First of all I’d like to comment on the whole destiny vs. free will discusion. Regardless of Oda’s take on this, which I do not pretend to understand fully. I’d like to point out there is no chance of you guys agreeing on this. This is a matter that religions and philosophers argued about endlessly. It is also very much tied into the whole concept of divinity or lack thereof. Not to mention the more humble question of biology that is invariably tied in with this i.e nature vs. nurture.
In other words, are you shaped entirely by your genes or by your life experiences? And are those life experiences and your reactions to them predetermined or random? I will not burden you with my views on this. Since a) this is hardly the appropriate place for such a discussion and b) what I believe is irrelevant.
If destiny is hard to talk about in facts and genetics not advanced enough to answer the hereditary angle. Behavioural psychology does offer insight into how behavior is learned, the concept of adaptation. And how that learned behavior becomes part of who you are i.e our personality. Now granted, outside the lab the outside stimuli could still be random events or webs of destiny weaved by an all knowing deity, you know whatever floats your boat.
So lets look at Luffy. As a child he encounters tigers, bears and crocodiles. He could have run away, in which case, the enforced lesson from this is these are dangerous creature best avoided. Or, guided by a stronger brother or perhaps due to some internal decision, fight and defeat them. Thus the enforced lesson is how to defeat such monsters but more importantly that he could defeat such monsters.
What I’m trying to say is achieving one goal, however trivial, helps achieving others. Not only via learning the various skills required to complete said goal. But rather the belief that it is an achievable goal. And slowly as if by steps on a ladder one expands the horizons of the achievable and nurtures one’s own will and ambition by gradually achieving ever harder more complex goals.
As an illustration of the above consider depression. Which can simply be explained as a trip in the opposite direction namely down the ladder of will or ambition. Failing some task, sometimes, causes a depletion of will that goes unnoticed usually. It is only noticed and called depression once it causes simple everyday tasks like sleeping, waking, small talk, facial expression, emotions and personal hygiene to name a few to become monumental burdens beyond one’s ability to undertake.
Mind you, calling the way I explained my take on will above pseudoscience would be a grand understatement. However, I think it is a valid simplification.
Moving on to my second point regarding the many complaints about the tournament, especially last chapter, and current complaints about interruption of fighting in this chapter. I must confess that I’m annoyed to no end by these complaints. Mainly because reading manga is a spectator sport, yet some here have nurtured the delusion that they have some control over how things unfold and proceed to fill these threads by their incessant whining whenever their “demands” are not met. If you don’t like it stop reading it! That is the most you can do on the matter beside annoying me.
Furthermore, aside from ruining the enjoyment of the chapter by bitching about it. It rarely produces any useful discussion. It’s usually endless pages of one line comments in the form of “meh, I didn’t like the chapter” which makes it tedious in addition to annoying. Or, my personal favorite “this is sexist because she uses her tears to fight”. Nevermind Mr.5 using boogers because that stereotype is fine. And so on and on and on.
I choose to talk about the tournament because bitching about it is the current fad. It’s been weeks and weeks of this. It also has the side benefit of making the complainer lock smart “I’m in it for the plot and character development man, not the childish fights man” And although not exactly topical this week. I think it’s close enough considering it’s bound to come up again soon. I didn’t respond timely because I’m lazy and I loath typing. Also this is about broad themes of one piece and Dressrosa which Zeph brought up in his discussion of ambition which prompted my response in the first place, and well since I’m typing anyway, might as well get it all off my chest.
The tournament is an homage to Dragonball obviously. And love it or hate it, I hate it if you’re wondering, it popularized the element of comedy and parody into super power manga. Which is a great thing, otherwise we would still be reading about stuffy characters who “must” save the world and take themselves way too seriously. This not only elevated the level of enjoyment but also the made the characters more relatable and complex. Not to mentioned allowing dark topics like death and racism to be covered with a heavy side of humor to make them more palatable. Oda especially excels at this, his no death fetish notwithstanding. So an homage is a given. This is Japan, respect to your elders is kind of their thing. Live with it.
Now instead of being just an homage. Oda employs the tournament and indeed the entirety of Dressrosa to make fun of a certain cliche of manga, The mysterious, brooding, ever calculating intelligent schemer, the Laws of the world, Doflamingo too if you can forgive the flashy outfit and maniacal laughter. I like to call these the pretentious asshole character type, PACT for short. Indeed if you think about it. All the Shichibukai that Luffy beat Crocodile, Moria and soon Doflamingo belong to this troupe. You might think that Oda has a low opinion of such types?! of the remaining Shichibukai Blackbeard and Kuma are PACTs as well though their tails are yet to be told. And have a little more depth to them in all honesty, not Mingo though, the only thing of substance about him is his fashion sense, and post TS Law? not even that! I don’t know what happened to the carefree rebel with pet bear who casually picks up a giant on a whim? nevermind that, I’d settle for said bear and giant and to hell with his personality. For the sake of completeness I’d say that Jinbei and Hancock seem to have the commonality of being protective of their homeland and suffering from some history of discrimination and hardship which I suppose is better than nothing and worthy of Luffy’s friendship. Speaking of nothing, Hawkeyes isn’t a PACT that would require a personality and goals. He basically just exists and occupies a volume in space, has a mass, probably. As for Bugs I don’t know, he lies to himself so often anything is possible.
So we arrive at Dressrosa as part of an elaborate scheme of Law’s in which caesar is to be returned in exchange for Mingo stepping down as Shichibukai. Meanwhile SHs are to destroy the SMILE factory. As an added bonus Law let the location of the exchange slip to Smoker in order to have the marines arrest Mingo on site.
Mingo counters by faking the Shichibukai step down and arranging for Luffy to be held at the coliseum via the the tournament and Ace’s fruit. And somehow the marines are more interested in Luffy either do to Akainu's hate for him or more Mingo infiltration.
So these 2 schemers are trying to outwit each other. Law wants to destroy the factory and leave. That is why he tells Fujitora that he is allied with Luffy. He wants to keep Fujitora and Mingo on Green bit to buy time for the SHs to act. Mingo wants to kill everyone and laugh while doing it. Mind you Law does not want to defeat Mingo despite nasty history between them. He wants to leapfrog him. make him irrelevant so to speak.
Both underestimate Luffy immensely. Mingo also underestimates the rest of SHs crew. SHs will carry out Law’s plan and he will realize it was not enough to achieve victory. That will be his failure plus he might require saving. Mingo will find his Diamante division destroyed courtesy of Luffy. If there are no underhanded tricks with devil fruits and whatnot there is simply no way to overpower luffy with brute strength. He has not been serious at all yet has sailed through C block. Luffy will destroy Mingo utterly and free Dressrosa thus the tournament is a testament to Luffy’s brand of kickass and the failure of both Mingo’s and Law’s plans to put him in his place. Hell, he is in disguise and keeping quiet and is already one of the fans’ favorites.
The spectacle of the tournament also acts as a backdrop to the plot. You see citizens of Dressrosa merrily cheer in the coliseum while the other SHs reveal the dark truth about the island. Which is beautiful way to display the ruthlessness of Mingo’s rule. Kind of like Michael Corleone killing his enemies in the five families with backdrop of his god son’s christening. If I’m not mistaken the original coliseum served a similar rule of propaganda and crowd control but zeph would know more about that than I.
My third and final point is about revelations in this chapter. Particularly as they pertain to the Organization of Mingo’s troops. Please remember this is speculation on my part so take it with a grain of salt.
It appears there are 2 factories one under the coliseum which apparently all prisoners are sent to and one in the flower fields. I don’t know how they are related or whether both are involved in SMILE production or not. Also some citizens perhaps dissenters or randoms are turned into toys. If I were doing it I would turn more people than I need to run the factories into toys, that way the ones working in the factory are a minority of toys and it’s not easy for an outsider to tie the 2 things together i.e hide the factory workers among lots of toys. It appears that the families of toys have their memories erased perhaps the whole island too considering how interconnected people are. Toys are allowed to meet their families under the guise of innocent play thus the are threatened by the continued welfare of their loved ones into complete submission.
Since Diamante's mark is on the hole for toy “recycling” and the factory the toys labor in or one of them is in the coliseum or rather under it. It occurred to me that perhaps the symbol for each division corresponds to their job. Remember Law was the leader of the heart division and is a doctor perhaps his role was health and logistics. Diamante “diamonds” is responsible for money thus is in charge of mainly procuring money via selling smiles. Trebol “clubs” is the policemen responsible for controlling the citizens, hunting down strawhats and interrogation etc. While the spades guy perhaps guards the palace or leads troops into battle.
I think the dwarves were monitoring all and were watched by Mingo in turn, he has their princess and 500 of their people after all. So when they say Palace troops are moving perhaps Spade guy is going out to intercept their attack. So Law and Luffy bugged Mingo while he was expecting and preparing to crush a revolt by dwarves. Yet in all this he chooses to save Caesar. Which tells you how well thought out Law’s plan was despite it’s inevitable failure.
In further speculation I have hunch that since the toy maker should be in Diamante's Division perhaps it is Lao G. since it is a similar fruit to Jora’s and they like playing cards together?
I enjoyed reading this. Unfortunately for you the majority of people who see it will just pass it by because of them being too lazy to read it or the ones who do read it will not have enough common sense/intelligence to understand. That's the issue with forums like these, the lack of common sense/intelligence.
But it looks like you figured a great many things out and some at least in a very sensible way, though they haven't been confirmed I still agree.
Anyone who wants to actually gain anything from discussions in this thread should read what you've typed. But thanks for posting this. Just don't do it again unless you want to waste your time posting it for a majority of simpletons.
, which is what I have been saying from the beginning. 
"–---------------------------------------------------edit:Even Bellamy was considered dead for years until he was revealed alive in this arc. But my goal is not to prove that Monet is definitely alive... just that there is room for her to have survived, given past "death scenes" in the series.
It seems that he has become potential SH due to this and many other reasons I thought up. If he ends up fighting along side, Luffy in this arc throughout most of the chapters it will have become quite obvious that he will be the next Crew Mate.