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
Oh, I agree 100 percent. One of Oda's worst qualities is that he refuses to acknowledge what comes after the Strawhats liberate a place. He likes his parties but none of this situations can resolve without a lot of darkness and horror. Wano is actually one of the most blatant examples of this.
I definetly think this is an odd pivot for Oda considering the overall tone of the story. But I think it can work as long as he doesn't over do it. As it is, it looks like we are going to get four to five of these chapters about Kuma's absolutely tragic life. If this dark theme goes beyond that it is going to be a problem. If it only stays for these few chapters it will disappear in to the greater narrative of the story. If it hangs around longer it is going to be a very jarring change of tone after all this time.
How he handles the darker themes of his story going forward is going to be very interesting. Not subtle enough and he will ruin the whole tone of One Piece. But if he goes too subtle after this is will make this moment look even stranger. Not an easy line to straddle.