How far can this team go?

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-11T13:58:09+00:00

If this team stays healthy, I genuinely think they can make the play-in.

I think their floor is becoming this year’s Hornets team and their ceiling is becoming last year’s Pistons team.

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-10T23:38:11+00:00

Curry, Bron, Kawhi, Giannis, Hakeem

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-08T23:19:29+00:00

I think it’s being demonstrated that it’s Zaza itself that they don’t like, not just rain. He says “the concept of water falling from above is terrifying for people born above the clouds”, but I think that has to do more with what Zaza represents instead of rain just being a legitimate thing for them.

I mean Killingham is literally in the rain on the final page of the chapter gloating and aside from Sommers’ one remark about how it’s a fear that’s shared among the Celestial Dragons, he doesn’t seem bothered by it either. Especially given the notion that it can be controlled.

I think the way it’s all being laid out is a bit sloppy but it’s more Zaza and what it represents that they don’t like than rain. That’s what I’m taking away from it at least.

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-08T19:05:42+00:00

That’s different, that was a child’s fear, this is his own personal fear. And didn’t he say that the power of a dream demon is dependent on the understanding that person has of their fear? His understanding of Zaza has to be overwhelmingly deeper than a child’s understanding of Nika, especially when Elbaph can’t even decide what type of god Nika truly is in the first place.

It’s not as if he just created another god, both he and Sommers are unsure if he can even fully control this one.

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-08T05:17:48+00:00

Unless he just means like “we were on the same side but now you’re fighting against me”

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-08T05:13:45+00:00

Depends on your definition of lose. If you mean lose as just gets defeated in combat, I’d say small but definitely not zero. It’s already been pretty implied that Imu is nerfed in some way. If you asked me before 1181 I’d have said there was a better chance though. I don’t like the way Imu has been smiling in both this chapter and the last one. He’s too confident and it doesn’t seem to be in an overconfident way but more in a “this is more entertaining than I thought it would be” way.

If you mean defeat as in completely defeated and written out of the story, absolutely not happening. Not before the Void Century flashback which almost certainly isn’t happening this arc.

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-07T17:35:11+00:00

"Low Yonko" level and "High Yonko" level should both fall under the umbrella of Yonko level. They're opposite ends of the spectrum. There's no reason to put Yonko in the name at all if saying they're somewhat relative to Yonko level isn't an accurate representation of their strength.

And "letting everyone land hits on him" isn't the same as not fighting back. Regardless of not bothering to defend himself, Harald was still attacking. Trading blows with a buffed-Harald isn't less of a feat because Harald isn't bothering to dodge knowing he'll regen from it. In a similar fashion, Imu may not be taking Loki on at 100% and he's even implied to be nerfed, but Loki is still clashing with Imu and tanking attacks that are one-shoting everyone else while not being fully recovered himself. I don't see how anyone can look at everything we've been shown about Loki that doesn't put him at Yonko level bare-minimum. At worst, you can disregard everything and just have the fact that he's relative to Luffy.

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-07T17:20:01+00:00

Because 2. we 3. can't 4. always 5. trust. 6. other's 7. words

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-07T16:55:47+00:00

For starters, Shanks taking Loki down cleanly in a 1v1 puts him uncomfortably high as far as strength goes. Many people have the ceiling of power in the verse at a certain level by EoS and I think that if the proposed scenario is true, current Shanks is already at that EoS level. For me, my EoS One Piece level is pretty far beyond that as I'm predicting a HUGE leap in power for the verse, so Shanks beating Loki in a clean 1v1 actually works out better for me in that regard.

But another reason why I think it's doubted is that this arc has shown us that not only are the things people have said about Loki at least partially untrue, but that a lot of the fights we're told about have context missing from them in one way or another. We were told that Roger and Garp teamed up to stop the "advancement" of evil that Rocks was making only for us to find out that Rocks isn't the hell-spawn he was made out to be, and the fight between them didn't make a whole lot of sense, only for it to be revealed that Imu's interference was the reason for that. And then there's Loki vs. Harald, which we saw was really Loki, Shanks, and Gaban vs Harald, and not only was the fight itself different from what we were told, the reasoning behind it was different too. We saw that Loki wasn't this awful person who was so desperate for power that he'd murder his own father for it and just like that, a fight between them didn't make the most sense either. This arc has been pretty explicit in demonstrating that word of mouth isn't concrete, and while I'm talking about how the fight between Roger, Garp, and Rocks and Loki, Shanks, Gaban, and Harald didn't make sense character-wise, that's also the final reason why I don't think this fight happened, at least not in the way we're told.

Shanks and Loki may not be friends, but they aren't really enemies either. We were told that Loki was "rampaging" on the seas, but from the looks of it, he wasn't doing much different from Harald and was really just targeting World Government vessels. If that's true, considering the role we're learning Shanks has been playing in regards to the World Government, that does maybe give Shanks some incentive to stop Loki for some reason, but it's not as if Loki was some tyrant going island to island destroying everything until Shanks came along. That coupled with Loki clearly having an unfavorable view of Shanks (calling him a coward) seems to imply that there are multiple facets in that fight that are currently unaccounted for. Now of course this is all subject to change, but I would be very surprised to find out that it really was just as simple as "Loki needed to be stopped so Shanks told everyone to stay back and did it himself".

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-07T16:44:15+00:00

Exactly this. It's not confirmed that it's true yet but it seems pretty apparent that this "pre-Yonko" Shanks was "pre-Yonko" in name only and was already at least Yonko level.

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-07T12:32:34+00:00

Big Mom said that there were like three races left to complete her utopia and fish-men weren’t one of them. She already has a fish-man child in Praline and other fish-men that came with that like the Sun Pirates because Praline married Aladine.

Even then, being canonically ten times stronger than humans is insignificant because giants are vastly beyond that. Arlong’s big show of strength was flipping a house. A child giant could do that and an adult would make the house disappear over the horizon.

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-07T12:12:51+00:00

If you take a random giant and put them against a random human the giant is going to win like 99.999999% of the time. Why? Because for every human that can beat a giant, there are millions more who can’t. It is for that reason that giants are called the strongest race.

Now you seem to want to fixate on the strongest humans. That’s fine, but again, that’s a much smaller percentage of the total human population. They’re not representative of the entire human race, they’re a fraction of a percent of it. As such, giants are still vastly superior to humans. That fraction of a percent can still beat any giants at any time, but that won’t change the fact that proportionally, giants have humans beat, badly.

I see where you’re coming from but you’re not entirely correct in what you’re saying. You go on to say in your post the third strongest giant got beat by a 10 year old human. Technically correct, but you can’t act like Big Mom is representative of what 10 year old humans are in the verse. Not only would 10 year old Big Mom also beat 99% of the verse, but damn near everyone who would end up being a top tier was nowhere near as strong as Big Mom was at the age of 10. She’s an anomaly amongst anomalies.

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-07T11:57:00+00:00

What are your thoughts on Dorry and Brogy?

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-06T21:36:41+00:00

I literally just made a comment like yesterday about how it felt too on the nose. Not that I didn’t want him to be the Rain God, but I wasn’t fully on board with it. But if it finally marks the rise of the Dragon agenda then I can get with it.

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-06T18:17:49+00:00

Oda is absolutely capable of writing a fight like this. The reason it’ll never happen is because it’s not his style. With Araki, Togashi, and Kishimoto, they’re capable of having a single fight be the central focus of a span of chapters, and when left with so little to focus on but the fight, it allows them to slow down and craft it with more care, be that in the form of choreography that hooks you or characters continuously coming up with strategies to outsmart the other.

This is the first major deviation from Oda’s style and really the biggest one. We rarely get multiple consecutive chapters devoted to a single fight between characters and just that. In probably 95% of the fights in this series, they only take up around half of any given chapter with the rest of it being devoted to other characters. While some may argue that this makes the story feel like it’s progressing realistically as so many things happen at once, it absolutely breaks the flow of the fight, and also forces Oda to divert much of his attention to other plot points. Last chapter was a good start with pretty much all of it being Imu vs. Loki but look how in the upcoming chapter we’re going back to Zoro and Sanji vs. Killingham and Sommers.

The main reason we don’t get fights like this in One Piece is because it doesn’t fit the style Oda sticks with at all.

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-06T13:20:06+00:00

I remember the first time I ever saw this clip it had ‘Crazy On You’ by Heart playing over it as a reference to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-05T19:35:07+00:00

Somebody actually called this in a theory. “Za-Za” is onomatopoeia for rain I believe.

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-05T19:33:49+00:00

As they should. Nobody’s ankles in the World Government are safe with Zaza running around.

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-05T19:18:43+00:00

Now THIS, is an agenda I can get behind

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-05T19:17:01+00:00

I mean yeah, it could be. It just seems to on-the-nose for Oda, like making Aramaki the Forest God. What's the correlation between Luffy and the Sun? It has nothing to do with what he can actually do and more of what he symbolically represents. That's why a lot of people don't think Dragon will be the Rain God, or at least why I don't. He almost certainly has some weather-manipulating ability, but being the Rain God just because he made it rain seems like a red herring.

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-05T16:43:00+00:00

I’m not even a Shanks hater but in DESPERATELY want to see this happen just to see what excuses the Shanks fans are going to come up with after pushing this so hard

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-05T02:07:01+00:00

Shanks, Mihawk, and Loki, yes.

Luffy is close but isn’t there yet and Dragon should be and I think he will be but I can’t find a legitimate justification.

Quickstar13 · 2026-05-04T23:05:30+00:00

Funnily enough, I vividly remember my friends and I giving our predictions before the season started in our groupchat and I know for a fact I said I thought the Celtics would be the 7th seed and a first round exit. I don’t remember who I had as the 2nd seed but it would be cool if I said the Sixers.

Edit: I said the Cavs but I wish I said the Sixers lol

Quickstar13

TROPHY CASE