In the past, Venus almost always had Shodai Kitetsu sheathed whenever we saw him, but there was one panel iirc from pre-TS where he was shown polishing his sword in the background. This obviously suggested that his sword wasn’t a black blade, but it’s worth noting that it wasn’t until a few hundred chapters after pre-TS that Oda actually established black blades as being the pinnacle of swordsmanship. So it’s possible that Oda hadn’t really planned out for black blades to be a huge deal when he was drawing Venus’s sword unsheathed that one time. Heck, Oda clearly didn’t have basic black Hardening planned out back then since we never saw it at all pre-TS.
In this chapter, we just see the Shodai Kitetsu being drawn black without any sparks at all (Oda usually draws at least a little bit of sparks whenever Zoro hardens his swords). We never saw the sword transition from looking normal to being hardened. Any casual reader of One Piece isn’t gonna remember seeing Venus’s sword unsheathed in the background one time from over 500 chapters ago, before we even knew black blades were important, so for almost anyone who isn’t an obsessive OP powerscaler, this is gonna be their first time properly recognizing the Shodai Kitetsu unsheathed. Since Oda didn’t draw the sword transitioning from being normal to being hardened, its appearance in this chapter will definitely make many people assume it’s a Kokuto.
In this chapter, we just see the Shodai Kitetsu being drawn black without any sparks at all (Oda usually draws at least a little bit of sparks whenever Zoro hardens his swords). We never saw the sword transition from looking normal to being hardened. Any casual reader of One Piece isn’t gonna remember seeing Venus’s sword unsheathed in the background one time from over 500 chapters ago, before we even knew black blades were important, so for almost anyone who isn’t an obsessive OP powerscaler, this is gonna be their first time properly recognizing the Shodai Kitetsu unsheathed. Since Oda didn’t draw the sword transitioning from being normal to being hardened, its appearance in this chapter will definitely make many people assume it’s a Kokuto.