No matter what kind of excuse Oda makes up, it will never make Vegapunk's actions seem justifiable.
Vegapunk saying that it was Kuma himself who wanted to lose his consciousness is just like those psychopaths who cut off the breasts or the dick of teenagers and then argue that they were just doing what those teenagers requested themselves.
It doesn't matter whether or not Kuma wanted to be turned into a cyborg; The fact that Vegapunk accepted to do it intrinsically means that he's an absolutely perverted man who did an absolutely evil thing, so he does not deserve any respect whatsoever, and should at the very least be condemned to life imprisonment.
And Oda is clearly insane, as he is clearly portraying cloning as a good thing. The information that was revealed in the last page in conjunction with what is stated by Vegapunk as the narrator in the first page clearly means that Vegapunk (Oda) is meaning to convey the message that cloning is a great step towards peace for the world.
That's absolutely disgusting and Oda should feel ashamed of himself for having conveyed such message through a manga.
And considering Vegapunk's conversation with Kuma, I can only guess that Vegapunk's intention is to make it so that the memories of the original person is passed to the clone, probably in an attempt to make it so that when people are very old and almost dead they can pass on their memories to a new body and maybe supposedly even the soul. That's a totally despicable transhumanistic idea.
Creation of humans in a laboratory is intrinsically a very disgusting thing. If it's through cloning it's even more disgusting. And it's even more disgusting if it's cloning as a means to attempt to somehow keep living on by passing from one body to another in this world, which is absolutely impossible to happen because the soul is not a material thing that can possibly be passed from one body to another through artificial means, but the idea itself is very dangerous because it can lead some crazy people to make clones and then try to pass memories from one person to another through a micro-chip or some other repulsive means. And I don't believe it will ever be possible to transfer memories from one person to another through some kind of technology, but the possibility of people starting to attempt to do it inserting machines in people's brains for experiment is already very terrifying and shouldn't be promoted.
The idea that the human soul has weight is also preposterous. If it's not an immaterial thing, then what they are referring to cannot be the soul.
And I get it that in One Piece it is in fact possible to pass the soul from one body to another through some super power, as proven by Law, but portraying it along with cloning as "advancement of science" for a better future of humanity is what is very problematic.
When Law swapped the souls of the main characters in Punk Hazard it was portrayed as an undesired thing that had to be reverted, but here Oda is portraying it as a means for a better future of humanity (probably by prolonging life by passing the soul from the original body to the clone), and this is totally fucked up.
ColtBuntlineJan 22, 11:36 AM
“Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.”
― Saint Augustine |