Surely they’ll let you into the World Government this time Harald 
What did you think of this week’s chapter?
No break next week! 
Garp and Harald certainly don’t learn their lessons. It’s interesting that they’re both so driven by their ideals (justice and peace respectively) and then they’re hit with the reality of things. But we also see the setup of next generation who reject following those paths in Dragon and Loki.
Loki’s flashback with Rocks is such a tease of what his devil fruit will be. Seems like the reason it’s important is that when a giant uses it they can somehow call out to the Galleila company giants… what could it be???
Garp and Harald are really neat depiction of powerful people with good intentions being thwarted by a system far larger than them. I think it’s no accident that Oda writes in the line from Sengoku that explains that the navy is so incomprehensibly large that it’s basically only united by ideology rather than any sort of personal leadership. Garp kinda reminds me of a good version of Kizaru who believes that he’s just a cog in the machine of the WG’s will but Garp actually uses his personal strength to nurture others to take on the system (kind of hinting back to when we learned that the Roger pirates were “too early” but used the rest of their lives to either prepare for the great war or herald the next generation).
That’s a nice running theme with a lot of the Marine characters, they each have an ideal of what justice is or should be but they inevitably clash with reality. Garp loses faith in the justice preached by the Marines after the God Valley Incident but resolves to stay and protect the low rankers from what they can’t stand up against, only to find he can’t protect everyone when the WG is set to execute Ace. Ultimately he recognizes the limits of his personal justice which is why he’s training the next generation vs Sengoku who’s basically done with trying to change things after retiring.
I guess the third-worlder comprador really did double down.
but also it is nice that Oda shows how hollow Sengoku’s ideology was considering he ultimately just paved the way for hardliners like Akainu to take over. Sengoku reached the top of the marine hierarchy and actually had less power to shape things then he expected. It’s probably also no coincidence that after his retirement he stops giving a fuck and just is stuck on payroll doing nothing (old japanese men doing nothing at companies meme). Oda avoids the pro-cop messaging at the very least by demonstrating that the marines are this huge, world-spanning army that doesn’t have full control of itself and so making sure that this military transitions into something progressive is important or else they’ll be these huge power vacuums.
Based Dragon stocks going up++++
Given there are apparently around 27 million soldiers in the world today, is this a Not Knowing Numbers Moment, or deliberate worldbuilding implying that One Piece has a higher population than modern earth?
That would be congruous with the many observations suggesting that the one piece planet is significantly larger than earth.
So like odas infamously known for being bad at scaling things (just take a look at zuneishas retconned height). But I think this just shows how heavily militarized the one piece world is. You basically have to be folded into the world governments army if you want to leave your island and have some sort of stable job.
The one piece world is a post apocalyptic one analogous to ours but I think its also just far bigger because oda wants to be able to tell the story of people discovering the past and exploring the vast forgotten expanse instead of clinging onto things that they know.
