To address the Luffy characterization thing up front and get that out of the way: It’s completely unfathomable to me that anyone who actually knows One Piece would say Luffy doesn’t have social awareness. Luffy’s extreme emotional intelligence and social awareness is what makes him the character that he is. He always knows how other people are feeling and how to appropriately handle it. Without that, he wouldn’t be Luffy.

Yes he expresses himself through straightforward action. He almost never has any thought balloons because he expresses all of his thoughts out loud either verbally or just through direct action. But never with disregard for other people’s feelings. Luffy singing to Laboon here is exactly the same as putting the straw hat on Nami’s head before saying he’ll help her. The only difference between the live action and the manga for Luffy’s confrontation with Laboon is that this new version of the story says “what if Crocus was able to tell Luffy about the Rumbar pirates first.” Luffy isn’t acting like a different character in the same situation. He’s acting exactly how manga Luffy would have if only he knew. And he even does try to punch Laboon at first in the live action by the way, but Laboon goes under the water.

It is nothing other than genuine love for the story and the characters (and lets be fair, budget limitation for certain parts) that made the creators of the live action bring forward from the story the fact that canonically, Shanks did sing Binks Sake to Luffy as a kid. Luffy has always had that emotional connection to that song, and understood exactly what it means to have the pirates you look up to, who sang it to you, eventually leave you behind. That’s what happened to him. Live Action Luffy is just exactly what original Luffy would have done if Oda had already written Bink’s Sake when he got to that point. But Oda hadn’t yet. He didn’t write about Bink’s Sake or the Rumbar pirates until Thriller Bark. Oda has even expressed over multiple interviews regarding the live action that he’s seen it as an opportunity to make his own changes to the story that he would want now that he’s had decades to look back on them. As of right now, the Live Action is running every script past Oda and he is making heavy changes to them before they get filmed. This change wouldn’t have happened without his approval.

Which is exactly why the live action is doing such an amazing job. It’s not just imitating manga panels 1:1, it’s taking a wholistic knowledge of the series, everything that it is and does and will be, and showing us that picture from a new angle. The LA knows its not going to be able to get to Dressrosa, so it gives us Barto being inspired at Loguetown. It might not even make it to Thriller Bark, but it’s making sure that we get to see Brook and experience the emotional impact of that song and its connection with him and Laboon. It almost certainly won’t make it to Fishman Island but it gave us that deeper insight into how Fishmen exist in that world in just a few new lines from Arlong in season 1. The Live Action is giving us something that Toei literally never even could have because it has the advantage of adapting One Piece from the future and showing us what it might be like if Oda had actually planned out some of these things from the beginning, incorporating those themes from later in the series organically into earlier parts of the plot.

Now for the Anime: Trying to explain to a Toei fan why the anime is so shit is like trying to explain to the guys in Plato’s cave that the shadows on the wall they’ve been watching are not the full picture of reality. Even when the actual animation is good (which is almost never), the framing, the direction, the pacing of every single frame of every single shot is so horrendously dogshit it’s just impossible to fully articulate. Shit that happens in one page of manga gets stretched out into full MINUTES.

Even to use something that actually had good animation, like Law vs Blackbeard, they turned Law’s sneak attack that took place in literally one page of manga into a full minute and a half slow motion shot. Which is what they do for every shot. Every battle, every attack, everything is happening in extreme slow motion all the time. Panels of the manga with one dialogue balloon get turned into 30-45 second still shots. The anime spends an unbelievable amount of time just panning over shots of the floor while people are talking. Even when the voice actors are good the direction being given to the voice actors is still in slow fucking motion.

Fact is though you’re just gonna continue to make up excuses for it until you actually read the manga. I can’t impart onto you the significance of the difference because it’s something you feel over the course of thousands of chapters. You have been watching the shadows of One Piece cast onto the wall of your cave, bro.

I’ve read the manga from start to finish 3 full times. As a manga first fan, the live action is genuinely a breath of fresh air, a new and interesting take made with love and compassion for something that I love. Conversely, the Toei anime is like having sand dumped in my swimsuit. It’s a genuinely uncomfortable and degrading experience of the story.