One Piece Vol. 20: Showdown at Alubarna
- ISBN
- 9781421515144
- Publisher
- VIZ Media
- English release
- Pages
- 216
- Chapters
- 177–186
- Anime
- Season 4: Alabasta ep. 93–130
Chapters 177 to 186, and the book where One Piece stops being a series its protagonist can punch his way out of. Crocodile dissolves and reassembles whichever part of him is struck, so the first meeting between them is not a contest, and how it ends belongs in the section below rather than here. The rest of the volume is the crew crossing ground: a giant crab, the river Sandora, a squad of spot-billed ducks, and then the arrival at the capital, where the cast splits into simultaneous single fights across a city. That structure is the one the series has reused ever since. Season 4 runs to chapter 217, so a viewer has seen all of this. It sits in Box Set 1, the volumes 1 to 23 set, at $244.99.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
Crocodile puts his hook through Luffy's chest and buries him in the sand, and the book does not dig him out. That absence is the decision Alabasta is built on: the story runs for most of the next two volumes without its protagonist, and the fights that fill the gap are the ones the arc is remembered for. Usopp and Chopper against Mr. 4 and Miss Merry Christmas start here, and the pairings alongside them carry into Vol. 21. What the defeat changes is the terms. Every earlier fight in the series was a question of hitting hard enough, and this one cannot be answered that way at any strength, so what Luffy eventually finds is not a bigger attack. Vivi's failure is in the same book and gets less attention: she gets in front of the rebel army she has spent eight volumes trying to stop, and it goes straight past her.
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Lines from this volume
“This world is full of peace-loving fools like her. Easy for someone who's never been in a real battle.”
“That woman's a mystery, even to me.”
Over the previous two pages Crocodile was sorting everyone into types with total confidence: Vivi a peace-loving fool, Luffy an incorrigible one, dozens more like him already deserted. Then his own partner declines to fit. When Luffy calls Crocodile the fool, Nico Robin laughs. Crocodile asks whether she wants to die too; she smiles, says so be it if that is his wish, and leaves, pausing only to remind him that he promised not to call her by that name. A threat that frightens nobody has failed, and this is the one thing in these pages he admits he does not know. It also does structural work. Oda needs Robin unreadable for now, and the cleanest way to establish that is to let the man who reads everyone else confess he cannot read her. The page gives the reader no more access than it gives him. Her motives stay offstage, and the villain is made to say so.
Crocodile invites contempt and gets agreement. Luffy has just described Vivi as someone who does not want a single person killed in the rebellion, and when Crocodile sneers at that and asks whether he agrees, Luffy says that's right. The villain's point deserves its strongest form, because it is half true. Stopping a civil war without casualties is the kind of plan a person makes before seeing one. Luffy's reply is best taken as a concession. He grants the naivety and keeps the conclusion: as long as Crocodile is around she will kill herself trying to stop him, so he will finish Crocodile himself. That answers the objection without denying it. Idealism can be foolish and still be worth protecting, by someone prepared to do the fighting it refuses. Crocodile's reply on the next page, that he has deserted dozens of fools like Luffy, shows why he cannot follow the argument. To him attaching yourself to a stranger is the mistake. To Luffy it is the reason he is in this desert at all.