#i have a lot more thoughts on the thematic resonance and plot significance of g5

[kaizokuou-ni-naru]

The "Luffy's fruit is a Zoan" reveal/retcon was extremely controversial when 1044 was first released; do you think Oda did a good job foreshadowing it?

yes!! it addresses a lot of idle questions i had about luffy's powers for quite some time (while also raising a ton more, of course, but that's the nature of one piece).

(all of my thoughts here and on gear 5 in general owe some credit to @grainjew, who has been my main discussion partner on this topic)

luffy's fruit has always been, from what we've seen, kind of weird for a paramecia? obviously since the categorization of 'paramecia' is sort of a grab bag and a lot less well-defined than logias or zoans, that's kind of a hard claim to make, but generally speaking, most of the paramecia users we see throughout the series do not have their powers always on. (the strongest counter-example i could think of to this trend is brook, and even that is one i think you can argue.) luffy's power is way more passive, in the sense that he doesn't have to activate it- it's just there, always. even seastone and seawater do not make luffy not rubber, they just sap his energy and stop him from stretching himself, as we see as early as arlong park.

that is weird! what we see of most other paramecias is that they have to use their powers intentionally, even when those powers do involve transforming their body in some way, like with mr. 1 or alvida. there's a whole plot in dressrosa about knocking a specific paramecia user unconscious so she'll lose her grip on her power and it'll disappear. luffy will stretch when he is asleep, when he is underwater, and without knowing he's doing it. he's always rubber.

so luffy is weird for a paramecia, though not completely unprecedented. his power has always seemed to me to be... almost logia adjacent, in the sense that he's made from a specific material and all his powers are based on being that material, but that doesn't quite track either. aside from the fact that the thing he's composed of is tangible and, again, he can't turn it off, he clearly has access to a greater level of complexity in his transformations than logias do (whose devil fruit powers seem to be basically a binary system).

which actually leads me to compare him to chopper, who is the zoan we know the best, and who, conveniently, also ate a version of the hito hito no mi.

i think the way luffy and chopper interact with their powers is actually very similar. much like luffy, chopper was fundamentally altered by his consumption of a devil fruit in a way he cannot return from. he can still look like a normal reindeer, but he can never actually be one, because the most important trait his devil fruit gave him was human sentience. and he would still have that if you put him in seastone, he just wouldn't be able to transform. similarly, luffy had his body fundamentally altered by his fruit in a manner he does not seem to be capable of even temporarily reversing. he can't make himself not rubber any more than chopper can return himself to being a normal reindeer.

like chopper, luffy's power progression has been based around finding new ways to transform his body and force it into new and more powerful forms. his gears are roughly comparable to chopper's points. that is zoan stuff! chopper is the main other person we see interact with his fruit in that specific way. so, yeah, i actually do think it does make sense for luffy's power to have actually always been a zoan. at the very least, it makes more sense than him being a paramecia, to me.

however, having said that, i also don't think it's as straightforward as luffy just being a zoan instead of a paramecia. we see that the awakening of his fruit definitely has both paramecia and zoan qualities, since he's transforming both himself and the environment around him, as well as other people. (the wiki puts this down to him being a mythical zoan but i just don't think that's true. kaidou is also a mythical zoan and he is completely baffled by what he's seeing.)

i made a bunch of jokes in discord about luffy being devil fruit nonbinary while i was reading this chapter- there's three genders and you have to pick one, and you can't just go switching it up, etc- and i do think that what luffy's fruit indicates is that the sorting system of devil fruits itself is imperfect. outliers do exist that don't fit cleanly between the lines- which we already knew! just look at katakuri.