Manga: Chapter 747 (SPOILERS)

SPOILERS

Reading One Piece on Weekly Shonen Jump is pretty kick butt.

Summary
Doflamingo meets with his officers.

Franky heads towards the factory.

Team Luffy is confronted by some of Doflamingo's henchmen and Fujitora.

Pica begins his rampage.

Thoughts

This was an impressive chapter when reading it for the first time. It basically raised the stakes even even for Luffy and the gang. Things are pretty harsh for them and the deck is not in their flavor. They have the whole country against them and not many options. If Luffy doesn't succeed then things will be bad for them and basically everybody on the island.

Upon rereading it a few times, not much happen. The crew ran around. Doflamingo talked to his people. If anything, the only big things, besides Pica coming from the mountainside, was that Franky is still alive and kicking.

I must commend Oda for the beautiful set up for Franky . In just using a few panels, we can figure out what happen to Franky when he fought against Senor Pink's team. It looks as if Franky had ran out of cola and was unable to fight. He may have been able to kept on battling them but without his fuel source, Franky had to brace for the flood of attacks.

Then the best part is that Franky is the one who is will destroy the factory. Oda has been foreshadowing this for chapters and just now has it become clear. Of course, Franky has been saying he will but it was becoming unlikely with each passing chapter because of him being knocked out. Now it looks as if it has been confirmed that Franky will destroy the factory with his laser attack. This comes after Doflamingo claiming that the Smile Factory will be safe due to it being made out of SeaPrism Stone. It looks like Oda is foreshadowing a surprised Doflamingo as the devious Warlord is setting himself up for failure once again.

Doflamingo is so confident that only Devil Fruit Users have the power to destroy the Factory that he didn't even consider somebody like Franky to exist. If nobody is there to guard the Factory then it looks as if this part of the operation is going to be easy to accomplish for Franky.

A few other things to notice is Fujitora's decision to go after the Luffy-Law Pirate Alliance. He claims that he wants to protect the people and has made strive to stop some of the Parasite String infected people but he is still adamant in going after Luffy and Law. Clearly Doflamingo is the source of the madness that has taken over the kingdom.

His logic is that it would do no good to remove Doflamingo from the Warlords as it will just repeat the cycle of putting horrible people into the organization. He is correct there but it makes no sense to go after Team Luffy who haven't tried to hurt civilians. As seen in the panel below, Zoro even questions if he should attack the ones who are shooting at them.

This seems all really strange for the blind Admiral. He is a mysterious figure who is blinding us with his logic. I can only  guess that he has some sort of plan. This may involve using Luffy, Law and Zoro to get close to Doflamingo for an attack against him. Then again, maybe he wants to eliminate one threat at a time and right now that is Luffy and gang.

Lastly, lets talk about Doflamingo's crew. They all seem to be close as each one of them consider the other to be family. This is even more obvious by how Doflamingo considers his own crew as his  family and will hurt anybody that may laugh at them. He would treat everybody outside of his  family as disposable but the people in his crew he won't harm and is kinder towards.

This is rather different compare to previous villains. This idea of Doflamingo's crew as family almost mirrors Luffy's idea of his crew.  What is even scarier is that both captains will go to great lengths to do anything to protect and defend their crew. We have seen the things Luffy would do for his friends and you can see some hints of that during Doflamingo's meeting with his crew. This will be rather interesting to see later when Doflamingo's men are beginning to be taken out one by one.

I had to use this scene for the review.

This is also rather interesting to see this dynamic as Doflamingo's crew is the few pirate crews we have seen in the New World. So far it looks like all of the pirates crews in the New World have a tight dynamic and almost see each other as family in some form or way. Whitebeard's crew saw their captain as their father. Big Mom's crew all call their captain "Mom". Finally, we see this similar interaction with Doflamingo being called "The Young Master". Maybe this idea of family is what keeps crews together and could be the reason why Moria never made it far in the New World. If this is the case then the Straw Hats have a good chance in going far. That is if they can get out of Dressrosa.

I would like to see things get done soon. I was thinking once Usopp knocks out Sugar that we would be done building up. Instead, Oda continues to build up the tension which would usually be good but instead I feel like we are in neutral. Hopefully with Giant Stone Pica looming over Dressrosa means that we can get to chipping away a Doflamingo's scheme.

Until next time true believers!