Luffy & Nami’s Hug - Clarification
d-shanks-akagami:
Ok here it goes: Basically it boils down to her hugging Luffy out of happiness
There are two things I want you to take into account before I explain, in order to help you understand my viewpoint a little bit better:
In real life time, Oda is reuniting the SH crew after approximately 2 years of being separated. This is probably the longest internal separation of the SH’s in reference to our real life time period. Which means that Oda would like for their reunion to be somewhat impactful as fans have been waiting a long time for this.
In OP time, they have been separated for about 10-11 days (forgive me if that is wrong, but I believe it is around that many days). Now 10-11 days in OP time, imo, is considered a long time. The entire Pre-TS was a period of 3-6 months only, so 10-11 days could be considered a significant amount of time passage for the characters.
Now, lets focus on the moments right before their reunion. Chopper excitedly comes to Nami and exclaims “Luffy and the others are here!” and “He’s at the entrance!”. You can see immediately that she is happy to hear the news and excited to see them after such a long time. When Nami is running towards the crew, you can see she is yelling “Luffy!” because she is happy to see him again after such a long time. Obviously she is happy to see the rest of the crew too, but she runs towards him specifically. Bepo (Law’s navigator) did the same exact thing, he hugged his captain because he was gone for so long. Nami is not doing anything different in my view.
It is further supported by the fact that she is running towards Luffy with the intent to hug him, when she had the option of Usopp or Robin, both of which, would be perfectly reasonable options for Nami to hug, and an easy route for Oda to take if he wanted to. But this is the reunion of the SH’s after two years, and the reunion of two characters which, imo, share a very close bond.
You can see that she was going to hug him regardless, she was running towards him with open arms the same way Chopper was to Usopp. It is only because Luffy mentioned Sanji that Nami, instead of hugging him out of happiness to see him again, hugs him but then starts crying instead.
The anime also shares my interpretation, as they focus on her mood change the second Luffy mentions Sanji. Therefore it can be reasonably assumed that if Luffy had not mentioned Sanji, that she would have hugged him regardless but it would’ve been a “happy to see you again” kind of hug instead of “I’m sorry, Sanjis…” hug. But this is OP we are talking about, not a slice of life, so Oda did what he had to do to build up drama and tension, as well as end the chapter on a cliffhanger.
It is of my belief that Oda has made Luffy and Nami’s friendship a bit more special than the others (not in a romantic way, but as a bond). So now that he has two characters with a very close bond about to see each other again, he has the emotional one initiate the hugging which would make sense and not feel OOC for any of the two involved.
Sorry if its a bit longer than expected, it really is a basic thought I am trying to convey. That Nami went to hug Luffy because she was happy to see him after being separated in what could be considered a long time in the OP world, but the mention of Sanji just turned a happy hug into a comfort hug.
This is all supplementing my theory that Oda is going to be less and less subtle about any end game pairings he has in mind from here on out, so this event fits perfectly within reason of doing so.