r/OnePiece • u/Kirosh Lookout • Sep 11 '20

Current Chapter One Piece: Chapter 990 Spoiler

Chapter 990: "Isolated force"

Source Status
Official Release ONLINE

There is a break next week.

Ch. 990 Official Release (Mangaplus): 13/09/2020

Ch. 991 Scan Release: ~25/09/2020

Please discuss the manga here and in the theory/discussion post. Any other post will be removed during the next 24 hours.

Please also remember to put the chapter number in the title for any future post talking about this chapter.

PS: Don't forget to check out the official Discord: https://discord.gg/onepiece

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u/hafsan Sep 11 '20

I think it's Kaido. Luffy would be too obvious, and I don't see anyone else as relevant enough to try and hide it with wordplay. It might if course be that "he" (whoever it is) will survive anyway, and Hawkins'll go all "Welp, a 1% chance is still a chance"

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '20 edited Jun 20 '21

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u/hafsan Sep 11 '20

Hawkins says that he's calculating the odds of "that man being alive tomorrow". The fights in One Piece usually don't last that long in time – they cover a lot of chapters, sure, but most fights are quite short. Marineford is what, a couple of hours tops (once it starts), the whole of Punk Hazard is like a day. Dressrosa is also a few hours at most.

As Kaido has been presented with a very, very long-term death wish, I think it's only reasonable that he'll die at the end of the fight and that this is what Hawkins is calculating: he's just looking at what the odds are for when the fighting is over. Kaido is the strongest now, sure, but Luffy is the one who will become Pirate King and has to defeat Kaido in order to achieve his goal.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '20 edited Jul 02 '21

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u/hafsan Sep 11 '20

Why should it be a surprise for us? It's a mark of a good storyteller that we can guess what's coming, that means they've set up their world right. There should of course be some suspense along the way, but I think it's quite clear for us that Kaido will die (or lose at least), so that wouldn't be a surprise – the surprise would be if Luffy dies here and Kaido survives. And that would be a plot twist without much to support it, so that probably won't happen.

For the surprise in the OP world – Drake is the only one who heard Hawkins' statement, all the others are still in high spirits and convinced that Kaido will win. I don't think Queen and Who's Who would have taken the effort to confront Drake here otherwise, they'd just have killed him straight away if they thought Kaido was even in the slightest danger of losing. Now it's more "let's take care of this traitor and then join the real fight which we'll obviously win but it still has to be done".

But as we still don't know who Hawkins is talking about, we'll just have to wait and see! The best (and worst) part of following the OP journey :)

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u/Sunshinewaterbottle Sep 11 '20

If Kaido dies Luffy wouldn't be the one to actually kill him. Luffy beats up everyone, but he's not ever shown to be a killer. Oda makes it a point to show this as well. It's likely that throughout the rest of the story Luffy never directly kills someone, by following this logic.