@Tangaroa:
The Council of Kings would really be a perfect story point to not include the Straw Hats.
You've got a slew of people who've been saved by them, such as Vivi, Bison & Neptune, politicking with a mix of seen and new enemies with the Navy and Goresei shepharding them.
As Empress of the Kuja you can have Hancock play a key part and throw in any other pirates or villains playing whatever role in the proceedings you want.
Legitimate reasons to throw in references to the Straw Hats as saviours, enemies or bogeymen.
Give Smoker a starring role. Flashbacks for every fan fave.
If there's not 60 chapters in there this is not the series I love.
Then you expect basically both you and others to be pleased/ like 60 chapters or more of mostly talks and re -introductions?
Because quite frankly I see the Revelrie as the calm in the storm right before it truly gets worldwide to affect all these nations at Revelrie.
So should we be really expecting it to get attacked necessarily?…
@valiantt:
Yeah it IS possible to make a good strictly Smoker arc if Oda went back and gave him a definable crew/Marine Squad like Blackbeard's. I'm curious why Oda never bothered to make a marine equivalent of the Straw Hats since it seems like a natural thing to do. Instead, we have solo (T-Bone), pairs(Coby/Meppo, Smoker/Tashigi), and one odd squad (Hina/Fullbody/Jango), but not a single "squad" with definable members outside of the leader. Heck, I'm more surprised that he didn't do this with Coby/Meppo by picking up a mix new characters and older/returning characters as new potential marine recruits or something.
Oh well, another potential opportunity that was never realized :sad:
Well technically I guess I always thought of it as all those people, despite the bounties are mostly after basically the monster trio with I suppose Tashigi, and Helmeppo , (and even this can't be too sure of, because it 's mostly based on the facts that he used swords, don't remember if he really even stated personally going after Zoro in Water 7, or just mainly helping Coby with his goal), after Zoro primarily.
+++ with pirates it'd make sense that you might run into other rival pirates, and Marines thruout your journey, almost constantly to the end in order to reach your goal; But for the Marines vs pirates, having their end goals actually include capturing the same pirates, or any repetitive enemy, they would've been hunting for years, ( some pirates you know some of them will be reluctant to actually turn in or actually execute), would seem not only are they already setting up the pirates as unnecessarily legendary hurdles of people instead of status to be overcome, but shouldn't Marines/ WG endgame goals be more about actual positioning within the Marines/ WG because the type of people they are would shape how they used that power to revolutionize the whole system, or even just their part of it…
Just my thoughts/ musings on the interesting topic you bought up