Whole Cake Island arc is a pretty interesting arc as it’s purpose aside from giving Sanji a backstory, is to showcase how far Luffy and his crew are compared to a Yonko and how much more they have to learn.
As of now Luffy, can’t beat Cracker on his own who is probably the third strongest commander in BigMom pirates excluding BigMom herself. Coming to BigMom herself, luffy almost got completely owned by fighting her and that’s bad considering the fact that luffy has to fight her at some point in the story and even more so, if you realize that luffy will also have to take on kaido in the future.
Now, in the recent chapters, Luffy has clashed with Katakuri who is the strongest in BigMom pirates a few times and has constantly gotten owned. But whats interesting about this particular fight is that Luffy for the first time is fighting someone with similar power. In fact Oda went to specifically make this panel and have someone highlighting the similarities.
Now you might be wondering, why is that important?
Well, I believe Luffy will pick up and copy Katakuri’s fighting style and implement it to his own.
Think about it, Katakuri is basically a better version of Luffy (as of now) and he would be the perfect person to learn from. He easily stopped red-hawk (so far to my knowledge, this move has been unbeatable and hasn’t been fully stopped) and can stretch at will like Luffy. Even though he has been retconned to be a paramecia (just like Luffy), he still feels fluid and is easily handling Luffy’s moves. What’s even more interesting is that, his haki and DF usage is also very similar to Luffy.
To those skeptics, you must remember, this won’t be the first time Luffy is copying and learning from an enemy. During his fights with CP9 members, luffy copied Soru which allowed him to move at high speeds in his G2 state. Now the question is what would Luffy copy or learn specifically? That’s where we encounter a problem, we haven’t seen enough about katakuri to know what moves he has. All we have seen is stickiness and some sort of intangibility that is allowing him to nullify haki attacks ( Luffy’s punches pass thru) and to trap opponents for a counter attack. Personally, i think Luffy might copy different sets of techniques we haven’t seen yet but looking at the properties of rubber, it is possible for Luffy to reduce damage taken by haki punches IF he can soften up and stretch his body at the right time in order to reduce damage. I believe we will see more things that Luffy can possibly copy and ways for him to take on big shots. Luffy needs to get strong enough soon so that he can take on a commander by himself otherwise i see no way of him surviving Kaido and his full might even with the help of other Supernova.
*Theory by Levosire