>>282077591
I think Imu is whatever Vearth originally was.
Maybe this depiction of Vearth is stylized but I think Oda deliberately left it as a clue.
I think through the "ages" things repeated and clans/crews/armies/etc... banded together to defeat "Imu" and they were always in the end lead by two opposing forces. Joyboy and Davy Jones, Luffy and Blackbeard....and originally in the times of Nika maybe (since Nika looks pretty tribal and "prehistoric") Vearth looked the way it does in that statue and since then it managed to survive by body hopping or having some weird power.
The way Vearth is mentioned in the context of a conflict between "sky people" and presumably surface entities also matches with the shandian lore that also feels primitive and tribal. So maybe that's the origin of all that's going on.
Maybe Vearth was in opposition to the "invading" human cultures and that's also why to this day it (and by extension the WG that it controls) see humans as insects or pests. It's an old grudge.