@MasterKingJC:
And she stole control of the homies away from Big Mom's side and did espionage in Wano.
Funny how those things are conveniently ignored from Solgarde's post.
I'm sorry– is someone handing you a piece of paper that makes a later enemies followers sometimes, and only sometimes, obey you some sort of unique "skill" or "talent"?
That's what you really want to hang your hat on about "oh, Nami brings invaluable skills to the crew"... that she was handed a Vivre card and to everyone's surprise, that meant some of the homeys would obey her?
The espionage stuff... maybe. But considering she has been a constant fixture in every single storyline since the beginning-- the second or third most featured character across the story-- doesn't it feel a bit like scrapping the bottom of the barrel that you kind of got to go searching for single instances where she didn't prove to be more of a hindrance than a help?
@KageKageKing:
Have you missed that one part where Nami prevented the ship to being swallowed by a hurricane after Little Garden?
That pretty much goes hand-in-hand with that bit right after the entered the New World. In fact, it is pretty repetitive.
Two instances of "oh, you'd better watch out on these seas! See how the weather is super crazy with this unbelievably big storm, unlike anything you could ever imagine! That's totally normal here and could hit you unexpectedly at any time!! Are you really prepared to deal with facing these sorts of storms constantly?!!"
And then after that one story, the Straw Hats never again faced any sort of adverse weather patterns or rough seas. The rest of the entire ride as as smooth and easy as merry-go-round with not a mention or a hint of any sort of supernatural weather patterns again. In fact, I am not sure I recall them ever even hitting a light drizzle.
And, really, getting a ship through a storm has little to nothing to do with navigation whatsoever. They tried to make it out like it did by having Nami direct where to turn, but… really-- such a thing wouldn't even be possible unless one was psychic or something. A navigator would be really helpful getting a ship back on track once a storm had passed-- except no such thing is ever needed because all they have to do is blindly follow the log post.
And to make this clear, I am not saying that Nami /should/ be worthless, but that Oda created the world, created the challenges that the Straw Hats were going to face. And if the second or third most important character in the story (since both rough drafts of the story had a Nami-esque character and no Zoro, she is arguably #2) was "Cat Burglar Nami", one would think that a writer would make sure that sneaking into a place and/or taking something from that place would be key challenges to completing each story line.
In fact-- as this is a story about pirates-- one would think that such things should be common occurrences anyway.
But I guess the same could be said about Usopp. He is the Straw Hats "sniper"-- but I am pretty sure in over 800 issues, the number of times that Usopp furthered the story by hitting a far off target can be counted on a single hand. In fact, neither the Going Merry nor the Thousand Sunny even had/has a cannon that Usopp could potentially use as far as I can recall. They are always leaving anything of the sort in the hands of Luffy/Zoro/Sanji's superhuman powers or using their cola burst to fly away and escape from the situation.
But even Usopp can be said to accomplish things throughout the story. And, as noted, the one thing Nami is entirely reliant on to be useful was something that Usopp just randomly made-- despite Usopp never before and never again showing any ability to make anything even remotely comparable. And that's despite him having tools like dials or Franky's high tech later that he could work with. So the weather wand doesn't even feel like a natural progression of the story, it just seems to have been lazily tacked on in order to give Nami /something/.
But-- if Nami isn't bad enough, the other female crewmate Robin is even more useless. She has a devil fruit power, but aside from a few times when she was depicted stopping other members from falling to their doom, she hasn't done a whole lot. She started off as an enemy. She got captured once already. And now, after all this time, the story has foreshadowed in Zou that Luffy doesn't even remotely need her to get to Raftel anyway and instead she is going to be captured by Blackbeard and be used by him to also get to Raftel.
So, yeah-- the story has been written in such a way that both of the female Straw Hats are just utterly useless.
They are both good character ideas, both good character designs, both have interesting backstories, both have nice dynamics with the crew. But the story has been crafted in such a way that they aren't allowed to contribute to the success of the Straw Hats.
The only examples we have are two super contrived storms that claimed to establish something about the world that was later demonstrably false... and items literally handed to them by other characters that any random warm body could have been handed and use.
Or, in the case of Robin, most of the time she is with the crew the excuse is given that it is perfectly fine if she isn't doing as much as the others because she is absolutely key to the final success and it is impossible without her... only to get to Zou and be told "Ha-ha, only kidding! Actually she has only been there to ultimately get kidnapped and help the bad guys all along."