One Piece Vol. 41: Declaration of War
- ISBN
- 9781421534572
- Publisher
- VIZ Media
- English release
- Pages
- 232
- Chapters
- 389–399
- Anime
- Season 9: Enies Lobby ep. 264–336
The rescue stops for a flashback in these eleven chapters, 389 to 399, and the flashback is what the arc was built for. Robin is still refusing to be saved when the book opens, and the reason goes back to her childhood on an island of archaeologists trying to recover a century the World Government forbids anyone to study. This is where One Piece stops being a story about a crew and becomes a story about the institution the crew is standing in front of. The volume takes its name from chapter 398, and what that chapter declares belongs in the section below. Season 9 of the anime covers the whole book. At 232 pages it lists for $11.99.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
Ohara is the volume, and Ohara is the closest thing this series has to a thesis. The flashback covers the archaeologists who kept reading, and the only two people the contents page names for it are chapter 393, 'Olvia', after the archaeologist the flashback is built around, and chapter 396, 'Saul'. The World Government answers scholarship with a Buster Call and erases the place. Aokiji, a Marine, lets Robin go and tells her to find friends and live, and the rest of the arc exists to collect on that sentence: Robin says she wants to live, out loud, and chapter 398 is titled 'Declaration of War' so the point cannot be mistaken. Franky then destroys the blueprints CP9 came for, which are not Pluton's but those of a weapon built to oppose it. The series had villains before this book. Here it acquires an enemy.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Links on this page are affiliate links, which cost you nothing extra. They never influence what appears on this site or what the commentary says about it.
Lines from this volume
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Why did you come to save me?!”
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“How many times must I tell you? I'm not coming back to you and the crew!”
Read cold, the scene argues against her. On p. 17 a soldier reports that she and Franky have broken their chains and are out on the balcony; on p. 19 Luffy calls across that it is kinda far but he will try to jump over; and she spends the moment telling him to go home. Taken at face value this is a woman refusing a rescue she plainly needs, and the speech printed just below it, that she does not even want to see their faces anymore, makes the refusal look final. The objection mostly survives. What the pages add is the phrase "how many times". A person whose mind is made up says no once; this is someone who has had to keep making the same refusal, and Franky has just spent pp. 12 and 13 telling her that her agreement with the government was reversed by that idiot and that if she keeps turning away, they won't be able to save her. Her face in the panel before this one is not anger but strain: eyes shut, teeth gritted, breath lettered beside her. The line is an order she is giving herself as much as the crew.
Franky builds the trap this line walks into. On p. 13, chained beside her, he tells her she is still running away from something, asks whether she is afraid her friends will die there, and sets a condition: if she keeps turning away, they won't be able to save her. A rescue, in his account, needs her consent. She gives him no answer in words. Eight pages later Luffy is across the gap, having shouted that he is glad she is still there, and the condition comes due. This is her answer, and it is aimed at the premise rather than at Luffy: nobody asked for this, so nobody is owed it. The page plays it as fury (mouth wide, sweat flying, Franky's "...?!" in the panel beside it), but the punctuation gives her away. A refusal would end on the exclamation mark; this one puts a question mark first, and a question is something a person can answer. Luffy's reply, in the next panel, is an ellipsis.