The curse of Wano bloat and Egghead's terrible writing finally takes hold. Series sales are now lower than when the series started despite OP expanding to a global audience since then. The massive dip started with volume 89, which was around the end of Whole Cake. That was when I started becoming more critical of OP too with how horribly they handled Big Mom's defeat and the whole pointless wedding cake subplot.
This is what happens when you prioritize telling a story about your world over its main characters, reduce most of the main cast into background characters to prop up randos like LORD LODEN and his 70-fucking followers, and make the protagonist the literal 'Chosen One' with incredibly obnoxious powers. What made Luffy's rubber powers so compelling was how serious he tried to make them despite being inherently silly, but when even Luffy's serious stance in battle is now gone to the point where he now only spams Nika, even against random animals, you know we're fucked.

One Piece Movie Red, its companion volume, and volume 103 (Nika's intro) seemed like they would've broken the downward trend until volume 104 was released, the very first post-Nika volume.
agree about the sh becoming background characters to the side characters. i to dropped off after whole cake, with bobbin hype build up only for oda to do nothing with it.
 
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