After 10 Years, One Piece's Sneakiest Easter Egg Has Finally Surfaced - Did You Catch It?

One of the best parts about One Piece is the amazing level of foreshadowing always present in the story. While not every story beat has a seamless setup, many story beats will often come from seemingly innocuous details shown off years, even decades prior, and that level of attention to detail always creates an incredible payoff for anyone who sticks with the story for that long.

One Piece is always full of incredible foreshadowing, and fans might have just caught on to a new piece of it. With how lore-heavy the Elbaph arc has gotten, fans are looking over the manga for hints at future events more than ever before, and as such, a new One Piece theory suggests that a hidden truth about a major character has been hidden in plain sight for over a decade. Whether it means anything is still up in the air, but with everything that’s been happening in recent chapters, it’s hard to see it as anything other than intentional.

One Subtle Detail In One Piece Might Have Revealed Kuzan’s True Allegiance

One Of One Piece's Biggest Secrets Completely Flew Under People's Noses

The latest theory that’s been making rounds among One Piece fans is centered entirely around Kuzan i.e. former Admiral Aokiji. Kuzan is one of One Piece’s most enigmatic characters thanks to his surprise allegiance to the Blackbeard Pirates while being implied to be hiding something else, and recently, fans have noted that in chapter #699, the shading in Kuzan’s glasses briefly resembles Imu before Doflamingo asks where he stands and what he is, so One Piece fans are theorizing that Kuzan was hinted to be working for Imu back in Punk Hazard thanks to how his glasses were drawn.

As surprising as Kuzan working for Imu would be, it would make plenty of sense. Whatever secret Doflamingo learned about Mary Geoise could easily be connected to Imu, thus explaining his dialogue with Kuzan, and Vegapunk’s speech established that Kuzan would be a major player in the final saga, and working for Imu would be a perfect justification for that. Add in how Imu has an invested interest in Blackbeard, thus explaining Kuzan’s allegiance to the Blackbeard Pirates, and there’s plenty of evidence in One Piece, circumstantial or otherwise, to support the idea that Kuzan is secretly working for Imu.

Does One Piece’s Latest Theory Confirm Kuzan’s Status As A Villain?

Is There No Going Back For Kuzan?

If Kuzan is working for One Piece’s Imu, that makes the question of where he stands as a character even harder to answer. It was one thing for Kuzan to work for Blackbeard, but working for Imu would be on an entirely new level of villainy that would be hard to excuse, so Kuzan working for Imu could possibly fully cement his transition into a villain in One Piece. That would be a surprising turn for someone who started as a largely moral figure, and overall, there’s no telling what a story like One Piece could do with it.

Kuzan working for Imu is still hypothetical, of course, and with how enigmatic a character he’s been after largely being a good person in the story’s early days, a hidden agenda of his isn’t fully off the table, so Kuzan could only be working for Imu as part of some other secret plan that hasn’t been revealed. Everything about this is still hypothetical, but if there’s any truth to any of this, it would easily be One Piece’s most exciting development yet, and it all would have stemmed from some foreshadowing that flew over everyone’s head for over a decade.