 Somewhere in this video, there is a hidden message. I'm not going to tell you where or what, but rest assured, it is definitely lurking somewhere. Hello and welcome to the ground line review your source for everything One Piece. My name's Liam, I'm a big fan of coriander and if you're not, then we're going to have problems. But today we are here to dissect and dismantle a topic that arises extraordinarily frequently, being the concept of the lurking legend of One Piece. Now, if you've never heard this term before, then congratulations, I suppose. It probably means you don't spend too much time involved in online discourse and you've got your own thing going on. Good on you. But in that case, you will not have heard this title stated whilst reading the manga or watching the anime alone because it's a term that comes exclusively from extended media. Specifically a message written directly by the hand of one Etcher Oda, claiming that we would be introducing a lurking legend of the One Piece world. A statement that sent some very legit white beard-esque shock waves throughout the fan base at the time, which we are still dealing with to this day. Because ever so intriguingly, despite the fact that this statement was made in late 2017, to this day, we still have no solid confirmation on who this lurking legend is. And as a result of this here mystery, whenever a new character of some degree of importance is introduced, they are immediately branded as the long-awaited lurking legend of One Piece. A good example of this would be Kozuki Oden. As soon as his flashback began, the peaceful beach of the One Piece fandom was engulfed in a storm of Oden is the lurking legend tsunamis. And this has also happened with other newly introduced characters such as Rockstee, Zabeck and Eem. It's also been retroactively applied to characters we've already met such as Kaido and Edward Weevil. And then as usual, things get really, really weird. And now there's even a theory that the lurking legend is in fact Zoro. And you know, I'd like to think that I'm a very open-minded person, but I'm not that open-minded. In any case, we now have a mystery to solve and a lot of crazy thoughts to debunk in our quest to identify the lurking legend of One Piece. And to begin, we are going to indulge in a quick round of lurking Luffy, a very simple minigame, the rules of which are as follows. Luffy is being a creep. And he has decided to lurk behind one of the following objects and is going to be your job to guess which object Luffy is lurking behind. Now, should you guess incorrectly, then your legally mandated penalty will be to subscribe to the Ground Line Review. Also resulting in consistent injections of One Piece culture administered straight into your YouTube feed. And if you do guess correctly, then you will be arrested by the world government on suspicion of aiding Luffy being a creep. Stop it Luffy. Stop. But which object will it be? Make your choice now and we shall reveal the answer in three, two, one, and bam, Luffy was lurking behind the oddly shaped rock. Strange child he is. So if you guessed incorrectly, then you know the thing to do and please do say hi in the comments below if you are a new member of the Grand Fleet. Welcome. All right, the lurking legend. So here's the first problem with this whole title phrase thing. A lot of people tend to throw it around without understanding the context in which it was said. After going through this, you'll immediately realize why this individual cannot be someone like Kozuki Oden or Zoro. So this whole legend statement was made during Jump Fest or a big annual convention in Japan that is focused entirely on manga series published in Weekly Shonen Jump. And One Piece being their flagship property is kind of a big deal. So it gets very fancy stage shown as part of that a message from Otis Delivered where he generally teases what is going to happen in One Piece during the following year. And these statements almost always become controversial in some way because they have a tendency to spread like wildfire and get misinterpreted and then the people who misinterpreted them get upset when their misinterpretations don't come to fruition. A couple of other famous examples include when Oda claimed that 2016 would be the year of Sanji or when he alluded to the fate of Sabo Vivian Bola Hancock almost recently for Jump Fest of 2021 where he claims that a certain red-haired man will be making his move. So it's usually pretty big stuff although nothing has caused as much of a stir as the lurking legend statement. So let's go ahead and give it some of the old analysis. Hello, Oda here. Are you enjoying Jump Festa? I'm actually watching this stage together with you all. It's fun, isn't it? I visit Jump Festa every year to eat with the voice actors. A bit of negative truth from Oda there. It's not to say hi to the fans. It's not to deliver hype for One Piece. It's to hang out with his friends and you know, we're good on him. Now then, next year it's finally time to go to Wano country. Let's go. And for some context, this is from Jump Festa 2018 which actually took place in 2017. It's confusing. That's just how they name them. Some informed people might say, hey, you said that last year, didn't you? I did say that, question mark. I thought that it would be possible. Now I'd like to add some new information to the list. Now, this is quite funny, but also important because Oda did state that we would be entering Wano in 2017, which of course did not happen. Didn't even come close. We entered Wano in 2018, which I'm pointing out because these statements more often than not cannot be taken as raw fact. Oda is notoriously terrible at discussing the entire concept of the future in any sort of accurate way. And that will become very, very relevant in this discussion moving forward. But next up, the part we're all waiting for. By the end of next year, I'll be introducing one of the legends lurking in the world of One Piece to you. It's going to be the biggest enemy Luffy and his friends have ever had and it's going to be the one that will stand in front of us. Whitebeard may be involved. Oh, I've talked too much. The Summit War. Can you believe that will end up looking cute? And just as a side note here, this is another one of those heavily misinterpreted piece of information regarding this whole Summit War statement. A lot of people took this to mean that Wano was going to be the arc that makes Marineford look quote unquote cute. But that is never stated and when combined with the lurking legend statement, it is almost certainly referring to the final saga of the series, not Wano. So for everyone who keeps saying that Oda promised that Wano would be a battle bigger than Marineford, stop it. So I have a lot of things I want to draw next year. I will continue to move forward. Stay tuned. Love at Chura Oda. And look, he didn't actually say the love part, but I'm sure that's how we all feel when reading these messages. But reading through this provides a whole new world of context. And with this in mind, we can actually construct a list of criteria that this lurking legend needs to meet. And it consists of three main points. One, the lurking legend must have a connection to Whitebeard. And Oda says that Whitebeard may be involved but that's just mysterious teasing language. Point number the second, the lurking legend must be an enemy of the straw hats. There is no room for ambiguity with this one. It is very clearly stated that this individual will be a future enemy that stands in front of us. Also the biggest we've ever faced, but that's more arguable. Finally, and most precariously, the lurking legend was supposed to have been introduced to us in the year 2018. And this is the one criteria that I'm going to be a lot less strict with because as we've already discussed, Oda kind of sucks when it comes to time-based predictions. So whoever this character is could have been intended for 2018, but pushed back. However, with that said characters introduced in 2018, we'll receive bonus points for matching the idea. And it really is that simple. These three criteria, I had to think about it for a second there. Why am I so bad with numbers? These three criteria will eliminate the vast majority of lurking legend candidates. So let's have an example. Golden Lion Shiki, raw. I don't see his name pop up much these days because there are, quite frankly, much better and more palatable choices. But there was a time where he was a big, big front runner for this concept. And to be fair, he does tick two of our three boxes. Shiki does have a connection to white beard due to both of them being part of the Rocks Pirates, although this information wasn't known at the time. And he would also present himself as an enemy to the straw hats. And you know what? He even gets bonus points for literally lurking in this world. As far as canon go strong world, well, that never happened, but chapter zero sure did. And right now, as far as we know, Shiki is just chilling on his floating set of islands, you know, somewhere. But there are also a lot of problems here. One being that Shiki was already introduced to us, so that factor alone effectively eliminates him from contention. And also there's a thought that no, Shiki is not going to be the biggest enemy that straw hats have ever faced. And I know there's a lot of people out there who are just dying for Shiki to be relevant again, but sorry, it's not happening. Similarly, Edward Weevill comes up a lot in lurking legend based discussion because he fulfills the same two criteria that Shiki did. Weevill has very clear connection to Whitebeard being his alleged born and everything. And Weevill seems to be positioned as a potential antagonist for the straw hats, packing some pretty serious power as well. He's been compared to a young Whitebeard, so that's nothing to scoff at. His face is, but that's a different matter. The big problem once again being that, well, we already knew Weevill. Not only was he not introduced to us in 2018, but he actually made his series debut in October of 2015. So as opposed to a lurking presence, he is very, very active. And if you wanted to get into painful semantics, which this is a YouTube video on the internet, so we do, you can also argue that he isn't even a legend given that he's more of a super talented rookie at this stage. Weevill just doesn't fit, not into this statement or not into anything actually, not even his own skin. Look at all those stitches, he is practically bursting at the seams. Getting into a bit of a pattern now, let's also dismiss Kaido. He was thrown in, then out for the same reasoning. You know, he has a connection to Whitebeard and he is legitimately the biggest sorts of straw hats are faced up until this point, I suppose. But again, it's really difficult to introduce a character who has already been introduced to us. Nor is he in any way lurking given that he is a well-known active emperor of the sea. So we're running into a lot of problems with this whole lurking business. We definitely need a character who we did not know prior to this statement being made. And in the intro, I brought up Kozuki Oden. Now he has the lurking criteria pretty down pat given that he was a relatively unknown yet undisputedly legendary figure of one piece. And Oden of course was also incredibly connected to Whitebeard, but the big obvious problem is that Oden would not be an enemy of the straw hats. And this is where context is ever so important. Too many people throw around the lurking legend term having not actually read or comprehended the rest of the statement. And there's also this fun amino page proving exactly this where someone is trying to make the case for Marko saying Oda didn't necessarily state that the lurking legend will be a villain. And I'm just like, that is literally the one thing that Oda 100% confirmed about the lurking legend that he would be a villain or she or it didn't confirm any gender, just the villain part. So get out of here with your Marko nonsense and Oden as well and Zoro just, eh. And while I'm in a foul dismissive mood, it also isn't Douglas Bullet. Sure, it would have been fun to tie that statement into one piece stampede, but the film was released in mid 2019. And it's also not Skoppa Gabon because it's never Skoppa Gabon. Stop bringing him up. In my mind, there are only two actually credible figures who could be assigned the lurking legend title, the first of which is Rocks D. Zabeck, although it does require a lot of faith. So what I mean by that is lurking legend is a concept that does apply to him perfectly. He's an individual who's been more or less erased from history, despite his frankly unbelievable achievements, one of which was to recruit a young white bit into his cruise as a connection there. That Zabeck does have a big issue being that his first appearance was in 2019 rather than 2018. But here is where I'm willing to give Oda a bit of lenience because the Reverie Arc was published in 2018 and to be fair, Rocks' name was mentioned. Oda may even have been planning on showing Rocks as a silhouette, but eventually decided that this was not the time to expand on him too much. So I'm really not too fussed about the 2018 criteria here, but the one aspect of Rocks' candidacy that should give us, you know, quite a bit of pause for thought is that he would need to go on to become a future enemy of the Straw Hats, which if he was, sure he could probably claim the mantle of the biggest enemy the crew have ever faced, the problem being that, and look, this is no big deal, but right now he's just a little bit dead. Allegedly dead anyway, which is something we should never take as a fact in one piece, death is questionable at all times for everyone. And everything about Rocks is one gigantic question mark, so it's not outrageous for him to still be alive in some way, shape or form, maybe. With that said, there is one other character who satisfies me a bit more in regards to this, and that is, of course, Im, or Imu, depending on what you wanna say, I don't care. But if everyone who could possibly be brought up as the lurking legend, Im fits the most perfectly, primarily because Im was introduced in 2018, and in addition to that, he is a certified lurking legend, being a dude bra who quite literally rules the world from the shadows, as well as the big bad in charge of the entire world government, so it does make a lot of sense for him to be set up to be the biggest enemy the Straw Hats will have ever faced. In addition to that, without the world government involved in full force, we can certainly look at making Marineford look rather kawaii. Plus, unlike Rocks, Im is confirmed to be alive, so that positions him in a much more better spot as a future enemy. Whereas Rocks requires quite a bit of mental gymnastics and a fair chunk of speculation, which has led to such fan-based gems as the theory that Rocks is actually Im. And even if that was correct, which to be clear, I don't think it is, then we would still be on the right track, because Im, even if he was Rocks, would still be the lurking legend, so yeah. However, the Im idea is not perfect either, because we still have yet to discover if there is a connection to Whitebeard. With that said, that criteria is by far the easiest of the three to satisfy. And personally, I'm much more on board with Im being the lurking legend, far, far more than Zabeck, but at this stage, it really could be either one of them. But if you would like to dive into Zabeck some more, then please do check out this video examining everything we know about one of the greatest legends lurking on know to have ever existed in the One Piece world. Very exciting stuff, so I look forward to seeing you there.