One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

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In another more setup-y chapter, we open with Luffy and Sanji still on the deck. How will Luffy try to entice Sanji to join his growing crew of vagabonds and pillagers and oh who are we kidding here? He just asks him. Sanji says no.

The reason, as given a bit farther in, is that Sanji wants to make head chef someday despite not getting on with the current head chef. (The head chef actually tries to get him to go with Luffy at one point. Simply blowing him off or something more?) This is fair enough, but it makes Luffy’s ambition of getting him aboard the Merry Go difficult. How he might eventually change Sanji’s mind isn’t really addressed here. In fact, a pretty big chunk of the chapter is dedicated to Hijinks. Since Luffy’s been drafted as a choreboy, the restaurant employs him to undertake various tasks, almost all of which he fails comically at. (Favorite bit for me here; when one of the chefs asks how many plates he’s busted and he admits that he’s lost count.)

Elsewhere, conversation turns to the dreaded Don Krieg, the pirate who is apparently the “most ferocious” in the local waters, and I imagine will be this arc’s actual, eventual antagonist.

You see, Gin—the pirate Sanji rescued by giving him some rice—doesn’t take a directly antagonistic role here, and he’s even very friendly to both Sanji and Luffy, showing genuine gratitude to the former and being yet another in the growing list of more veteran sailors trying to wave Luffy away from the Grand Line. But he does take an indirectly antagonistic role, because when he heads back to Krieg’s ship, he finds the don pirate’s vessel in what looks to possibly be disarray. And there, he promptly, and conveniently, forgets all that kindness he showed to Luffy and especially Sanji earlier, promising to take his boss right to the oceangoing restaurant.

Such is the way of pirates! Perhaps a clash of crews here is inevitable. I look forward to finding out tomorrow. I have to admit that the stuff with Kuro and Kaya was solid but it took a while to really grab me. With this arc I’m invested straightaway. I hope this Krieg fellow is as fearsome as his name (literally just German for “war”!) and reputation suggest.

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