 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything one piece. And today we have a review of episode 901, charging into the enemy's territory, Bokoratown, where officials thrive. And I'll say this first and foremost, I do not have a lot of great things to say about this episode. It was probably my least favorite of the Wano era thus far. And so if you're one of those people who despise warranted criticism and just want me to stroke the giant cat-peen of Toei, well then this is your cue to probably stop watching. Now with that out of the way, I will say that this episode is not a complete disaster. There is still some good stuff. The animation is fine for the most part and the art style continues to hold a shiny new appeal, amongst other things. It's primarily about the content itself because I'm really starting to get the feeling that Wano is slipping back into the classic lazy filler one piece days. And I hate that because we started out so, so strong, adapting like 10 pages per episode but extending that in such a compelling way. And that just it, well, it didn't happen this week. I mean, part of it happened. I accomplished exactly 10 pages of adaptation but honestly, it felt like even less because some of that filler insert just made it feel stagnant. And you know what? Let's just get straight into it, Batman. Look, I had problems with how his stuff was wildly extended last week but this episode takes things to a whole new level. For so much needed context, in the manga Batman is a nobody. He is a tiny bit of flavor who appears in four or five, maybe six panels of the most, firing a couple of barrage of arrows, one blocked by Zoro and one completely disregarded by Zoro and Luffy. And then he just disappears because he's a throwaway character, just a bit of wacky fun, really. He most certainly does not have this magical infinite amount of arrows and he absolutely cannot block a punch from Luffy coated in Armament Haki. I mean, actually not only did he block said punch but in this episode, he actually managed to repel Luffy. Luffy, Monkey D. Luffy, captain of the Straw Hat Pirates, trained by Silver's Ray Lee and the person who defeated the undefeatable Charlotte Kata Kuri. He was bested by one of the lowest ranking members of the Beast Pirates possible. And you know what? Not only that, but Batman managed to hold off Zoro at the same time. In fact, if we go with the anime's retelling of these events, Batman legitimately posed more of a threat to Luffy and Zoro than Hawkins did. And this, this is actually ridiculous. We have two members of the worst generation entirely incapable of dealing with an obese man with wings coming out of his arse and to make matters worse according to the anime, Batman actually kind of let them escape. Whereas in the manga, Zoro and Luffy actually just plain ignore him. Viewing him is not worth the time to stop and moved forward to save Tama. Leaving Batman in the obscure dust where he belongs. And this is probably where anime defenders will pipe up and say, dude, shut up, it's adding to the story. But it really doesn't. All this scene does is place an artificial roadblock preventing us from getting to the real story by powering up Batman to the point where his existence just makes no sense. In terms of story, character development, world building, whatever you want, this contributes a grand total of nothing. And then the next argument is going to be, well, the anime needs to do this. Or they'll catch up to the manga. Once again, no, no, they don't. The anime and its production partners choose to do this as part of their business model. For the last 20 years, they have been intent on serving one piece content all year round to the point where they were glad they serve you utter crap just to keep it up rather than switching to a seasonal model like every other modern shonen property. And Wano was supposed to change this. It was marketed as a new life for the one piece anime. But instead of that, it looks like in the future all will be getting his stuff like watching Gazelle man breathe heavily for 53 seconds. Which of course, to be fair, adds an incredible amount of depth through the story and the character. We needed that entire 53 seconds of heavy breathing. And I'm personally shocked that the manga didn't dedicate at least a full page to this moment. But you know what? I guess that's just over rushing through the series like the madman he is. But like I said, this episode was not a complete disaster. And in fact, even with the utterly unbelievable Batman scene, the first half did feel quite well paced. Things only started to slow down after the eye catches. And I did appreciate kicking off the episode with that energy because it makes the more subdued second half more natural to fall into. And something else I quite liked was how they introduced Holden more specifically with the fake out with the giant lion. In the manga, you do see a lion silhouette but it's, how do I put this? It's nothing special. It's clearly small and like tucked away on the side of a panel somewhere. It's not particularly intimidating. However, Tama encountering this lion was just beautifully done. The lion looked phenomenal. And I think it gave the audience a good reason to feel the fear that Tama was feeling. At least until the comic will reveal anyway. Which speaking of another great moment was the lion punching Holden in the balls. Well, more specifically when the lion realized that Holden's balls are also his own balls. That moment had me laughing out loud in the manga and the anime accomplished that as well. It was a very nicely done piece of comedy. None of this was really good enough to save the episode though. Like last week was a 50-50 mixture of good and bad but this week was pretty firmly in the negative. There's too much filler, too much unbelievable filler specifically. And actually, you know what? This has been creeping up on us for a while but the recaps are gradually getting longer and longer as well. This week's recap was almost a minute and a half long which serves no real functional purpose considering that next to nothing actually happened in the previous episode. It's just filler and it would not surprise me if that recap kept slowly elongating to the point where we're looking at two minutes perhaps even more. And that's more or less all I have to say. A very disappointing week from my perspective but if you enjoyed the episode then I am thrilled for you. It's always nice when people let me know that they actually liked it because it gives me hope that the anime is doing some form of good in the world. I've just, look, I've seen this all before. This episode was chock full of the same old crap that Toei had been spewing for well over a decade now and it is convincing me that there is no viable solution other than making one piece seasonal. Half the amount of episodes a year would give us the same if not more progress and allow the manga six whole months to get further ahead during the seasonal break. I mean, that's how you would do it if you were concerned in any way about artistic integrity of your series but if all you wanted is more money which to be fair, Toei Shuisha and Fuji TV are all businesses so that is the prime driving factor then you just keep doing this I suppose. That pretty much does it for episode 901. 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