You know what else is good? One Piece on Weekly Shonen Jump!
Summary
Caribou's men take down the factory. (Cover story)
Block D battle begins.
Team Nami defeats Giolla.
Doflamingo defeats Law and reveals he is a Celestial Dragon.
Thoughts
Oda dips his pen to do some more world building in this chapter that many people have been wanting for a long time. This time he did it by revealing that Doflamingo is a Celestial Dragon in one simple panel.
Now that we know Doflamingo is or was a Celestial Dragon, it really explains how he is able to get away with a lot of things and how much pull he has within the World Government. I am pretty sure the slave trade is something that shouldn't be happening but is because certain people in the Government are turning a blind eye. Then mention in a previous review, a Warlord may not have that much pull within the World Government.
As for the backstory, it looks like Oda is giving us an explanation as to how Doflamingo took over Dressrosa and the reasons why we have the Celestial Dragons. Do we have a case of a bastard child of the Celestial Dragons taking the spot that the ancient royals rather not touch? This is a big reveal that brings up a lot of questions as to why did the Nefertari Family refuse to move Marijoa? Did it involve the Poneglyph that is deep within the sands of Alabasta?
It is nice to see that Brook, Chopper, Momonosake and Nami got out of that mess. Giolla has one powerful ability that makes it almost impossible to fight back. Brook had to be cunning to overcome her and in the end it was her vanity that made her lose. I did question if Brook really did turn traitor because it did looked out of character of him. I guess he is willing to do anything to make sure that Luffy will succeed and that included faking to turn coat to save his friends.
Lastly, Oda has been hammering it into us lately about how the sins of our grandparents shouldn't affect their children. I believe this is the third time this arc? This shouldn't be a complaining point but it has been something we have been seeing a lot and I want to see how Oda uses this cliche.
Oda made a great chapter here and I am glad that we are getting some pieces for this arc coming together. Information is always wonderful to have before hitting the action. I just wish we were moving a bit faster towards the climax but based on what is going on, we still have a long way to go. The fighting has just begun in Block D and the Straw Hats are still scatter about.
Now that we know that Doflamingo is a Celestial Dragon, I wonder how many of you guys saw that coming? I did based on what I stated a few reviews ago. Did you? Leave a comment and tell me if you did.
Until next time true believers!
If Doflamingo is currently a Celestial Dragon, then I don't think he has nearly as much pull as the other ones have. The perks and pull that he has seem to stem more from being one of the Seven Warlords of the Sea than a Celestial Dragon/Tenryuubito/World Noble/Did I miss any other names?
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I think he was able to get away with running the Human Auction House partly because he was a Warlord, and partly because the World Nobles love slaves and the World Government will bend over backwards to accommodate them. Other Warlords may have been able to do the same, at least in terms of being able to get away with human trafficking without legal consequence (I mean that the other Warlords are able to get away with pretty hefty crimes that other people would have been thrown in prison for, not that other Warlords have been buying and selling slaves).
But I'm sure many OP fans are predicting that Doflamingo has near omnipotent pull in the World Government and is able to call in an Admiral whenever he likes (and probably predicting that he called in Admiral Issho) because he is a Noble. But I wouldn't go that far. Like I said, I don't think he has nearly the pull and the absolute political power that we are knee-jerkingly (?????) expecting him to have.
Let's look at what we've already known about Doflamingo even before he had his first line of dialogue: he's one of the Seven Warlords of the Sea. Now we all know the benefits and responsibilities of being a Warlord, and if Doflamingo was just a pirate with Celestial Dragon-sized benefits then he wouldn't need to put up with the latter in order to obtain the former. He wouldn't NEED to be a Warlord, but he is. And we see that being a Noble didn't grant him innate benefits and pull within the World Government despite being a pirate; he had a very large bounty in the past. So the World Government very greatly and very publicly wanted this man dead. That's pretty much the opposite of having pull within the World Government. Even him being secretly BFFs with the Five Elder Stars wouldn't make sense as we see that the World Government has the power to cancel or not issue bounties even against the wishes of the Marines (shown in the case of the escaped Level 6 prisoners and how Fleet Admiral Sengoku ordered the issuing of bounties only for the order to be overruled). So if Doflamingo were buddies with the most politically powerful five men in the world, then the Marines would be having their ships recalled every time they went to arrest him, rather than issuing posters offering over 300,000,000 berries to any random person who walks in with his head.
This is further shown by his reaction to Law's blackmail. If Doflamingo had the pull that a Noble has, then why would he even care about Law's demand? Why would he care about losing his status as Warlord if he could just call in an Admiral any time he wanted? But we see that, for the first and so far only time in the 720+ chapter manga series, Doflamingo actually loses his cool and almost freaks out when faced with the possibility of losing his Warlord status. Which means he needs not only the ability to engage in piracy without consequence, but the backing of the Marines to protect him (from the wrath of an angry Kaido, I would imagine. It's probably the only real threat he would ever face. Oh, and the legal consequences of invading and conquering a World Government member nation. We saw in the Alabasta arc that the World Government does frown on such things, understandably). He may have more pull than the other Warlords, but the bulk of his power comes from his status as a Warlord, not his Donquioxte lineage.
Hell, even his alias as "Joker" shows his limited Noble-based pull within the World Government. If he were able to get anything he wanted at any time, like the other World Nobles, why would he have to create an alias to protect his identity and keep the world (and the authorities) from knowing that he was pretty much the top dog in the Underworld? A Noble would have their activities as an Underworld Broker ignored by the authorities (just as the other Warlords have had their piracy and many other crimes ignored). "Joker" is a huge attempt by Doflamingo to HIDE his identity.
ReplyDeleteSome people may say that the contraband he deals with must be so deadly that even a World Noble would be pursued by the Marines for dealing in it, but that doesn't work as an explanation. The Nobles' dirty laundry isn't so secret that the World Government can hide it (like it is for the Warlords). They murder innocent people in the streets in broad daylight. Not a single Warlord has ever been seen killing an innocent person or Marine, not in the middle of a crowded battlefield or indirectly through a secretive organization of bounty hunters or from a ship hidden in a supposedly haunted part of ocean, but in BROAD DAYLIGHT IN FRONT OF DOZENS AND DOZENS OF PEOPLE. So the idea that Doflamingo has to hide his identity as an Underworld Broker from the Marines simply because of the contraband he deals with is so bad doesn't hold water if he has the ability to murder people in the streets in broad daylight without legal action.
Even the amazing Noble-sized pull he needed to pull off tricking Law shows how little Noble-sized pull he actually had. If it were any other World Noble, an Admiral would have been called in right away. Doflamingo could have just called Marine HQ, told them the whole story, and demanded an Admiral or three come down to support him. Instead, he goes to great lengths to not just protect his status as Warlord, but also to hide his identity as Joker from the World Government. His deception goes so far that he even tricks the MARINE FLEET ADMIRAL, which would be one of the top people at his beck and call if he had the pull of a Celestial Dragon.
Don't get me wrong, he has some amazing connections to have been able to pull off that deception. But he either has someone in the media or someone who can intimidate the media into reporting the story that he needed them to report. We know he didn't ask the Marines for help in this because they were fooled too (even Fleet Admiral Akainu/Sakazuki), and we can heavily assume that he didn't ask the Five Elder Stars for help because we know that they can just call up the Marines and tell them to ignore Doflamingo's crimes. It makes me actually wonder about CP0. Just who do they answer to exactly, and just how much autonomy do they have? Certainly any of the other Cipher Pol cells could have planted a fake news story after all. Why CP0?
I could be wrong. We aren't done with the Dressrosa arc and we haven't heard Doflamingo's backstory. We don't know that much more about him now than we do back in Jaya when he was an inconsequential background character not-killing Bellamy the Hyena. Perhaps he is a Celestial Dragon at this very moment and can call in an Admiral-strike and do whatever he wants because he's a Celestial Dragon. But then Oda's gonna have some splainin' to do.
But hey, that's just a theory. A One Piece Theory!.........Sorry, I was watching Game Theory on Youtube a little while ago.
First off, good reference to Game Theory. I have been dabbling into their stuff recently so I felt that was coming.
DeleteYou bring up good points and correct that we still need more information. I think what will help clear up what is going on is what the Elder Stars' response to Sakazuki. I would say that Doflamingo would have enough pull as a World Nobel to be able to call on CP0 and run fake news stories. Remember that Law was surprise when Doflamingo reveal what he did to trick Law. If I remember correctly, Law said something along the lines that a Warlord wouldn't be able to pull something like that.
My best response is that we will find out that the World Government didn't know his lineage until after he got his bounty or he was a runaway Celestial Dragon. I still find his epithet as "Heavenly Demon" strange. Though, I am basing this upon the Japanese translation for the Celestial Dragons.
I think he was able to use some family connections to call in CP0. I obviously could be wrong, but I don't think the Five Elder Stars were involved. Otherwise, Doflamingo would have known that he could just call them up and they would have just called up Sakazuki and told him to send over some Admirals with no questions being asked, and also if anything happens that Doflamingo is under no circumstances to lose his Warlord status. Instead, we had Doflamingo pull a deceptive tactic that tricked even Sakazuki.
ReplyDeleteLike I said before, it makes me wonder who CP0 answers to, or at least how independent they are. I know that in real life, the CIA does things that even the President doesn't know about or is minimally aware of. Perhaps it's the same thing here. CP0 has been said to be the "strongest of the Cipher Pols". I wonder if that is supposed to mean most independent and secretive, considering that the Cipher Pols are actually civilian intelligence agencies and not ninja assassin units as the Enies Lobby arc would lead us to believe.