[marvelB]

Wow, monster post....

Originally Posted by paradox13

Complete mastery of the fruit + haki. Luffy will become pirate king and yet he 'only' has plastic powers. This proves that you don't need an imbahax fruit to get to the very top.

If you have mastery of the fruit, you can turn parts of your body to that animal. I think it is pretty convincing because bees are a matriarchy, and it also explains Big Mom's animalistic tendency to cannibalize her crew.

Uh, I'm not really sure what you're getting at with this post. Yeah, we already knew that mastery of a non-hax DF isn't necessary to rise to the top, but I'm still not sure what that has to do with a bee zoan or whatever (especially since, as someone else pointed out earlier, her body was visible enough to show no signs of her being in a bee form).



And frankly, bees aren't carnivorous insects, anyway. You're probably thinking of wasps and hornets, which ARE carnivores. But even including them, I think Oda would have made a more obvious hint that she's a bee or wasp zoan (like showing a stinger, or maybe show her gulping down honey or something like that). And while those bugs are venomous through their stingers, I'm pretty sure that none of them produce toxic saliva.....

Originally Posted by grey_1960

Second, after that chat with Big Mamma I personally think things have become personal. Kidd destroyed Big Mamma's ship that was carrying gold, but Luffy just declared war directly to Big Mamma, took responsibility for the candy, and wants to make fisherman Island his turf. That is a bold action to take with a Yonkou. On top of that Zoro and Sanji don't seemed worried at all.

That.... doesn't really mean anything, though. Yeah, Luffy declared war against an emperor, but we also saw him declare war against the WG long before the skip occurred. And notice how that kind of resulted in him and his crew getting smacked around by a bunch of top-class opponents for the following arcs up to the skip. We already know he has a tendency to be reckless, so while it's cool that he's protecting the fish-people from Charlotte's wrath and all, there's still a very real possibility that his actions may force him to bite more than he can chew.

Originally Posted by grey_1960

Luffy is displaying haki like Shanks, the straw Hat have already defeated two Shichibukai, Luffy would have destroyed Noah's arch if given the chance, and they just got done crushing 100,000 people without effort. Luffy is the only one who has shown off a lot of his abilities. If Zoro and Sanji are truly part of the monster trio then we have only seen a glimps of what the Straw Hats can do. I am just comparing what we know and the time line of other people in the One piece Universe. These two years of training was about closing the power gap.

Actually, the two years of training was just so the crew would be strong enough to survive in the New World. That much was strongly emphasized before the skip, even. It wasn't really about Luffy becoming an even match for the Yonkou/admirals.

And honestly, I wouldn't cite Hody as being the best example of showing off Luffy's growth for several reasons, the main two being that Hody had gotten himself a huge power boost that let him withstand most of Luffy's attacks, and second, they fought in an environment that was disadvantageous for DF users. And as for the pirate army, those guys were just fodder who relied on drugs, anyway (as evidenced by the 50,000 pirates who got knocked out by Luffy's CoC blast). Sure, the officers may have been a bit stronger, but they went down quickly in the end, as well. Simply put, their opponents were just a ragtag group of racist fish-pirates who had no real experience fighting in the outside world. I think we'll get a better gauge of the Straw-Hats' growth when we see them take on a more experienced crew of New World pirates.....



Edit: BTW, I just realized something: Earlier in this arc (around the time Shirley made the prophecy, to be more specific), I had jokingly predicted that Luffy would earn Big Mom's wrath by destroying her candy factory. And considering the current chapter's content.... well, looks like I wasn't so far off the mark now, was I?