I see a lot of people suggesting that the Alliance is gonna lose this fight against Kaido and Big Mom on the night of the Fire Festival, and then the real fight will happen at another date.
The reasons they provide for this is:
-Kabuki play has 5 stages and we are still in stage 3, which usually ends in tragedy.
-The Straw Hats aren’t emotionally invested into this fight yet.
-The Yonkos are too strong.
These are fair points, however I feel that the alliance absolutely has to win the war on this very night of the Fire Festival. Reasons:
1– The Straw Hats are shown to be going into this fight extremely confident and up beat. If they take an important loss here, Oda won’t be able to justify them being this confident again in the future.
2– Jinbe only recently put a sick burn on Big Mom, telling her she’s just a “mere Yonko”, and he’s isn’t afraid of her. Oda wouldn’t make Jinbe say that stuff and then have him witness Luffy getting utterly destroyed by those very same “mere Yonkos”.
3– The idea that the Straw Hats would lose their very first fight after Jinbe officially joins the crew sounds silly to me.
4– In the last chapter Luffy clearly says they’re gonna win this war, beat Kaido, Orochi and Big Mom, then have a big party. Since Luffy has said it with his full authority as the Straw Hats captain, they cannot lose here. He would look immensely incapable otherwise.
5– The whole point of the 2 year time skip was to prepare for exactly this type of situation. If Luffy loses here then it’s clear that he is incapable of protecting his crew even after the vow he made after Ace’s death.
6– This whole ‘sailing to Onigashima’ thing is very reminiscent of how they took the train through the storm to Enies Lobby. At that time the CP9 guys were absolute monsters WAY stronger than our crew. But they managed to take the win in that very fight. They got power-ups sure, but they’ve received power-ups here in Wano as well. Luffy’s power-ups have also always been deceptively huge. There is no reason to believe it won’t be massive this time as well.
7– There is no reason to believe the 3rd and 4th stages of the Kabuki play cannot take place over the course of a single night. Dressrosa was over 100 chapters and it happened in a single day. There is plenty of room for there to be an initial tragedy, sparking the emotional investment by the Straw Hats, inspiring them to fight again and win. An entire night is a looong time guys, remember Thriller Bark?
*Theory by Pawn_Riot
