Character · One Piece
Bartholomew Kuma
A warlord the size of a house who carries a Bible, apologises before striking, and has paw pads on his palms.
In Otakana the clue reads: Bible-carrying giant who sends people flying
- Type
- Character
- Series
- One Piece
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Bartholomew Kuma ate the Paw-Paw Fruit, which puts a pad on each hand and lets him push anything at all: people, air, and things that are not objects. Push a person and they fly for days before landing somewhere across the world. Push the air and it becomes a shockwave. Push the exhaustion out of someone's body and it turns into a ball that another person can be made to absorb.
He was a revolutionary before he was a warlord, and by the time the crew meets him the government has been converting him into a weapon in stages, replacing whatever it finds convenient. The horror of the character is that the conversion is not finished and he knows it. Whatever he does under orders he does with the part of himself that has not been taken yet.
His most famous act looks like the worst thing that has ever happened to the Straw Hats. He scatters them across nine locations, splitting up a crew that had never been apart, and the story spends two years of its own timeline on the consequences. What that scattering actually was is one of Oda's better long-term deceptions, and it takes hundreds of chapters to pay off.
Spelling KUMA
KUMA is four letters and two beats, and the word means bear in Japanese, which suits a man built like one. The game wants this half of the name rather than Bartholomew. There is no trap at all here: ku-ma, kana for kana, nothing lengthened and nothing doubled, two vowels and two consonants alternating cleanly.