One Piece Unveils Huge New Straw Hat Mystery

One Piece's Reverie arc continues in the latest episode of the anime series, and fans have seen new sides of the New World along with revisiting some of the series' favorite returning faces. As fans know so little about how the greater government of the One Piece world works, each new revelation is only bringing about more questions as it seems like Luffy just might be wrapped in a bigger mystery than anyone could have expected.

The latest episode twists the knife even further as one of the reveals toward the end of the episode sees a giant Straw Hat hidden in the depths of the holy land, Mariejois. Now it's just a matter of figuring out what this means.

As teased in the preview for the episode shown off last time, Episode 885 of the series is titled "In the Dark Recesses of the Holy Land! A Mysterious Giant Straw Hat!" and as the title suggests, there's a huge straw hat...in the dark recesses of the holy land. While the majority of the latest episode is focused on a meeting between many of powerful allies Luffy and the Straw Hats have made over the course of the series, the big reveal comes at the end.

Fans see as a dark silhouetted figure slowly walking through a fog. Given its tall crown and its ability to freely roam the halls of Mariejois, there's a tease that this figure is important to Mariejois as a whole. This figure comes across a room with a giant Straw Hat has been hiding inside, and is holding Luffy's wanted poster as a way to compare the two.

Not only does this add an extra layer of mysticism to Luffy's adventures, it opens up many more questions about the Straw Hat. It seemed like it was important to the series because it was important to Luffy, but now this adds more weight to its original owner, Shanks. Just what does this giant Straw Hat mean? Does it have ties to Luffy's hat? Or is it something more? Hopefully future episodes of the series will explore this further.

Eiichiro Oda's One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best-selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold. The series still ranked number one in manga sales in 2018, which surprised fans of major new entries.