 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything One Piece, and today we have some pretty well-checking questions to ask, because as part of our onslaught of reverie-related information, there is a lot of dread surrounding the fates of two characters in particular, those being Nefertari Vivi and Sabo, last name undisclosed. And that dread, unfortunately, is very warranted, as is subscribing to the Grand Line Review in order to keep up to date with all of the big news, as well as receive regular One Piece content uploaded straight into your YouTube feed. You see, I'd usually make some sort of quote-unquote joke to convince you to subscribe, but it doesn't really fit the tone of this video, given that it involves speaking about a prominent death in the series. So instead, I'm going to ask you to press the subscribe button to pay your respects to the deceased. That should work. And that's really the centre of everything we have here. We actually have two giant revelations that come to us courtesy of one big newsmorgans, one of which is that there was a death at the reverie, just flat out it is confirmed that someone has died. The other is that, in addition to this death, there was an attempted murder, emphasis on the word attempted, but these incidents would appear to be entirely unrelated. Or are they? But it is our very unfortunate duty to figure out who these events apply to, because whilst Dota has not revealed the answer to us at the time of this recording, there are two particular characters who are extraordinarily hinted at being Sabo and Vivi. And it gets pretty confusing to try and place the two especially in the anime adaptation, because they very sneakily added something in that muddles this event even more, which we will get into. But in case you're wondering why I've namedrop Sabo and Vivi in particular, well that will become clear shortly, but something that one piece fans have kept in mind for just over a year now were Oda's words at Jump Festa 2020, where he was discussing then current manga events, and then he said the following. Wano Country Ark is finally entering its last rush. I've drawn this arc precisely because I wanted to draw these scenes. And then Sabo, Vivi, Hancock, ah yes. And this time I've made that quote sound significantly less orgasmic than I did in the video about the warlords, but here Oda is pointing towards major, major developments with both Sabo and Vivi. Hancock as well, but I've already covered that side of things. But that's why we're going to have those two key characters in mind here. And in order to figure out this whole death and attempted murder slash assassination situation out, we're going to start with Sabo's side of the story. So Sabo infiltrated the Holy Land of Marijua along with the Revolutionary Army Commanders actually, along with three of them anyway. Karasu, Morley and Lindbergh. Bello Betty remained on Momoiura Island, which tells us quite a bit about this mysterious operation actually. If they didn't require Bello Betty's incredibly OP abilities, then it likely means that they were not aiming to start some sort of grand insurrection against the world government. You know, one thought would be freeing all of the slaves on Marijua and using them as a makeshift army in addition to the Revolutionary Forces. But as of right now, it looks as though the purpose of this action was purely to retrieve Batholomucuma, or at the very least, what was left of Batholomucuma. Now as for exactly why the Revolutionary Army chose to do this during the time when Marijua would have been heavily protected by the Marines is a different question, one of potential strategy, although I suppose it might also make it easier to slip into. It's high risk, high reward. And we're going to be focusing on the risk portion of that because there is a confirmed report that on the fourth day of the reverie, Sabo and the three commanders engaged in combat with both Fujitora and Ryokugu, so they fought directly against two admirals, which is almost never recommended. And I can't imagine that they had planned to do so. And whilst we don't know the exact outcome of this battle, we do know that it did not go well for Sabo's group, because when news was published, the Revolutionary Army members had a very shell-shocked reaction. Emporio Ivankov screaming that no, this could not be true, drag an attempting to remain calm despite his obvious state of distress, and koala even bursting into tears. However, the reaction that sells me the most on the Sabo death idea comes from the darn. In both the manga and the anime, she says something along the lines of, we only just found out he was alive, which would make a lot of sense if the newspaper is reporting him dead, you know, juxtaposition. Otherwise, it's just a very strange sort of thing to say. And with those reactions in mind, a very natural thought would be that the death that occurred during the reverie was Sabo. If you plug that into canon right here and now, everything makes some degree of sense, especially when we consider that Sabo and his group are very unlikely to be at the center of the other event, the murder attempt. Unlikely, but not impossible. So I must say things aren't looking too great for Sabo in this situation, but there are options obviously in which he does not die. One being that, just as Ivankov proposed, this news is fake. I mean, I do trust Big News Morgan's in this case anyway, because for all of his sensationalism, he is a journalist at his core, and he doesn't just, you know, make things up. There's always a basis for his outrageous headlines. But there is the potential that he has been purposely misinformed by one of his sources, because he was obviously not on marriage wire at the time, so this is not a firsthand account. And the other immediate argument I have in Sabo's favor is much more meta, and it's simply that I don't quite understand why Oda would go to all of the trouble to narratively resurrect Sabo, only to kill him again. And not only that, but kill him off-screen as well. To me, it would very much defeat the purpose of, you know, shoe-horning him back into modern one piece. However, I am obviously not Oda, and I have no idea what he has planned. At the same time, though, the issue I would have with Sabo not dying is surely that would mean he was captured instead. Which makes me real iffy, because that might set up a Marineford 2.0 with Sabo at the center instead of Ace. And that sounds, well, it sounds kind of not great. Then again, that is my personal opinion though, which holds no value whatsoever in uncovering the truth. What I do believe is that at this very moment right here and now, we are being led to believe that Sabo is the one who died, much more so than any other character. The majority of the evidence available points to him, and perhaps the world government wanted to cover it up because the Revolutionary Army were involved. At the same time, though, this could, and I think likely is, an easy red herring from Oda, drawing our attention to one direction whilst preparing to hit us over the head from another. So to shed some more light on this, let's now turn to our second side of the reverie coin, Nefertari Vivi. We do know that something happened with her or more accurately, the alabaster kingdom. Because upon returning to Fishman Island, Garp informed King Neptune and Princess Shirahoshi about this incident, after which point Shirahoshi expressed personal concern for Vivi in particular. And this incident would quite naturally fall into the murder attempt story. Because we're dealing with royalty here and someone may have tried to take the life of Vivi and or her father Cobra, who was a very important figure here as well. There is very, very good reason for the world government to want either one of them dead. In Vivi's situation, we have her ominous selection by Eam. When the Five Elder Stars asked which light Eam wanted snuffed out of the world, it would appear that Eam likely selected Princess Vivi, and that could have easily led to her attempted assassination. At the same time during the reverie, King Cobra was pretty severely pushing his luck, won by teaming up with King Riku to propose the abolishment of the Seven Warlord. But also because Cobra had stated his intentions to speak with the Five Elder Stars about the Poneglyphs actually, so he is a very curious cat. And the Five Elder Stars in turn became pretty wildly suspicious of Cat Cobra, thinking that he may have figured something out that they simply did not want him or anyone else to know, which is also a pretty fantastic motivation for murder. And at the moment I would say that Cobra is a far greater target than Vivi for this sort of attempt. We now run into a problem though, a problem that was caused very specifically by the anime. Episode 957 included a very curious scene that was not, I repeat was not, featured in the manga. And it actually has pretty astounding implications. So if you watch the episode you might remember seeing this little girl running around looking very very confused because the people of her nation are in a state of despair. And as it turns out this little girl is from Alabasta and we know that for a confirmed fact, because when we see a wider shot of the city you can very clearly see the Alabana Palace in the background. It is an unmistakable piece of architecture. So this is the city of Alabana and after reading the news the capital citizens are crying, they're on the ground in anger and they've largely just given up in a state of despair. And they go to great lengths to point this out because it's very very similar to the Saba reaction. And if we plugged into canon right now that either Vivi or Cobra had been killed then this all makes perfect sense. I really don't think that the citizens of Alabasta would have had this kind of reaction in response to a murder attempt, because there is genuine loss and grief in this scene. Something that would not exist without the death by their princess or their king, both of which were dearly loved almost universally. So I really don't think we can be so quick and firm to state that Saba was the one who died at the reverie because this scene certainly says otherwise. However, this does bring up the question of canon. Like I said before, this scene was not in the manga. We 100% absolutely do not visit Alabasta. We don't see any reactions from Alabastan citizens and we get nothing from that part of the world in general. So this is actually a really wild situation where the anime has taken or been given creative license to veer away from the source material. That or they've been given information that we don't currently have access to and it's being used in a very strategically intriguing way. So I will repeat that this scene is technically not canon. However, we also cannot dismiss it. The one or error of the anime has been a very interesting ride to say the least. And there has been at least one occasion where the anime has actually managed to do the impossible and spoil manga readers. I won't go into what that was because that manga event still hasn't been animated yet. But what I will say is that if you look closely at the openings, particularly over the top, then you'll know exactly what's coming. And at the time that had not yet been revealed even in the manga. But it is another confirmed sign that Toei in general are now working much closely with Oda's future plans in mind. Which in this case is being used as a filler scene. Something to pad time because adapting one chapter to one episode doesn't really work out all that well. Except the stroke of brilliance here is that this is not filler if it is true. And it's actually quite a potentially valuable nugget of information for manga readers as well, which is very much why the one or anime is worth watching for everyone. I'm definitely getting a bit off topic now though, but that's because this one anime scene has actually thrown into question the primary conclusions of the reverie. Taking the anime telling of events, we are given equal cause to believe that either Sabo died or one of Cobra or Vivi died. And I'll also say that things might not also be that cut and dry. There's nothing to say that two of these figures kind of died. Especially because we were left on an even bigger cliffhanger, because the last time we saw Big News Morgans he was being contacted by King Waple, who also had some sort of scoop to provide him with. Which to be clear this information was provided to Morgans after he found out about the death and the murder attempt. So there is a third currently unknown to us piece of news that is known to the general public, which is why there is a terrible, terrible potential in existence that could see both Sabo and a member of Nefertari royalty being killed. But if I had to put down some money on who it was at this point, I think I'd be at a bit of a loss, but narratively I want to say Cobra. He makes the most sense from a story perspective because his death would see Vivi need to rise and become a true leader of alabaster. You know the next generation stepping up. And also look I don't quite know how to say this nicely, but Cobra is a very disposable character. Yes his death would be sad, but not quite the earth shaking event of Vivi or Sabo. And the large majority of you seem to agree with the Cobra idea as well, because in a poll I conducted on the channel, well over 60% of respondents believe that this old man has met his unfortunate demise. But it would also leave room for a murder attempt to have taken place in regards to Vivi as well, with both occurrences now being referred to combined as the alabaster incident. Which once again makes sense until we think about Sabo again and go, well, why would the Revolutionary Army react like this to any news about him that did not involve his death? There's just so much shock and grief within them that I do find it difficult to explain in any other way. Unless we have a much more convoluted situation at play, something which really requires us to abandon Occam's Razor and delve into more sprawling theoretical explanations. For example, one thought I've seen is that the world government and by extension Big News Morgans could be framing Sabo for the murder of someone, saying that the Revolutionary Army broke into the reverie and murdered say Cobra, when in reality it was the world government who killed him. In that case, the reactions of the Revolutionary Army would also make sense, sort of, except I feel that they would dismiss the accusation out of hand because they know Sabo wouldn't do such a thing and that the world government does have some degree of control over the news being spread, so that's pretty untrustworthy for an organization aimed at taking them out. And it still wouldn't make sense with Dadan's words about having only just found out that Sabo was alive. Like, why would the bandits exclaim that in response to seeing a report that he'd murdered someone? It's not a natural response at all and the simplest explanation for this particular scene is that the newspaper is reporting that Sabo was dead. Whether that information is accurate or not is a different discussion. But there really are endless slot paths you could go down if we abandon the idea of simplicity, which we may need to do because I can't reconcile why Oda would just kill Sabo. Although I would say that killing either Sabo or Vivi is a magnificent way for Luffy to properly set his sights on destroying the world government, potentially even teaming up with the remainder of the Revolutionary Army if it was Sabo. But I think the situation at hand is that we're being toyed with here. Both Oda and Toei giving us some very dramatic red herrings to cause some hype and just salivation for more and more information. In the end, I find it very difficult to believe that he would either kill Sabo or Vivi off-screen, so I'm going to stick with Cobra but this is one piece, which is always liable to leave us in shock and all are doing the unexpected at every turn and this is no exception. It could also turn out to be a completely left field solution that nobody has thought of, which does happen. But until then we shall all remain in a state of dread, wondering which of our characters has very unfortunately departed this world. But what do you guys think? Please do leave your thoughts in the comments below or even join my Discord server and if you'd like to see more videos like this then please do go and check out some of my other content or even subscribe to the channel for more glorious One Piece business uploaded straight into your YouTube feeds. But for now this has been the Grand Line Review and I'll see you next time.