chapter 0 and the waaaarrr

one piece stuff:

Chapter 0 was pretty awesome but still pretty much a tease. I know, I should have expected that. It's just to build hype for the movie (btw, mission accomplished!!!!) but I hoped we'd get a lot of juicy details on the One Piece mythos too. And we did. Just not juicy enough. Like, we saw Roger's pirates engage Shinki's in an all-out battle, but we didn't actually see how either of them fought. And we learned about some guy named Admiral Kong, and we learned that there was a chief warden before Magellan pretty recently, but we didn't see these guys. And we saw Sengoku fight! Almost. But someone threw that battleship, geez.

We did learn a lot, though. Garp's turned down promotions before, implying that he's probably equal in power with Sengoku. Plus, Shinki has been hyped up from "guy who flew out of impel down" to "on par with the pirate king". That's insane. Actually, the results of Roger vs. Shinki is sorta strange. A "weather incident" let Roger win? To me... that suggests Dragon's involvement. Why would Dragon help them? Maybe... Garp is Roger's father too, and Dragon and Roger are brothers, making Ace and Luffy cousins!!!... unlikely. Well, still more likely than the "Crocodile is a woman in chapter 0 and Ivankov made him a man". That's just silly I mean shup.

Uh what else... really impressed with the number of background characters shown way back in Buggy's flashback that show up again in Roger's crew for battle. And all the designs of the younger characters look awesome. Looking at Mihawk and Doflamingo, you get the sense of how their appearances evolved naturally as they grew up. It seems so in line with their characters. And all the scenes of the characters were nice. Makes me hopeful that Gaimon will get involved with the story again, and Kuina and Zoro's dojo.

So yeah. Pretty badass.

Almost as badass was chapter 565, though, which to me seems to bringing the whole war arc to it's final thrust. Luffy is up against the three admirals. There is obviously no way he's going to win it. Whitebeard has played his final trump, whatever that is. The Supernova reacting to it all makes me think that the focus is going to shift very soon. A few people have theorized that they'll show up at the war, but that's a bit contrived - plus, powerful as they are, I'm not sure they could do much good at this point. I think their departure shows how a new age is about to begin and the ramifications of the war will start to have their effect.

At this point, I'm kind of skeptical that Whitebeard will pull this one off, even though I've been supporting this possibility all along. He'll still do some more major damage, though. But I'm still thinking it's high time we see some third party involvement here. I don't think it'll be the supernovas, but Blackbeard's promised something pretty crazy and there's still a whole other Yonkou (Kaidou and Shanks are fighting but who knows about the last guy) that would probably have some interest in this.

So yeah. Awesome. Awesome awesome awesome. My only concern is this: if Movie 10 is canon, does that mean that the manga will no longer provide 100% of the canonical adventures? And if Movie 10 isn't canon, does that mean that canonically, Shinki escaped and had this awesome plan but then just did nothing? Or will Movie 10's story appear in the manga in some form? Also, if it is canon, does that mean that the manga and/or anime will have to get to the point that it takes place in chronologically before it comes out? Because that means reuniting the crew and stuff....

well whatever.