Everything in One Piece became about muh evil government evil aristocrats hurr durr.
It stopped being about pirates having an adventure.
There is no more space for personal duels or personal character development, it's all about kissing the Messiah's feet and sAviNg TEh wOrLd.
Thats exactly my issue with it too. It's lost most of its heart, soul, spirit whatever, that sense of adventure and charm. We still got some of it post TS though ofc but its a lot weaker than it was pre TS.
OP has felt a lot more generic and typical overarching evil supremacist and corrupt government plots, I read OP to GET AWAY from that fucking reality daily, I don't get that escapism anymore frim OP and I hate it.
I wanted OP to grow up in some ways and i used to want to grow up for most of my life but now I regret it immensely and like a lot of people, just want to regress, go back to innocent and childhood days, to be able to actually enjoy life and be stress and responsibility free.
I feel the OP fanbase is ironically like the Smile afflicted users, the ones who "failed" I mean and stuck as pseudo Jokers/on permanent laughing gas. Stepford Smilers exaggerating how much they really enjoy the series and how happy it makes them and how "fun" it is. Hence the overexaggerated posts on Reddit, Twitter and especially Youtube with those obnoxious, sensationalist titles, thumbnails, reactions and such but Twitter and Reddit also do it verbally and such too.
That's why I'm glad for the Toon Force shenanigans of Gear 5th too. It brought back things to the awesomely lovable, fantastic, no holds barred nonsense and wacky hijinks of pre TS OP especially earlier on in it and it didnt feel like a fucking chore to get through episodes and chapters. OP is trying way too fucking hard now, it overcompensates too much, too much delusions of grandeur and the fanbase has to attempt superhuman levels of mental gymnastics to try to deny/disprove that and claim its never been better than before somehow, that somehow the post TS is BETTER which is completely insane imo.
But nothing good in life including the best moments never last forever and always felt they were never around for long enough. I'm grateful for what we got but I'm never going to stop missing it and wish we could have gotten more of it, more time with it like that one person you lose who you were close to and wish you could see them again, see more of them, spend more time with them, not waste what you had with them and take it for granted.
Seeing Luffy humiliate Kaido like that was extremely catharthic tbh and it was a fantastic tribute to the history of animation and cartoons and thus what we and Oda grew up and inspired him especially but also us too. For the first time in a long fucking time in this arc, since the beginning of it, I've finally truly enjoyed it and felt happy as briefly as it lasts. The rest of it has just been disappointment, misery, frustration except some extremely brief moments here and there.
One Piece is now Luffy Piece for the most part when I grew up loving ALL the SHs, each of them invidually and especially together as a crew. They barely feel like a crew anymore to me now. Oda split them up for years for both IRL and in-story, more so IRL ofc and shoehorned hundreds of new characters and some right in our faces that we're supposed to appreciate, love, enjoy, cry for and such but are written so fucking shallowly and way worse than the SHs were, who were also flanderised and ruined post TS too.
Sorry for the biting cynicism but I'm really not in a good mood today as you can see. I'm also extremely sour over this chapter too.
[automerge]1653589526[/automerge]
Ngl but I like this proto version of Mihawk more than the real thing lol
That's fair, I don't at all.
Yeah I've also started wondering too when the fuck is Zoro supposed to fight Mihawk in the shitstorm that the world's about to be during the next arcs lol
Shanks arc. Or it will be some kind of kung fu/Japanese movie type epilogue where they seek each other out once the main adventure and story is over and we get the grandest of all duels to end the story and end on an extremely massive high that we've waited decades for.
[automerge]1653589622[/automerge]
Oh no, i didn't say that Mihawk wasnit supposed to exist.
But the addition of the Shichibukai forced Oda to add him to this group
Ah right. I thought he was added in as part of the Warlords too as they were last minute additions too, your post made me think about that possibility. I can't believe I never thought of it before given what we know. But I've always felt Mihawk was an intended character from the beginning of OP at least or even before it.