After formulating my thoughts on the scabbards in that thread, it made me think about what I thought about Perospero's fight in this arc. This seems like the appropriate thread to talk about it.
I have to say that one thing that has quite annoyed me during that phase of the arc was the sentiment by quite a few of the posters here that the Minks were being unreasonable assholes for "bullying" poor Perospero like that, since he didn't actually kill Pedro, the dude chose to take his own life. I just have to call bullshit on that for two reasons.
Warning, little rant incoming:
First of all, the only reason Pedro, Carrot or any of the Strawhats were in Big Mom's territory in the first place was because the Big Mom pirates basically kidnapped Sanji by blackmailing him AND were going to murder him in cold-blood. Everything that followed was in response to their actions. They were the aggressors and do not get to play the victim card because those meanie Strawhats attacked them.
Secondly and more importantly, the only reason Pedro sacrificed his life was because Perospero was about to murder Chopper and Brook. If a sadistic killer is about to execute your friends and you die trying to save them, then yeah, said killer absolutely gets the blame for your death. And of course your loved ones would be justified to hate the killer's guts, as he is the one that put you in a situation where it was either you or your friends.
All of that said, Perospero felt shoe-horned into the arc and his fight was incredibly lackluster. It made no sense for him to go to Onigashima alone and it was disappointing to have all these members of Big Mom's family with untapped potential, like Daifuku, Mont-D'or and most of all Smoothie, just waiting at the coast while the one character we already got a lot of in WCI got to play a part in the raid. Fine, including Perospero in the action to close of some hanging plot threads from the last arc could have worked, but then it at least needs to be emotionally satisfying and it was not.
As others have said, this fight belonged to Carrot, not Nekomamushi. I can understand why he would be angry at Perospero, but the characters had never met before and it was just weird to see him go off to have revenge for Pedro in the middle of the raid. And their ensuing "fight" barely deserves to be called a fight. Meanwhile, Carrot got absolutely nothing else in return, which has to be the worst treatment of a secondary character since Rebecca. Heck, it's actually worse. While Rebecca, after all her buildup of wanting to protect the Toy Soldier, ended up a completely useless damsel in distress who couldn't accomplish anything and constantly needed saving, she at least got a proper emotional conclusion at the end of the arc. All that stuff where Luffy helps her reconcile with her dad was actually touching and an appropriate ending for both characters. Carrot meanwhile got completely side-lined the whole arc and didn't even get to say goodbye to the Strawhats! That's just bad!
