Is One Piece Kind of Rubbish Now? Doesn't Hit Like It Used To Emotionally

Gonna get crucified for this but here it's 3am and I wanna rant, and you're giving me an opportunity so here it goes:
One Piece has been lowkey trash since Punk Hazard tbh

The writing noticeably changed around then. The overall additions to the universe of One Piece and grand adventure of the Straw Hats is still interesting and hype to follow, but I agree that the emotional moments have been null. But I didn't even care about the luffy sabo ace flashback, infact I was getting really annoyed during it and I didn't really care about Ace's death either, or the Minks protecting Raizo - which many put among the most emotional moments for some reason.

I used to cry at fucking Chouchou barking at his owners house when it burned down.

The character writing and moment to moment build-ups just aren't there anymore. But that's the least of the stories problems.

We've been on our way to Wano for 1/3rd of the entire manga now, but inbetween that were so many stops that didn't feel important that it just gave all of them that "Okay but can we continue the REAL story now?" feeling for me. I stopped reading One Piece for the first time in like 16 years during Dress Rosa and WCI couldn't hold my attention either. And then we got reverie which was another break from the real story and now this flashback that broke up the real story. Everything just keeps stopping and it doesn't feel like it's part of the "real story". Why can't Oda finish a story thread he started before inserting another one?

I could have lived with just Dressrosa, that made sense due to Punk Hazard and smile and whatever but did he really need to cram WCI in there? I guarantee you he thought of some cool thing with Big Mom and Kaido teamup and what comes from that in Wano and then had to think of a way to introduce us to Big Mom before that happens so he just decided to throw that arc in there as well out of nowhere.

It already felt a bit dragging on all the way back in Alabasta with all the stops and that was only 50 chapters, we met Kin'emon in Chapter 656 and since then we've been on our way to Wano. It took 253 Chapters to get there. 253 chapters of "okay can but can we keep going now".

Only 165 chapters were between the end of THRILLER BARK and the start of PUNK HAZARD. All of Sabaody, amazon lily, Impel Down, the entire marineford war, the return to sabaody and fishman island fit into 90 chapters fewer than what it took to get from Punk Hazard to the start of Wano.

Fuck this Samurai shit man, I'm gonna be so happy once this is over.

/r/OnePiece Thread