u/Brunsia

There’s something that’s got me thinking. Ever since Imu appeared, there’s been a lot of speculation about his true appearance. We’ve seen him—or her—from the very beginning in that black cloak that hides his face and features. His appearance is still a mystery, really. The latest chapters seem to confirm that Imu can manifest and speak through other bodies, like Gunko’s. I reread chapter 1174, when the children are about to fall off the cliff. Sommers, when he finds himself in trouble, makes it clear that it’s useless to talk to Gunko, because Imu is “inside” her.
But I think the interesting question now isn’t whether Imu can possess bodies as such, but rather, whether Imu even has a real body anymore.
The scene with Gunko and Brook really got me thinking about this.
Imu speaks through Gunko, but she also doesn’t seem to be herself—almost as if the body were a thing, a vessel that Imu occupies at that moment. This made me think that Imu can’t even manifest on this plane without occupying a vessel. I thought that too when I saw the Gorosei emerging in Egghead, when they said, “What can we do? We’ll have to come down,” and when someone says, “This is serious if the Gorosei appear on Earth” (something that might have to do with the moons where Enel goes? Or is it just something else?) etc.
Meanwhile, Nika/Luffy seem to represent the the opposite of Imu—freedom, life, movement, inherited will, etc.—even though he is referred to as both the god of destruction and the god of freedom.
Could it be that Imu never physically survived the Empty Century, and must occupy “vessels” (other earthly bodies) in order to exist? Could he have survived by changing vessels over and over again until even the original body was lost?
That might explain why Imu is never shown in full, or why Imu is perceived more as a presence than as a person.
And the Brook scene becomes even stranger because Brook recognizes the body… but not the entity controlling it. He doesn’t recognize Imu. Imu asks Brook where he knows Gunko from.
Perhaps Imu is no longer a person. In a previous post I had to delet in another subreddit, people commented that they wondered if perhaps the real body might be in the freezer where the giant straw hat is kept. Perhaps Imu is simply a will that refuses to disappear.
Thinking about the existence of two hats—one frozen in the freezer seen on a cover, and the other owned by Luffy—I connect this to the duality we see in many aspects of One Piece: good and evil, Nika and Imu, Earth and Sky…
And that led me to a hypothesis: perhaps Imu and Nika come from the same person or era; there was a conflict, as if the ideals of a single person or era had split into two opposing extremes. Spectrum? Creating two “entities” with completely opposing ideals, both stemming from the same origin? This could explain the existence of two hats: that they was only one a long time ago, and the person or being “split” or something into two personalities. One is Imu, the “opresor” as such, has no body and must possess bodies, and the existence of Nika, who, unlike having to “possess” a body, inhabits it naturally, due to his nature of freedom.