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.
 
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.
Thats not the reason at all. Straw Hats are so uninteresting. One Piece peaked at Impel Down and Marineford when the entire cast was just side characters and Luffy, with the focus being on the most interesting characters in the world like Admirals, Shichibukai and Yonko.

No one cares about Usopp or Nami anymore, you cannot try to write pre ts like post ts, that would be so lame. But Oda is so ass in using the insane world he build up. How comes we still barely have seen anything from characters like Dragon and Shanks? The big players in the world get wayy too low of screen time, instead Oda is way too Luffy focused and introducing new irrelevant characters to waste panels on.
 
The only one that needs feats from this fb is Garling, as he's still a unknown active player right now. We now Dragon is strong, Garp, Gaban and Rayleigh are retired and the rest are dead.

But knowing Loda,
He's going to prefer giving aura to characters like Rayleigh or Whitebeard over Garling just because he killed his wife and is a piece of shit. He's writing him as a cowardly, spoiled prince, so that when he's humiliated, the fan feels a sense of satisfaction.

The average fan will applaud this, unaware that they've killed the aura of one of the few remaining villains. (Although, Toie already did that with his colors.)
 
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.
The Japanese probably also thinking the same thing.
 
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