Manga: No Chapter This Week (SPOILERS!)

SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!

Time to take bets! Speaking of! Bet on Viz for your One Piece Manga!

Hi guys, as some of you may know the author of One Piece Eiichiro Oda is unwell, so this weeks chapter isn't happening. I hope he gets well soon and I hope it isn't anything serious. Anyways its time to recap whats been happening in the last few chapters. Shhh...spoilers are ahead (that was for my fellow Doctor Who fans).

After we went through the long flashback explaining the Fishmen's hatred of Humans as well as the tragic deaths of Queen Otohime and Fisher Tiger, we returned to the present as Jinbei tried to apologise to Nami for all the suffering we must've felt. She forgives Jinbei as Nami gets some nice character development and learnt that not all Fishmen are bad. After this, Hodi unveiled his plans to take over as ruler of the Ryuuguu Kingdom going as far as a threatening attempt to kill King Neptune (and eventually the 3 princes) through execution in order to lure Princess Shirahoshi out. This is because she has a powerful haki which allows her to summon powerful sea beasts which her ancestor supposedly had. Luffy is prepared to go fight Hodi but Jinbei stops him as it is too dangerous for him going as far as having a fight with each other.

Later on we see Jinbei and Shirahoshi going to confront Hodi (when they get captured easily) so we don't know what happened between these times yet as a result the location of the Straw Hats is unknown except for Zoro, Usopp and Brook who were captured by Hodi's crew and locked in a cage to be left for dead in a room filling with water. Back to the villains, Hodi has now become so enraged partly due to his abuse of steroids as well as his true anger inside that he has now become more powerful (and can also command giant sea beasts to his will) as well as becoming albino. He reveals to everyone how he was the one who truly killed Queen Otohime, due to her interfernace with the humans and his personal annoyance of her.What makes this even more surprising is that Shirahoshi apparently already knew about it. On top of all this shock, the other crazy villian Vander Decken has thrown the HUMONGOUS ship the Noir directly towards Shirahoshi which will take out half of the island.....DAAAAMN.

Pretend Luffy is there to help with the question at the end.

Here are my thoughts, this is clearly focusing on the villains. While I do admit that this section of the story is actually pretty interesting, most of us (myself included) were expecting to see how much the Straw Hats have grown in these last 2 years that have passed, both in terms of behaviour as well as each of their own abilities. While we have seen bits peppered through this part of the story and its no doubt leading to a big epic battle to show this off, I feel like its taking a little too long. You could argue that this happened in the past of the series too but I expected something different thats all. Some people absolutely HATE this part of the story just because its slow, I complain too but we DID just come off a huge battle in terms of Marineford even if that was quite a while ago, so maybe I'm asking too much but if you want to stick with your opinion thats fine.

So that about wraps this segment up, hopefully Oda should be getting better soon and the story should be getting a little stronger. While we wait for the next chapter to be released lets have a debate in the comments; which Straw Hat do you think will fight each New Fishman Pirates member? Please post your debates and other comments below. Thanks guys and have a great week!