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The story
In the latest One Piece chapter, what looks like a “Deep Sea Contract” mark was spotted on the arm of Imu-sama — long assumed to be the series’ ultimate villain — sparking speculation on 5ch’s Nandemo Jikkyo (“Everything Live”) board that Imu might actually answer to someone even higher up. Alongside joking theories comparing the mark to religious motifs like Buddha or Christ, plenty of commenters also vented frustration over the series dragging on and its recent story direction.
What people said
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Whaaat?! Now THAT'S a wild theory!!
There's already a 'Human-Human Fruit, Model: Great Buddha' in the story, you know. The Great Buddha is real!
So now, at this point, we're getting the 'Sengoku is the mastermind' theory?
Did they actually misspell ACE as ASE?
Make that another 15 years.
That's 5 years on the in-story timeline. It's probably only been a few months so far.
Same, I want to see the Heart Pirates again too, so I wish they'd hurry up and wrap the Elbaf arc already.
This guy's surname is Nerona = God, so that one's covered too.
Both of them burn through their Devil Fruit powers and Haki, it turns into a bare-knuckle brawl, they each lose an arm, and then collapse after making a heart shape with their own blood or something?
You bastard—!! There's no way Oda-sensei would pull some cheap 'Tough'-style sales stunt, huh—!? (mock-shouting in the exaggerated style of delinquent manga dialogue)
Ooh, you said it, you actually said it.
Though to be fair, Sword Master Yamato did wrap up all its foreshadowing and mysteries in one go by the end.
Jujutsu Kaisen was like that through its whole second half too. Once it ends, the complaints stop.
At the end of the day, people are still following the latest chapters. Well, I get wanting to complain though.
Thriller Bark started after the series' 10th anniversary, and even by that point the story really hadn't progressed much.
Hard to say how the Jump editorial team actually feels about the dragging-on. If they're just grateful for the sales it brings in, they'd probably want it to run forever. But if they think it's become unsightly as a manga and that he should wrap it up already, then the trust between them is probably eroding.
Best not to think too hard about consistency at this point.
Characters just talk about what they personally know. That's how it works in real life, right? It'd be weird if fiction worked differently from reality when reality is like that.
↑ The moment you start saying that about a work of fiction, it's game over.
Then what about stuff like stretching arms — things that are flat-out impossible in reality — what about that kind of creative license, huh?
It's precisely because it's impossible in reality that the audience has to imagine the world based on the information given within the story — if you reject that, they've got nothing left to go on.
Background and Key Points
Imu-sama has functioned as One Piece’s ultimate hidden authority since first appearing seated on the “Empty Throne” in Mary Geoise, the secret seat of the World Government that even the Five Elders answer to — until now, the character has been treated as the setting’s apex, faceless evil, so any new visual detail on Imu’s body is unusually significant worldbuilding. The manga has run in Weekly Shonen Jump since 1997 and is currently in its self-declared “Final Saga”; Oda has previously said in interviews that the story would wrap up in roughly five years, a promise commenters in this thread openly doubt given the story’s continued expansion into new arcs and tie-in films.
The thread’s actual split is between readers treating the newly spotted “Deep Sea Contract” mark as real lore — fuel for theories that Imu itself is subordinate to some higher, quasi-religious power, echoing the series’ existing Buddha-model Devil Fruit — and readers who wave it off as a rushed, low-effort design choice, folding it into broader complaints about pacing, inconsistent characterization, and the series being compared to Naruto and to Sword Master Yamato, a manga Japanese fans invoke as shorthand for endless, unresolved plotting.
What’s easy to miss without Japanese-manga-fan context is that the “Deep Sea Contract” term has never been defined in the story before this chapter — it appears only as a design element in the raw artwork, so every theory floated here, including the Buddha and “secret mastermind” readings, is speculation built on one ambiguous drawing rather than confirmed plot content.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo board) thread “[Sad News] One Piece’s Imu-Sama Turns Out to Be Just Some Familiar’s Pet lmaooooooooooo.”
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