I watched episode 1015 in its entirety. It was ok, but if that's peak One Piece anime these days, I'm good. The coloring is really nice looking and some good animation but it's so.freaking.slow. I like that Luffy's theme song when he hits Kaido is still the same song from ep1 OP.
I think, and I could be wrong, but the first awakening was versus Doffy at Dressrosa but became more apparent with the fight against Karakuri. Remember how he was able to make things like mochi?
People hated it and accused Luffy of being "special" and the "chosen one" and accused this of ruining One Piece and what made Luffy unique in a genre full of chosen ones. Which is kind of asinine as we've always known he'd become the Pirate King and there have been numerous "chosen one" analogies tied to Luffy such as him being the one destined to destroy Fishman Island or save the slaves from Mariejois. They liked Luffy because he worked hard to get to where he was but couldn't ignore that the only reason Luffy was able to awaken it to begin with was his boundless creativity and hard work, making it two fold. This point is mostly backlash against Naruto because Naruto was a chosen one and had everything handed to him. The fear was that all those years of hard work were negated by this. Fair criticism but I disagreed with it.
I mean Luffy definitely worked hard but then he died. Also we never saw what his last attack would've done because he got grabbed by CP0.
It also does feel like he used the haki stuff he learned in Wano with Gear 5 because he's punching through people.
With the chosen one thing, at least it's not shoved down the audience's throat that omg he's the chosen one. There are some prophecies but people don't really seem to care about them much. Even Yamato wasn't hyped to see Luffy because of the prophecy, but because she wanted to meet Ace's younger brother.
People hated it because it was cartoony and not super cool super saiyan shit.
lol
People hated it because it was an "ass pull" and Luffy was too strong and thought he didn't "earn" defeating Kaido, which is preposterous because the mad lad literally died while fighting him.
People hated it because they thought it had no weakness (we now know this to be false as the current arc confirms that it makes him old).
I do think Luffy is now ridiculously strong, to the point where it makes the whole crew useless. But this was a problem even pre-timeskip. They always had to find a way each arc to get Luffy out of the fight, because if he was there he's just wreck everyone and end it. I felt like the crew started to catch up, but now he's left them back in the dust again. The bounties reflect that. 3 billion to like 500,000?
The weakness is weird in that basically it's the same as Gear 4 and Chopper's thing. Power up for a limited time and then out of commission for a bit. Just kind of odd.
I like that with Gear 5 and getting to Emperor/Yonkou level, he doesn't really need to worry about the sea anymore since he can run on air. Big Mom could also get out too with her flying and Kaido could fly as a dragon. Feels like anyone at that level needs to be able to not have to worry about the sea.
People hated it because of the tie in to Sky Piea felt, according to them, forced, and that Oda just pull this out of his ass with no build up, no nothing and that One Piece had jumped the shark.
I don't even remember the Skypiea connection. Was Nika the sun god brought up during Skypiea?