We cannot talk about the former navy admiral without getting into spoilers for anything that happened up to and including the Egghead arc, so if you are not caught up on Egghead in its entirety, then I would recommend skipping this post. But before we get all the way to that point in the future, let’s first travel back to a story arc in One Piece that many people try to forget about where we first meet the man known as Aokiji: Long Ring Long Island.
Who is Aokiji? Well, he’s a lot of things. He’s lazy, laid-back and cool. He is the first of the three navy admirals introduced in the story and also the first one we encounter in the story. He chose to let a young Nico Robin live and escape to the ocean instead of killing her, and he was a friend of Jaguar D. Saul during their time training under Garp. He was one of the most talented people within the navy and Sengoku put his name forward to become the next Fleet Admiral. As we all know, that position ended up going to Akainu instead and after a long fight on Punk Hazard the former admiral vanished from the story for quite a while. He is also more or less Koby’s predecessor as Garp’s pupil and that makes the events on Hachinosu even more complicated. But who is he now?
Well now he’s back to being just Kuzan, the name he was – presumably – given at birth and not the epithet he gained when he was an admiral. All three of the admirals are named after animals by the way. Kizaru is a yellow monkey, Akainu is a red dog and Aokiji is a blue pheasant. So having left the navy, he has also left his epithet behind. The official wording in some of the chapters is “he handed in his resignation” which will become important for some pretty common theories we’ll talk about later in this post.
Kuzan spends quite a lot of time wandering around, trying to find his new place in this world. He doesn’t want to serve under Akainu and although he’s always had a sense of lazy justice, he spent a lot of time serving under and alongside some pretty decent people. For a long time people were speculating that Kuzan would end up joining the revolutionaries. What we got instead was Kuzan encountering Blackbeard and his crew and a dinky bar somewhere on a no-name island. After freezing most of the emperor’s crew, he listens to Blackbeard’s request to unfreeze them and the two hit it off pretty well. They become quick drinking buddies and a little while later in the story we learn that he has officially become one of the ten titanic captains serving under Commodore Blackbeard. This was a very unexpected move from Kuzan and that brings us to the events that take place on Hachinosu.
At some point during the events of Egghead, Captain Koby clashes with the Blackbeard Pirates in the Goa Kingdom, as both are there for Hancock’s powers. A deal is struck which ends in Boa Hancock getting out unscathed with a little bit of help from Rayleigh, and Koby ending up a captive of the Blackbeard Pirates. They bring him to Hachinosu where he reveals to them that he’s a member of Sword, causing Blackbeard’s plan to ransom him for his own kingdom to fall apart pretty easily. Kuzan is the one who explains to Teach that members of Sword have handed in their resignation so the navy can cut ties with them when they become a liability. This gives the Sword members much more freedom, but at the cost of a lot of protection. Kuzan obviously has to know about this organization as a former high ranking member of the navy, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Kuzan is the one explaining the branch of the navy to Blackbeard in this scene.
Koby ends up escaping from his cell with the help of Perona, right around the time that a navy warship approaches Hachinosu with the sole purpose of saving their friend. Teach is out on a mission at this time, so there are only a few of the titanic captains present. A large-scale brawl breaks out which ends with Koby escaping, but at a cost. Garp and Kuzan face off against each other in the middle of this chaos and if you’re a manga reader only, I highly recommend you give this fight a watch on Youtube as it’s very beautifully animated. This results in Garp being captured on Hachinosu while Koby escapes with the rest of Sword. Fun little sidenote, when Makino and the people of Luffy’s hometown learn about this, she refers to Garp as “Grandpa Garp” to her child, which could just be an affectionate term, but I think Makino might be either Luffy’s aunt, or the child she has right now is Dragon’s. It just feels weird for her to have a child with an unknown father and it be irrelevant to the plot. I think the story of One Piece might end with this child traveling out to sea to become a famous explorer or something like that. But I digress.
When Garp and Kuzan face off, they have a little heart to heart in which Garp tells Kuzan to stop being a little baby and in which Kuzan tells Garp that he can’t let Koby escape while Teach is away. This could just be bravado on both men’s accounts, but I think there is a little bit more to it. I think Kuzan handed in his resignation, but it was never fully accepted by the navy, making him a member of Sword. He has been acting in that capacity while spying on Blackbeard and winning his trust. I don’t think Kuzan’s brand of justice fits the navy, but all the people he spent his life surrounding himself with – Garp, Robin, Saul, Sengoku – are such opposites from someone like Blackbeard that him fully joining up with the emperor feels like a strange move. These aren’t good people, and Kuzan is good people. It doesn’t fit. So my theory is that Kuzan is still aligned with the good people in Sword, while disavowing the rampant corruption of the main navy branches. He captured Garp but let Koby escape because that’s what Garp wanted to happen, and he had to bring someone back to not look suspicious.
Obviously I’m not the first person to make these claims, and if you come to my blog every week expecting completely new theories that no one has ever thought about before I don’t think you’re in the right place, but I do love diving into these theories that already exist a little bit more and look at the manga and anime myself to see what parts I agree and disagree with. But that’s my opinion and my thoughts, and if you think differently then please let me know in the comments down below. Thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 