Hello, everyone!
Some time ago, I theorized that Momonosuke was going to be joining the Straw Hat Crew as an honorary member and that Tama would follow him to join the crew proper. During that theory, I suggested that Tama could produce a large number of her Devil Fruit-based kibi dango and have Usopp use his sniping skills to force feed large swaths of the Beast Pirates' forces to bring them to their side. Lo and behold, that's exactly what happened!
Her ability has proven to be extremely useful against the Beast Pirates and has shown strong synergy with at least one Straw Hat, so it's now been made much easier to see how she could be a solid fit with the crew.
Of course, this one moment doesn't prove that Tama is going to join the crew, nor does it mean that she would be useful in other scenarios. The reason she's so useful here is because so much of the enemy's forces is made up of people who are part animal and susceptible to Tama's Devil Fruit. In future battles, however, she almost certainly will not have that advantage. It hasn't been established if her kibi dango work on proper Zoans, but even if they do, very few members of Big Mom's or Blackbeard's crews or even the Marines are Zoan-users, so the overwhelming numbers advantage that she afforded in this case will likely not be applicable in the future.
Even without an army of recruited enemies, she'd still have Komachiyo for mobility and Hihimaru for offense, but given how large they are, I imagine that they'd make stealth significantly more difficult for clandestine operations. For combat, Hihimaru seems like he'd be good for clearing crowds or fighting grunts, but we've already seen he's not really a match for ranked officers since he was taken out by Page One and Ulti in approximately three minutes.
Nami and Usopp weren't able to beat Page One and Ulti in a straight fight at their current level either, so it's definitely nothing to be ashamed of on Tama or Hihimaru's part, nor is this a hard deconfirmation on the basis that she and her animal partners are "too weak," but it's a bit difficult to see Tama going up against a named enemy and winning with what she has to work with at the moment.
Don't forget, though, along the same lines, Nami doesn't have what it takes at the moment to take down Ulti, even saying that she would need to be able to generate a bigger lightning bolt to do any real damage to her.
We can take this as foreshadowing that Nami is either going to get Zeus back from Big Mom somehow or that she's going to get some other kind of power-up fairly soon. Given how quickly the crew has shown they're able to come up with or learn new techniques, it doesn't seem like it would be a stretch for Tama to pick up or even just reveal some new tricks in the near future.
There are two major categories I think we should focus on for Tama's growth potential: her Devil Fruit and her ninjutsu.
All we know so far about Tama's Devil Fruit is that it produces kibi dango that make the eater loyal to the user, that this only works on animals or human-animal hybrids, they provide no nutritional value, but ostensibly they taste good (at least to animals). Up to this point, though, we've only seen animals/Gifters that weren't already under their influence eat them. In much the same way that eating three Rumble Balls used to cause Chopper to enter Monster Point, I wonder what would happen if one of Tama's animal partners were to eat a second or even third kibi dango?
When Speed was handing out the kibi dango to the Beast Pirates, she did so under the guise that they were medicine made by Queen, listing effects such as healing wounds and boosting strength.
This was definitely a lie that Speed came up with in order to convince the Gifters to eat them, and going by Briscola's hesitance that they were having said effects, it seems like whatever soothing or empowering effects they had were just placebos. But what if that's not the case? Could this have been foreshadowing for an ability that Tama would discover later wherein she can actually heal and strengthen animals that are under her control? If so, it wouldn't even take any special training to learn this; all Tama would have to do is feed a second kibi dango to any one of her companions and this function should become immediately obvious.
It's also possible that she has to specifically create the kibi dango for a particular purpose. Near as I can find, up until now Tama's exclusively been pulling the kibi dango from her right cheek. There isn't anything to base it on yet, but it's possible that the right cheek creates kibi dango that sway animals and the left creates kibi dango that boost the body's abilities. The size of the kibi dango could also potentially be altered to change the potency of its effects, or if there are no animals in the immediate area it could be used as a lure to draw in animals not yet under Tama's thrawl.
On the ninjutsu side, we need to examine the sorts of techniques that ninja are capable of in the context of One Piece.
We've seen Raizou use classics like the Smoke Escape and Shadow Clone Jutsu...
...Shinobu flying about on a kite...
...and though we haven't seen most of them in action, we know that the Oniwabanshu have a range of ninjutsu including transformation, illusions, and spirit possession.
We know that in the case of Raizou and Shinobu that their ninjutsu are not derived from Devil Fruit, as we know that Shinobu uses the Ripe-Ripe Fruit and Raizou uses the Scroll-Scroll Fruit, neither of which are incorporated into the above techniques. We also know that a number of the Oniwabanshu's techniques are not related to Devil Fruit either, such as Jigoku Benten's biwa hiding a gun within it. Therefore, we can conclude that ninjutsu is a set of abilities separate from Devil Fruit, similar to the physical abilities of Rokushiki or the seemingly magical abilities of hypnotism through mediums such as the ideomotor reflex (Jango), music (Brook) or color (Miss Goldenweek).
Given that Tama is so young and not particularly strong, almost any ninjutsu could heavily augment her combative capabilities, such as using binding jutsu to immobilize an enemy, smoke/clones/illusions to evade, or fire jutsu to deal damage. However, I think what we really want to focus on is how to use ninjutsu to augment her current powerset. Of all of the classic ninjutsu abilities, the one that best suits Tama would have to be summoning.
For some context, summoning, or kuchiyose, is traditionally more akin to channeling spirits to allow them to speak through the user or give advice. Among the Oniwabanshu, Kazekage is stated to specialize in kuchiyose, which presumably refers to the channeling of spirits. However, as frequently seen in ninja anime such as Naruto, kuchiyose also refers to more literal summoning, bringing an animal, object or person through space through a contract and small blood sacrifice. It's hard to say if Oda would want to make drawing an individual through space a technique that just anyone could use, but if that's something he'd be willing to do, I can't think of a better character to give that ability to than a beast tamer.
With this, Tama could act independently without fear without fear of being cut off from her partner animals. This could easily be limited by making her only capable of summoning a limited number of targets at a time (maybe getting more summons as she becomes more experienced), only being able to retain a summon for a limited amount of time, or having the act drain her in a similar way to her kibi dango tiring her out.
Of course, this could itself also be a hidden ability of her Devil Fruit. Once an animal has been fed a kibi dango, Tama could reasonably be expected to be capable of summoning them in much the same way that the Naruto world's summons are based on a contract between familiar and summoner. What the exact mechanism would be, I'm not sure, but I am amused by the idea of Tama pulling a kibi dango out of her cheek and then throwing it as if it were a PokeBall to call upon Speed. The limitations I listed above would still be able to apply, and we wouldn't have to worry about the implications of bending space being a readily-available technique.
Even if Tama is able to summon her animal companions from anywhere and give them a strength boost, though, I don't really think that's quite enough to give her a competitive edge. Even the strongest Headliners among the Gifters are still essentially just fodder to the Straw Hats, so while Tama could summon them to use their unique abilities as creative solutions to different situations (Speed for maneuverability and long-range attacks with her bow, Batman for flight, Daifugo for wall-crawling, etc.), I think what she really needs is a partner who can hold their own in a situation where she can't avoid conflict. Fortunately, Oda has provided us with the perfect candidate: Onimaru, aka Gyukimaru.
Back when I was comparing all of my own Straw Hat Recruitment Patterns to the existing Alphabet Pattern, a number of people suggested to me that the missing G slot should go to Onimaru under the name of Gyukimaru. While I still don't understand why people were so attached to the idea since Onimaru hasn't really had any place in the story outside of being a plot device to amass weapons for the Samurai Alliance, rereading those particular suggestions got me thinking about how Onimaru could be reintroduced into the story and what purpose he could serve.
It does seem a shame to leave Onimaru on his own, especially since he seems so powerful. Not only was he able to fend off hordes of enemies by himself for thirteen years, he was also able to go head-to-head against Zoro.
Now, to be fair, Zoro was likely holding back, partially because he didn't have all three of his swords and partially because he wanted to know more about the situation, which is especially evident considering how easily he seems to beat Onimaru in their rematch.
In Onimaru's defense though, he was also apparently holding back, as Kawamatsu claims that neither of the two were actually trying to kill each other, so it's difficult to say where exactly Onimaru falls in comparison to Zoro.
I think it's safe to say that Zoro is the stronger of the two, but Onimaru is clearly a formidable opponent who I think could reasonably be seen going up against ranked enemies in a way that just couldn't be expected of animals like Hihimaru.
So how would Onimaru work as a companion to Tama?
Well for one, if she becomes capable of summoning, she can have Onimaru in his Gyukimaru form fighting for her anytime she's back into a corner, possibly being able to use combination techniques based around her ninjutsu or potential other kibi dango abilities such as power-boosting. She might even be able to summon him continuously, warping him to different locations on the battle field to be able to strike from unexpected angles. We already know that Onimaru isn't above attacking an enemy that's distracted from behind, so he'd likely be more than willing to incorporate ninja assassination techniques into his fighting style.
If she doesn't gain summoning, though, Onimaru's fox form more than solves the size problem that Komachiyo and Hihimaru present. While Gyukimaru is incredibly large, Onimaru is significantly smaller and quite quick (which is presumably how he was able to steal Shusui from Zoro and run to Bandit's Bridge). That said, Onimaru is still quite big for a fox, seeming to stand at about half of Kawamatsu's height, probably a bit shorter than Hiyori.
At this size, Onimaru is likely more than capable of acting as a mount for Tama much like Komachiyo while also serving as a powerful guard like Hihimaru, and with his apparent swiftness he could probably keep up with her during espionage missions without revealing her location. In fact, since we still don't know how Onimaru is able to transform, it's very possible that he can take on other forms. Maybe he can make himself smaller, possibly small enough to fit in Tama's kimono and giving the appearance that she's summoning him. Maybe he can become a more lithe human, working directly with Tama as a ninja pair. If this ability is transformation ninjutsu (which Daikoku is apparently capable of), he may already be versed in other ninjutsu, though I think that might make Tama redundant, so I think it's more likely that Onimaru's abilities lean most heavily towards combat and all clandestine matters would be left to Tama.
Of course, there's also the fact that the kibi dango ability is based on the legend of Momotaro, who recruited a dog, monkey and pheasant before raiding Onigashima. Obviously Komachiyo is the dog and Hihimaru is the monkey, but thus far we've seen no sign of the pheasant. I've suggested in the past that she could use local wildlife for scouting purposes, so perhaps the pheasant will be a bird specifically for that purpose, rounding out her team between mobility (Komachiyo), combat (Hihimaru) and strategy (unnamed bird). Still, I think Onimaru would make an excellent trump card even if Tama has the other three. In fact, if she has those three plus Onimaru, she would have even more options for combination techniques, so really it works even better for her to retain her base team and still recruit Onimaru.
I know Tama isn't the most popular recruitment choice, and I'm still not saying that I think she's guaranteed to join or anything, but the presence of an animal that does have comparable combat strength to at least the mid-tier Straw Hats suggests that her powers might prove useful beyond just the one hyper-specific animal-rich scenario the crew currently finds themselves in, giving her at least somewhat of a stronger chance. Whether she ends up joining the crew or not, Oda definitely has more plans for Tama somewhere down the line, and I'm very interested to see how both her abilities and her character develop in the future.
Until next time,
-Tokiro Oumaga
Some time ago, I theorized that Momonosuke was going to be joining the Straw Hat Crew as an honorary member and that Tama would follow him to join the crew proper. During that theory, I suggested that Tama could produce a large number of her Devil Fruit-based kibi dango and have Usopp use his sniping skills to force feed large swaths of the Beast Pirates' forces to bring them to their side. Lo and behold, that's exactly what happened!
Her ability has proven to be extremely useful against the Beast Pirates and has shown strong synergy with at least one Straw Hat, so it's now been made much easier to see how she could be a solid fit with the crew.
Of course, this one moment doesn't prove that Tama is going to join the crew, nor does it mean that she would be useful in other scenarios. The reason she's so useful here is because so much of the enemy's forces is made up of people who are part animal and susceptible to Tama's Devil Fruit. In future battles, however, she almost certainly will not have that advantage. It hasn't been established if her kibi dango work on proper Zoans, but even if they do, very few members of Big Mom's or Blackbeard's crews or even the Marines are Zoan-users, so the overwhelming numbers advantage that she afforded in this case will likely not be applicable in the future.
Even without an army of recruited enemies, she'd still have Komachiyo for mobility and Hihimaru for offense, but given how large they are, I imagine that they'd make stealth significantly more difficult for clandestine operations. For combat, Hihimaru seems like he'd be good for clearing crowds or fighting grunts, but we've already seen he's not really a match for ranked officers since he was taken out by Page One and Ulti in approximately three minutes.
Nami and Usopp weren't able to beat Page One and Ulti in a straight fight at their current level either, so it's definitely nothing to be ashamed of on Tama or Hihimaru's part, nor is this a hard deconfirmation on the basis that she and her animal partners are "too weak," but it's a bit difficult to see Tama going up against a named enemy and winning with what she has to work with at the moment.
Don't forget, though, along the same lines, Nami doesn't have what it takes at the moment to take down Ulti, even saying that she would need to be able to generate a bigger lightning bolt to do any real damage to her.
We can take this as foreshadowing that Nami is either going to get Zeus back from Big Mom somehow or that she's going to get some other kind of power-up fairly soon. Given how quickly the crew has shown they're able to come up with or learn new techniques, it doesn't seem like it would be a stretch for Tama to pick up or even just reveal some new tricks in the near future.
There are two major categories I think we should focus on for Tama's growth potential: her Devil Fruit and her ninjutsu.
All we know so far about Tama's Devil Fruit is that it produces kibi dango that make the eater loyal to the user, that this only works on animals or human-animal hybrids, they provide no nutritional value, but ostensibly they taste good (at least to animals). Up to this point, though, we've only seen animals/Gifters that weren't already under their influence eat them. In much the same way that eating three Rumble Balls used to cause Chopper to enter Monster Point, I wonder what would happen if one of Tama's animal partners were to eat a second or even third kibi dango?
When Speed was handing out the kibi dango to the Beast Pirates, she did so under the guise that they were medicine made by Queen, listing effects such as healing wounds and boosting strength.
This was definitely a lie that Speed came up with in order to convince the Gifters to eat them, and going by Briscola's hesitance that they were having said effects, it seems like whatever soothing or empowering effects they had were just placebos. But what if that's not the case? Could this have been foreshadowing for an ability that Tama would discover later wherein she can actually heal and strengthen animals that are under her control? If so, it wouldn't even take any special training to learn this; all Tama would have to do is feed a second kibi dango to any one of her companions and this function should become immediately obvious.
It's also possible that she has to specifically create the kibi dango for a particular purpose. Near as I can find, up until now Tama's exclusively been pulling the kibi dango from her right cheek. There isn't anything to base it on yet, but it's possible that the right cheek creates kibi dango that sway animals and the left creates kibi dango that boost the body's abilities. The size of the kibi dango could also potentially be altered to change the potency of its effects, or if there are no animals in the immediate area it could be used as a lure to draw in animals not yet under Tama's thrawl.
On the ninjutsu side, we need to examine the sorts of techniques that ninja are capable of in the context of One Piece.
We've seen Raizou use classics like the Smoke Escape and Shadow Clone Jutsu...
...Shinobu flying about on a kite...
...and though we haven't seen most of them in action, we know that the Oniwabanshu have a range of ninjutsu including transformation, illusions, and spirit possession.
We know that in the case of Raizou and Shinobu that their ninjutsu are not derived from Devil Fruit, as we know that Shinobu uses the Ripe-Ripe Fruit and Raizou uses the Scroll-Scroll Fruit, neither of which are incorporated into the above techniques. We also know that a number of the Oniwabanshu's techniques are not related to Devil Fruit either, such as Jigoku Benten's biwa hiding a gun within it. Therefore, we can conclude that ninjutsu is a set of abilities separate from Devil Fruit, similar to the physical abilities of Rokushiki or the seemingly magical abilities of hypnotism through mediums such as the ideomotor reflex (Jango), music (Brook) or color (Miss Goldenweek).
Given that Tama is so young and not particularly strong, almost any ninjutsu could heavily augment her combative capabilities, such as using binding jutsu to immobilize an enemy, smoke/clones/illusions to evade, or fire jutsu to deal damage. However, I think what we really want to focus on is how to use ninjutsu to augment her current powerset. Of all of the classic ninjutsu abilities, the one that best suits Tama would have to be summoning.
For some context, summoning, or kuchiyose, is traditionally more akin to channeling spirits to allow them to speak through the user or give advice. Among the Oniwabanshu, Kazekage is stated to specialize in kuchiyose, which presumably refers to the channeling of spirits. However, as frequently seen in ninja anime such as Naruto, kuchiyose also refers to more literal summoning, bringing an animal, object or person through space through a contract and small blood sacrifice. It's hard to say if Oda would want to make drawing an individual through space a technique that just anyone could use, but if that's something he'd be willing to do, I can't think of a better character to give that ability to than a beast tamer.
With this, Tama could act independently without fear without fear of being cut off from her partner animals. This could easily be limited by making her only capable of summoning a limited number of targets at a time (maybe getting more summons as she becomes more experienced), only being able to retain a summon for a limited amount of time, or having the act drain her in a similar way to her kibi dango tiring her out.
Of course, this could itself also be a hidden ability of her Devil Fruit. Once an animal has been fed a kibi dango, Tama could reasonably be expected to be capable of summoning them in much the same way that the Naruto world's summons are based on a contract between familiar and summoner. What the exact mechanism would be, I'm not sure, but I am amused by the idea of Tama pulling a kibi dango out of her cheek and then throwing it as if it were a PokeBall to call upon Speed. The limitations I listed above would still be able to apply, and we wouldn't have to worry about the implications of bending space being a readily-available technique.
Even if Tama is able to summon her animal companions from anywhere and give them a strength boost, though, I don't really think that's quite enough to give her a competitive edge. Even the strongest Headliners among the Gifters are still essentially just fodder to the Straw Hats, so while Tama could summon them to use their unique abilities as creative solutions to different situations (Speed for maneuverability and long-range attacks with her bow, Batman for flight, Daifugo for wall-crawling, etc.), I think what she really needs is a partner who can hold their own in a situation where she can't avoid conflict. Fortunately, Oda has provided us with the perfect candidate: Onimaru, aka Gyukimaru.
Back when I was comparing all of my own Straw Hat Recruitment Patterns to the existing Alphabet Pattern, a number of people suggested to me that the missing G slot should go to Onimaru under the name of Gyukimaru. While I still don't understand why people were so attached to the idea since Onimaru hasn't really had any place in the story outside of being a plot device to amass weapons for the Samurai Alliance, rereading those particular suggestions got me thinking about how Onimaru could be reintroduced into the story and what purpose he could serve.
It does seem a shame to leave Onimaru on his own, especially since he seems so powerful. Not only was he able to fend off hordes of enemies by himself for thirteen years, he was also able to go head-to-head against Zoro.
Now, to be fair, Zoro was likely holding back, partially because he didn't have all three of his swords and partially because he wanted to know more about the situation, which is especially evident considering how easily he seems to beat Onimaru in their rematch.
In Onimaru's defense though, he was also apparently holding back, as Kawamatsu claims that neither of the two were actually trying to kill each other, so it's difficult to say where exactly Onimaru falls in comparison to Zoro.
I think it's safe to say that Zoro is the stronger of the two, but Onimaru is clearly a formidable opponent who I think could reasonably be seen going up against ranked enemies in a way that just couldn't be expected of animals like Hihimaru.
So how would Onimaru work as a companion to Tama?
Well for one, if she becomes capable of summoning, she can have Onimaru in his Gyukimaru form fighting for her anytime she's back into a corner, possibly being able to use combination techniques based around her ninjutsu or potential other kibi dango abilities such as power-boosting. She might even be able to summon him continuously, warping him to different locations on the battle field to be able to strike from unexpected angles. We already know that Onimaru isn't above attacking an enemy that's distracted from behind, so he'd likely be more than willing to incorporate ninja assassination techniques into his fighting style.
If she doesn't gain summoning, though, Onimaru's fox form more than solves the size problem that Komachiyo and Hihimaru present. While Gyukimaru is incredibly large, Onimaru is significantly smaller and quite quick (which is presumably how he was able to steal Shusui from Zoro and run to Bandit's Bridge). That said, Onimaru is still quite big for a fox, seeming to stand at about half of Kawamatsu's height, probably a bit shorter than Hiyori.
At this size, Onimaru is likely more than capable of acting as a mount for Tama much like Komachiyo while also serving as a powerful guard like Hihimaru, and with his apparent swiftness he could probably keep up with her during espionage missions without revealing her location. In fact, since we still don't know how Onimaru is able to transform, it's very possible that he can take on other forms. Maybe he can make himself smaller, possibly small enough to fit in Tama's kimono and giving the appearance that she's summoning him. Maybe he can become a more lithe human, working directly with Tama as a ninja pair. If this ability is transformation ninjutsu (which Daikoku is apparently capable of), he may already be versed in other ninjutsu, though I think that might make Tama redundant, so I think it's more likely that Onimaru's abilities lean most heavily towards combat and all clandestine matters would be left to Tama.
Of course, there's also the fact that the kibi dango ability is based on the legend of Momotaro, who recruited a dog, monkey and pheasant before raiding Onigashima. Obviously Komachiyo is the dog and Hihimaru is the monkey, but thus far we've seen no sign of the pheasant. I've suggested in the past that she could use local wildlife for scouting purposes, so perhaps the pheasant will be a bird specifically for that purpose, rounding out her team between mobility (Komachiyo), combat (Hihimaru) and strategy (unnamed bird). Still, I think Onimaru would make an excellent trump card even if Tama has the other three. In fact, if she has those three plus Onimaru, she would have even more options for combination techniques, so really it works even better for her to retain her base team and still recruit Onimaru.
Tama is clearly not built for combat, and her primary partners Komachiyo and and Hihimaru don't seem like they could make her a match for ranked enemies. In order to bring her more up to speed, she could learn summoning ninjutsu to supplement her animal-controlling Devil Fruit ability, discover a power-boosting ability in her kibi-dango to augment the animals she controls, or recruit an animal that seems like a more comparable opponent for ranked enemies. Onimaru, the battle-adept shapeshifting fox, has been absent from the story for some time but was at one point a popular pick for future Straw Hat, so making him either the default or ace-in-the-hole animal companion for Tama would be a good way to reintroduce him to the plot and make Tama a viable fighter, especially if they incorporate each other's qualities and abilities into their fighting style. She could also get a bird companion to complete the Momotaro comparison, giving her greater movement and strategic options in conjunction with Komachiyo, Hihimaru and potentially Onimaru.
I know Tama isn't the most popular recruitment choice, and I'm still not saying that I think she's guaranteed to join or anything, but the presence of an animal that does have comparable combat strength to at least the mid-tier Straw Hats suggests that her powers might prove useful beyond just the one hyper-specific animal-rich scenario the crew currently finds themselves in, giving her at least somewhat of a stronger chance. Whether she ends up joining the crew or not, Oda definitely has more plans for Tama somewhere down the line, and I'm very interested to see how both her abilities and her character develop in the future.
Until next time,
-Tokiro Oumaga
