Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
I made that claim because it is the most logical.

To start with, if you list all the fishmen seen so far with the power level to fight side by side with the straw-hats, then it will be a very short list indeed.

Then, if you remove from that list those fishmen who have stronger obligations to do something else, like King Neptune, and those who are moraly to corrupt to be acceptet by the straw-hats. then the only name left on the list would be Jimbei.
Well yah, certain characters would be completely excluded, though I'd shorten this list to only those who have a morality questionable enough to just be entirely off-limit (Which would be the Hodi Jones and VandenDecker and most likely their servants, taken they don't get unexpected character development);

Although I don't find it likely, I don't necessarily want to entirely exclude characters like Neptune cause, although I do not at all think he'll be a new nakama, I have seen no clear evidence that he will have to stick around by necessity.

He'd be a weird addition, so I feel fine excluding him, but Oda's done crazier stuff in the past.

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A big reason I find Jimbei unlikely is the fact that we've seen so much of him that if he'd have real strawhat potential, we would've had some sort of strong suggestion of it, I don't see any real reason for him to join other than him and Luffy getting along, the power stuff seems fairly incidental. (aside from Buggy, almost every guy from ID was shown as fairly on-par with the others)

You can call me crazy here, of course, but there's quite a few characters in this arc who we know very very little about or who we haven't seen in an actual fight yet.

For almost all strawhats their actual show of skill came much much later in the arc they represented, so any situation where we have barely any information can, in my opinion, be considered "more likely" than a character we have potentially damning information about.

To cite a very specific example: Aside from her absurd size (which isn't necessarily a negative thing, considering the straw hats are meant to mirror the blackbeards); why would the mermaid princess be excluded from the list by necessity? Her dialogue (interest in worldly things like the sun, trees etc) reveals potential for a dream of sorts and we don't have any real evidence that she'd be entirely incapable of fighting on a level that's at least similar to the straw hats.

Remember, her brothers and father all seem pretty potent at fighting, and she's the 2nd biggest ouf of that entire family.

Does this mean she's gonna be the next straw hat? I don't really expect it, but I see more signs that feel similar to a regular straw hat joining than anything we've seen with Jimbei.

Truth to be told, I think we're much too early into the arc to make any judgement, I could even imagine one or two other characters showing up that we haven't seen before, or some sort of twist that we didn't expect changing the way we look at characters.

On that note, I can't wait for this week's chapter, It's really fun to have some classic One Piece again.