@Redx:
Using Mihawk as an example isn't exactly a good thing to do. If you've forgotten, Mihawk is the world's greatest swordsman and can cut through anything. So the fact that Mihawk is able to cut luffy doesn't mean that luffy's skin is weak to sharp weapons. If you recall, luffy has also taken powerful cutting attacks head on like for example rankyaku and come out unfazed. He has also been hit dead on with powerful explosions and managed to get up again with minimal injuries.
LOL–OK. I do not agree with your point about Mihawk, but in this case in doesn't matter--it's irrelevant to the argument. You can't actually prove your point by making my example seem as if its a bad one. You still have yet to prove that Luffy's skin has any sort of strength over that of ordinary skin when it comes to being sliced and diced by sharp objects. Rankyaku--interesting. I'll need some actual links to pages with specific examples, please. Last I checked that was how one proved something here on AP. And for the record, Explosions produce blunt force, to the best of my knowledge.
@Drake:
Honestly, I could try and come up with some ridiculous scientific substance to support my statement…But in the end I'd probably be wrong anyways .
It can be assumed that natural skin is significantly more fragile than almost any rubber I know of. When it gets down to it though, we can throw logic out the window when it comes to One Piece. So in the end I may be completely dead wrong, but I still think rubber skin is harder to pierce.
Ill use a real life example (which is pretty dumb since reality is thrown out the window).
Say we have a screw driver that gets shoved into someones arm...It would take less force to pierce natural skin than rubber skin.
And the whole sharpness thing is important, when it comes to things like katanas and actual weapons it doesn't really matter, I'm mostly talking about objects that may not be sharp enough to pierce rubber but are sharp enough to pierce normal skin. There's also the skill of the wielder to take into account, speed of strike, size of weapon, and all of the other stupid little details that Oda doesn't care about.
In short…It can be assumed that it would be easier to pierce normal skin rather than rubber skin, but at the same time it doesn't really matter that much since this is the wonderful fictional world of One Piece :D
Thank you for your thoughtful and interesting analysis. I appreciate the time and effort you went to to write this, and I better understand your position, but I'm afraid I'm with Coruscation on this; to whit:
Really don't you think Oda would have let us know during all this time if Luffy had extra resistance to cutting force? Instead he keeps emphasizing that it's his "weakness". It just seems to me like a totally baseless idea that has no reason for being true and isn't implied anywhere in the manga.
I think Oda does make certain things very evident, and he has gone out of his way to point out that Luffy is leery of sharp objects–implying, one could, and many often do, argue that this points to an actual weakness on his part. In other words, I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree, I suppose.