User blog:DancePowderer/No Room at the Inn, Deductive Reasoning

Instead of one my fun analyses or past-their-prime parody blogs, I'm going to break character on this blog and actually do something I rarely do on here, my job. Over the past few months or so, there have been some arguments on the wiki over various issues, all of which have a recurring theme. That theme, is that we, as the users, came to our own conclusion about a topic or issue through rational, deductive reasoning, the outcome of which (as I saw it), had no room for error. There are some users who have a problem with that, since the conclusion was drawn by us, the readers, rather than from information present in the manga. It comes down the fact that the answer we were looking for was all but flat out stated. I am of two minds when it comes to this issue, one of which is more dominant than the other.

My first, and dominant mind, is that these conclusions are perfectly safe, given that we analyze and examine every single possibility within the realms of reason (both One Piece and realistic). I will use a semi-recent argument as an example. We all remember the argument we had on Trebol's talk page over what kind of Devil Fruit type he actually was. Based on the information we had, the majority believed that classifying it as a Paramecia was the wiser, more correct choice over calling it a Logia as we had been. This next part might look like I'm arguing and beating a dead horse, but please know that that is not the case. I am merely using this to illustrate an overall point. Given what we knew: his substance wasn't natural, we saw his body underneath the cloak, for more pro-Paramecia arguments, see Trebol's talk page. After all that, people still wanted to either keep it as a logia or classify it as unknown. My question here is, why are people so afraid/against making their own conclusions when the evidence is so overwhelming and the answer is staring you in the face? I realize that people like to argue that "Oh, One Piece is unpredictable", "Because it's Oda", the latter of which I refuse to acknowledge as an actual argument, but I digress. However, as unpredictable as it may be, there are some consistencies we have to acknowledge. For instance, there are three Devil Fruit types. We know this as a fact, and no one can argue against this. Yet some people wanted to classify it as unknown. The way I see it, to classify a named fruit as unknown is to essentially acknowledge that there is a fourth type of Devil Fruit in the world, which to me seems like real speculation, unlike drawing our own conclusions after ruling out all other options. If you can rule out all but one option then that option must be the correct one.

That being said, I am all for the use of caution and discretion. And we shouldn't draw conclusions on everything. For instance, we shouldn't make any conclusion on who Lola's mom is. Could me Big Mom, could be Elmy. People are split on that too, and in more ways than one. But that doesn't mean we need to make a conclusion on that, because we have no information on it. No action should be taken there as of yet. I realize that when it comes to making statements like that, people are afraid of that 1/1,000,000 chance that we're wrong. Turns out there's a fourth fruit type, or Big Mom's really an okama. Stuff like that does happen on the very rare occasion. Too infrequently for it to be taken into account. I realize that a lot of people are afraid of that barely existent off-chance that we're wrong, but what is life without taking a chance?

Well, that's my round-about way of giving you my take on it, now tell me yours.