Mom's Secret - The Giant's Island Elbaph and a Little Monster

As Big Mom shrieks for Mother Carmel, the tale jumps back sixty-three years to her childhood. Linlin's parents bring her to Elbaf's shore, promise sweets if she waits, and sail off, privately confessing they are leaving her behind owing to all the destruction trailing her and trusting Carmel to take her in. The girl waits the whole day through, but they never come back. A century earlier, the giant Giant Warrior Pirates had ravaged the seas and torched countless cities until their captains, Dorry and Brogy, came to blows on Little Garden. When several of that crew faced execution by the Marines, a youthful Carmel stepped in, warning that Elbaf's warriors would raise an army for vengeance and pleading for mercy. Granted the title Mother, she established the Sheep's House, an orphanage welcoming children of every race who had nowhere else to go.

Thirty-seven years on, the tiny five-year-old Linlin enters Carmel's care and finds in Elbaf the first place built to her scale. Her good intentions keep misfiring: she pens a bear with a wolf hoping for friendship, then drops the bear with a single blow when it devours the wolf, and she tries removing the extra joints from a longarm orphan and the fins from a fish-man child, never grasping their races. The other orphans come to dread her. Months later, her friend Gerd describes the twelve-day fast before the Winter Solstice Festival and the feast of a sweet named semla that precedes it. Linlin tastes semla, falls for it at once, and gorges herself. The fast grinds on her, and by its seventh day she breaks, tearing through the western village while screaming for semla. Jorul brands her an unpardonable god of disaster housed in a child's body and draws his sword as Carmel begs him to stop.

Part of the Whole Cake Island Arc, marking Elbaf's location debut and the introductions of Carmel, Gerd, Jorul, Jarul, Goldberg, and Road. The anime lengthens Linlin's parents leaving her and her attempt to break up the bear and the wolf. It adds the orphans and giant villagers reacting with unease after she goes for the fish-man child's fins, shows Road and Goldberg as newborns, and dwells on the moment her semla craving takes over. A narrator recaps the Straw Hats' ties to Dorry, Brogy, Oimo, Kashii, and Hajrudin. Unlike the manga, a young Stansen is absent. The eyecatcher pairs Monkey D. Luffy and Sanji.