User blog comment:Kaido King of the Beasts/The Nature of the Zou Arc/@comment-24850639-20151209222600

The reasoning for both is pretty strong, and irrefutable actually. So I'd hate to sound like everyone else, but I think arcs like this will be the norm throughout the rest of the series. At the end of the day its the New World now, and the crew no longer has the luxury of being able to just screw around and have fun. Of course there's still gonna be plenty of screwing around and having fun, but now it will be in the context of a larger, much more important story. No more arcs like Long Ring Long Land. I think of it this way: The end of Marineford essentially marked a "halfway" point of the series. The 1st half was just under 600 chapters, so in my opinion it only makes sense for the series to AT LEAST hit 1200 chapters. Considering where we are now, 1000 is definitely just not enough. Most of the SAGAS (Alabasta, Water 7, Summit) are somewhere between 100-120 chapters. Dressrosa was 100+ BY ITSELF. So unless he plans on doing like 1400 something chapter's Oda's gotta find a way to tell more story with less chapters. The theme of this saga was the new pirate alliances, so unless there's a curveball with Urouge and/or Bonney coming up, I think we've seen all the alliances we're going to for now. With that said, I now imagine Zou as an arc thats supposed to set the stage for the next Saga. We've had several sagas now where the end game a Shichibukai, or someone really higher up. Woudn't surprise me if the next couple of sagas are going to be specifically dedicated to taking down certain Yonko. To me Zou makes a lot of sense as a 50-ish chapter transitional arc kinda like Punk Hazard. That was enough chapters to get the history of the island (Void Century potentially), backstory of the key people (Jack-Neko-Inu), and some good bouts that may or not turn out to mean anything. The Monster Trio actually has the potential to be a Fabulous Five, with the inclusion of Law & Bepo. So considering this new crew in everything, I just can see certain fights being really detrimental to Kaidos operations and him deciding direct intervention is necessary.