacing of the story? I expected stuff like Zoro vs. Grim Reaper, Apoo, starting to involve the flower capitol having them react to onigashima, orochi, etc. to all conclude before Kaido's flashback. The more stuff you push behind Kaido's awakening the more impossible it gets for Oda to actually make this be the final section of the story. The story just has too many plot points to solve to do it all naturally in one last high-stakes rush of chapters.

[@burninghammer4765]

There's also other reasons to go against it. For example the citizens of Wano have been broken for twenty years now, having them successfuly rise up immediately to the fight as soon as asked in one night is pretty absurd. And that's ignorging the fact that, at least in Act 1 and 2, Oda made sure to let us know shit like Kaido being a deity, the higher class society living in the Flower Capitol still being wealthy, brain washing of children for the last 20 years, etc. It just doesn't really make sense for them to rise up and banish everyone in a few hours with so many years of ingrained defeat and brainwashing. I think it would have a lot more emotional weight if they did it AFTER facing yet another defeat and having time to actually process the new scenario they are in (especally for the actual Flower Capitol citizens - I would kind of like to see the Sumo Guy from Act 1 get a redemption arc and be on their side). This would also give Momonosuke and Yamato (and maybe Zoro) time to interact with them and fufill what's been set-up for their character arcs. I also think this ties in nicely with the themes that Oda set up but hasn't really circled back around on. Thriller Bark was focused on the value of the Straw Hat Crew as subordinates contrasting Moriah's view on subordinates. One of the things that the Straw Hats were stressing during their training right before the time-skip is that Luffy can't do everything alone and they want to be strong enough to help him - Usopp literally monologues these exact words. Combining that with all the focus on breaking wills and showing the alliance Luffy defeated, especially noting the parallels betwen Oden/Scabbards which is nine followers and a fallen leader - this seems kind of like the perfect set-up to finally pay-off those words. Hell right when this stuff all started in Punk Hazard we had Luffy saying he's not worried about betrayal because he has his crew! Which they responded by acting flattered and saying leave it to them! And as you mentioned yourself that Luffy will defeat Kaido not in a one-on-one but because his best asset as the candidate to be Joy Boy is his ability to bring people together is the best way to end the arc. Also I feel like people have a tendency to overlook how insanely undramatic Wano is. Go pull up a list of the chapter titles and try to remember each chapter - you will probably notice something insane. The only time we had a sustained dark tone with the alliance being pushed by the villians is 1014 - that is the only time in the entire raid that Oda managed to go a full 17 pages of putting pressure on the main characters without injecting some sort of hype or feel-good moment. And that was literally followed up by the most baffling line in the entire arc - Sanji telling Chopper to remember all those miracles in response to hearing Luffy was defeated. If that line wasn't trying to lull the readers into a false sense of secruity only to fucking break them later on - I have no idea what's going on in Oda's head. Is he really just an overrated formulaic author with no interest or ability to write unique arcs that is poking fun at himself? Call me crazy but I don't think the statement is true and I doubt that was his intention. Also this arc literally has a chapter called "I Can't Imagine Losing". I feel like people seem to forget how different the other arcs are. For instance in Alabasta we get tons of low points through out the arc to contrast every single high point in the series - that's how drama works. If you make a sports story you don't have the protagonist when every single game in a row while acting like his victory is only a matter of time without ever doubting himself. Even fucking Air Bud has the dog get kidnapped before the final game. In Alabasta we have - crew gets captured and taunted by Crocodile and left for dead, Sanji makes big save, Crocodile defeats Luffy, Straw Hats defeated Baroque Works, Crocodile is unchecked and about to kill Vivi and the king, Luffy returns, Crocodile wins, Luffy returns, Bomb about to kill everyone, Crocodile poisons Luffy...and only after that do we get the two emotional payoff moments with the bomb being handled and Luffy wining. You'll notice Oda was careful to create a constant ebb and flow of lows and highs. Now try to do that with the raid. You'll literally just have a bunch of highs all in a row. Unless Oda plans on building up to a bunch of lows all in a row, this is a decision that literally flies against the idea of basic writing. Which we just demonstrated that Oda knows from Alabasta. So what's the reason? I previously proposed that maybe Oda is rushing the arc so much that he's failing to create any remotely sustained low points in order for the high points to actually shine. But some of the new wave Shonen series also have this ADD pacing and they still manage to create tension and drama. I'm finding it incresingly hard to believe this isn't an intentional way to set up the biggest emotional downer of the series. Either way the fact that this tweet perfectly sums up Wano really needs to be addressed twitter.com/AJazzazui/status/1527526815362912256 Of course if things were that simple I would have been bigger on the raid failing last year. One of the biggest problems with the raid failing is that it doesn't really fit with Oda's general statements about the series ending soon. To be fair Oda said at Jump Festa 2003 that a Straw Hat would die in 2004 then took till late 2006 to burn the Going Merry (at Jump Festa 2004 he acknowledged it hadn't happened yet and then just kind of went "oh well"). So Oda is really, really bad at predicting timelines - even when predicting how long the current arc wiil last. Even in the infamous SBS he said the point of the statement was more about telling readers that the story is properly heading towards the end, so the point was less about the exact date or chapter number. To me then there are two major problems with the raid failing theory. 1). Creating a meaningful defeat. I touched on this in a previous post when I said that Kaido just knocking out Luffy again will be boring. I think any raid failure state where it's just "we can't beat Kaido!" "Well shit let's retreat and try again tomorrow" is garbage. There needs to be death, which is a bit of a problem. I would say there are four characters in Wano who have no chance of dying - Kin'emon, Momonosuke, Hiyori and Yamato. That's a big problem because I would also say these are the only four Wano characters people would care about dying. If Oda just tried killing one or two of the scabbards randomly, people would probably cheer about how it finally feels like a war instead of feeling like it's an emotional low. I think there are two ways it could work - one is mass death, like most of the scabbards aside from Kin'emon and Kiku (personal theory I won't waste time on). The other I've already touched on - kill Luffy. There is clearly something going on with his lifespan in relation to Gear 5 and his previous "death" so this feels like the one opportunity Oda would have to do it and all the themes are nicely aligned (it's even the Fire Festival!). The only problem is I have no idea how the revival section would work - he would need to be dead long enough for the raid to fail but obviously still revive afterwards? Would he revive in captivity? Would the alliance be fighting under the assumption he is dead while he is still alive? Would Oda just have Chopper or Usopp or someone run off with his body and he would revive after the raid had already failed and be in poor condition? I do feel like the life span thing is more set-up for Chopper to (eventually not immediately in this arc) cure it. Also you could question at this point, is this really something Oda would write? He did say at one of the Jump Festas that Luffy would soon learn he can't progress further without making sacrifices - still it is hard to imagine Oda going far enough to properly pull off this idea. 2). This one is easier for Oda to pull off, I just have no idea how to do it and felt I should acknowledge it. It will be very difficult for Oda to re-escalate the story into a war against the Beast Pirates without feeling like he's hitting the same story beats and not adding anything new to the table. This just takes some creativity, new themes, adding new elements to the plot - all stuff that Oda has shown the ability to do and is more up his aisle than the first point. But unlike the first point I have no fucking clue how to do it as I am not a creative writer. So I feel like it is certainly a major issue worth pointing out. Believe it or not but I had a ton more that I wanted to say but I'm kind of sleepy after typing this for two hours. Still if Act 3 ends next week I'll probably be mentally checked out of the series, so this might be the last time I really get to type about One Piece like this. Figured I wouldn't hold back. Ultimately, after thinking hard and typing this I have to acknowledge that the two issues I listed out above are major issues. I also have to acknowledge that in points like the lack of drama I am biased due to how hard it is to believe that Oda really spent 10 years building up the ultimate battle just to turn it into a feel-good romp against a mediocre pirate crew. With that in mind I have to acknowledge that I think this just being the end for Kaido has a higher chance than the raid failure. That said I definitely think the two new points against your theory, Kaido's Flashback and Momonosuke's Anti-Climax, push the raid failing ahead of the "wano will get good any minute I swear" theory. I got a feeling Oda might blue ball us with 1050 and not actually answer any questions but I think we'll see if Kaido's down by 1051 at least.

[@StrawHatJedi]

@@burninghammer4765 Your comments are very thoughtful as always and you brought up a lot of great, really interesting ideas. I'm gonna come back and respond with a longer post, but just wanted to leave a quick comment for now.

[@emperorluffy6001]

Yeah theres no way this is over. I feel like a lot of people who think it's over don't really care about the story and just want to move onto the next thing. They're not interested in the storytelling. They're just tired.

[@StrawHatJedi]

I can understand people who are weary from reading the battle and anxious to move into the endgame where we can get some deep lore revelations, but at the same time, I think the manner in which Luffy wins is so important. Declaring Kaido as the world's strongest is a major complication and that's why I initially suspected there was something more going on with Kaido and his DF. No doubt it seems Oda's ready for Luffy to be approximately Emperor level, but not at the very top of the scale.

[@tamidobi856]

omg here we go with the kaido "awakening" theory smh

[@carlpvnsem2875]

kaido awakening isnt a theory, it's guaranteed to happen

[@tamidobi856]

@@carlpvnsem2875There is no awakening, stop the cap 🧢

[@emperorluffy6001]

Right. Kaido subordinate Doffy had an Awakening but Kaido the actual boss somehow never achieved it despite having his DF for 40 years. You do realize how stupid that is right?

[@ReiseLukas]

@@emperorluffy6001 Awakenings are supposed to be ultra rare. The chances of even one of the Yonko having Awakened should be slim. This might be one of the reasons why Kaido as attempted Suicide. Mythical Zoan devil fruits may require death to Awaken

[@emperorluffy6001]

@@ReiseLukas Chances of the Yonkou having them are extra high exactly for that reason. Doffy said it was a matter of experience. So obviously the most experienced and significant plot relevant characters are going to have it. Theres no way 2 people with over 40 years of experience at the top of the pirate game haven't awakened their fruits.