What Everyone Gets WRONG About Captain Kuro

this is Captain Kuro the second smartest person in all of the East blue capable of conjuring 100 Master plans in his mind brain faster than you can conjure a single thought of what you might want for dinner but Captain cororo has a big secret one that surprisingly few people pick up on and it's going to play a big part in this video because we are on a mission to rank every major antagonist in the most comprehensive and exhaustive way possible video by video this time featuring the controversial Captain Kuro so this is going to be a good one because Kuro is so such a weird villain he has a lot of great ideas with un questionable execution so let's start with our standard criteria for a good villain which is threat Captain Kuro was the main antagonist of the syrup Village Arc and when it comes to Threat Level Kuro he's a bit of a tricky turnup because he comes at a weird time in one piece he's a very middling threat because he comes after our introduction to the world but before the stakes get properly serious and I think that his Bounty is a great illustration of that Captain Kuro isn't a big step up from buggy Buggy's Bounty was 15 million berries and when meeting cororo he's 16 million so as an audience member it's almost like what's even the point this guy can't be too much more troubl than the clown we already beat and you're right because he wasn't however kuro's Bounty is a matter of some controversy it's generally accepted to be 16 million berries but in the anime that amount seems to change a lot for example in episode 45 we see kuro's crossed off Bounty which lists 14 million berries and in one piece Stampede for whatever reason coro's Bounty is featured in Buena festo's Bounty collage but it has him listed as 15 million and my only possible conclusion for these inconsistencies is that the anime staff simply did not care enough about Kuro to double check the counter number because this hasn't happened with any other East blue villain nobody ever messes up har Long Don Creer even Al's number Alva so this does not bode well for kuro's ranking the fact that the anime and the movie production stuff can't even be bothered enough with him to get his facts right however what I personally like about Kuro is that he's a bit of a beta test for cp9 the idea of a competent agent with an alterior motive spending literally years on an island to implement and execute a mission he even kind of has access to one of the rokushiki techniques which he calls Nashi meaning stealth Fort although certain translations decide to call it the pory fort maneuver which makes Kuro sound like the villain of a Broadway musical and it's never been confirmed but this technique is shockingly similar to soru and I suspect the captain Kuro may have accidentally learned a version of sodu I also think that Kuro actually does a great job of appearing empathetic when he has talk with Kaa and he reminisces on how good her family has been to him this sort of deception is fantastic because seeing that for the first time did make me question if I was wrong about him maybe he is just a good dude after all with some flaws and I think it's important to give Kur that credit because he had me fooled for fur of two pages because shortly thereafter Oda goes ahead and reveals that he is in fact the big villain man and we were right to suspect him all along and you know I do think that a modern erro Oda might have implemented this twist a lot better like he did with cp9 I mean imagine if first time we met Luchi as a carpenter galila and then three pages later he's on aend and mushy revealing that he's the main antagonist of the entire Saga wouldn't have hit quite as hard so I'd love to see a version of serup village where Kura being the villain is revealed later on and maybe well led to suspect that D Jango is the main antagonist but then again that does kind of mess with Uso's whole story of knowing and telling everyone but them not believing him so I'm just going to leave that on the table for now and we're going to discuss motivation because Kuro has what I think is the most unique motivation of any East blue villain when you can consider the likes of alv buggy Don and arong they're all focused on the big picture of acquiring wealth Fame and power to implement their evil agendas what I love about Kuro is that he's the exact opposite he's doing everything he can to disappear and retire from piracy what he seeks is essentially what Luffy wants he wants freedom and he's also quite similar to mihawk Kuro wants to live a peaceful life and is sick and tired of being hunted by the Marines he even goes on to say what good a riches if you've always got the Marines Chasing You H and I think the Quest for a quiet life is a very UND deuticke and shame usup a man who has never gone out to see is proud to be the son of a pirate and holds that as the Pinnacle of honor and it's his goal to go on and become that brave Warrior of the sea meanwhile Kuro a man who is an actual piracy veteran is disgusted to so much as be associated with the word he's ashamed of what he was and he is willing to do absolutely anything to erase that part of his life it's like having a pair of hands so dirty that no amount of washing will ever clean them Kuro says out damn spot but then the damn spot says L you mad bro and Kuro is genuinely antagonistic towards Usopp and the reason for that isn't because Kuro is a bad dude it's because Usopp is the son of a pirate Kuro has such a deep disgust of his previous profession and he's projecting that onto Usopp who holds that profession in the highest regard and there's one very telling interaction where Kuro even states that Usopp has a gift for deceit and that he wouldn't put anything past him that filthy pirate loving man which is classic projection because Kuro is the one with a gift for deceit and plans on doing all of the really bad things he calls Usopp trash he calls his father filthy he calls both of them animals but it's all projection especially since kuro's entire crew of themed on animals so Kuro hates Usopp because Usopp is a reflection of what he hates being Kuro even says that Kai's EST state is no place for someone like him when what he means to say is that it's no place for someone like him which I know is the same sentence but the hymns imply different people now speaking of different people Kuro is actually two people and not a lot of readus pick up on that which is a shame because to me this forms the most compelling part of his Persona there's even one point where he says Captain Kuro has outlived his usefulness as if he literally wants to become another person which he does with his Butler Persona clor and it makes you wonder if Kuro was even his original Identity or just another Alias that he took on and became at one stage because he does make efforts to complete completely transform himself right down to the basic use of language which I will admit is a lot less apparent in English but in Japanese there is a distinct difference between when Kuro is talking and when cland is talking it's like listening to two different people through simple choices such as Kuru using the pronoun order and cland using Watashi which in English can both only be translated as Z but in Japanese this Simple Choice tells you a lot about a person and more evidently in English you can tell the difference whenever Kuro or clor talk about death Kuro is very blunt and refers to it as killing whereas claror the pacifist would never use such Wicked terminology no he says accident and this is another very important detail that people Miss kuroro himself claims to have become a pacifist or actually I should say that claror claims this which is odd because we see him very willingly harm people later on but that's because this is cororo acting not claror and we know that he's not just acting he's not just playing pretend because he tells Jango that he's become a pacifist he tells Jango alone there was no reason to lie about that to Django if anything hearing that your captain has become a pacifist might even undermine your faith in him so Kuro actually believes that he's capable of becoming a different person but having said that I don't think this is portrayed as clearly or as powerfully as it could have been but look arguably the most compelling aspect of this Captain Coro is that he's a Super Genius whose plans are all catered right down to the most minor of details kuroro is a different type of villain in many ways but he's the first intellectual antagonist that we encounter by which I mean it's not so much his strength that we fear but his mind mind brain he's introduced to us as Kuro of 100 plants a master strategist with an eye for excruciating detail and DET Oda even once stated that Captain cororo was one of the top three smartest people within the entire East bu Saga with the other two being Ben Beckman and Nami and this well this is all very threatening because Luffy Luffy can't deal with that kind of opponent he's built for rubber fist fights not pirate chess which in theory makes K the most dangerous opponent to date provided that he can make good on said intelligence but that brings us to the problem of writing genius characters if you choose to do this then as an author you need to work overtime to make sure that these characters are always several steps ahead of the audience not just the inworld characters you need to have the audience believe that this 2D fictional character is smarter than them the threedimensional humans and it also leaves these kind of characters much more open to scrutiny because if cororo of a 100 plans has a plan that he's been planning for 3 years and then there's a problem with the plan then that's going to shatter the illusion of Genius but this is what I think most people get wrong about Captain Kuro he was never a genius he was a big brained fish in a very small brained Pond he is the sharpest of the dullest the brightest of the dim in all of the other metaphors you get the idea but cororo has deluded himself into thinking that he's a genius and it's really interesting because throughout syrup Village his intelligence is constantly being questioned by Jango right from the get-go Django tells Kur that he wasn't sure about this whole plan thing and then later on when Kuro lets usab go after overhearing the plan Jango throws this failure back in kuro's face when it ends up becoming a big problem but Kuro is completely unable to accept his own mistake and insists that he was correct all along and that this is somehow D jango's fault Kuro is the most frustrating kind of person a man who cannot face his own mistakes and can somehow contort his way out of any personal responsibility he never makes mistakes the mistakes are made by everyone around him that is Captain Kuro at every step during the AR even right at the end when his plans are obviously falling apart he insists that the plan was M perfect but his plan his plan sucked not just when it fell apart right from the Inception when speaking about his own plan Coro says there's no room for error in my three-year plan and my plans never go of course so no room for error except the following one this plan relies entirely on Django and the black cat Pirates actually returning after 3 years when they could easily peace out and go do their own thing two this plan relies on the black cat Pirates not being caught by the Marines for 3 years three instead of spend spending the 3 years gaining the trust of the villagers kuroro could have just had Django hypnotize them because there's no need for acting when you can control people's minds and in that case you don't even need to attack the village or risk drawing any unwanted attention at all especially since four Kuro got stupidly and I mean stupidly lucky with ka's parents dying without his involvement and then with Ka herself going on to become a very sickly girl again without his involvement Kuro did not kill the parents Kuro did not poison K I mean he did Poison KY in the live action but not in the actual manga G didn't do anything except to keeping a very well-kept house so if he just infiltrated and gotten Ka to pass away from something that looked like a natural condition then no one would have raised any suspicion five why not get Ka to write the will a bit earlier than the morning of her accidental death perhaps even a year or two in advance because nothing is less suspicious than a fresh will written hours before death furthermore he didn't even need D Jango to hypnotize Kai into writing the will he just needed to threaten her which is ultimately what ends up happening Kaa writes the will without jango's powers six and this is a big one when Usopp discovers the plan kuroro lets him go allowing Usopp to form the resistance that stops Jango and the crew which we've discussed then seven instead of Simply accepting the anniversary gift kuroro decides to out himself kill qu well kill in quotations Mary and then add that point of compromise there was no reason for him to do this all he needed to do was keep up the ACT until dawn but no he initiated the plan the night before the plan was meant to commence which is especially bad because somehow number eight kuroro fails to actually kill Mary which then alerts K to his betrayal which is terribly out of character for someone who we are told is so detail oriented it's not out of character it is his character and if you don't believe me then number nine before the black cat Pirates were able to sack The Village which remember was the plan cororo attempts to slaughter each and every one of them thus preventing them from enacting the plan must full Gambit sir his perfect plan needed them to take the fall so what you going to do now stroll into the village and kill a bunch of residents yourself in which case why bother spending 3 years to gain their trust it was completely unnecessary in the end he starts killing his crew and abandoning his own plan whilst insisting that his plan is still the perfect plan and in the end I personally don't get a lot of satisfaction out of beating Kuro because we did not beat Kuro Kuro beat Kuro and apart from Faking his own death which was a genuinely well thought our plan I'll give him that but apart from that at no point does cororo take the smartest and most carefully considered options and he also leaves far too much up to chance which is why the most generous analysis I can give this character is that Kuro was a man who thought he was smart and that unowned belief in himself is what caused his undoing but I need to admit I don't know if that's just me trying to find an excuse for the character because even if that is the intention then I don't think Oda nailed it I think that Captain cororo as a whole comes across as a weakly written character a genius stereotype that was used by an author who was perhaps a bit too young to really understand how a character like that needs to be implemented and that choice harms him greatly Kuro was set up to be this intellectual force to be reckoned with which both raises the stakes but also significantly raises expectations if cororo wasn't introduced as a genius and instead he was just some guy of you know middling intelligence who wanted to do some really bad things then no one would scrutinize him anywhere near as harshly as he gets or if it was made super clear that his genius was a facade all along and then all of the mistakes they become believable you could even thematically tie that to Usopp because he's also a notorious liar with no substance to back up the stories he's telling and maybe we could have done a parallel story with Kor to show that he's a liar who claims to be a genius in the same way that Uso claims to be a brave Warrior of the sea and then Usopp could have seen how hollow Kuro was and used that as part of his reason to set out to sea and make his Li a reality but we can't really have that because cororo can actually back himself up as he does have the strength in intelligence required to get to this middling point of you know not genius but smarter than average and quite competent but also stupid at times guy man so in the end I don't really know what to do with Kuro and neither did Oda because he has no resolution Luffy beats him we see his body fall onto the floor and then nothing although anime Watchers will know that in episode 45 we do see Kuro one last time having resumed his role as a pirate however this did not happen in the manga and anything about kuroro after his defeat is completely unknown he wasn't arrested because there were no Marines there and in the live action he seen sailing away in a rowboat because I think that even they recognized that Kuro needed some sort of resolution or at least a hanging threat of potential and now kuroro is one of the only villains in all of One Piece who has never appeared again which you know good on him because I guess that means he got his wish cororo was able to disappear from the story and not get caught up in cover stories and future events because he's completely off the radar he could be off somewhere else implementing another three four maybe even 5year plan that we have yet to see come to fruition because the entire story of one piece so far hasn't even covered 3 years it might be a case where at the very end of one piece OD shows us a single panel of Kuro having successfully achieved his retirement but also it's entirely possible that we never see Kuro again and I personally have no expectation to or I should say I had no expectation to because Kuro does appear in a gag one shot called my plans never fail by Rio nak and this was a promotional five-page manga to tie into one piece Stampede where it is revealed that Kuro has retired in a small house somewhere and for some reason still wears his Butler outfit I guess fully taking on the Persona of clor but in any case he receives an invitation to the Pirates festival and decides to call his old buddy D Jango who is now a marine and it ends with Kuro getting really angry and destroying all of his furniture so this is a non-cannon tie into a non-canon film but despite that I think this actually shows Kuro in his purest form which is a deluded man who thinks he's an intellectual and belongs at the peak of humanity but who is in reality a very small man who meets an equally small end that's how I choose to view Kur because if he is meant to be everything he says he is then Oda simply failed and Kuro becomes a very rare example of a character who falls short of the height built up by the author but either way I think that Kuro was the kind of character that East blue was not quite ready to tackle the Simplicity of early one piece was not a good canvas for this sort of figure and Oda has since gone on to implement hyper intelligent antagonist very very well so perhaps cororo stealth walked so that characters like crocodile and Rob bluei could stealth run and and while cororo does have some genuinely interesting ideas most of them aren't fully baked and in the grand scheme of One Piece villains I really don't think I can award him more than a d tier but you let me know in the comments which villain you'd like to see ranked next

Channel: GrandLineReview

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Id: Sn1SWnpCsSM

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2024