it's loving luffy hours

so mainly where my thoughts seem to diverge from general fandom opinion & maybe i'm in the wrong here and there's evidence to dispute what i'm saying but i still like my idea better is that observation haki isn't a sort of magical ability that allows you to practically see through walls or predict the future based on that ability alone. and the reason why i feel this way is because observation haki isn't like conqueror's haki where you have it or you don't, as far as we've seen observation haki is a skill that anyone can learn and hone. luffy has great observation haki and we watch him put literal months of constant practice into it.

further to my point is the name of it itself, observation haki, & something i've picked up from training martial arts for several years across several disciplines, and it's that everything has a tell. there are minute differences in body language for every movement. if someone throws a kick with the intention of hitting the head or body, their chest will drive forwards first. if they intend to throw a low kick to their opponents leg, their hip drives forwards first. a person who's seen a kick coming for their chest three times won't be able to see it coming until the leg is already tracking towards their face, someone who's seen a kick coming for their chest three hundred, three thousand times will be able to tell and react from that fraction of a second it takes for the attack to begin--the former person will be amazed that they were able to see it coming, but the latter has trained countless hours being able to notice.

my take on observation haki is that it's just thin slicing taken to an extreme as an anime power up. someone with observation haki can tell what direction you're about to run in based on the way your boot shifts in the dirt, can see where you're going to strike by tracking your eyes and the way your muscles tense, maybe they can't tell what is in your pocket but they can tell it's something important, something heavy, etc. they can't see through walls but they can recognize what's happening in the other room by the sound of footsteps, the quality of voices, the sound of objects moving. this skill can be honed to the point of feeling like someone can predict the future, like mihawk's 'foresight', but really all they're doing is observing their surroundings and understanding the way that people and the world works enough to be entirely confident in what is going to happen next.

another reason i feel this way is from the concept of feints and that observation haki can be tricked. the first peek we get at observation haki comes from enel in skypeia, and luffy defeats his haki by emptying his brain and acting entirely on instict, having zero plan. this can also read as observation haki being a magical ability and intercepting with telepathy and predicting the future, but again, it just makes me think of feinting. when you've drilled hundreds of hours to associate certain body movements with certain actions, you can trick someone by moving in those ways without intention of making that action. going back to kick fighting, when you kick with your lead leg there isn't much power because of the position of your body--so you shift your stance in a sort of rapid step bringing your rear leg forward and out and using the momentum to drive your lead leg towards your opponent, causing a much more effective strike. this is a dramatic tell, and telegraphs very loudly to your opponent "i am about to kick you with my lead leg," especially if you actually do throw that kick. however. because it's such a loud telegraph, your opponent will brace to block that kick or rev up a parry/counter the moment they recognize it, and prioritizing blocking that specific blow opens them up to being attacked in other ways.

this is a pretty basic example of the concept, but it brings me back to enel and the idea that observation haki isn't purely a supernatural ability. if observation haki is a trained skill that revolves around association, x sensory input equals y outcome, it can be tricked. luffy having no idea of what he's about to do before he does it and doing it completely limp as a rubber man means that every tell that enel has come to rely on with his observation haki is useless. if it was a telepathic or supernaturally predictive ability, luffy clearing his mind wouldn't have actually helped him because enel would have been able to predict what he was going to do anyways: luffy's tactic worked because by having no intentions, he had no discernible tells.