#egghead arc

ONE PIECE LIVE ACTION 2.04 || ONE PIECE ch. 1111 >> Dorry, Brogy & Sun God Nika

I love egghead

happy birthday, jinbe! you're the hardest straw hat to meme but i think that's because you actually kinda have your shit together

(also tumblr's not letting me post with the absolute wall of links to the other parts anymore, so navigating backward beyond the last few posts is on y'all now)

i think there is a disconnect between luffy’s expectations of zoro and zoro’s expectations of himself and both of them feed into it unconsciously. see the root problem is that zoro has sky-high unrealistic expectations of himself and is basically always half-killing himself trying to live up to them because he hinges his sense of self-worth upon them. zoro is NOT always calm cool and collected, that's a front he puts on to others because he thinks it's what's needed from him — to always be steady and grounded and unshakeable.

meanwhile luffy relies on zoro and trusts him implicitly and that is cool and fun but holy shit does the knowledge of this weigh on zoro. for much of the story luffy cannot conceive of a world in which zoro loses and he expresses as much. skypeia "how could this have happened while you were here" is the first moment that springs to mind, but also consider: in sabaody when luffy told zoro and sanji to split up to protect their crew members while running from the pacifistas, he had already seen zoro was wounded at that point. chapter 510 zoro collapses due to his wounds from thriller bark, and chapter 511 luffy makes the plan to split up! and this isn't him being intentionally callous — he just thinks zoro is always going to be able to handle what gets thrown his way!

i think we have this feedback cycle where zoro demonstrates reliability -> luffy places a lot of trust in zoro -> zoro increases the burden on himself beyond what luffy expects -> luffy sees zoro is trustworthy and places more trust in him -> rinse and repeat. and yeah this starts in the east blue, where luffy witnesses zoro 1) carry him in buggy's iron cage with his guts spilling out, 2) purposefully injure himself in his fight with cabaji to make a point about how he will not let getting wounded hold him back, and 3) literally swear on his sword that he will never lose again, while half-bisected. like. that's quite the first impression to make. no wonder luffy thinks zoro is basically invincible after that.

and zoro wants to be relied on by luffy! the problem comes in where as i've mentioned zoro is someone who holds himself to completely ridiculous expectations. so to zoro "being relied on by luffy" means something different, something harsher than what it means to luffy. it's zoro constantly bodily throwing himself in front of harm and berating himself for being "weak" and not expressing pain either physical or emotional because he thinks that's what makes him reliable. thriller bark is obviously The example of this but i think the aftermath of the moment actually says as much as the moment itself. zoro trains ridiculously hard despite his injuries, he conceals what he did from luffy, he hides his pain in sabaody until he literally drops from the strain. he's barely holding it together and he's presenting a front of "i'm okay i'm okay i'm fine" because he thinks that's what luffy and the crew need from him — until he quite literally can't anymore.

okay now flash forward to latest the latest arcs. in chapter 1175, we have luffy saying "i always believed in you" to zoro and zoro going "yeah i know that!" and like. oh boyyy. i think we are reaching a boiling point with this disconnected communication because luffy has been "checking up" on zoro in a way he never has before. sending kaku to watch over him in egghead, asking zoro if he needed help in his fight against lucci, and now going "i always believed in you" in elbaf. zoro has been off since wano and i think luffy is picking up on it. but to zoro, luffy's concern probably reads as luffy losing trust in him, because zoro is so used to having luffy rely on him wordlessly. if luffy can't trust zoro to uphold his promises (read: never show vulnerability) then how can zoro continue to have worth?

oh also there is yet another aspect to this, which is that zoro himself has high expectations of luffy and will hold luffy to said expectations. and he's generally pretty good about communicating them (i.e. in w7 and punk hazard) but lately he's gotten more shifty about this too; see: post-egghead zoro saying behind luffy's back that luffy's pathetic for feeling so sad over vegapunk now that he's an emperor of the sea. but! here's the twist! zoro's expectations of luffy are actually zoro's expectations of himself, because zoro is the projector of all time and holds luffy up as a mirror to his own self-worth. if luffy is worth following then that means zoro is worth something. if luffy isn't worth following, what does that say about zoro? this is why when zoro is scared and upset he'll sometimes verbalize that by criticizing luffy. again, see punk hazard.