That is a weak excuse for Oda not to give them any personality of any kind. I have seen far greater “monsters” than those two in fiction that still had personalities.
Off of the top of my head, characters such as Knives from Trigun MAXIMUM, Mangoku from Kingdom and Makaku from Battle Angel Alita are all “monstrous” characters done well. They all have personality, they all have concrete motivations and they are all characters whose view of the world is explored.
To not explore an antagonist just because making them a hate sink character is easier, is simply lazy writing.
I never claimed that you did say that.
You are correct. They do not have anything to do with power scaling. That is the point.
Dark Admiral said this.
This was your response to that.
So the topic was Whitebeard’s death and the reasoning for why it was impactful.
My point was that Whitebeard’s death was not memorable/impactful because he was strong. In fact, his entire character arc revolved around how weak he had become.
Whitebeard’s death was memorable because he was an objectively well written character that the audience was given more than enough reasons to respect as a character.
Linlin and Kaido are both objectively mediocre characters with no respectable qualities and no amount of “sugoi, how stronk” from Oda is going to change that.
When these two characters fall, it will be nowhere near as meaningful as Whitebeard’s demise because Oda failed to give these characters any meaning to begin with.
“The heroes” always unite to defeat any antagonist in any story with a protagonist versus antagonist dynamic. It also happens in nearly every single arc of One Piece.
With this logic, one could replace Kaido with a block of cheese and as long as Cheesedo provides enough of an obstacle for the “heroes” to unite against then it has done enough to fulfil it’s narrative obligations as an antagonist.
This level of “meaning” is utterly superficial. Antagonistic characters should be more than just obstacles to be battered down by “the good guys”.
