Whether you’re watching the anime, reading the manga, or both, One Piece is on fire right now. This weekend’s episode in the anime featured absolutely stellar animation and, best of all, was Yamato-centric. Then I bopped on over to the manga, and my jaw hit the floor and didn’t pick up until several minutes after I’d finished.
Spoilers for the post-Wano One Piece manga below!
To say “things are heating up” in the manga would be an immense understatement. Blackbeard is fighting Trafalgar Law while freaking Garp is preparing an assault on Blackbeard’s home turf. Kid’s crew is preparing to disembark on Elbaf. A Bartholomew Kuma still on auto-pilot is about to attack Marijois. Sabo is assumed dead after an entire island was wiped off the face of existence to keep Imu secret. Boa Hancock had to flee Amazon Lily. Sentomaru was re-introduced for the first time in a decade and immediately ate it. Hell, Vegapunk is now an active character and told us the best explanation we have to date of what the hell a Devil Fruit is.
And to point, events at Vegapunk’s lab on Egghead Island, where the Straw Hats are currently located, are reaching a fever pitch. It tells you exactly how intense things are that Luffy has already used Gear 5 in this relatively young arc. CP0, headed by Rob Lucci and backed by a ton of Seraphim, has decided to disobey orders from the Navy to await backup and is targeting—for the kill!—both Vegapunk and the Straw Hats. One of the members of CP0 is Stussy. We’ll get back to her in a second. There’s a lot we have to talk about here.
Bonney, Vegapunk, and Kuma
Luffy bumped into fellow Worst Generation captain Jewelry Bonney immediately after crash-landing on Egghead. It was revealed that Bonney was looking for answers from Vegapunk, who took away her father Kuma’s free will and turned him into a cyborg called a Pacifista. Since the arc began, we’ve pieced together that Kuma and Vegapunk were longtime friends, and Vegapunk has known Bonney since she was a child. This is especially intriguing given that, despite being under government employ for ages, it very much seems that Vegapunk has been sympathetic to the Revolutionaries this entire time. He was basically just using the World Government for their money. I approve of this.
Bonney wants Vegapunk to turn Kuma back, but Vegapunk informed her in chapter 1071 that he can’t do that, but there’s “a good reason.” In this chapter, Vegapunk elaborates that he can’t tell Bonney that “good reason” because it will “hurt” her. In fact, Kuma made Vegapunk promise that he would never tell Bonney the reason why.
Fortunately for Bonney, and unfortunately for Vegapunk’s capacity to keep his promise, Bonney finds a giant bubble made by Kuma’s Paw-Paw Fruit. A refresher: Kuma’s Devil Fruit is able to repel objects, and one key feature is the ability to “push” pain out of a body and give it physical form in the shape of a bubble. Vegapunk wondered if other signals given by the body—such as memory—could also be pushed out by Kuma’s Devil Fruit.
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The bubble found by Bonney are these memories. Assuming we get to see them, things are going to get juicy quite soon.
My hunch? In the same way that pushing Luffy’s pain out of his body made that pain disappear from him in Thriller Bark, I figure that this flashback between Vegapunk and Kuma must have taken place right before Kuma lost his consciousness. Pushing his memories out of himself in this fashion would have essentially given Kuma amnesia.
I also suspect that it was Kuma and Vegapunk’s plan all along for Kuma to attack Marijois with the reinforced armor and abilities of a Pacifista. Since Vegapunk seemed to know that the government would eventually want to eliminate him, I bet the trigger was the moment the government acted upon that impulse. In 1067, Kuma goes “berserk” and heads to Marijois immediately after CP0 asks to land on Egghead. Seriously, the next page.
As much as Vegapunk doesn’t want Bonney to see these memories, I’m actively cheering her on. You go, girl. You deserve the truth! I also have a theory about Bonney, but first we need to talk about…
Stussy’s True Identity
Stussy is like an onion: she keeps getting layers added onto her. First, she was the so-called “Queen Of The Pleasure District” and a powerful force in the Underworld. Then, we learned she was an undercover agent for CP0, working alongside Rob Lucci. Now it turns out she’s a goddamn clone of a member of the goddamn Rocks Pirates. And has a sweet Devil Fruit power (a Succubus is the current prevailing hypothesis). It’s probably safe to assume that the person who cloned her was Vegapunk himself, and this is probably the ally he called last chapter who was waiting for his “orders.”
At first, I assumed we had never met Buckingham Stussy, the member of the Rocks Pirates who Stussy is cloned from. But then I thought long and hard (read: went down a wiki hole), and I remembered the existence of a squat lady we haven’t seen for a while. A lady only known to us as “Miss Buckin.”
That’s right, HER. The mother of Edward Weevil, who has been rampaging around calling himself Whitebeard’s son. This lady, who in turn has been calling herself Whitebeard’s lover. THIS is Buckingham Stussy.
We’re not told this explicitly, but we’re know enough to put two and two together. In chapter 909, Marco tells the Cat Viper that she and Whitebeard were crew mates on a pirate ship “thirty-something years ago, close to forty.” We also know that Whitebeard was a member of the Rocks Pirates, and that the Rocks Pirates were defeated 38 years ago. All of that information, coupled with the fact that she does look like Stussy when you put into consideration how Oda ages women (sigh), and it seems quite clear that Miss Buckin is our pirate.
But wait, there’s more! Because how did it come to be that a former member of the Rocks Pirates would be cloned by Vegapunk?
How MADS Could Tie In
A couple of front-page spreads ago, Oda properly introduced MADS Laboratory For Peace, a scientific team led by Vegapunk. This was apparently a team dedicated to “pacifism,” which explains how flimsy the ties between its members must have been. Other than Vegapunk, you had Vinsmoke Judge (yuck), Queen (of Beast Pirates fame, ugh), Caesar Clown (gross), and a mysterious woman. Many fans were guessing that this woman, whose back is to the camera, was Stussy. But now it seems almost certain that it was Buckingham Stussy.
I think it’s likely that Buckingham Stussy joined MADS some time after the dissolution of the Rocks Pirates. We don’t know how long ago MADS began, but we do know Vegapunk was working for the government as of relatively recently by the time of the Ohara Incident, 22 years ago.
Plus, in a now painfully obvious-feeling conversation, Yonji told Sanji that “human beings can be built.” He said this all the way back in the Whole Cake Island arc. In chapter 840, Yonji says that their dad used to work with Vegapunk on “a research team skirting the law in a foreign territory.” He continues:
At the time, Vegapunk’s great discovery was the presence of bloodline elements in living things… In essence, he found the blueprints of life. The world government felt threatened by this and arrested Vegapunk! The research team disbanded. Or should I say… they were absorbed by the government. But father escaped their grasp and continued the research alone here at Germa. The research into copying and augmenting life itself.
Yonji, One Piece 840
Who the hell thought Yonji would be the one with the giant-ass contextual quote we were looking for?! Damn.
You’re suddenly remember that all of Germa’s soldiers are clones, aren’t you? That’s why Stussy is “clone no. 1.” She was the first experiment, likely on a member of MADS. There are now much, much more. Plus, it seems like Stussy’s creation was the impetus for Vegapunk to start working with the World Government.
Another Clone On Egghead?
But wait! What if there even more clones? For one, this could explain the existence of Edward Weevil, since it seems rather unlikely Whitebeard would both eschew a son and have a one night stand with a former member of a crew he hated being a part of.
We can understand the opening lines of chapter 1072 to be about Stussy:
Even if the world doesn’t agree, I know that she is a living, breathing person… A true and undeniable human being!! It was a success. I am certain of it. And this is one great step toward the creation of world peace!!
Vegapunk, 1072
This could definitely be about Stussy, sure. But right after this little flashback-monologue, we cut to Bonney using her Devil Fruit to appear as a child. She’s putting on an act and crying. Vegapunk starts freaking out. Almost as if he has a paternal impulse towards her.
What if Bonney is a clone?
I’ll one-up you even more. We know Bonney has a huge appetite. Her pirate nickname is “The Glutton” because her appetite rivals even Luffy’s. We know one other character with an appetite this insatiable. And she also has pink hair.
What is Bonney is a clone of one of Bucking Stussy’s former crew mates on the Rocks Pirates? What if Bonney is a clone of Big Mom?! (The excellent One Piece theorizer Arthur also has this theory!)
We don’t know whether the real Big Mom is dead or not. And we don’t quite know how the “soul” works in One Piece—whether clones have their own 100% original soul, or whether they share something with the person they’re cloned from. Just some tiny connection. What if Big Mom is dead, but Bonney’s existence is why Zeus is still around?
I think that’s enough to chew on for now.
(Featured image: Toei Animation)
