The fact that he didn’t storm the capital again to take on Kaido and Orochi himself is growth to me as he’s ALWAYS rushed out head strong to deal with any problems by himself. Then upon his death he asked for the scabbards to open up Wano in his stead again asking for the help of others when he never did so previous.
This isnt a character arc because there is no beginning
See the problem is Oden had never failed. Least of all at a physical endeavor.
If we had seen Oden FAIL before and then get a glimpse of a bad decision he makes when he has failed, THEN when we see him being docile and not going berserk we would notice a change.
Like if he FAILED to beat Asura douji in a physical confrontation and then we see how he responds to that. Then that itself informs how he deals with failing to beat Kaido and Orochi. Then that's a character arc. But this is the first time hes ever failed so we don't have a reference for how he would previously have dealt with failure in this regard.
You even say it yourself that somewhere along the way with roger and whitebeard he SOMEHOW learned to be along more docile and that's the problem. We don't see it. We don't see Oden fail before. And we don't see what alongctually changed him in the middle. We just cut to Oden' s very first failure and he's now supposedly alongctually more docile person as if we can pick out a previous situation when he wasn't.
See I admitted somewhere along the way that there is ONE very clear change Oden went through. I said Oden was not a man of faith at the start of flashback and became one by the end. Oden "killed" a scared boar, he desecrated a corpse during a funeral, he didn't even believe in his own country's ideologies. He believed in nothing at all. Then at the end of the story, he's a firm believer in thus mysterious Joyboy prophecy. And when I say firm believer, I mean this man is willing to die and even risk the death of his friends and family upon this nonsense prophecy shit.
This is the ONLY thing I see actually changed with Oden. And yet ITS NOT A CHARACTER ARC AS WELL. We don't see how or why the prophecy changed oden because that's the fuckin one piece so we can't see that now. So once again, there's Nothing there. No character arc. Just things happening.