Video version: https://youtu.be/_b_uxh-g_nA

Gunko

As Gunko reawakens, it seems her mental state conflicts between her genuine memories and Imu’s control over her. In one memory, we see Shuri crying out to her father: this is the same memory we originally saw when it was first revealed that Gunko had memories with Brook, already a year and a half ago before even the whole Xebec flashback. This time though, we see more of her face, and while we never saw this memory within the Brook flashback, we definitely have better context for it, as this would likely be right before Leuven was killed. The memories however are interrupted by Imu’s presence, marked by a big “kiiin” (キィィン) sound effect, sounding like a loud ring. Among them, there’s an interesting shot of a woman in a bed with Imu overlooking her. Given the context that this is within Gunko’s memories, it makes sense given the way the panel is framed that this is her, but the interesting thing is that she’s asking Imu that she wants to live. The framing of the bed seems to suggest that she may have been on her deathbed, so I wonder if perhaps she was afflicted by the same disease as her mother of the smog or something similar. This scene could perhaps be the moment that Gunko was granted not just a covenant, but also the perennial youth, so I wonder what the dynamic between the two was to have Gunko receive such a special privilege that seemingly only the Gorosei have received thus far. At the same time, here she uses “Imu-sama”, suggesting this is still under the controlled persona of Gunko, or at least while being subservient towards Imu given how she uses the honorific.

The following memory appears to be of Shamrock and Gunko speaking to Imu in front of the Empty Throne, right before they were deployed to go to Elbaph, with Imu explaining that despite the failure with Harald, there is now urgency in getting the giants on their side, likely following the escalation with Egghead. We see Gunko grasp her arm, and the symbol seen in the panel right next to it would suggest that it’s where her Mark is located. She however continues to be conflicted on whether she is Shuri or Gunko, addressing Brook as “kisama” (貴様), a really aggressive second person pronoun, but she herself being brought to tears, her prideful speech not matching her visible emotional reactions.

Lily

The edging at the library continues as we merely get a reaction of the chest’s contents rather than an actual view at them, though the group appears to be rather confused as to how this “tool” could help them turn the tides. Biblo gives a little tidbit about how a human named Lily once lived on Elbaph, evidently this being Nefertari Lily of Alabasta. This fact is quite interesting, as Lily obviously wouldn’t have much reason to actually live here, being the Queen of a major country, much like Vivi, she would be very occupied. But we do know that after her supposed “mistake” that caused the poneglyphs to be spread around the world, what Imu now suspects was actually intentional rather than accidental, she supposedly “vanished” from the face of the world. Given how secretive the Gorosei were talking about it, the assumption thus far was that Imu either disposed of her for her mistake, or even some theories floating around about how Imu took possession of her body at some point or something like that (although now they seem less likely that Imu appears to have a male-looking body).

But the answer could be a lot simpler given what we’re told here. Maybe Lily did actually just run away from Alabasta and seeked shelter in Elbaph. The giants were evidently allies of the people of the D. clan: we are told how Douzan, who we are currently assuming to be the Wargod that previously had the nidhöggr fruit, switched sides to betray Imu, thus in other words siding with the D. people. So it would make sense that maybe Lily felt she couldn’t come back to Alabasta after everything that happened with the poneglyphs, and so left her younger brother with the letter that Cobra cited when confronting Imu and entrusted the country to him while she instead hid away on Elbaph in a similar way that Saul did. The real question is, did she simply hide on Elbaph and lived out her days without much else, or did she do something while on the island that will hold great relevance? Particularly as the context implies that what is in the chest is something that Lily herself left behind: in other words, there is a letter left behind by Lily, which seems even more likely to be a poneglyph at this point given her whole involvement in the whole kerfuffle, but also a tool that will help change the tides of battle…

Sanji vs Killingham

Sanji continues his fight against Killingham by unleashing an attack called “Ifrit Jambe: Sky Table Kick Course”. Taking away the obvious fact he’s powering into Ifrit Jambe, this attack appears to be a combination of two of his most classic techniques: Party Table Kick Course, the move where he gets upside down and starts spinning on his hands, which you might also remember from the iconic shot in the first opening, and Sky Walk, the move where he gets to fly in the sky using the rokushiki technique of Geppo (moonwalk). As such, party here is replaced with sky as he executes the move while in the air.

Killingham retaliates by piercing Sanji with Longinus, with an attack called “Celestial Lightning”. This attack is fitting, as the spear of Longinus is said to be the spear with which a roman soldier stabbed Jesus Christ through the side of his chest, thus not only making the name of the attack quite fitting, but also the fact that he similarly pierces Sanji through the side of his chest, with him also falling to the ground in a crucifix-like pose. Ironically, you could even compare Sanji’s own desire to self-sacrifice himself to the symbolism of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice upon the crucifix as a way for Oda to symbolically tie all this together.

This is accentuated by Sanji beginning to remember all the times he’s sacrificed himself across the series: there’s a quick glimpse to the first time he tried to act this way during the Baratie, when Luffy told Sanji that dying is no way to repay a favor, as he was ready to lay down his life to make sure Zeff wouldn’t die and that the Baratie wouldn’t be lost. The next shot may be harder to recall given the simplicity of the line, but the outfit should be telling: this is in Skypiea, when Sanji told Nami and Usopp to run away as he prepared to hold off Enel, right before he is blasted by lighting but he ends up thanking him for the light, hence the emphasis on the cigarrette in this panel. In the next panel, this is Sanji during Thriller Bark, during the scene when Zoro was willing to sacrifice himself to take on Luffy’s pain; Sanji tried to take Zoro’s place, but Zoro knocked him out and absorbed all the damage instead. The following panel is from Zou as is clear from the outfit, when Sanji throws away Nami, Brook, Chopper, and Momonosuke from within Bege’s body to ensure that he alone (and well, Caesar, but who cares about him) are taken to Whole Cake Island. And of course, the following, is Sanji breaking down during Whole Cake Island about how he had hoped his own sacrifice would at least protect his beloved crewmates.

Killingham belittles Sanji, though wondering why he is so resistant to attacks, asking if he has a body made of steel. This of course harkens to the Germa modifications, which despite Sanji’s abandonement of the Raid Suit, only help to accentuate his own hatred for himself. Suddenly though, Sanji recalls a memory: in a funny spin on the traditional power up through flashback trope you see in shonen, in this case Sanji is begging to himself to not remember these memories, both for his bad memories in Momoiro but also likely because he may feel stubborn to admit Ivankov was right. Much like Zoro harkened back to Mihawk, it makes sense Sanji recalls his training during the timeskip, but Ivankov is shockingly a really good counterpart to Sanji’s own sense of self-sacrifice. Ivankov is someone who chooses to live, someone who has embraced who they are, specifically because, well, they are an okama: someone who, especially in this case, has trascended the concept of gender. To accept your own gender and your own existence requires a degree of self-love, of acceptation, and of pride on who you are and who you exist as, rather than a rejection of yourself due to a fear of how society may judge you. And so who better to help Sanji come to terms with his own personal acceptance than someone who, ever since childhood, was always accepting of who they truly are.

As a funny little final detail for this chapter, the sound effect around Ivankov at the end doesn’t read as “Don!!” or “Ban!!”, but instead as “Van!!”. The reason for this is because Ivankov has a unique speech pattern where instead of saying “watashi”, the neutral first person pronoun, he instead uses “vatashi”, and similarly uses “vanata” instead of “anata”. This is to make him sound more Russian, since Ivankov is, as evident from his name, styled to be Russian, and so the vs in the pronouns give him more of a Russian-sounding accent in Japanese. But there’s also the added layer that in spite of the phonetics, “vatashi” is not a real pronoun, it’s made up, but it’s showing that fundamentally, in order to encompass his new gender identity, Ivankov came up with a new pronoun that befits the gender-fluid state he achieves by switching between sexes at will. And as such, of course, the sound effect here goes from “ban!!” to being “van!!” as well!

Followingly, Killingham manifests Sanji’s own nightmare into reality just like he did with the other MMAs, in a move he calls “A Utouto Putto”(アうとうとプット/夢出力). Since “a” and “putto” are bizarrely written in katakana while the “uto uto” is written in hiragana, distinguishing the two apart, the pun becomes evident. “Uto uto” means being drowsy in Japanese, or falling asleep, but combined with “a” and “putto”, the reading becomes “autoutoputto”, or in other words, a pun between utouto and output. This is evident with the kanji reading, which reads as “dream output” (夢出力), or more literally “power to remove dreams”. The official translation cleverly translates this as “lights output”. The following move where he fuses with the MMA is instead called “Yumeutsutsu” (夢現) or “Dreamality”, a combination of “dream” and “reality”.

The mix between Ivankov and Killingham is a bit reminiscent of the dragon Iva Oda drew for the SBS, though funnily in this case even the centaur form seems to sport Ivankov’s fishnets. Interestingly, the text box for the MMA lists Ivankov as the “queen” (女王) of the Kamabakka Kingdom, which is a befitting title despite the fact Iva spends most time in his male form. The MMA then follows up with an attack called “Loga Uto Uto” (ログアうとうと/退場) which as you might guess, is another pun on “uto uto” and “logout”. The kanji reading is that of “exit” (退場), which fits the concept of “logout”. He then follows this up with a simple “Mule Kick” (ミュールキック), spelled just as such in katakana.

We get a flashback during the timeskip, during the time that Sanji was collecting the 99 vital recipes of Kamabakka, having taken his 30th recipe (which you can even see him clutching in his hand after the fight) from a new character called Clara, one of the 99 masters of Newkama kenpo. You can tell this is during the timeskip beyond the obvious context by the fact that Sanji’s bangs are parted on the other side. Seeing the outcome of the fight, Ivankov forces Sanji to rest, which does recontextualize things a lot, because Sanji described his time in Kamabakka as some kind of nightmare where he had to survive each day, but it’s clear that Ivankov just treated this as training while making sure Sanji got his due breaks as well.

As we’ve mentioned before though, Sanji holds a deep fear towards Ivankov, and seemingly this fear is even bigger than the one he has towards Judge or his siblings. Not so much because of how Ivankov and his people almost turned him into a girl once, but a lot more because Ivankov is someone who understands Sanji for who he truly is, and that very thought of inner introspection terrified him more than the ghosts of his past who, by now, are gone. All that remains… is Sanji’s own fear of self.

The Sanji Character Analysis

The following is going to get quite a bit long, so strap in for a bit!

The reality is that, when dealing with trauma, especially when it comes to domestic abuse, it is technically possible to escape from it. Except for particularly specific circumstances, most people who grow up do eventually manage to escape from abusive households, if not for the simple fact of the passage of time and being old enough to sustain onself, despite some of the challenges a lack of autonomy can bring. But even in cases where the physical form of that trauma is gone and you’ve moved on, the chains of trauma within yourself still remain. At that point, many times, a pattern often manifests with those with this kind of trauma where the chains that bind you aren’t so much the abuse currently happening in the present, since by some point those who once abused you will eventually disappear, but by the very chains that you have built around yourself through making a habit of that abuse. If you grow up a certain way, you become so used to it that even when that source is gone from your life, it lives on within you as a bad habit. If you grew up with someone constantly reminding you how you are worthless, even after you escape that environment, you’ll continue to remind yourself you are worthless simply out of habit. In the end, what really scares Sanji isn’t his abusive family; after all, he’s already left them behind, he very much says that here: “I’ve settled things with Germa. I’m not the same as I used to be. My friends have given me more than enough worth…”. As he tells Ivankov, he deludes himself into thinking that just because he’s left the past behind, he’s moved on. But what really scares him isn’t so much the past, but the part of that past that lives on within him, and as a result, Ivankov is nothing more than just projection. Because Ivankov is the only one that really managed to understand Sanji to his core, he’s also the embodiment of Sanji having to face his own inner demons.

To try and tackle this matter a bit more seriously, I’d like to preface this with the acknowledgement that, especially reading this chapter, I begin to realize how much a lot of Sanji’s own experiences mimick my own. I’ve mentioned it passingly before, but the reason why I suffer a lot from a bunch of health issues isn’t really due to any natural condition, but all because of a lot of abuse that I suffered as a child, and without getting a lot into detail, I’ve taken great strides across the years to not just work on improving my own mental state, but also understand it better by trying to study the psychology behind it more. And everything that Sanji mentions this chapter is really reminiscent to me with that kind of coping mechanism that is quite similar to mine. So while this is inevitably subjective, I hope I can offer my own perspective on his own struggles as someone who has lived something very similar.

Just as a disclaimer, beyond the fact this is obviously not medical advice, it’s important to understand that there are no absolute ways to categorize mental traumas since every single psychological experience is so immensely subjective, but there are certain overarching patterns that can be commonly recognized across certain kinds of trauma, especially when we reflect them in fiction as we see here with Sanji, so just as a heads up I’ll try to boil this stuff down in simpler terms so it’s easier to understand. To put it in the simplest way, I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of abandonement, the trauma a child suffers when he isn’t given the love he needs from their parental figures, something that is essential to the growth and development of any child. But there’s an equally insidious form of a similar trauma, and that is rejection. It’s one thing to be ignored and abandoned and being starved of that source of parental love, but just as dangerous can be when that love is weaponized against you. A child naturally sees their parents as their primary source of love growing up, a beacon they can rely on, but in cases of abuse, a parent can go from a source of love to a source of fear. A child tries to do anything to get their approval but instead parents instil a fear response rather than one of comfort.

But the reality is, even if you become consciously aware of how self-damaging you can be, there’s still a part of your subconscious that keeps telling you that you are worthless, and that you do not deserve the things you get in life. In the end, it’s nothing more than a habit that has stuck with you, because it’s the only way you know how to survive: you had to deal with this so much day to day that you literally don’t know any other way of living. This results in you often comparing yourself to those who are suffering worse than you, suffering from what is called in psychology as “Impostor Syndrome”, the belief you do not deserve the accomplishments and love you’ve achieved. A line that Sanji mentions this chapter actually reinforces this idea and stuck out a lot to me: “The times are hard, and there are plenty of people out there living shitty lives. I’m not going to wallow on my own misfortune”. There’s almost a fear in trying to acknowledge your own suffering or that you deserve things in life because you’re afraid of becoming the arrogant monsters that those who hurt you growing up were that you pivot too hard in the other direction.

This constant mentality of trying to downplay your own suffering because “the times are hard”, “the world sucks anyway”, or “others are suffering, so how can I be deserving of love?”, despite them potentially being unsubstantiated, are so common with people who have undergone this kind of trauma, especially if you suffer from some kind of OCD disorder, which often accompanies them by making such intrusive thoughts so much more present. There’s this constant feeling of trying to make sense as to why you didn’t receive the love you wanted in life, as if that needed some excuse rather than just being coincidence. Why were you punished, be it by your parents or the heavens, to suffer such a difficult childhood? Clearly, you must not have been good enough.

So the only way to prove to yourself that you deserve that love in your life is by offering proof of your suffering. In other words, you almost end up having to prove to yourself that you “deserve” that love by working hard, and if you haven’t felt loved enough, then you feel like you have to work even harder. This is where I identify myself a lot with Sanji’s mentality: I’ve often been plagued by this idea that in order to be more loved in this world, I had to work harder. That unless I was willing to suffer a certain amount, put my life on the line, and show that I truly deserved to “earn” that love, then I wouldn’t get it. The only way to earn that sense of self-worth, you tell yourself, is through sacrifice and hard work, even when it reaches a point of recklessness and you start throwing away your very own health for the sake of achieving that. It leads to a lack of respect and appreciation for yourself where you become a lot more reckless and self-sacrificial, because you feel it’s the only way you’ll be able to be of use to others. And the issue is, it’s easy to conflate this idea with actual positive applications of hard work: of course, to earn things in life you have to work hard, and there’s nothing wrong with striving for a great goal or wanting to improve yourself. Even Ivankov says so this chapter, when Sanji says he’d be willing to die for Nami or Robin, Ivankov affirms the very concept of putting your life on the line for others isn’t bad per se. Even Ivankov puts the example that there’s a man he is willing to protect with his life, which given the parallelisms with Sanji and Luffy is most likely to be Dragon, but he makes it clear that this has to come through a love for yourself first and foremost. It’s so easy to mistake the two concepts, but they aren’t the same: devoting yourself fully to something isn’t the same as sacrificing yourself for it, and the key to that is self-love.

An interesting thing is that psychological studies have shown that those who have suffered from traumas akin to abandonement or rejection often end up with a higher romantic desire or even increased sexual libido. While we could get into the science of it all, I’m sure you can probably understand the basic process behind it: if you were starved of that love when you were younger, like somebody starving for food, you’ll be so much more hungry to seek that elsewhere later on. Some unfortunately, drowning in their own trauma, manifest this desire towards others in creepy or unethical ways, but there’s also plenty of people out there that despite having the human decency to respect others, do still fervently hope they can find someone they can deeply connect with and love, which is what leads to increased desire to be with others romantically. Of course, practically everyone has a desire to love, but that desire will become a lot more desperate to those who have not had any form of love since childhood.

As a result, after I read his backstory, it didn’t surprise me that Sanji had been such a loverboy his whole life. In a sense, his love for women can be seen as a personal projection of his desire to be loved. Since he felt that lack of love, he tried to search for it elsewhere, in hopes that it could in some way be reciprocated. This makes more sense once you start thinking that the only two people who were ever kind to him in his childhood happened to be, in fact, women: his sister Reiju, the only one of his siblings who showed him kindness, and the love he received from his late mother Sora. But what makes Sanji’s love towards women peculiar is his almost bizarre commitment at always keeping that love at a distance. Sanji is never shy about telling Nami or Robin how much he finds them beautiful, but it never really feels like he considers settling down withe either of them a realistic option. Similarly, we’ve seen the same with plenty of women across the series: even in cases with people that actually reciprocated Sanji’s feelings, it never really feels like Sanji entertained much the idea of seriously settling down with them. Viola reciprocated some of Sanji’s feelings in Dress Rosa, but when the time came to it, he left her behind without much thought. He had considered marrying Pudding but that was only out of circumstance: the moment the marriage wasn’t obligatory anymore to save his crew, he was grateful towards her but had no hesitation to just move away again, never even considering to ask her to come along or giving much thought to their parting. And we even see something similar with the geisha O-Some he rescues in Onigashima, and so on and so forth.

Part of it I’m sure is just the way Oda writes things and the gags he builds around it, but I do think there’s something interesting about the fact that Sanji never really seems like he approaches any woman with the concept of commitment. And I don’t think this is just due to him being a pervert, but I think at his core, Sanji might just be afraid of wanting to actually commit to any love. I wonder if deep down, more than just being scared that a woman might not want to fully love him back or could abandon him, I think it’s even more likely that he’s scared that he himself could not be a good husband and love the love of his life as well as he wishes he could. Because after all, as his father told him, he is worthless. And so he has to keep fighting this hypothetical battle against his inner demons of trying to prove his own worth through suffering and sacrifice, all while keeping those he wishes to be closest to at a distance, never ready to commit. We see this attitude of his not just with women, but also with his crew: in the same way that during Whole Cake Island he kept Luffy at a distance and tried to keep leaving the crew because he once again felt he wasn’t worthy, ironically only making things worse.

But Ivankov puts it better than I could: love from someone who doesn’t love themselves is worthless. There’s a lot of people out there in the world who feel lonely or without a partner and they often fall back on thoughts similar to those that Sanji experiences here. But the reality is, it doesn’t matter how much you try to win your own inner battle of self-worth, none of that usually really reflects much in the real world. Something I’ve come to realize across the years, is that despite many people’s claims that women (or men, by all means) only care about the money, or the looks, or even the opposite that they only care about true kindness and strong upstanding people, the reality is a lot simpler: people fall in love with those around them. Obviously people can be more easily attracted to beautiful people, people with money, or kind, caring people, but the reality is there’s enough people out there in this world for just about everyone, and I’ve seen plenty of people get together with others simply because they just happened to be there. But you’re only able to put yourself out there if you’re not busy trying to sabotage yourself all the time in this pointless battle of self worth.

If you spend all the time trying to convince yourself you’re worthy of the love of others, you’re not actually going to triumph and prove some beautiful girl that hey yes, you are deserving of love. Rather, you’ll spend so much time arguing with yourself that you won’t spend the time or energy to go and meet new people or even be willing to take chances because you’ll be so afraid of rejection, putting yourself at a stand still the way Sanji does towards all the women he loves, in the same way he also holds himself back from being able to fulfill his own true potential and become the best person he can be, to the point he can properly fight back to protect his beloved crewmates.

The answer to all this is simple: you just need to love yourself, just as Ivankov or the okama would. And this needs to be an unconditional love: not a love that you’ve earned by proving you’re good enough, but a love that you earned from the simple fact of being born. You need to accept the idea that all humans deserve to be loved and that includes you among them. And remember: if someone who can’t love themselves cannot love others, then that simply means that once you love yourself, you’ll be able to love others too. Of course, the process to doing so isn’t the easiest, and personally I would recommend getting professional help to help you achieve it. But in all my years working on myself, I’ve realized how much that phantom of self-deprecation haunts me from my past, and how much even today I struggle to appreciate and love myself. And while it is hard, I’m trying to put in more effort day after day to allowing myself the simple natural right to be loved and to love others, and I can only hope that, much like Sanji, anyone else out there suffering from something similar can find that love for themselves too.

Sanji’s Final Line

As Sanji slowly comes to his own realization too, the nightmare fades from Killingham. Sanji then lights his cigarrette and tells Killingham “You hold your head too high! Bow down, horseman!”; there’s several indicators here that Sanji is regaining his confidence: for one, him lighting his cigarrete again harkens back to how him deciding to start to smoke was a way to show Zeff that he was starting to become a man. Obviously, don’t smoke kids, I hope most of you have the literacy to appreciate the symbolism and that Oda isn’t saying smoking is good, but it symbolizes a personal sense of maturity Sanji holds towards himself. The other, ironically, is the use of the term “horseman”; this is similar to insults Sanji has used against other opponents before, particularly this reminds me of the time he caled Kuroobi during his fight at Arlong Park as “sakanaman”, which given how “sakana” is the Japanese word for “fish”, basically comes off as “fish-man”, but said ultra literally in Japanese like an insult. In a sense, it’s a way to show that the suave gentleman we remember from the East Blue days is appearing a bit again here.

But the most telling is the expression Sanji uses, and this line is where we get to the linguistical nuance we mentioned, the line “zu ga takai” (図が高い), which literally translates to “your head is too high”. This expression harkens to the concept of bowing in Japanese culture, meaning that if your head isn’t lowered enough, it means you aren’t showing due respect to someone that needs it. In anime and manga, this line is often used by villains trying to sound high and mighty, as if others should bow down to them. You may recall if you have good memory Gunko using this line very early in the arc when she first appeared at Aurust Castle, telling one of the giant guards his “head was too high” and forcing him to bow to her by squeezing his leg with the arrow bandages. If you want another similar example, there’s an iconic scene in Jujutsu Kaisen, where Sukuna very much says the same line that a lot of fans often remember. This is to give the idea this line in anime is often associated with villains trying to sound mighty. So doesn’t it sound out of place for Sanji to use it?

Well yes, but you have to consider the context. This is the kind of line that royalty would use… the kind of line a king would say. But this is the kind of thing that Sanji would never allow himself to say because it would remind him of his father. If he ever tried saying it in the past, he would probably get intrusive thoughts about how he is getting ahead of himself, and he is acting no better than his family, which connected to everything we’ve mentioned before leads to the self-deprecation he constantly has. But his moment of acceptance here is almost embracing the fact that something like this is okay: after all, Sanji isn’t telling some poor suffering kid or peasant to lower his head; he is telling this to an absolute scumbag who, by all means, is holding his head too high (quite literally too, given the Centaur form). So Sanji is willing to accept here that there is context to these things: saying this line does not make him a horrible person, if anything he is willing to do something prideful while understanding that in this context it embodies standing up for the right thing. This kind of royal pride isn’t the toxic arrogance of some deluded monarch, it is the makings… of a real king. A conqueror king who can stand above all others, not because he thinks he is better than them, but simply because he has finally come to realize how that pride and respect needs to come from within first and foremost… that, is true love.