@Shift:
But there's still no hook like any of those examples for Yamato. The cup's shadow,
The cups shadow WASN'T a hook. It was a super tiny detail that was there, but that everyone missed. Because the point was for it to be missed.
The names weren't hooks, they were just names filling out a page. One of the entries was Pandaman! And then later it turned out… those names were actually important.
Then later you go back and go "oh, Oda snuck that in without us knowing!"
If its a retcon or not on Oda's part, it IS a trick he's used continuously. Sabo is almost certainly a retcon that wasn't originally planned, but he fits the details that were there. The fishman island princes dancing to make Shirahoshi probably wasn't planned beyond being a wacky quirk, but it was given meaning. We know the drum cherry blossoms and the Vivi X farewell weren't planned, (Heck, basically everything Vivi including her being a princess) they were Oda taking advantage of what he'd already done. So there's a line somewhere between "planned in advance" and "took advantage of something already there because he got inspired" and Oda is good at making us not know what's what a lot of the time.
And Oda was dropping the fact that Kaidou had a son at about that time. And he's mentioned reading Rose of versailles and being surprised by the lead just a few months earlier.
I agree, its not anywhere near as impressive a magic trick as some of the other things Oda's done because its such an easy one to do after the fact, but he still went in and made the connection all the same.
Oda DID have one unusually tall character in that shot whose face conveniently went off-camera. And that was the ONLY character in the sequence that happened to. Dozens of other background characters over those chapters, the person that ended up being Yamato was the only one with their face taken out of frame and cut off. Everyone else was fit into bottom or center frame.
It could have been written off as perspective, but in that panel Yamato IS way taller than everyone else. Same way you don't appreciate how tall the Warlords or Blackbeards are until there's a regular person in front of them for scale.
I don't know if that was Oda making use of that because it was literally the ONLY on-camera extra that fit, (among dozens) or if it was deliberate cropping like the sake cup, but it IS a unique thing... that no one would have ever, EVER stopped to think about because its so innocuous.
Meanwhile someone wearing a demon face mask with horns would have just distracted from the scene. Yes, you'd want to know what their story was... but that wasn't the intent of the moment.
So was it a planned trick, or one he made up after the fact? Does it matter when the result is the same?