Beasts Pirates are the failed version of the World Government
I’m curious to know the reason behind why some Awakened Zoan hagoromo ribbons are black (the antagonists’) and some are white (Luffy and Yamato’s). Obviously the meta-reason is black equals bad and white equals good, and it could all just be an aesthetic thing, but I wonder if there’s an in-universe explanation to it.
Also, the reveal of yokai Devil Fruits for the Five Elders makes Kaidou’s dilemma with the Celestial Dragons in his flashback all the more interesting. I always felt like that flashback was illuminating a divide between physical power and political power (REAL power) that Kaidou struggled with bridging the gap between, hence how he was ultimately a pawn of the Government through being a child soldier and even up until his adulthood as a backdoor weapons dealer for the World Government. Kaidou’s status as the “World’s Strongest Creature” could be seen as ultimately a lie, because real strength is not about your brawn, but about your socioeconomic status. Your money, your influence, your experience, oftentimes even your bloodline.
The Elders’ monstrous Mythical Zoans seem to further this notion of being the TRUE “World’s Strongest”, because here they’ve seemingly upstaged the Beasts Pirates in terms of even the beastliness of their Devil Fruits. Kaidou has no Mythicals under his command, not even his own Mythical child stands with him, but the Elders are a conglomerate of seemingly multiple Mythical Zoans. Kaidou has SMILE Fruits for his army in Wano Country, but those are just cheap knockoffs compared to the multiple real Zoans that are scattered the entire world over across hundreds of thousands of Marines and Cipher Pol agents and prison wardens and maybe even the Holy Knights that hold dominion everywhere. From higher-ups like the Mythical Sengoku to rising stars like the Awakened Lucci and Kaku to more soldier-level subordinates like the Jailer Beasts in Impel Down. Hell, even chapter 1094 alone shows yet another Vice Admiral with a Zoan Fruit, an otter in this case.
This makes me see the Beasts Pirates as more like “the failed version of the World Government”. I think Higurashi was right, the world is a jungle and humans are like animals, because the end result of ruling through raw animalistic might and humanistic political might is ultimately all the same.
The exact same “might makes right” hierarchical nonsense. Therefore it takes the real Kings of the Beasts to rule over a world full of animalistic humans, and so the Elders take off their false human identity and reveal their true selves: beasts amongst beasts. I’ve always noticed that Oda likes to give so many dozens of his characters animal features, alongside Oda simply just liking to draw animals and weird characters, I think this is a thematic part of the reason as to why.
*by ultibman5000
