 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything one piece. Today we have a manga review of chapter 918, Luffy Taro Repays the Favour, and the title of the chapter is a nice little reference to chapter 913 which was called Sura Repays the Favour, so there's a lot of good favour etiquette happening on Wano as of late. However, it appears to have been done so in one of the worst case scenarios possible, because it's essentially been confirmed that Jack is incoming. I was hyped for that last week, I'm hyped for it this week and I will continue to be hyped for it next week. A calamity getting involved is exactly what we need to really kick this arc into action after a disappointing bout with Holden and a seemingly powerless Hawkins to deal with. I mean he even admitted there's not a whole lot he would have been able to do against Luffy, so yes please, let's bring in some of the big guns. But for now I'm really enjoying Law's reunion with Luffy because his constant surprised anger is just great comic value. This is the side of Law that I really love, the all too serious concerned adult, getting mixed up in the shenaniganry of two idiots. Plus he had some really great action panels this week specifically the one where he sliced up a whole group of Hawkins as minions, and a further amazing panel featuring a sword clashed directly with Mr Hawkins. In fact the art in this chapter was on point in general right down to that super dark panel on the two page spread of a family about to commit suicide presumably to avoid starving to death. That was incredibly unexpected by the way One Piece really gets taken to a place that dark outside of a flashback and it's really cool because that one panel just conveys so much. I complained last week about how Oda used an entire page to convey the plight of Wano in a way that we already had an understanding of, and I'll stand by that complaint because this week Oda expressed that idea significantly more effectively in but a single panel. That aside there's a fair bit of intrigue to be had in this chapter which is primarily generated from the last panel showing a series of graves with some very familiar names on them. There are eight in total, five of them with readable names, one of whom is Kozuki Oden. He's allegedly dead so that checks out, tick no problems there. However it's when we read the names Momonosuke, Kinomon, Kondro, and Raizo, characters we know of as alive and well, that an eyebrow is raised. Now there's a simple answer to this, and that is that these graves or the majority of these graves are fake and are used as propaganda to keep the citizens of Wano under control, thinking that they have no hope of returning to their previous ruling class. That also happens to be the boring answer though. So instead of harping on about that, let's take a moment to talk about ghosts. I usually try not to dig too heavily into theories but this one is pretty irresistible. As a result of this chapter there is a potential implication that Momonosuke and his posse of retainers are in fact dead and have been dead all along. Now this idea sounds pretty preposterous at first and honestly I'm still not really sold on it myself but the more I think about it the more the thought gains some traction. I mean firstly there is precedent for the world beyond death in the series through Brooke who has demonstrated that every character has a soul and therefore some sort of afterlife existence whatever that may be. So ghosts aren't a huge stretch even if all four of these characters do seem to possess a solid physical form which we'll get to but before that we have an intriguing piece of evidence from the mouth of Momonosuke himself. In chapter 820 I think it was he claimed to have met Goldie Roger. Now on paper that is simply impossible because Momonosuke is a mere eight years old and Roger was executed 24 years ago and that's like three whole Momonosuke's ago. At the time Momonosuke was branded a liar and it was kind of played as a joke you know the whole situation where a child just lies to be involved in the conversation so I put it out of my mind for quite some time but these gravestones are certainly going to reignite that discussion so here's the idea. Momonosuke was not lying about having met Roger. Rather he was actually alive around two and a half decades ago and during this time the Kozuki clan was overthrown resulting in the death of Odin and Momonosuke along with Kinamon, Kanjiro, and Raizo. Then decades later they are resurrected by some guy with a power that's more than likely devil fruit related and the four of them fled one or two gather allies to defeat Kaido and that's just one of the many vague ways this could have played out. I mean just about anything could have happened like perhaps instead of a resurrection devil fruit ability it was a power that puts their bodies into stasis to be awakened later even a sugar-style situation where their aging was frozen and they've just been wandering around the world for two decades although that last one is pretty unlikely because Momonosuke acts like an eight-year-old where a sugar was noticeably mentally mature but the basic idea is that something has caused these figures to become displaced in time thus allowing Momonosuke's statement about Roger to be true. I should mention that some people are also discussing the idea that Wano itself might be enclosed within some sort of time dilation field but that gets demunked pretty easily because the timeline of events surrounding Ace arriving and Drake becoming a headliner match up pretty much exactly with the passage of time in the real world and just a tiny bit of visual evidence to support spooky Wano ghost theory is just how aged those gravestones look. There is no way they are recent they seem far too weathered and look yeah I know all of this can be filed under the crackpot theory section but the end of the chapter to me is implying something pretty ridiculous if even Zoro was surprised and the whole thing about the unbelievable truth of Wano I just don't see Oda building this up to this point simply to have a mundane solution. There's also some minor speculation to be had in regards to the graves whose names we can't see so there are two mysterious retainers and one Kozuki clan member. I don't want to be dismissive but I think it's fairly safe to say that the Kozuki clan member is Oden's wife and Momonosuke's mother which just completes the family unit nicely but I'm more interested in the two retainers. Personally I'm hoping that one of them turns out to be Shutenmaru because it ties that character to the core story a bit more rather than having him be another random faction of Wano. As for the other my immediate thought was Hitetsu the tengu guy from many chapters ago. To me his design matches the fairly outlandish style of the retainers we've seen thus far so it would just make sense really at least aesthetically. Another possibility is that the two retainer graves belong to Nekoma Moshi and Inuarashi and to actually just thinking about it they make a lot more sense than Shutenmaru or Hitetsu because they were both actually said to be retainers of the Kozuki clan but oh wow. The implications of them being involved in this ghost resurrection time business is just crazy but then again if the graves did belong to the two minks and I don't see why their names would have been hidden so meh. But that's enough speculation let's move to a small but extraordinary important occurrence this week which has to do with Tama. I posed the idea a couple of chapters ago that she may be able to tame Haldum's lion with her abilities and this week that was essentially confirmed when she fed Speed a kibidango and she was automatically brought over to the side of the straw hats. And yeah this is pure insanity because Tama has now become a hard counter to the entirety of Kaito's forces. I mean it's still unknown if her powers work on real zoan users but even if it's just limited to smile users that is huge. Any smile user who we see from here on out has the potential to become an ally and just on that I guess it's no surprise that the hot horse chick which I feel weird saying but that really is the best way to describe her. But anyway yeah it's no surprise that she was the first to be converted because the standard attractive female characters almost never stay as antagonists. But surely with this new information the plan becomes to capture as many of Kaito's army as possible and turn them into your own personal force in rebellion unless of course Tama's powers have limitations to do with the amount of individuals she can tame at any given time or even simpler limit regarding how much of her cheek she can plonk off. I mean everyone has a finite amount of cheek on their face to work with in life. And the last thing I want to touch on is Hawkins. He was cool and all as per usual but he said something really weird when he discovered Law's identity which was that Luffy and Law did form an alliance after all. And this confuses me because surely Hawkins already knew that. I mean he was with Kid and Apu when he found out that the alliance took down Dorflamingo so it's not as if the idea of an alliance was up in the air. There was also the whole article prior to that which announced the alliance and Hawkins definitely would have seen that because it contained the announcement of his own alliance in that very same newspaper. Anyway that's just a weird thing that got to me that no one else would probably care about but Hawkins was cool in general. Although I still can't really get a read on him he's just so deadpan in every possible situation. I don't know if the Straw Hats are hindering his lifestyle on Wano or if they're giving him hope to topple Kaito. In any case that pretty much does it for chapter 918. A surprisingly intriguing installment into the series and I cannot wait to get into the greater depths of the Wano story. If you enjoyed this video then feel free to like, favorite or subscribe and if you are in any way keen on supporting this independent channel then please do check out my Patreon discord server or Twitter the links to which are in the handy description below. And finally please do comment with your thoughts on the chapter. This has been the Groundline Review and I'll see you next time.