I get you, but its not a meme to me. I honestly think this way now, used to love zoro but now hes become bland :(. I would like to see your arguments on the matter my friend.
Alright sure. First of all let's address the panel time. I do not believe that panel time is irrelevant Since panel time NATURALLY endears people to a character. Aside from a character having just generally less character moments, panel time forces Oda to get creative with what to fill the panels with even outside of character moments.
For example one of the Gags Oda dropped for Zoro pre time skip to post time skip was the Sleeping around gag. This was a gag designed to feel up space. Zoro did not have anything to do in certain scenes and yet he still had to be somewhere in the scene so Oda made a gag that Zoro sleeps alot. This is NATURALLY ENDEARING even outside of Oda actually writing anything regarding Zoro. And this is only possible when you have the panel time to spare.
Zoro in the few panels he now has post time skip can't be shown sleeping around. Like there's plot happening all the time and for Zoro to be in a scene, he must be doing something or else the plot will stop happening for seemingly no reason. That's a whole gag obliterated because of screen time and so a little bit of that endearment goes with it.
Theres more examples than just this gag or gags in general that are lost from people just not being in the story so I picked an obvious one to make this point. That's my stance on whether panel time matters.
Now what Oda chose to do since this panel time is so little is make the scenes Zoro is in matter. Let's pick a situation that mirror a pre time skip one but is treated explicitly different despite it being a similar number of panels.
This situation is Zoro's interactions with Tashigi. Pre time skip, Zoro's interactions with Tashigi were trapped in between a gag and his complete disregard for her being a person at all. Zoro would fall on his ass and then call her imposter and then run away. That's the gist of their interactions through Loguetown and Alabasta. It's somewhat charming to see Tough guy Zoro fumble around and a good number of panels can be taken on this gag as long as you don't realise how immature Zoro is all the time.
Cut to Punk hazard and Zoro's dropped the gag because first of all panel time, and second of all he's matured. This is the first time Zoro actually gave a coherent answer to Tashigi in regards to how he sees her. He calls her WEAK. That's all. No more shouting about Imposters or whatever, he just tells her straight up that she's just weak. Tashigi was always under the impression that her gender is what made her not get respect from Zoro and her gender made weak but Zoro just tells her he doesn't respect because she's weak and she's weak because she doesn't try as hard as him. AFTER TWO YEARS, Zoro actually recognizes tashigi is a person and says something that's not a gag.
Of course you can read this as "Zoro being cool tough guy" and he is of course but he's also matured and THAT'S A GOOD THING. I mean at some point people mature and the gags stop being warranted.
In fact this comes full circle when Tashigi cuts down Monet and Zoro praises her for being stronger than he thought and she refuses the praise saying she's still too weak nonetheless. This is THE FIRST TIME she ever said she was weak WITHOUT mentioning her gender as the reason. I mean honestly how is this interaction not better than pre time skip Zoro just because Zoro is "tough cool guy".
I'll stop here for this specific point regarding panel time and how Zoro's actions in the panels had to be adjusted to actually matter more than they usually would pre time skip.
And don't misconstrue this as me saying the quality of moments pre time skip is inferior, but not every pre time skip scene with Zoro was "Nothing happened" and even though Oda hasn't had a scene like that post time skip with Zoro, he's done an admirable job with the time he has given Zoro nonetheless.
That's point number one of couse. On to the next one
