(TL:DR I completely agree with you.)
Wildfire you say?
:laughmoji:
The irony of King barely doing anything still, despite his role and hype. I may as well call him "King Nothing", "where is your screentime, King Nothing?" lol. King the Missing Link or my favourite, King the Background lmao.
But yeah, I was really hyped in a brutal, morbid way when it seemed like he was gonna kill Hyogoro like that. I thought it would be a very haunting, apt and fitting moment for this war and the storyline of Wano itself. Much like how Yasuie's death happened and felt like it came out of nowhere and left such a huge impact too. But Oda had to cheat out of that, sigh.
Now he's supposedly killing off Kanjuro for good, gave us a death fakeout with Orochi and possibly another if he's not dead this time, tricked us into thinking Oden and even Toki might be alive and having returned somehow, giving an an apparent death to Ashura and finally, might be killing off Kiku and Kinemon?
I'm getting so tired of this. It's a raid on 2 Yonkos and an all out war, it was bad enough with the lack of deaths at WCI within a Yonkos terrtitory with a rampaging Yonko but now with 2 Yonkos? I know Oda wants to keep deaths minimal but impactful, but these death fakeouts really ruin the credibility of the story and his own writing skills and thus any future tensions and stakes for us and the characters.
I've still yet to see One Piece get back to the amazing hype of the end of Thriller Bark, Marineford and especially the Sabaody arcs.
We've had Enies Lobby and Thriller Bark parallels/vibes with this arc so that definitely raised it's hype too, but even pre TS, Oda was making characters cheat death when they shouldn't be able to and it gets really tiring now, after all these years especially.
I suspect Ashura will still be alive, none of the Scabbards may die and even Pedro might end up coming back too, along with Pekoms. Will of P after all. Sulong Pedro will take on Perospero.
It doesn't help when things like the Payback War, Akainu vs Aokiji, Revos vs the Admirals at the Reverie etc keep getting off-screened and now we're getting even more of an Ace 2.0 situation/parallels with Oda trying to make us think Sabo has "died" too and this time, off-screen to really bait and wind us up too!