#Luffy is a perfect example of how my sexuality headcanons have no bearing on which ships I like lmao

[infriga]

Monkey D Luffy!

Sexuality Headcanon: Luffy is ace/aro as FUCK. Asexual icon.

Gender Headcanon: Luffy identifies as a guy and he definitely cares about being manly, but his ideas of being manly seem to be based less on him wanting to be a man and more on him just liking manly things because he thinks they’re cool. Aside from that he’s completely gender blind so I doubt he thinks or cares about it much.

A ship I have with said character: What ship DON’T I have with Luffy. He’s the kind of character who can be shipped with basically anyone because he has chemistry with most people. My favourite are probably SanLu, ZoLu, and KataLu, though I’m also fond of LawLu.

A BROTP I have with said character: My top ships are also my top Brotps, but I also love his friendship with Bon-chan, and his relationship with Tama is also really cute.

A NOTP I have with said character: Tama, his grandpa, Dadan, uh, there are so many characters in One Piece god, probably the really shitty villains like Spandam or St Charles because they don’t deserve him. I prefer his brothers as a brotherly relationship. Blackbeard. Oh Akainu for sure, Akainu doesn’t deserve to be loved at all. Most of the other characters are fair game tho.

A random headcanon: Luffy is secretly instinctively good at math but has a hard time articulating it out loud so most people don’t realize it. His culverin attacks in G4, especially as Snakeman, basically require a hefty calculating ability with angles and stuff to be as accurate as they are, and he was able to determine how many meals he missed in an instant when he woke up in Alabasta so canon supports this. He’s really good at judging distances and stuff in general too so it fits in my opinion. But he’s so dense most of the time about other stuff that no one would suspect it.

General Opinion over said character: I think Luffy is a more complex and interesting character than most people give him credit for. A lot of people mistake being a simple person with being a simple character, but there’s a reason why it’s so hard to get a good handle on his characterization when writing him. Part of it is that Oda almost never shows Luffy’s thought process, which leaves a lot of his actions up for interpretation. It also means we can’t really delve into how he thinks like we could for other main characters who tend to do a lot of thinking that the audience can see. Luffy does do a lot of thinking himself, but we don’t get to see it, we just get to see him pondering something before making a decision. He often seems to come to a quick conclusions which makes people think he doesn’t take much time to think, but too many of his decisions had to have been thought through beforehand so that means he does often put a lot of thought in to plenty of his decisions, even if it doesn’t seem like it. He's definitely a quick thinker, but he does think.

One arc that really showcases how Luffy isn’t just a singleminded idiot is Water 7. We get his reaction to finding out that Merry can’t be fixed, where he insists that they won’t ever leave someone behind, that they refuse to accept that her journey with them is over, but then the shipwrights counter that by telling him that he basically has to choose between the ship and his crew, because they won’t be making it to the next island if they keep sailing on Merry. And this obviously hit him hard. Later when we end up in the cabin with Usopp, Luffy has decided to buy a new ship. Usually Luffy makes choices based on what he wants, and does whatever he can to do it no matter the obstacle, but here he’s taking his role as captain seriously, and instead making a decision for the good of the crew, whether he wants it or not. This is where it gets really interesting to me. We the audience know he’s just as upset about leaving Merry behind as Usopp, but Usopp has been through a lot of shit in Water 7, and is blaming himself for losing the money they were going to use to repair Merry, so Luffy tries to put on a happy face to keep Usopp from feeling bad. This is very out of character behaviour for Luffy clearly, he’s never been the type to hide how he feels, but the decision itself makes sense in context. He’s not acting based on how he feels, he’s acting based on what he thinks is best for his crew. That moment, where he masks how he feels because he’s trying to do what’s right as captain based on what he thinks will help the crew and Usopp, is reflected again at the end of the post-Enies Lobby arc, when he wants so badly to let Usopp back on the ship, but he knows he can’t until Usopp apologizes, because he realizes that Zoro was right, crewmembers can’t be allowed to leave and rejoin the crew so easily without consequence if they show a lack of respect for Luffy’s decisions. So he stands there and sweats and is so obviously unhappy about it, but he waits anyways. These sorts of moments are the ones where I want to point at him and say “there’s more to him than just meat and punching things!” We see another good moment at the end of the WCI arc, when Jinbe asks Luffy to go on without him so he can stay and help his former crew. Luffy absolutely doesn’t want to leave Jinbe behind. They finally just got him to join their crew, they just spent the whole arc trying to rescue another crew member, and they’ve had friends die for that cause. The last thing they want to do is abandon Jinbe, leaving a crewmate behind is one of the things he would never be willing to do, but Luffy has to make a choice. He could order Jinbe not to go, but he respects Jinbe, and he doesn’t want to take that choice from him. Jinbe’s former crew is like family to him. But they can’t stay and help Jinbe either, because after everything they went through to get Sanji back it would be an insult to stay when the fishmen are putting themselves at risk to give the Strawhats a chance to escape. The best thing he can do is give Jinbe the order to survive and return. “Even if you die, don’t die.” aka “Don’t let even death stop you from coming back to us.” He tells Jinbe with all the authority of a true king that he is Jinbe’s captain now, and Jinbe is bound to obey his orders. There are so many other scenes I could point to for this topic but these ones are some of my favourites and if I went over all of them this would probably get way too long.

Yeah, basically it bothers me when people say Luffy doesn’t have any complexity as a character, he absolutely does, you just have to look for it. He’s not giving up all his intricacies easily, you have to work for them. I could talk all day about this topic but I’ll stop here for now lol.