@Maju:
luffy trusts sanji,in fact he trusts each of his nakama.remember what happened when he read sanji's note left on zhou..he was completely relaxed because "sanji said he will come back"
sanji could have kept his facade saying that he was gonnasolve this one himself and luffy would have trusted him..and even if he doesn't, it's still a better approach than to try and beat up your own captain..sanji knows better than everyone else that that's not how luffy works.
If Luffy would just let Sanji resolve everything alone under the hypothetical Sanji's statement "I'm gonna solve it myself", Luffy wouldn't have gone to WCI in the first place, since, as you mentioned, Sanji had already claimed that he would come back. Not that Luffy doesn't trust his underlings, but Luffy is also someone that slips in the problems of others, he makes people ask for help, he does for them what they are not asking for. So yea, I completely understand Sanji's resoning.
And it's exactly because Sanji knows Luffy so well that he did the same thing that Usopp did in Water 7 (even worse), so Luffy wouldn't have the right to demand him back to the crew without Sanji's apologies first. Luffy would have to leave WCI, just as Nami was inclined to do.
I fail to see how intercepting a ship at sea and sinking it is less practical than fighting them on land, on your own HQ,where they can, you know, fight with their fists instead of with their ship.
And that's without considering the fact that they were literally the only people that could make the plan fail,and she allows them to go as near as sanji as it's possible without actually making them meet..and for no reason.
an that's without counting the fact that since they knew where they were since cacao island and pekoms got kidnapped by bege, they could have took possession of the ship and luffy would have been stuck on cacao island anyway.
it would make sense if big mom was depicted as a stupid individual,but she is many things, and stupid it's not one of those.
It's not that trapping the Strawhats inside her territory is the only possible strategy, but it is a valid one. If she sends ships, couldn't they just abort mission and leave? Isn't it harder to escape if the foe is in the middle of the spider web instead of approaching the web? Even if the foe can struggle like a cornered rat, they will fall anyway, just like Luffy was in fact captured by the enraged army after defeating a Sweet Commander. That's how it works. And then it took help after help, miracle after miracle, to escape from the web.
And it's not only militar strategy that I'm accounting for (since One Piece is not about that)… but flavor. Big Mom is like a villain from a fable, she's the witch from Hansel and Gretel, and she seduces her preys with lies and sweets (that's what the seducing woods stand for).
she is in on the plan for killing germa,the plan includes the marriage and the marriage needs the dress…there's literally no place where she could have wanted to go so much to not try the dress..imagine if she goes away and the marriage can't take place beause she doesn't have a dress because she went in some random place for no particular reason that we know of.
It's not like Pudding needs to choose the dress NOW. Honestly, this is only a matter of good will towards such a banal plot device. Any mistery fiction is written for the perception of the reader, not only for the characters that are being fooled, so it's really okay to have Pudding saying something that the readers will interpret as A, but she's actually thinking of B. Why would she need to go elsewhere? Maybe Big Mom called her to the castle (that actually happened) and she's the kind of boss you have to stop anything you're doind to attend to (I had one like that, lol) or maybe she just needed some time alone in the toilette. Maybe she was supposed to be at Seducing Woods to keep misleading the Strawhats just for the sake of it (flavour), afterall she even went out of her way to tell them the truth when they were trapped in Mont d'Or's book (that's what villains do! flavour once again). Anything works, really.
it would make sense if the other races were all standardized..but we saw humans with horns,strange shapes and pretty much whatever feature you can imagine..and yet it's that third eye that makes an attractive young lady a monster. And big mom, the woman that is all about diversity and acceptance calls her a monster despite the fact that she probably had sex with a 3 eyes guy exactly because she wanted a daughter of that lineage.
Big Mom is the personafication of human's contradictions, something very real. She has a suplerfluous idealization of things that she doesn't care at heart. She wants to make her children giants to look at them eye to eye at a dinner table, but she doesn't even care to know if her kids want to become giants or if they are bullied. She loves the living creatures she collects, but she slaves them inside a book. She wants a world where every race can coexist in peace, but she has no particular interest in them besides her own pride of saying she's such an open minded person that is following the dreams of Mother Carmel. As Big Mom describes herself in her Bad End Musical, she's like a "devil"… but a devil that's following the path of someone with good intentions (supposedly), so it's a warped reality full of contradictions.
Big Mom insulting Pudding because of her third eye is character construction, not a writing flaw.
So we're in this warped world called Totland and it's coherent that many of the children suffered abuse, like shown many times, not only regarding Pudding. And I repeat, she stands out because she's the only one of her kind. Who knows who are the horned people or if they are a clan or if they were bullied when they were kids too.
her context is that she thought that sanji was a little naive piece of shit,but he likes her third eye so she loves him now…it's not even gradual,it's not even like he liked the guy before,she was enjoying her time thinking about killing him.
Before I start going deeper in this SanPu relationship, I have one important disclaimer: Oda avoids making something more realistic out of a romantic relationship, so it'll be a little whacky to match the overall tone of this series. By the way, one of my few complaints to the last section of this arc is the lack of insight in the dynamics between Sanji and Pudding, that were reduced to the repetition of the same two jokes… unfortunate. But I get that Oda wasn't confortable showing something actually serious there. That said, let's understand what happened.
First we need to understand Pudding and she's a very conflicted girl. And I say that because, even before the wedding, Pudding was showing a duality in her character, and not because she was pretending to be a good person. Chapter 848 gives us a little insight on how uncorfortable she was with her reality as a puppet and even how she was jealous of Lola's free spirit, so that scene was the preparation for her final twist. However, Pudding was too used to the way she found to live her life without troubles, since becoming a bad person was what made her deal with her bullying (her vengeance to her bullies), hiding her third eye made her popular (Cocoa Town loves her) and then her acting skills made her one of Big Mom's favorite children. So Pudding was living a facade.
For all these reasons, Pudding was never truly open to like Sanji back, since he was supposed to die by her hands anyways. Above all, Sanji was romantically cheesy when he was dating her fake persona, so she could not take his affection to heart, because that was not her, but her role as an actress. However, when Sanji complimented her third eye, that was when she was showing her "true" colors (her malice), so that's the first time he was addressing her for what she perceived as her identity, and everything that happened before between the two had to be recontextualized in her head. Of course, it was also the first time that someone remarked that her third eye was actually beautiful. So yeah, that was different from before and something special to her. Also, we have to take into account what chapter 902 clarified even further, that Pudding was very self conscious about being a monster, so that was always disturbing her interactions with Sanji.
It's also important to note that Pudding didn't fall in love for Sanji immeadiately after showing him her third eye. That was the trigger and everything after it was gradual. In their very next scene, she was still trying to kill Sanji, although a little shocked now because her internal duality was all over the place in her mind. Then, we had a little nice snippet of Pudding witnessing Sanji rescuing Nami in his arms and she got jealous. That was the start of everything. And then, along their journay together to bake the cake, she could see his cool side in all its glory and keep falling in love for Sanji. In all honesty, Sanji can be very charming.
it might not be as important as the other i said before but still doesn't make much sense considering how capricious we know big mom is..yeah there was a tea party but she could have served whatever sweet she wanted, it didn't have to be that specific cake,and yet she waited for days, despite having a big history of going crazy if she doesn't eat what she wants immediately,for really no reason.
She was crazy for a wedding cake because there was a wedding. When you have a wedding, the most famous treat is the cake. One justify the other and create the meaning that garnishes the taste that she was craving for during the Tea Party. It's not like she'll be crazy about a wedding cake at any day of the week. In fact, as we've seen, her tantrum three days ago was for a croquembuche, something unrelated.
And she got to keep her shit together and waited for the cake. She can do that as long as she knows she will get at she wants after such a delicious wait.
–- Update From New Post Merge ---
@Icefae:
There aren't plotholes as much as there are total fucking asspulls that ruin the stakes of the arc. I do agree that it fits nicely in the narrative though (it's important for us to have fought a yonkou before kaidou and I like most of the new characters unveiled in this arc that are sure to return). And even though the last half was total dogshit to me I still think it's the best New World arc.
–- Update From New Post Merge ---
"plotholes" are a tough sell in a story as ridiculous as one piece. But you're fooling yourself if you think that WCI has problems that were present in previous arcs. In many ways WCI was a new low.
Thanks for the insightful remark.
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