Wano in retrospect is a story of towering highs and abyssal lows. It's all of Oda's best and worst traits in a package larger than any before. I reread all of the arc that was out during the monthlong break, although I do kinda wish I'd held out for the last half dozen chapters, because there are definitely things I think I'd have looked at differently if I'd read the latest chapter first. Oh well. I ended up writing a lot of text for Reddit's Wano reread threads while the forum was down, and I'm going to recycle a lot of it here, across multiple replies because I know the new version of this thing has a character limit.
The arc starts strong. Act One is a fantastic introduction to the Land of Wano - it was a smart choice to scale the main cast back to just Luffy and Zoro to focus on the setting and its inhabitants as a primer, even if the means of separating Luffy from the rest of the crew are a bit contrived. The things we learn about Kuri - Bakura Town and its opulent Paradise Farm compared to Okobore and the ruins of Tama's village is the conflict between the Flower Capital and the rest of Wano writ small.
It's interesting seeing the the bit where Kin talks about Oden while we only see the crew's reaction, now that we have the full story. The fakeout about Kin'emon and co possibly being ghosts was really funny as well.
Having Luffy lose to Kaido so decisively and so early is a really cool shakeup to Oda's traditional formula that sets the stage for the kind of training arc he doesn't usually do, and a chance for the crew to do some problem solving of their own in the next act. It's a great way to have introduced Kid and given him a reasonable way to start getting along with Luffy as well.
The first act is hard to fault, but the second starts to stumble in a lot of ways typical of the middle portion of One Piece arcs. Oda gets ambitious and tries to juggle a number of subplots, characters and worldbuilding elements that would have any other writer running screaming. I've got a soft spot for stories that dare to aim high, even if they don't quite hit the mark. But the second act of Wano mostly works.
It takes the class conflicts established in the first act even further, using the foundation set by the Bakura/Okobore dynamic in Kuri to dig deeper into the attitudes and lifestyles of both of Wano's distinct social classes. We see how horrifically money-driven the Flower Capital has become, and how people who lose their ability to contribute to the economy are scorned and exiled. We're shown how the ruling classes have active disdain for the poor, tormenting them with tainted food (when they get fed at all) and talking about them as a blight on the landscape.
Wano in this section also truly feels like a hostile, enemy-controlled place to the crew. You can feel the pressure on them to move around in secret and avoid confrontations. I had forgotten about the falling out between Law and Shinobu over how to keep his captured crew from spilling the plan, or the crew being forced to abandon the capital entirely after their identities were exposed at the execution. Even knowing how it resolves, Law and Shinobu's argument feels like very genuine drama and a real problem for the struggling alliance.
Yasuie's sacrifice is the kind of moment that's really uncharacteristic of Oda outside of flashbacks, but I think putting it in the present goes a long way to show how loathsome Orochi is and how much the completion of this plan means to the people of Wano. Yasuie sacrificed everything, in a series where death in the present day is nigh-unheard of, to buy the alliance their chance to strike. The confusion of the Ebisu people's dissonant laughter, Toko's gut-wrenchingly childlike reaction, and the subsequent, horrifying explanation of how the Smiles were used all combine to make the execution likely this act's strongest scene.
We may complain the epilogue skipped over a lot of things Oda would typically do at the end of an arc, but we're outta this place without Pell-ing Yasuie, so call that one a win.
Luffy's stint in prison is another definite highlight with a whole lot of "how will he get out of this one" questions rising and falling as he struggles for survival first with his powers sealed by seastone, then limited to space of a sumo ring, then in the face of Big Mom herself. And it's all happening so far before the raid you know there's no real backup for him. And after all of that, his line "I've always been free. And now this place is mine." brought a huge smile to my face. It's a perfect Luffy moment.
All of that said, Oda's storytelling develops two strange quirks during this act.
The first is a feeling that time only moves forward. If two things happen at the same time, like the fight over Yasuie's body and Luffy's sumo inferno, the camera will only focus on one of them at a time, and will generally not go back over the things it missed. There are few "meanwhile" narration boxes here. By the time we cut back to the Flower Captial after focussing on Luffy for a bit, we've missed the end of the fight and have to piece together what happened from what's being done and said in the present. While I think this strategy was probably the right choice to keep the pacing quick and emphasise a feeling of chaos and disorder, it also makes for some weird cuts, like Zoro's meeting of Yasuie and loss of Shusui, and can result in whole subplots like Kid's escape and recapture happening out of sight of the reader.
The second is a reluctance to give a definitive end to any fight among people who'll be important on Onigashima. We don't see the kind of damage actually done to Orochi by Nami and Zeus's lightning, or how Sanji stopped both Page One and Drake from rampaging in the capital, or any real part of Kaido and Big Mom's overnight battle. We know Nami and Sanji held their own at least enough to escape unscathed, but none of their opponents show any noteworthy injuries afterward. We also know that Kaido and Big Mom both fought and defended hard enough to consider each other more or less equal after, but also apparently didn't manage to hurt each other at all.
Oda seems to want to have his cake and eat it too. He wants major heroes and villains (and villains and villains) to clash before the big fight, but he can't afford to have anyone on either side giving away their tricks, looking weak, or getting injured before the finale, so he just has us look elsewhere while these fights resolve.
If it had just happened once, I probably wouldn't be complaining. I'm also not saying that Act Two would have been substantially improved by showing Sanji vs Page One in full, just that Oda ended up using this one technique often enough that it gets really transparent how and why he's using it.
I also don't think it's a coincidence that the two major characters who do suffer onscreen defeats during Act Two, Killer and Hawkins, end up being each other's final opponents later. Kind of an Onigashima losers' bracket.
Other assorted highlights include Franky's search for the mansion plans, Caribou sensing a trap when Luffy allies with him, Kawamatsu in general, the Scabbards marching to battle at the end, and basically all the new Gifter designs.
I also really liked the number of things that paid off in unexpected ways. When I reread the bits with Raizo looking for Luffy's handcuff key, I thought it was going to be slightly wasted page space, given that Queen just frees Luffy himself later, but the keys were used to free Caribou instead, who helps Luffy get the oshiruko that starts Big Mom's rampage, shuts down the prison's communications and provides more food at a critical moment in Act Three. I thought Law's crew being captured, him trading himself for them and then being freed by Drake would be a plot thread that went in a circle for nothing, but it was actually the only way to smuggle the message with the altered meetup location out of the heavily-guarded prison block and keep the plan alive. All these little moments are gears turning in the larger machine of the plot, and it all makes sense when you see how it comes together.
There's maybe a little continuity glitch in Gyukimaru claiming that Shusui's theft was the start of Wano's misfortune. Looking back now, we know that Kaido and Orochi had controlled the country for literally years before Moria stole the sword. But I'm willing to chalk that up to a fox's bad memory and lack of political awareness.
There's some cool stuff here to take note of for the ending too. While late in Act One we were shown propaganda being taught in school to make the youth idolise Orochi and Kaido, we learn more and more about the level of sympathy the adults who remember the old days have been able to maintain, and their secret hope of a return to Kozuki rule. At the banquet scene, we learn it's not just the undercover Denjiro, but all of Orochi's top sycophants that have no respect for the man. The scene where the prisoners kneel to the child Momonosuke as he struggles under the weight of his father's legacy is a great moment to compare and contrast with the reveal of his adult self at the end of the arc.
The chaos of the second act makes for an overall great reread with the benefit of hindsight. There's some unquestionably messy storytelling as Oda tries to keep the pace brisk and conflicts happening without spoiling anyone he wants to use for the final battle, but the man is just so good at taking a story that seems to be branching off in a million directions at once and pulling back together in a satisfying way.
It's crazy to think all these ups and downs only represent the first third of the whole arc. There are better things still to come, but there are also worse ones.