 It was a fairly reasonable assumption to make that Ulti would be an ancient's own user. I mean, that just turns out to be a theme with the top tier combatants of the Beast Pirates. However, for her to turn out to be a subscriber source was just insane, especially because every time an opponent hits her, it subscribes them to the Groundline Review, resulting in regular One Piece content being uploaded straight into their YouTube feeds. Hello and welcome to the Groundline Review, your source for everything One Piece. And today we have a review of chapter 983, Thunder. And this week the time is upon us. The long-awaited revelation of Yamato is here, except I suppose it wasn't really that long-awaited because we only found out he existed a handful of chapters ago, and he wasn't exactly revealed either because he appears wearing a mask, so apparently everything I just said is a lie. Although it does have a slight sliver of truth, I suppose. And you know, I don't think I've ever thought about Yamato long enough to have developed any expectations whatsoever regarding what his character may look like or act like, but this is another one of those occasions where yeah, I wasn't quite expecting this. Upon initially seeing him, Yamato's design seems to be quite understated, which is kind of an odd thing to say about a character who does proudly don a Hanyamask. But at least when compared to the more beastly existence of his father, what we see of Yamato here almost seems plain in comparison, especially on Wano where we've seen a slew of similar looking designs in this arc already. And in fact, Hanyamask aside, we've actually seen an extraordinarily similar design, which came in the form of one Kozuki Odin. And I'm sure that this aesthetic similarity hasn't gone past anybody, but the most striking resemblance to Odin's design would be the Niodaiski, which is the other decorative style rope thing worn on the back. It looks pretty much like an exact replica of Odin's and who knows, maybe it even is the same one because it did not boil with Odin in the pot. However, what did boil with Odin were his chain restraints, a form of which are also worn here by Yamato, so look, I'm definitely not on board with the whole Yamato is Odin insanity that I've seen happening around here. However, this design does very, very purposely evoke Odin for some reason. And if I had to guess at this stage, I would say that Yamato witnessed Odin's execution and was enamored, as was pretty much everyone present, and then started looking up to Odin as a form of role model, which would explain the rebellious nature in regards to his father Kaido. Although after this chapter, I'm not sure if rebellious quite covers it though because he does intervene on behalf of Luffy and as such it would seem that Yamato is a natural ally, especially with Luffy's like completely placid reaction to him. He just lets himself get picked up because he's a good judge of character and he knew that Yamato was a friendly presence, which just to distract from the Yamato conversation for a bit is a cool feature. Luffy's intuition does come up every now and then, but it's almost like another form of Haki at this point, you know, the way that he can just naturally feel intent. And in fact, that is a canonical version of Haki as demonstrated by Fujitora and Otahime, but in Luffy's case, it seems like more of an animalistic feature, but it is an incredible talent and something I did want to take the time to highlight here. Back to Yamato though, he is especially intriguing with his words about how he has been waiting for Luffy. Actually, you know what? He doesn't mention Luffy specifically other than recognizing him, I guess, but Yamato says he has been waiting, which is important because if he is referring to waiting specifically for Luffy, then this is going to lead to some very conspiratorial thinking from me. But if Yamato was just waiting for, say, a general presence, like, say, a joy boy, then that's a different story. Before we hop into that though, I have to go back to one of my bread and butter ideas, which I have developed over three decades of consuming media, which is the general principle that major characters only wear masks when they have something to hide. Characters like Yamato are not given masks as a purely aesthetic choice, and it is almost always done so in order to facilitate some kind of reveal to the audience. And we did see this whole idea in play earlier in Wano, when Otah used mask theory flawlessly with Killer. Otah had him walk right in front of our eye sans mask, and we legitimately believed that he was someone else, and then, gasp, come as though the man's layer turns out to be Mask of Soldier Killer. Absolutely brilliantly done. And I would bet that something similar would almost certainly have to happen here. And I don't want to go too deeply into this rabbit hole because we can get very lost. Like, we could go full-on crazy town and pose that Yamato is actually like adult Momonosuke, who has traveled through time, somehow, and has been waiting for Luffy. I mean, I don't know how he would have become Kaido's son, and actually, you know, speaking of sons, don't think this went past me. The fact that Odin's son looks like a dragon Kaido, and the fact that Kaido's son looks like an Odin look like. It's a very fascinating juxtaposition there. But this chapter has opened up all sorts of madness to the world, and I've even seen ideas floating around like, oh, Gekko Moria resurrected the body of Odin, and that became Kaido's son because corpse children are a thing. But yeah, look, there are plenty of other channels out there for theories like that. So let's stick to the chapter. And I would say that Yamato's introduction was pretty damn spot on because Oda replicated the Thunder Bargouir attack, which Kaido used on Luffy during Act 1 of Wano. And it is replicated to perfection. The power of the club swing is there, the striking elements of Haki are also present, and the angle is pretty much exactly the same. Although, weirdly enough, the thing I love most about this, though, is that when Oda showed Kaido performing this attack, Kaido's panel took up two-thirds of a two-page spread, whilst Yamato's attack takes up two-thirds of a single page. So it's a very artistically effective method of portraying this man as a mini-Kaido. And this is one of those things that only really works in the manga format. The anime will never be able to portray the exact technique that was used here because their screen size is a constant. But all in all, I'm pretty happy that Yamato isn't just another Kaido, you know, a volatile, hulking mass of an antagonist. If anything, he seems like the exact opposite. A carefully plotting intricate individual. And he just leaves me with a gigantic question mark. I can't say I have any strong feelings towards this character one way or the other at the moment, but I am very keen to find out more about him and specifically why he dresses like Mr. Odin. That's an awful lot of words about Yamato, though, especially when so much of the fun stuff happened during this chapter. And to keep things in roughly the same area, we also saw a cool conflict between Luffy, Ulti and Page 1. And this entire affair has completely solidified my opinion surrounding Ulti. I think she is fantastic. And you know this didn't hit me until much later after reading the chapter, but how rare is it to see a female brawler in one piece? Most powerful female characters have their sort of utility strategies like Nami with the climate attack or Robin with the fruit powers. And even Califah was much more of a technical fighter, rather than someone who just leaps into the fray. But Ulti just jumped straight into combat with Luffy with a really vicious headbutt. And that comprised my favourite panel of the chapter by far. This whole exchange right here is brilliant. It's two morons facing off against each other in the most primal way possible. Not even raising their fists, just going into full on headbutt mode, like a buffalo or a ram or something. This exchange is pretty crazy though, because initially when I saw it, it looked a hell of a lot like a clash of conquerors Haki. I mean just the close-ups of Luffy and Ulti with the black Haki lightning reminded me of the conquerors Haki burst with Luffy vs. Karakuri, as well as Luffy vs. Dolphemingo. And I know this is probably just plain old armament Haki, but that's the sort of feeling I got reading this part. And I do generally just love that Ulti immediately pushed Luffy into serious mode. So much so that he was about to activate Gear 4th to deal with her, which is pretty wow. And something that I hope the inevitable people who are not fans of this chapter are able to process. Because I can already see right now that there are a ton of people who aren't happy with Ulti in page 1 being taken down so quickly and or easily. But that doesn't mean they're down for good and it was such an exciting fight to see Luffy taking on the two dinosaurs. Especially with the choreography. The choreography of this entire situation was dynamic and flawless. Alright I did mention the D word and we do need to talk about dinosaurs though because these fruits are getting out of hand. We now have 5, count them 5, confirmed incarnations of the Riorionomi model insert random dinosaur. And look the ancients ones are cool and all, but seeing Ulti transform didn't give me a whole lot of excitement because the, god I need to try and pronounce this now, the Pachycephalosaurus, that wasn't too bad actually. In any case it just looks like more of the same to me. And apologies to extreme dinosaur fans, but between this the Allosaurus and the Spinosaurus, I just don't really care. To me they are all just T-Rex reskins and if we're going to go down this dinosaur heavy path I'd really love to see some more extreme variety like we have in King and Queen for example. You know we still have yet to see super unique things like a Triceratops, Degosaurus, or maybe even like an Anclosaurus or something. Or maybe some variety that isn't dinosaur based maybe. You know we have this zoan centric crew focus for this Megaroc and I just feel like all we really see at the top are lizards. You know where I guess we do get some zoan variety though and that would be during Zoro section of the chapter, which displays him having quite a bit of difficulty with Kaido's gifters, which in this case seem to be a cohort of bug related gifters which yay bugs. They do all look pretty cool and unique and they have this fascinating line about how they all wanted to become the Pirate King at one point, but assumedly they felt Kaido or Kaido related individuals and were engulfed into his crew. And I actually just thought that was a surprisingly insightful line coming from these for all intents and purposes completely unimportant characters. And that's because we don't often examine people who held that dream outside of major antagonists like Crocodile for example. And for most of One Piece we as an audience were trained to think that the world's reaction to wanting to become the Pirate King was either complete shock and disbelief or extreme laughter and mocking, it was a ridiculous idea after all. However the new world is a completely different realm, full of people who eagerly pursued that dream, although they have certainly fallen quite far away from that goal. I mean when you set out to become the Pirate King and end up being a bug smile user, you should probably heavily rethink your life's choices. To the wonderful world of Big Mom now and my dreams of Usopp and Chopper taking her on a merry chase were quite swiftly destroyed and she is now in pursuit of the Nami team. That's kind of a shame but this weird thing happened with the tank which Usopp and Chopper put down to a transformation mechanism. But I would actually say that this is probably Big Mom's double fruit in action. I think that she may have turned the tank into a homie which is hard to confirm at this stage because we don't get to see the front of it where there would be some sort of face if this were true. But I also think that might be why Oda went to the trouble of having Big Mom use her abilities on other random objects as well. Sort of just giving the audience a reminder of the sort of sort of Nami because it has actually been quite a while since we've seen it in action. Although it was just plain enjoyable, I've always loved that fruit and seeing a legion of these traditional Japanese Disney monsters is certainly an appealing idea indeed. And as for the Big Mom Pirates this chapter actually started very surprisingly with one Charlotte Parrot Sparrow making his way to Onigashima and I had assumed that the Charlotte children had all been removed from this conflict but Oda has plans for Candy Boy and you know what I was thinking about why Parrot Sparrow specifically and I've only come to two conclusions. It would either be because his candy powers are needed for some sort of technically related plot point or failing that because his character is specifically needed for the sake of another because Parrot Sparrow has no business of his own to conclude and so in this case I am thinking very much about Carrot. Parrot Sparrow is the one that Pedro was forced to sacrifice his life to dispel so perhaps this is going to set up a confrontation with Carrot where she can take some form of vengeance for Pedro and or continue to protect the straw hats in order to see them through to the dawn of a new world and all that. It is exciting though and I'm glad that at least one Charlotte child is going to continue to be part of this chaos. And finally we now cast our minds to the cover story where it is confirmed that Pound is indeed alive and the only reason why I take their time to dwell on this is because after his figure appeared on the ship a few chapters ago many many many people like an insane amount of people commented on that review as well as many other related videos that Pound was in fact dead and this was like his body floating tragically on the sea which is not only horrifically morbid but it's I guess it's just not one piece and to be clear I'm still not thrilled that Pound is alive. I think that Oda is once again shooting himself in the foot with his reluctance to kill any character despite giving them highly emotional charged quote unquote death scenes and I would imagine that how Pound escaped from oven likely is never going to be explained because he's such a minor character why would you bother taking the time but with that in mind that's why I think he would just be better served dead he had such a beautiful emotional moment doing his best to protect chiffon seeing his daughter and smiling classic will of D style actually and that is how I would rather remember Pound as a character who had an impact not a character whose impact was undercut but what are you gonna do this is one piece a series that has been running for almost a thousand chapters now and this deep into the game Oda is highly unlikely to change his ways but that pretty much does it for chapter 983 so 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 feed but for now this has been the ground line review and I'll see you next time