I never found the fact that people never give up their ideals in One Piece weird. I mean, it's writer belongs to a culture where:
- The Elite Class commited seppuku aka cut their belly open when they fucked up.
- Warriors would follow their Masters to death even if they know he was an stupid and worthless leader.
Not all did that stuff, obviously. But that seems to be the idealistic and romantic view behind the Samurai class. I don't think the stuff we see in One Piece is that different from Kenshin refusing to kill anybody in Ruroni Kenshin no matter what, or Naruto being Naruto because it's his ninja way or whatever.
It just feels much more notorious in One Piece. Because everything in One Piece is taken to the extreme.
Then Luffy becomes a destructive Yonko. But the fact remains that we have 1 definition for what constitutes a Yonko, and that is "four strongest pirates in the world."
I remember how ages ago we were told that the World of One Piece kept some balance because the World Government + The Warlords were as powerful as the Yonko (well, at least one of them individually, I still remember people losing their shit in Marineford when Shanks appeared).
The Yonko is a term that was created because Whitebeard and Shanks decided to block the road to One Piece, so the next two most powerful pirates (Big Mom and Kaido) had to settle down and start amassing power hoping that one day they'll be powerful enough to destroy the other Emperors and become Pirate King / Queen.
There are a lot more connotations to being a Yonko that just being strong.
Outside of protecting Fishman Island Luffy doesn't seem to care about protecting territory. Right now, you're right that, the Yonko are in a cold war--in a state of MAD essentially. Now, the only way that gets disrupted is if someone, like Luffy, comes along and breaks the stalemate. He doesn't even need to beat Big Mom to destroy the state of MAD that's been created, he just needs to disrupt and fuck her shit up enough to force her to abandon her stalemate position.
That's what I think is going to happen. Luffy's going to take the ponyglyph, or a rubbing, and destroy the stalemate in the process, he won't beat Big Mom now but will do so down the line. Even destroying the stalemate would be enough to send the New World into a feeding frenzy. From there Big Mom attacks Kaido while Luffy and co slip into Wano, clean up the situation with the shogun, and get out with another ponyglyph.
I'm just not sure he needs to, or can, defeat a Yonko yet. Even so, there's way this can all move forward.
The Yonko control territory from what we know about them. That seems to be a big part of the position given the aftermath of Whitebeard getting beat.
Yeah. Shanks seems to be the exception. His phoneglyph probably is on that tropical island where he gets drunk. That's it.
I don't think he'll defeat Big Mom any time soon either. Kaido seems like the first one they'd defeat, especially because stakes are quite high after the mink, the samurai and the destruction of the Devil Fruit factory.
Not so long ago, I thought that Big Mom may trick Luffy and throw him at Kaido in exchange of Sanji or his crew life or something like that. It would be quite cool. Luffy goes to Wano, weakens Kaido army and then Big Mom appears to finish the job in the middle of the arc.
This is a good metaphor, and why I think we're generally worse about gender things than other issues. I think everyone would think "this manga is for white people" is clearly racist, and it's not any different from "this manga is for boys." Girls can like manga too.
I think I read some time ago that even though the Shonen Jump targets male teens, lately the amount of females that read it has increased quite a bit. The split is much closer to 50/50 than it's ever been. They started greenlighting romcoms like Nisekoi and other manga that could appear to both genres like Food Wars (I haven't read much, but as far as I know both men and women have those foodgasms). Naruto was quite popular among young women too. I dunno about One Piece, but it probably has a sizeable female audience, considering how much it sells.