One Piece Vol. 8: I Won't Die
- ISBN
- 9781421500751
- Publisher
- VIZ Media
- English release
- Pages
- 192
- Chapters
- 63–71
- Anime
- Season 1: East Blue ep. 1–61
Chapters 63 to 71, and the book where One Piece swaps a villain who wants a thing for a villain who holds a place. The first half ends the siege: Gin is poisoned, the cooks are keeping him alive, and Luffy goes at Don Krieg to clear the debt. The second half is somewhere else entirely. Nami is welcomed back to Arlong Park, the base of a crew of fish-men, and the welcome is the problem. The East Blue's earlier villains wanted a treasure or an inheritance; this one runs an occupation, and the series does not return to the smaller scale afterwards. 192 pages, nine chapters. Season 1 of the anime covers chapters 1 to 100, so a viewer has seen all of it.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
Luffy beats Krieg, the siege ends, and Sanji still refuses to go; he agrees only after the cooks stage an argument designed to convince him he is unwanted. Then the volume turns, and the turn is what it is remembered for. Arlong's crew is fish-men, half fish and half human, and what they run at Arlong Park is not piracy but extortion of the villages around it. Nami is one of Arlong's officers, and has been for the whole time the reader has known her. Usopp learns it from her adoptive older sister Nojiko and Zoro learns it from Nami herself, after being captured and dragged into the park. The betrayal is not the payload, and the book knows it: the reason is withheld until Vol. 9. What changes permanently here is the kind of thing the series is prepared to be about, and the three volumes after this one are the proof.
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