One Piece Chapter 1198: Im's New Transformed Form Draws Dragon Ball and Bleach Comparisons

One Piece's newest chapter shows Im -- the mysterious figure sitting above the Five Elders -- shifting into a strange new transformed form, abandoning the cloaked silhouette readers have known for years.

Across 421 comments on a Japanese chapter-recap video, two different franchises get dragged into the conversation almost immediately: some readers say the new design looks like Bleach's Mayuri Kurotsuchi, others say it only makes sense as an homage to Dragon Ball's Frieza and his multi-stage transformations. Underneath the jokes, though, a lot of the thread reads as straightforward disappointment with where the story's gone.

A few commenters push back with their own theory for why Im keeps changing shape at all.

One Piece's newest chapter catches up with Im, the figure who sits above even the Five Elders, and shows them shifting into a new transformed form -- a design that has nothing in common with the cloaked, barely-glimpsed silhouette the character has kept for most of the story so far. A Japanese chapter-recap video built around the reveal pulled in 421 comments, and the very first replies jump straight to "I never imagined this when I was reading East Blue," the kind of reaction you get when a story's earliest, smallest-scale chapters suddenly feel like they belong to an entirely different series.

From there, the thread turns into an impromptu game of "name that reference." The design gets compared to one franchise almost instantly, with a reply immediately second-guessing the comparison -- the kind of back-and-forth that happens when nobody's quite sure whether the new look is supposed to be unsettling, funny, or both at once.

A bigger chunk of the thread lands on a different comparison: Dragon Ball's Frieza, famous for peeling back one transformation after another before revealing his true strength. It's less a one-off joke than the thread's dominant theory for why Im's reveal feels so staged -- commenters keep circling back to it from different angles.

Some readers' first instinct was that the new design couldn't possibly be a real, official reveal at all.

Once the jokes settle, a more frustrated layer of the thread takes over. For a chunk of commenters, the specific complaint isn't the design itself so much as what it signals about the story's direction.

Not every reply is ready to write the reveal off as a mistake, though. One commenter offers an in-universe theory for why Im's appearance keeps shifting at all, tying it back to details the series has already planted.

It's a theory with more good faith in it than most of the thread is willing to spend tonight. The chapter still ends with the joke everyone can agree on.

Between the Bleach jokes, the Frieza theorizing, and the outright disbelief that the design was real and not AI-generated, nobody in the 421 replies seems to be reacting to this reveal quietly. Whether that reaction lands as excitement or exhaustion depends entirely on who you ask -- but either way, Im's new form is clearly the only thing anyone in the comments wanted to talk about this week.