@garonne:
i honestly find a rubber world just…weird and lame. granted i also find a rubber fruit lame, oda's imagination makes it a great addition. if it just affects the environment do you think the rubber will be flowing? with doffy and kata they used their awakening for restriction and their substance moved around. do we expect luffy to catch ppl with rubber? if not what are you expecting beside the bellamy attack.
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i know you're using a hyperbole with the use of a billion but how many uses does a rubbery environment have beside recoil(bellamy's attack and just out right bouncing) and absorption (reducing attacks)?
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i get that doffy is a producer, just like megellan or mr 3, but katakuri is not JUST a producer. his whole body is mochi (as far as we know) just like luffy's whole body is rubber. doffy never turned into string so katakuri is a special case thats an outlier that doesnt confirm anything for luffy as of yet.
@Seafarer33:
Admittedly the natural properties of Rubber don't go far beyond that. Luffy can bounce himself or his opponent on the environment, disrupting movement - land at full speed on an elastic surface when you expected a solid one or the opposite andsee the result - and / or enhancing his own speed and attack strength. He can negate damage either directly (bounce off a rubber wall instead of smashing into it) or by raising massive rubber shields on a whim. He could also use his surroundings as a sling or cannon to propell himself or solid projectiles. There are also indirect effects, such as a wall turning elastic and everything it supports suddenly collapsing. Either way, I think a rubber environment should only support and enhance Luffy's natural fighting style and not replace it with something entirely different. On paper it's not much, then again all he ever did with the Gomu-gomu is punch, kick, or headbutt people yet we're still reading this manga so certainly Oda manages to make it interesting.
Seafarer did an excellent job in explaining why a bounce house-styled Awakening that only acts as support for Luffy's fighting style works well. It's a simple idea that doesn't seem versatile on paper, that much is true. But what is important is thinking about how it complements the rest of Luffy's abilities in quirky ways, not just what it does on its own. All I can really add are two things. One is that a rubber environment can potentially not just make Luffy himself bounce all over the place, but also just his punches and kicks like ricocheting bullets. Remember when Luffy overcame Enel's mantra by punching against a metal wall that made his gatling punches unpredictably scatter all over the place? That can maybe work. Also, he can maybe have the ground becoming rubber-esque work like quicksand.
I would however point that Doflamingo's use of awakening was by far the cheesiest and least interesting of his powers. All it did for me was let him fight on when he was so exhausted he apparently couldn't even lift a finger anymore. But it lacked style or the deadly elegance of his razor-sharp wires and didn't do anything he couldn't have achieved otherwise. Awakening turned a fight with great choregraphy into tentacle monster fest, I hope Oda does better with Luffy's.
Ugh, I hated that too. It felt so redundant and generic.
@Md-Martin:
I'm wondering if Awakened Zoans will still be represented as they were in Impel Down.
Maybe an Awakened Zoan can transform somebody else into an animal. Given that they aren't the fruit eater themselves, perhaps the people effected with these abilities wouldn't maintain their personalities once transformed.
Aside from what we've seen with Doflamingo and Katakuri's awakenings, and the implication of Logia awakenings given Punk Hazard's environment, it seems odd that the Zoans would be the odd-man out as far as abilities effecting something other than themselves. Add in with that the power gap between the Demon Guards and every other Awakened Devil Fruit user we've seen and it leads me to believe that the Demon Guards are in fact people effected by Awakened abilities, not the actual Zoan Fruit users.
To be fair, Zoan Devil Fruits kind of sucked in the first place. Instead of wacky powers, you get strength improvements that you could get just by training, along with some minor sense enhancements. This is just following consistency lol. Although I wonder if Awakening might be different for Mythical Zoans since those transformations seem to be like Zoan transformations with Paramecia/Logia abilities on top, thus making them the rarest kind of Devil Fruit.