User blog comment:DancePowderer/The March of...Progress? 845/@comment-3986064-20161102201640

Exquisitely-written blog DP. This chapter gave me a really big shock and Oda keeps surpassing my expectations every step of the way with this arc. The metaphor that you sniped feels to me like something that Luffy's been doing throughout One Piece, diregarding the norms, the established rules and pummelling in his own way, a much more moral one.

Sanji has always been a loner. He's always been distant and now he's finally distanced himself from the crew in order to protect them. His lack of concern is pretty peculiar, but I guess that will be explained later on clearly, because his statement that "not even he's that stupid" in front of his brothers might be just a way to face off taunts. I know that he still has a few doubts that his captain actually left, but does he really not know Luffy well enough?

I could hypothesize that it's his family that's making Sanji act this way... Traumatic experiences resurfacing and bringing him back to a mental state from when he was younger and weaker, not the character that has been portrayed throughout the series. And that would mean... from his point of view, he relates Luffy to himself, and since he would retreat, Luffy would too. I guess that's how it could be interpreted.

Nonetheless, those final pages were really impactful. Luffy fighting an army, the forces of nature soon to strike him too and that change of role for Purin. And I did not expect this... Well mainly because I didn't think about One Piece too much... but Purin's development was sudden and quite impressive. To not put Sanji through hell is really nice. And I really can't wait to see how she will be developed further. :D