why i think zoro and luffy are going to have a falling out (theorypost)
disclaimer: this is obviously a theory. don't base your one piece reading experience off of theories. this is just my personal opinion on a possible trajectory for the story.
okay with that out of the way. here's why i think zoro and luffy are going to have a falling out at some point in the future. that there will be an argument, maybe even a full fight, and zoro might even leave the crew for a little while. spoilers for egghead and elbaf, stop reading if you don't want them.
we all know zoro is on the edge of crashing out, right? that he's been acting off in egghead and elbaf — more hypervigilant, more quick to fight, less confident, less sure of himself. attacking loki while loki was tied up and wounded, struggling against lucci, getting scolded by gaban — it's just been a series of bad moments for him. there are so many little instances of zoro acting off that i can't include them all, but here are a few:
2. luffy and zoro have really... not been on the same page in elbaf. like at all. they've been arguing over loki, they've been sniping at each other over shanks, luffy yelled at him for trying to hunt his friends, etc. again, so many examples of this that i'm not going to include them all, but here are two instances out of many:
3. zoro is Not Good at processing his emotions. he copes with his sense of inadequacy by 1) lashing out and 2) by projecting onto other people, and often that person is luffy. there are multiple examples of this — punk hazard when he yelled at luffy to take things seriously, zou when he got upset at sanji, and post-egghead, in the moment where he said luffy was pathetic for feeling sad over vegapunk. i'd argue that him kicking loki's wounds was also a moment of projection from him, actually. zoro doesn't tend to say stuff like "if he died, then that's on him" about people other than himself.
4. so here's the crux of the issue: zoro feels like shit. he feels inadequate, he feels weak, he feels like he's not living up to his position on an emperor's crew, he feels like a deadweight/liability. how do i know? not just from how he's acting, but also from what other characters are saying to him. because zoro does not like to verbally express his feelings, a LOT of his character writing is contained in what other characters say about/to him. and what's been happening recently? a ton of people have been calling him out as a weak link, which serves as a reflection of his inner feelings.
5. and we've already established that zoro does not have healthy coping mechanisms for his fear and insecurity. he pretends that he's fine, that nothing is bothering him, but he acts like an asshole. so when he finally crashes out, as has been building up for a while, i do not think he's just going to have a sad internal monologue and feel bad about it in some secluded corner. i think he's going to lash out.
6. there are several points of unaddressed tension in zoro and luffy's relationship. i've written posts on some of them: this post on why i think zoro's "i'll never lose again" promise is unhealthy (and he literally just lost to imu btw), and this post on why i think zoro and luffy have a big communication discrepancy around self-expectation. two points of tension that i haven't written posts on are 1) thriller bark and 2) the onigashima death pact. those are some pretty big, fucked-up secrets zoro is keeping from luffy that could absolutely come around to bite him.
7. i see a lot of similarities between zoro's current character arc and usopp's arc in water 7. feeling inadequate, weak, like a weight on the crew — usopp experienced this heavily in water 7, and zoro is going through it now. usopp and zoro are the two strawhats with combat roles, and both of them struggle greatly with fear and insecurity. and we know that usopp fought luffy over the merry because he saw the merry as a representation of himself — a shipmate luffy could cut off. i think that usopp's arc thus serves as a model we can look at to understand what zoro is currently experiencing.
i think the zoro crashout is going to happen soon. he just got oneshot by imu, so he has to be feeling horrible, because zoro is constantly measuring himself up against a ridiculously high internal standard. and while i can't predict the exact shape his crashout will take, i think that it won't be neat and self-contained. and if it isn't neat and self-contained, he's probably going to get into conflict with the crew. and that means conflict with luffy.
again, this is just my theory. but i'm excited to see what's going to happen in the story, and i would personally love to see a zolu falling out arc, because i think zoro and luffy's relationship is all the more compelling for its tension and its contradictions.
