People use the word “treasure” to mean a lot of different things. The mayor uses it to refer to the island town he has helped build & now leads, it is what he most cares about in this world, and he also discusses how the dog’s treasure is the pet shop where his old owner used to work before dying. Luffy demonstrates that he has serious attachment issues with the straw hat that Shanks gave him, even though he is otherwise very stoic in his thoughts & actions.
Both of these attitudes are ultimately very similar, particularly in contrast to the attitudes around treasure we see from Buggy & Nami who really only care about gold & jewels & material wealth, so even though Nami is being shown as a protagonist member of the straw hat crew, we also see that her morals do not necessarily align with Luffy in that category. Nami is also very similar to Buggy in the way that she uses other people to protect herself without concern for the risks it poses to those people, as we saw with her lying about Luffy to distract the pirates chasing her in a previous episode, yet she still criticizes Buggy for using members of his own crew as human shields to protect himself. While I don’t think these traits make her evil or an antagonist, I do think they help expose the truth of the nuance of people and how many of us have more in common with one another than we are often quick to admit, and also that we regularly judge themselves much less harshly than we judge others.
Another theme in this episode is pride. The mayor does not want help when he goes to fight Buggy because he believes that it is his fight and his fight alone to defend his town from the pirates. Interestingly, we do not see a single other person from the town join him to defend it from the pirates, and I hope this detail is addressed in future episodes. Do the other islanders not help because the mayor has this prideful attitude, or does the mayor have this prideful attitude because the other islanders never help him with anything? We also see a similar prideful attitude from Zoro in that he tries to fight even when he is gravely injured and very weak from blood loss. Of course, Zoro is a master swordsman and pretty easily dispatches Cabaji, but that doesn’t mean Zoro doesn’t have a huge ego.
Last note, I really appreciate that Cabaji is on a unicycle to stick with the circus/clown theme of Buggy’s crew, and Zoro using “sideshow” as a pejorative was very funny.