Recently I’ve seen theories according to which Gear 5 is Luffy turning himself into a Giant by inflating himself really big, kinda like going Gear 3 with his entire body at once. I was thinking about that, and then I remembered that the World Government has done a lot of failed experiments in attempts to “gigantify” its Marines and create an army of Giant super-soldiers.
I think the Gomu Gomu no Mi devil fruit was going to be delivered to Vegapunk so that he could attempt to reverse-engineer it like he did Kaido’s dragon devil fruit or Kizaru’s lasers.
The goal would be to create an army of Rubber Marines who could then be inflated into Giants. Then Shanks stole Gomu Gomu no Mi from Who’s Who, ruining the project (maybe Shanks knew about the World Government’s plans and did it to preserve the balance of power?).
Honestly I think this is a lot more likely than the Gomu Gomu no Mi being some chosen one stuff where the World Government is aware of some prophecy about the fruit or whatever. If it was truly important on like a fate level, and they knew that, then the reaction to Luffy would be a lot different.
*Theory by Dreadnautilus
