she's also using the regular masculine omae for 'you' here instead of the vanata that she uses in the present, which is an accented version of the more formal (and more commonly used by women) anata. so her particular speech style has gotten notably more feminine between this flashback and the present, but has always been distinctly silly!

I think Kuma is the link to the Straw Hats allying with the revolutionary army to target the world government. With the arrival of Saturn, Bonney's connection to Kuma, Kuma's connection to Sabo/Ivankov/Dragon, it all seems inevitable. Once Kuma learns Luffy is Nika, he may straight up worship Luffy, and once Luffy understands Bonney and Kuma's dreams/lack of freedom, he may just have to throw hands with the WG for his new friend.

…Yeah I don’t think anyone expected this fight to go well considering how much the elders have been built up but I guess at least their heads aren’t just…exploding with a single glance…small mercies…

Kuma having giant blood makes a lot of sense (even though in this series there’s a lot of people who are just…inhumanly large or tall even without that) but Iva’s personality really hasn’t changed in the last forty years which is kind of nice to see. And of course the theories about Ginny being either Bonney’s mother or Luffy’s mother are already flying around, but I’m sure we’ll get more on her as this goes along…

Okay, yes, he looks like Shanks, I think we all knew that would be the case, but I’m actually more interested in the fact that he was already a holy knight almost ~forty years before the current storyline so it makes me wonder if the rest of them are of a similar age as well.

Ugh, everything about this is brutal and we already knew that Kuma didn’t have an easy childhood, but this gives a lot of credence to the stories that were told amongst slaves and prisoners about Nika being the warrior of liberation, especially when it’s now directly tied to a character that we’ve known for a long time… And that he was telling Bonney years later shows that it’s something that stuck with him and that he held onto through everything.

I’m not sure if this was intentional on Oda’s part or just Saturn giving a typical villain speech, but the fact that both Sanji and Luffy are there and out of the entire crew they’re really the two that would be the most emotionally shattered by anyone dying right in front of them when they couldn’t save them or take their place, in Sanji’s case is interesting to say the least.

This series is never not going to destroy me