None of this is new. It has been hinted at since Oda decided to first include enslavement in One Piece. Is it just that no one expected Oda to actually be this open about it or that people genuinely did not want to acknowledge it and thus preferred when it was mostly obscured so that it was easy to ignore.
Considering how close to the end we are Oda may be likely to lean more heavily in to these darker elements from now to the end. Though hopefully a bit less dark than this. This sought of heavy
This is surprisingly dark and that’s fine but the problem comes in when the momentary Darkness can’t be matched by the rest of the tone of the story
As less severe example of this is the end of Wano: People forget that 10000 Samurai fought for Orochi. Those are 10000 Wano citizens who has spent 26 years subjugating the rest of their fellow Wanonians and went on a life and rewatch fight to keep their status of subjugation over the rest of country… what happened to these 10000 samurai? Let’s say most of them died in the war, let’s say there’s 3000 of them left. Anha, what happened to these 3000 men?
Oda wants to have his darkness cake, the fact that there was an actual class structure in Wano separate from the Beast pirates that VERY MANY Wano citizens upheld and very many Wano citizens actively subjugated their fellow poorer citizens with no remorse… And Oda wants to eat the “feel good” reward as well of having the end of Wano COMPLETELY not address a single thing about this…
Oda’s inability to recognize and fully account for the darkness in his story is made fully manifest in Hiyori’a end speech of Wano Calling for the death of the Kurozumi showing the people of Wano and the story itself literally didn’t even acknowledge that this entire fiasco started because the Kurozumi were exterminated… Oda had to return later in an SBS to try and smooth this over WITHOUT addressing it after having been told by an editor what he just wrote
Oda is making this Ginny situation extra dark but it’s gonna eventually bump up against the general nature of One piece not actually being this dark and along the way there will be wires crossed once again like in Wano… I myself already have a problem with this Ginny situation because it makes Dragon and the revs look extremely bad and weak… and I’m sure there will be even more problems later on because of this