User blog comment:Nobody700/The worst in the best/@comment-24148870-20131218023905/@comment-10543621-20131218051113

Well, actually, look at it this way. We've seen how absolutely drastic the difference in power can be among individuals in the OP world. The difference stretches waaaay too far apart.

It's not that the 200 high ranking marines were weak, they were just not that spectacular on the scale of ranks to begin with. The marines are a large organisation. A rank structure has to be established and they will need a large number of people in many different ranks. As such the ability range would also be drastically different. I mean, it's the same in the pirate world. The marines around the rank of captain to commodore level are probably around the strength of your average little know pirate captain. The Strawhats are considered exceptional really. It's just the range is too wide.

Let's use animals as comparisons. (Purely in terms of crushing prowess by size, disregarding other traits and abilities) Normal civilians are probably like ants or smaller insects, and foot soldiers (marines, or small pirate lackeys, bandit lackeys etc) might be something like uh beetles? Or slightly larger insects. Then you have the small time captains and marine leaders in small time places who're probably slightly larger bugs still like cockroaches or uh cicadas. Then you have people like the Galley-La carpenters, who're strong enough to crush some pirates, but wholly weaker than much stronger fighters. They're probably like mice or rats. The 200 odd marines that fought on Enis Lobby are probably around the range of dogs and cats I'd say.

The strawhats at the point of Enis lobby however feel more a the level of wolves by that point, and I'm pretty sure an injured wolf would still destroy plenty of healthy domestic cats. If I have an issue, it would be that the 5 vice admirals did not get involved at all. At that point, I'm pretty sure the vice admirals would have been strong enough to subdue the strawhats. They're probably be in the range of larger wolves, or even like Jaguars or something.

And then we have the ridiculously strong people like the admirals who're probably like T-rexes, and people like whitebeard who's a god-damn blue whale flatening everything.

And the range might be even greater. The point is, in the one piece world, the strength difference is simply too great. The marines are too large an organisation. Those 200 plus marine leaders were already plenty strong, stronger than maybe hundres and thousands of others. But the strawhats are just simply stronger still.

I think the marine strength level is about right. Remember, we have to compare the entire marines as an organisation against every type of pirate in existence. We've seen how strong and how weak pirate crews can be. The marines would definitely have the same sort of variations in their ranks. The whitebeard war has shown that the average vice admiral fights on equal with a famed new-world pirate captain. At the same time, to someone like white-beard, the average vice admiral is fodder. That feels about right to be to be honest. At the same token, the average famed new-world pirate captain is also no match for strong marines such as Sakasuki. If the marines had that much more strong fighters to spare, there wouldn't be a struggle against piracy to begin with.