Tell me, how do you personally feel about these writing decisions? I’d assume you’re disappointed, but do you agree with what I say below?
I was annoyed when it was revealed that the F5 are done, but I could accept it. If Jack at least got a decent fight with Inu, I could accept it better, even though I would have greatly preferred that Jinbe, Usopp, or another SH takes out Jack. However, what Jack got was an absolute joke of a fight. He fought the Dukes entirely offscreen in his useless Beast form on the roof, then he got one page worth of action in chapter 1024, in which his controversial hybrid form got casually revealed in a completely unremarkable manner, followed by him getting tossed away like a chump. Then he gets probably less than half a chapter worth of action in this chapter, in which he goes down in a completely nonsensical manner (why is Inu not suffering from the consequences of exiting Sulong?). Not to mention that the powerscaling of a Sulong Duke beating Jack this quickly is pretty wonky. Not even a YC1 should be able to beat a YC3 this quickly. Are the Sulong Dukes low top tiers? Did Kaido, in his base, beat two guys stronger than YC1s and seven other Vet/YC level guys with low difficulty? Just really lazy writing on Oda’s part. I really hope that the spoiler providers are just incorrectly assuming that Jack is done, or that Oda is just fooling us and will reveal that Jack has Awakening as his trump card. However, I have no expectations for Oda to do so at this point, given how disappointing everything has been at this point. A SH beating Jack would have been so much more cathartic. The SHs are actually (at least somewhat) interesting characters, while Inu is just an extremely boring and uninteresting tertiary character. I have no reason to care about his victory.
Neko beating Pero may be even more nonsensical. Sure it’s fine from a powerscaling perspective, but it’s rubbish from a narrative perspective. Neko has an incredibly weak connection to Perospero, while at least Inu (and Neko) technically had the strongest connection to Jack out of everyone on the alliance’s side. Carrot had such a better connection to Perospero, and her beating him would have been so much more cathartic, even if you’re not really interested in Carrot’s character (I don’t love her and I’m not rooting for her to join the crew, but she really deserved this W). Neko beating Perospero is literally worse than Arya Stark beating the Night King. In both cases, these characters were obviously not the ones who should have beaten the villain, but at least Arya winning was unexpected due to her being the underdog. Sulong Neko beating Perospero is not only narratively weak, but also way too straightforward.
