“No matter how serious the story gets, Luffy is there to stretch and inflate. He always gives me a chance to fool around. That’s the kind of Manga I wanted to write.” – Eichiro Oda
The famous words of Eichiro Oda echoed across the fandom for the past few months. These words have never been more appropriate than now, after Luffy has awakened his Devil Fruit and reached his peak with Gear 5th.
Now, Luffy is truly free to stretch whichever way and however he wishes to. We are talking insane levels of rubbireness which not only affect him but also those around him, living or not. However, this will not be the case forever…
One Piece’s Power System
What makes a successful Shonen is the Power System behind it, but what makes a successful Power System is the variety of abilities it can create without breaking its previously established rules.
Every character has an ability tailor made for them which makes them unique and stand out from the rest. Very rarely, if ever, will you see two characters with identical abilities. To ensure this to be the case, Oda has made his power system to be the fruits, of which they are only one of a kind, that give you endless possibilities of powers. To further add variety behind these powers, Oda introduced additional ability, called “Haki”. This way, characters who don’t poses a Devil Fruit can also contest with the ones who do. Characters like Roger, Rayleigh, Shanks, Oden, Garp and Mihawk can now realistically be legends that they are.
Why thought? Why not give them Devil Fruits? They are endlessly creative. That creativity allows Oda to have a lot more freedom when drawing fight scenes resulting in way more ingenuity, yet Oda chooses to limit himself by making them fruitless. I can immediately hear people screaming of the top of their lungs: “It’s because Oda wants to show you don’t need a Devil Fruit to be strong!” But the question now is, to what end? For who is Oda trying to push this notion when our protagonist, the Future Pirate King, has a Devil Fruit and he has a really rare one, a Mythical Zoan. So why bother doing this?
It’s because Oda plans to take it all away from Luffy.
Rayleigh’s Flashback
We rarely get to have a peak into Luffy’s training during the time-skip, so when we do it’s a big deal. One of these peaks was during Dressrosa and Luffy’s fight with Doflamingo, specifically about Luffy’s usage of Gear 4th. Rayleigh says a particularly interesting line surrounding the aforementioned usage of Gear 4th and how Luffy needs to figure a better way to fight as this gear is not sustainable for a long period of time. It simply takes too big of toll on his body.
I initially understood this as Rayleigh telling Luffy he needs to better his usage of Gear 4th by developing it further, maybe even develop a new Gear, but in hindsight he was definitely talking about Luffy needing to master his usage of Haki. After all, that is what Rayleigh set out to do when he offered to train Luffy. We saw glimpses of what Ralyeigh was talking about with Luffy learning to coat Conqueror’s Haki and be able to fight Kaido toe-to-toe (for some time) just in his “base” form. However, this was very quickly brushed aside by Luffy’s Awakening of his Devil Fruit.
Kaido’s Comments about Roger
In Chapter 1047, Kaido brought up a rather interesting idea to the table. He mentions how you don’t need Devil Fruit abilities to conquer the World as Roger managed to do just that without having any.
Again, why mention this when our protagonist has a Devil Fruit? Not only does Luffy have one but so does the guy who keeps hammering in this idea, Kaido, of how what really matters is Haki. It especially seems like a contradictory statement when just 3 Chapters ago, your protagonist turned the tables around by awakening his Devil Fruit.
I can see this as Oda trying to reinforce the notion that just because Luffy has this very special Devil Fruit, a Mythical Zoan which had its name stricken from the annals of history, it doesn’t mean it’s what made him who he is now. However, that’s pretty shallow. It doesn’t go far enough. The principal rule of storytelling is “Show, don’t tell” which is only magnified in a visual medium that is Manga. Oda needs to show this to us rather than just tell us. The picture is worth a thousand words.
