I believe the first Joy Boy was of the Buccaneer race. Okay, to start on why I first thought of this, in Chapter 1095, Kuma’s father states that the legend of Nika has been passed down in the Buccaneer folklore for generations.
This conflicts with what the Gorosei say in Chapter 1037. One of the Gorosei state that the name of the fruit was erased from history, and that it was only a legend to them.
Despite this, the legend of Nika was a commonly told story for the Buccaneer race. This would make sense if Joy Boy himself (Nika) was a Buccaneer, so his discendents (or allies) would pass down his story through generations.
This in of itself isn’t enough to show that it’s likely that Joy Boy was a Buccaneer. The second reason is the giant straw hat within IMU’s chamber. To understand the size of the straw hat, first we need to know how big IMU is. Unfortunately we still don’t have any panels with IMU next to anyone else, but we do have IMU next to some swords.
IMU is shown to be fairly close to the swords, so using them as a reference to get their general size is good enough. Really, IMU is shown to be quite normally sized, if anything maybe a little smaller than others. So assuming that he is generally normally sized, we get an idea of how large the straw hat is.
What had bothered me for a while was that the straw hat is far too big for any normal sized person, but at the same time way too small for any Giant. I always had just assumed Joy Boy was just a large guy like Whitebeard or Kaido. But now we have this race who are all quite large, but not nearly as big as Giants. All the empánela we have of the Buccaneer race show them to be very large compared to everyone else. The giant straw hat seems to be the perfect size for a Buccaneer.
Lastly we know that the Buccaneer race committed a crime against the World Government, one large enough to condemn their whole race to death. Joy Boy (Nika) being one if their race would be a severe enough crime to the World Government to be punished so harshly.
*Theory by Solid_Santa
