in an anime phase

Like yes the obvious surface level implication is that despite everything, despite reaching the peak of his power (as far as his Devil Fruit is considdered at least), despite how far he has come, Luffy is still so far from reaching the level required for him to become Pirate King, that he's not going to be able to beat Imu. He's not going to be able to beat any of the Elders either, not yet.

The situation feels so 50/50 now-- we know Imu is on a time limit and can't stay on Elbaf too long, so he and potentially the other God Knights will have to retreat sooner than later.

I am just concerned if they're going to get away with the kids, that's all.

So two story directions we could be heading are A) The Strawhats somehow manage to force the rest of the God Knights out after Imu runs out of time, saving the kids B) Imu and co manage to snatch the kids and flee

Scenario B) makes me wonder if THAT could be like, the Inciting Incident for the Final War; Luffy feeling like he can't go forward with trying to find One Piece without rescuing the kids from Marijoa, 'cause I don't see why Luffy would go to direct war with the WG without a more personal motivation like that. Like yeah the WG sucks but he's not a hero, he's not a Rev, he's a stinky lil pirate so without a personal motivation (like helping friends) he wouldn't go pick up a fight or join a war against the WG, would he?

At the same time, there's a part of me that's still wondering if Elbaf could go down the Sabaody Route. That the only way to save everyone on Elbaf, including the kids, is by everyone fleeing the island, probably with the help of Kuma's power (if he's in a state where he has just enough brain power to let his DF do it's thing as long as somebody's just holding his hand up to boop people/ships away) I talked about this just like two months ago though so I'm not gonna repeat myself too much, but would the crew still stick together through this? Probably? Bare minimum I'd imagine they could get split into 2-4 groups (Luffy potentially being one group by himself), maybe the crew all managed to stick together on the Sunny and it'd be just Luffy who could get flewn away somewhere by himself. (Curious what'd even happen to Loki...) Thing is, if this happened and Luffy did get yeeted somewhere by himself, that could give him another opportunity to maybe train and get stronger-- not strong enough to face Imu just yet, but maybe strong enough to face one of the Elders (the Elder acting as a warm-up the same way Blueno was a warm-up before Lucci, y'know)

IDK man...

I think what is really getting to me about the parallel of those panels is that... Like I wonder if there's more to it than Luffy not being ready yet... Like there's a part of me that believes so hard that there's More To That Parallel Than That but I can't figure out what on earth that could even be. (It could be just sleep deprativation making me delulu because the Husbandile was mentioned lmao)

Also, just... God this is reminding me of how many subplots OP has going right now...

Vivi is hiding with Morgans, trying to reach Luffy

Garp is being held by Blackbeard with a bounty from CG

Swamp Guy is on his way to Blackbeard to spill the beans about Pluton and Poseidon

Loki's bestie on the phone is probably Shirahoshi

Pluton is in Wano and Crocodile is plot relevant again

Cross Guild as a whole

Moria escaped BB, Hancock had to leave Amazon Lily, Pudding got kidnapped

Shanks wants to get the One Piece

The current status of Law, Kidd and Barto, etc etc etc

Like a lot of these we can easily connect with various dots (Moria and Hancock could end up in Cross Guild for various reasons; Swamp Guy connects the Ancient Weapon subplots through BB, really the only subplot here that's just giant free-floating here is Vivi where whatever is happening to her can't really be connected to any of the other happenenings beyond her past beef with Croc due to Pluton, but like I said, irrelevant to her current situation, only relevant if she ended up hiding with like CG for some god forsaken reason and I don't know how or why either), but I just... Like I can't figure out where the fuck we are going here

need a lab experiments support group

And it’s just made me realize how much I take for granted at this point the knowledge of how fucked up the world government is. Because they would murk him. They would murder Crocodile instantly if they had even an inkling that he:

1) knew information about the Pluton and had a lead on it existing in Alabasta

2) found out he’d been plotting to get access to a poneglyph

3) found out that he’d hired NICO-fucking-ROBIN to read a poneglyph for him

He’d be dead dead dead dead dead. CP-0 would appear in a puff of smoke to make pearls of him. Hell, Alabasta might disappear off the map just for good measure (depending on what Imu’s endgame is). In hindsight, Crocodile needed the plausible deniability of a civil war, even an incited one, as a smoke screen against his real objectives. The WG simply does not fuck around with this stuff

So from what I can tell, this take on Dragon’s character came from the western audience, so important context to keep in mind. In the west, we are taught that poverty is a moral failure rather than a product of systemic abuse in order to cover for the people who benefit from it. With poverty comes a lot of things, but for the sake of this post, I’m looking at two.

Marginalized communities are subject to a much higher percentage of poverty than the majority cis, straight, white communities. Because of this, poverty has been racialized in a bid for making the bad faith argument that black and brown folks are inherently immoral, again to cover for the people who benefit from the systemic abuse. Poverty is also one of, if not, the main reason parents give up their children, so doing the responsible thing on behalf of that child is still unfairly judged as guilt by association.

This is all compounded when the parent is a single father, which is the secret third thing at work here. We still hold so strict to the gender binary and the roles enforced upon it that when we see a man giving up their child, the knee-jerk assumption is that he’s a shit dad that doesn’t care about his kid because men aren’t the ones that societal standards have assigned the primary role of child-rearing.