The Kong Situation is Crazy (How does no one know this?)

if I asked you who the greatest Marine in one piece was what would you tell me you'd probably say GARP the hero but let me ask you a question another question who was gupp the hero before GARP the hero well his name was and still is Kong a former Admiral a former Fleet Admiral and current commander-in-chief of the world government holding a position second only to the five Elder stars and I suppose emu but shh no one's supposed to know about him Kong is a strange character because his narrative role and his in-world role are completely disproportionate when you take into account physical strength as well as political and bureaucratic influence Kong is potentially the single most powerful and influential human on the planet and yet in one piece he's appeared in a grand total of three pages across two chapters one of which isn't even in the manga one of them was chapter zero the Canon strongwell chapter Titan but as always in one piece we know much more about Kong than his time on screen would dictate because it's very hard to keep quiet about someone of this massive legendary status Kong was first fully shown to us in chapter 594 message and he was introduced as the world government commander-in-chief a position previously unknown to us also his office is massive you don't really get the sheer scale of it until you see the wide panel but if you look not at all carefully because it's huge you will see Kong's aquarium which features giant sharks eels a whale and even a kraken it's an offer so large that only in manga could two people have a calm conversation because in reality they would both need to yell from other sides of the room which to be fair Kong is very used to as his first actual appearance was in chapter zero you can see him silhouetted yelling a garpa popular marine Pastime a sengoku and sakuzuki would both go on to learn yelling at GARP is part of the fleet Admiral job description because at this time 27 years ago Kong was the fleet animal although there is a slight translation issue in chapter 0 his position is translated only as Admiral instead of Fleet Admiral however it was later confirmed that he was indeed the fleet Admiral which leads to the pretty crazy question of just how old is Kong and the answer is very we can estimate Kong's age by the standard generational gap between Fleet Admirals for example our current angry boy in charge asakuzuki and he's 55. meanwhile the former much more calm boy in charge with sengoku who is 79 which is a year difference of many with that same generation gap we can estimate that Kong is potentially in his late 90s if not over 100 years old which is insane considering that he still actively employed with the world government and he looks pretty damn good for a 90-plus year old man in chapter 594 but this isn't too unusual for one piece we do have abnormally old human characters like Dr kuroha Who was allegedly 141 years old post-time Skip and Oda did say in the SBS of volume 56 that the life expectancy of a normal human in this world is about 140. so with that in mind Kong is practically just middle-aged now I should say that other than Dr Corey ha we have yet to meet another human who is over 100 years old which would make Kong the second oldest known human in the series with his biggest competition being haridas who is 99. if you don't remember him he's the with area guy who always goes [Music] that guy but to put age into some perspective Dr vegapunk is only 65 years old two-thirds roughly two-thirds of a cone so the path of a one-piece character seems to be spending about 50 years as a regular person and then living out another 90 years as a geriatric weird facts now though we know that Kong's birthday is on May 9th and that's important because May 9th is Goku day in Japan this is because the date five nine can be read as Goku so it became Goku day in honor of Dragon Ball Goku notably being an alien monkey and Kong is one in a long line of primate-based characters in one piece including one Marine literally named gorilla because Oda loves his monkeys even when they're also dragons but Kong's ability to greedily hoard units of age makes him a fascinating character because it means that he comes from an era of one piece that we know shockingly little about assuming he signed up in his early twenties a rookie Kong would have been a marine 80 years ago roughly around the same time when sengoku GARP and even Goldie Roger were born he lived in a world before the birth of its greatest heroes and its greatest villains and weirdly enough the most we know about what was going on in the world at the time comes from the isolated nation of Juana kozuki Sukiyaki was born the kuruzumi clan lost power and their systematic Purge began as for what was happening outside of wano ironically complete mystery meaning that Kong belongs to a largely unknown and practically ancient generation of Marines garps and Goku and suru all joined the Marines around the same time which was 56 years ago when they were in their early 20s and this would Place Kong in his late 30s early 40s at the time of their enlistment meaning that by now a man with his innate gifts would have worked his way to the top we're talking rear Admiral or even vice admiral rank maybe even full Admiral although the ages are a little bit inconsistent with the Marines you can't always judge a career progression by age because to have Vice Admirals like smoker reaching that position as early as 34 but then two ranks below him at Commodore we have brand new who is 56 but to be fair most of what brand new does can be summed up by graphic designer is my passion because he assigns and prints all of the bounty posters that's it that's his full-time job so Commodore may very well be his skill ceiling but even for the very best many marines would end their career at the vice admiral level because the criteria and positions available to become an admiral are incredibly harsh and scarce but Kong was one of the rare few to rise above all and become one of the three Marine Admirals together considered to be the greatest military might of the Marines it's very likely that Kong had been promoted to Admiral by the time the god Valley incident took place which was 38 years ago and it meant that Kong was very much a leader during the most terrifying ERA this world has faced in recent history which was the reign of the Rocks Pirates by this point GARP was 40 years old and almost certainly a vice admiral and as powerful as Kong was Slash is it definitely says a lot that ultimately it was GARP and Roger who had to bring rocks down as opposed to Kong and his two other Admiral counterparts at the time Kong even makes this admission himself during one of his rare appearances where he says to singoku you too preferring to sing and Goku and Gob have led the Navy since the days of Roger actively admitting that even though he was an admiral slash Fleet Admiral the true leaders of the Marines during a huge chunk of his time were GARP and sengoku his subordinates had eclipsed him skipping ahead to 27 years ago the Battle of Ed war was when Kong was well into his tenure as a fallen Fleet app with established command over the single greatest power in the world which means that he was 100 a hockey user all Marines vice admiral and above need basic observation and Armament Mastery however Kong may very well have been a user of conquerors hockey as well just as his successes in Goku is and sakuzuki maybe it's currently not confirmed but I'd be very surprised if he wasn't it really is a requirement to operate at the top levels of the world there's also a question as to whether or not Kong was a devil fruit user and at first and I suppose only glance he seems more along the lines of grab someone who has taken raw strength well beyond standard human limits he could very well be a fruit user though muscles and magical fruit aren't mutually exclusive but something that Kong is unlikely to get a lot of cred credit for in the fan base is his sheer intelligence primarily because it's all obscured by his insanely thick with so many seized muscles being Fleet Admiral means having the ability to command complex battles and even extended Wars it also means being able to navigate politics to some degree having a delicate approach to balancing the hundreds of world government Nations interests so you don't give this role to the guy who just punches things really hard what's more interesting to think about are who exactly were the three Admirals working directly under Kong at the time well of course we have confirmation that one of the three was Kong's eventual successes in Goku the Buddha he was an admiral when cheeky attacked marineford and depending on how you look at it another candidate could be black arm Zephyr he was the main antagonist to film Zed and he was a couple of years younger than sengoku so he's about the right generation and even though it's technically non-canon he was a former admin the problem is that even if Zephyr was Canon his window as an admiral is very short he became an admiral at age 38 and retired four years later after his wife and son were murdered he then became an instructor during the exact year when borcelino and sakuzuki joined the Marines but timeline wise even if he was Canon Zephyr could not have been an admiral when sheiky attacked marineford so sengoku had two mysterious strengths and unknown counterparts it couldn't have been barcelino's hakuzuki okuzan because all three of them were shown as Vice Admirals in more recent history kuzan and sakazuki during the O'Hara incident and bosselina was still a vice admiral up to at least 12 years ago when he defeated arlong in the fish attack of flashback and while he's been brought up fun fact kizarro and Kong have the same voice actor in Japanese his name is unsho ishizuka and he also voices Zara's men to koshiro so he's like the go-to old man actor as opposed to Kong's English voice actor Jim faronda who also voices barriete so he's like your go-to monkey actor however barriete in Japanese is voiced by kape Yamaguchi who voices Usopp who once shot kizaru who was voiced by unsho ishizuka who also voices Kong and there we go we brought back things around Kong Kong would eventually fade from Global prominence though and the popular thought is that congrata diet following the execution of Goldie Roger I mean what better time you capture the world's greatest criminal and your career ends on a high but that doesn't work for two reasons firstly it's likely that Kong retained his position for well over a decade after Roger's execution because then Goku was still an admiral during the events of Minion Island in law's flashback so up until very recently in world history Kong was the man in charge and had been for anywhere between two to three decades and the second reason why it's wrong is because Khan never retired he was promoted because Fleet Admiral is not the Pinnacle at the very very tippy top is the commander-in-chief a position that is second only to the five elders and I supposed him Kong's commander-in-chief office is even located at the holy land of marijuana thus making Kong one of the extremely rare non-world Nobles allowed to live there who isn't a slave I'd say that he may have been made a world Noble or like an honorary World Noble thanks to his Century of service but I get the feeling that it doesn't quite work like that you either need the celestial Bloods or your nothing to them nothing much like the fleet Admiral the the commander-in-chief job is still to oversee the entirety of the Marines however this position now also includes oversight over cypherport which the fleet admiral has no jurisdiction over basically Kong is the man in charge of every Armed Force in the world government and in the real world that would also include things like the Air Force or the Army but in the one piece World technology hasn't gone far enough to have an Air Force yet and there isn't enough land in general to Warrant a ground Army prior to their dissolution Kong also had theoretical direct authority over the seven Warlords I say theoretical because Kumar aside no one could control them and in fact in the case of doflamingo he was the one controlling the world government but that aside the commander-in-chief position is primarily lots and lots of paperwork because the more power you have the more accountability you have and so the more writing and signing and stamping that it is that you need to do and assumingly Kong still holds the commander-in-chief position to this very day because when sengoku retired he was assigned the Inspector General role which is in charge of investigating corruption within the Marines and this may actually tell us a fair bit about the kind of man that come is because the impression I get of him is that he was genuinely trying to help the world he took great pride in the Marines but not the sort of really extreme Pride that sakuzuki does whilst he and sengoku very much saw eye to eye However the fact that Kong lives at marijua May demonstrate a higher level of tolerance or even appreciation of the world Nobles the gops and Goku and even sakazuki definitely do not have and even though he is one of the most minor characters in the grand scheme of the story he is still by far one of the most important people in the grand scheme of the world again his narrative role is completely at odds with his in-world position currently Kong is a more powerful man than sakazuki he is the Pinnacle of progression with the Marine organization having transcended them and becoming the closest a standard human can ever become to a world Noble and also he has really cool hair I'm loving the triple spikes and the matching beard mates don't you even try to tell me that he isn't one of the most powerful characters in one piece although if you do try to tell me then try to tell me in the comments below which I may or may not read read

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Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 12 2023