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Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything One Piece, and today we have a review of chapter 989, I Can't Imagine Losing. And man, what a chapter. It's so incredibly rare, perhaps even unheard of in Wano, but this was a completely straw hat centric installment this week. Each and every one of them got a decent degree of focus, generally working together as well. All of which culminated in quite possibly my favorite panel of the entirety of Wano. And I know that me being me, I've probably said that a fair few times now, quite possibly even the last time straw hats were all gathered like this prior to the beginning of the raid. But this panel is just stunning, I love it. I especially enjoy that Jinbei is so front and center, making what I feel is his proper debut as a straw hat. I also really like Luffy doing his classic squat pose, which he tends to invoke to hype himself up. And best of all, the entire crew is framed by the massive body of General Frankie. And so if it wasn't already clear, this panel tells us that this is a true force of individuals to be reckoned with. As a certain emperor of the sea went on to find out this week, but we will definitely get to that. But just while I've mentioned Frankie specifically, not only was he the undisputed star of chapter 988, I mean, how could we forget the moment where he ran into Big Mom with the subscribe button for the Grand Line Review, thus forcing her to kind of literally smash that button and receive regular One Piece content uploaded straight into her YouTube feed. And my advice to all of you would be to press that button immediately before Frankie does the same to you. But Frankie's general amazingness only continues into 989, which is nice because Frankie to me is, well, he's honestly like a middling straw hat. I do enjoy him, I like him quite a bit, but I find that following the Water 7 saga, his chances to shine tend to be quite minimal. In fact, the last time I remember enjoying Frankie this much was on Dressrosa during the final chapter of his fight with Senor Pink. And that was probably about five and a half years ago now. So for all of that time, Frankie to me has been very much relegated to the background and I'd kind of forgotten how much I loved him. But 989 immediately brought all of those feelings back and it happens right from the very first closeup shot of him and Nami in that funky square panel. Frankie just looks so ridiculously cool here with Nami swooning all over him. And there's something about his facial expression that really hits me. It's like you can tell exactly what's going on in his mind and it's something along the lines of, yeah, baby, I know I'm super cool. Try not to make a big deal about it, you know? And as if that wasn't enough Frankie amazingness, which it wasn't, he's also given a Pirate King moment in this chapter as well, where he proudly declares as all straw hats and others eventually do that Luffy will become the Pirate King. And I don't know why, but these moments never get old for me, even after having seen one as recently as Momonosuke's. But still even this late in the series, it's so nice to hear people other than Luffy having that 100% belief in him, even in the face of say the strongest hag in the world. And this whole interaction also reminded me a lot of Jinbei's instance on Whole Cake Island, where he said that a man who would be a crewmate of the future Pirate King cannot afford to tremble in the presence of a mere emperor. And that would very much appear to be Frankie's sentiment here. He doesn't say it quite like that, but it's very clear through his attitude that he very much actually looks down on Big Mom in comparison to his own captain. And I think that this is also a very big tangible cue amongst others, that the time of the emperors is starting to come to a close here. This is the make or break climax of this whole institution. And regardless of the overwhelming challenge that is Kaido up ahead, Oda is showing us here that the relevance and widespread power of the emperors is fading quite rapidly. And I for one cannot wait for the new age to be upon us. But sticking with the topic of emperors for a bit, Big Mom was our main non-straw hat feature this week, and it's hard to know what to say here. If you weren't a fan of how she was handled in the last chapter, then I can't imagine you enjoyed this one too much either. I will say that I found all of her interactions quite enjoyable this week, especially the Jinbei-Robin combo attack, because it really does highlight the supreme weakness of Big Mom, which always existed but many have tried to deny. And that is that Big Mom is simply incapable of dealing with well-implemented strategy. On her own, Big Mom is quite possibly the strongest human being remaining in this world, but that means her battle tactics are extraordinarily simple and not even really worthy of the word tactics. She basically hits as hard as she can in any given direction because she has whatever passes for guard mode in One Piece. And I know that whenever I use the invincibility cheats in various games when I was a young lad, it completely removed any need for strategy and skilled gameplay. You basically just calmly walk about and dispose of the enemies until you very eventually win. That right here is Big Mom, except she's not dealing with AI that was programmed in the 90s. And it's not as if these attacks from the Straw Hats actually hurt her because that still seems nigh on impossible, but with their superior intelligence and relevant power, they can most certainly stall her, which we saw quite a bit of on Whole Cake Island, although it was to a much less successful degree. Which brings up something else that I think this chapter makes very clear, being that an emperor is significantly less threatening without their crew. On Whole Cake Island, things were extraordinarily problematic because the Sanji retrieval team were wildly outnumbered by the Big Mom pirates, which made Big Mom herself completely impossible to stop. But here on Wano, Big Mom is effectively alone. She has no help from Kaido's crew because they're all terrified of her. And on this occasion, Big Mom is outnumbered by a series of powerful and intelligent individuals, which inevitably leads to her getting clowned around like this. And I think that's incredibly revealing of the facade of an emperor. It's not about personal power and it never has been. It's about a figurehead gathering a critical mass of power and intelligence in the form of what is effectively an army of a pirate crew. And that is why Kaido is going to be a significantly larger threat on Wano, because he has the home field advantage that Big Mom had on Whole Cake Island with a crew of 20,000 beast pirates working in tandem with him. And just one final thing on Big Mom, I really love that her whole story with Brooke was continued here. The whole Big Mom Brooke dynamic was one of my favorite things to come out of Whole Cake Island and their continued interactions never failed to put a smile on my face. But transitioning somewhat smoothly into another topic, we actually had a pretty big revelation amongst all of this fun action, where Big Mom stated the nature of the numbers, which does solve a massive mystery that was left lingering by Punk Hazard. So not only were they conducting gigantification experiments on the island, but they were also doing so in regards to the ancient giant race, being the one that comprises Oz and Oz Jr. of course. So the Punk Hazard danger sign does make a lot more sense now because we know it's referring to the ancient giants. And that may be particularly relevant because there were a lot of thoughts that this sign could be referencing Kaido directly due to the nature of the horns and that perhaps he was an experiment that resulted from Punk Hazard, which I suppose could still be the case actually. Kaido himself might be a more successful attempt to recreate the ancient giant race, which would be pretty cool. Either way, I quite like that we're linking some things up here, especially because these ancient giants have become a very persistent curiosity ever since the days of Toa Bok. And it also makes the numbers themselves much more interesting, which is a big criticism I had during the last chapter. I find that I now care about the numbers incrementally more than I did before when they just appeared to be random big dude bros. Now that there's some sort of history behind their existence, they act as something of a gateway into the lingering mysteries of One Piece and make me much, much more excited for that very eventual Kaido flashback because that still needs to happen, right? Moving on though, the funniest scene of this chapter was probably that whole dynamic between Luffy, Zoro, and Queen. This series of panels was set up so wonderfully with Luffy appearing out of nowhere, shocking Queen, and then Zoro doing the exact same thing with the captain and the swordsman ignoring Queen entirely until he transformed and became a bit of a pain. Something else I took away from this though is Zoro's insistence or at least offer that he would go with Luffy to take on Kaido because while that might seem like a very minor thing and even a logical thought, this is quite an uncharacteristic event. Usually in these sorts of situations, Zoro will volunteer to stay behind and act as something of a roadblock for whatever enemy wants to prevent Luffy from reaching the big bad, like say Pico and Dressrosa. Meanwhile, Zoro himself very rarely shows an interest in the main antagonist of an arc. So this scene is very subversive because the way you would think it would play out would see Zoro telling Luffy to go on ahead whilst he deals with Queen, but instead we completely ignore Queen and Zoro's focus is on the big man himself, which as an admittedly huge Zoro fanboy is endlessly exciting because barring another subversion, it would seem like Zoro is being set up to have a major role in the Kaido battle, which has been more subtly hinted at before by inheriting Enma and such, but this is a much more clear cue. Not that we're getting there anytime soon though because Queen and King have very much ruined all of that and King appears to have a full force of flying Zoan uses at his disposal as well. And I have to assume that they're smile users, but then again, maybe not because they don't look quite as ridiculous as the ones we've encountered thus far. It's an intriguing little twist though and one that gets clocked by Sanji at the end, who is probably pretty well-placed to deal with them given the Skywalk and all. Speaking of Sanji though, he is not left out of this by any means and we see him recover after that pretty devastating hit by King. And while Sanji does admit that the raid suit is incredibly beneficial, it is very much worth noting that he has taken it off by the time that we see the group shot of the Straw Hats, which is very nice in one way because we do get to see Sanji in his classical cool glory, but at the same time, part of me really wants to see the spread with Sanji donning the raid suit. And it does generally make me wonder why he took it off. Was it just for the artistic purpose of seeing him in this panel or was it a more strategic and or narrative move than that? It really might be something as simple as Oda drawing Sanji in the spread with the raid suit on and just not liking it as much. And now before I forget, early on in this chapter, we had a fun moment of Yamato declaring that he is Oden and running towards Shinobu and Momonosuke. And this is hilarious because thinking about it from their perspective, you have this strange, strange person, clearly falsely claiming to be Oden and rushing towards you. It would be pretty terrifying even with Luffy's words about being able to trust Yamato. And so I'm quite anxious to see how this plays out because Yamato is just such a captivating existence with this whole Oden fascination. And I'm very much waiting for some sort of profound revelation via the journal knowledge that he possesses. But as for right now, and for the last few chapters really, Yamato has been a very secondary, almost tertiary feature actually. So for now, I suppose we'll just keep brewing that story in the background. And of course, we now head over to the cover story, which is probably one of my favorite pages of this whole beige adventure, weirdly enough, because we're looking at a zoomed in image from a zoomed in image from an original image. Lots of fun visual layering here. And the premise is that we have Pound attempting to prove to Lola and Shiffon that he is indeed their father with what is the most hilarious yet simultaneously most tragic of family photos. I really love that it was taken from Pound's perspective and it's just Linlin kicking him out and discarding him as she does. And in general, I think it's always very interesting to see time contextual images of Big Mom because she has undergone some fairly radical aesthetic changes over the course of her life. And with that, I believe that Lola and Shiffon are 26 now, which would make Big Mom 42 at the time of this photo being taken. So that would put her in the middling forties phase, but she's also dressed very casually in this cover, which is why I did sort of question to myself whether or not this was actually her at first. So it is a pretty cool perspective. Plus in the background of the first zoomed image, you can see Zeus watching over baby Lola and Shiffon, which is kind of adorable, which only reinforces my belief that Zeus is a good boy and should become a permanent member of the Straw Hat Pirates. But that pretty much does it for chapter 989. And 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 until YouTube feeds. But for now, this has been the Grand Line Review, and I'll see you next time.