There were many parallels drawn between Don Quixote Doflamingo and king Riku. Whereas Doflamingo is a warmonger, the Riku family is an 800 year pacifistic group. Where Doflamingo says “every human has a cruel side, death is entertainment”, Riku says “we are not beasts, humans should not kill each other”. Doflamingo tapped into the cruel side of humanity and shaped his people to be bestial as Cavendish described the colosseum. But Riku was able to shape his people to be loyal and loving.
At first I didn’t think I’d like this too much. Riku is doing the Cobra and Doflamingo is doing the Crocodile. We’ve seen this before. As I was comparing Riku with Cobra’s mentality that the country is the people, that both want to preserve their people's lives no matter what, we saw Riku was just as selfless as Cobra. He was sincerely prostrating for his people and did as Cobra, planned to sacrifice himself with faith that the country will live on without him. Then, like with Bon Clay impersonating the king to ruin his reputation, we had Doflamingo puppet the king to ruin his reputation. Both Crocodile and Doflamingo ruining a country while hiding in the sidelines. The similarities are strong here even if the motivations of Crocodile and Doflamingo were much different. Further, One Piece’s tendency to somehow be wonderfully morally ambiguous by creating this distinction between freedom and structure and having injustice seep in both while having both ideas of justice clash even amongst themselves is impressive, but I can be peeved by the fact that some characters are made too picture perfect. Sure, not many people in the One Piece world are absolutely evil but there are certainly the undeniably morally wonderful people to contrast with the bad people and I like my characters to feel slightly more human. Like Fisher Tiger was for instance.
Yet, despite these “criticisms” I was absolutely hooked and emotional in the end. Firstly, despite the goody two shoes aura of our man Riku, he was made quite believable to me. It wasn’t on the level of someone like Whitebeard, but to be a king who prostrates to his people, crying as he promises his sincerity in this awful action. To suggest cutting off his own limbs to prove himself. To win the people over despite the questionable order. To cry in pain as he slaughters his own people. To share so much respect and faith with Tank. He came off as real to me through these actions, I believed a man like him could exist. He felt human. Which makes for the puppeting of an entire kingdoms beloved soldiers to be actually puke-worthy. Doflamingo has immense power to puppet a field of people like this and absolutely no sympathy for anyone outside of his men from what we’ve seen. He made them slaughter and burn down their own kingdom and it looked horrible through the eyes of the citizens, even giving us implicit child murder. To have them show absolute faith in their leader and then have it betrayed in the most disgusting manner ever is sure to shatter all trust they had in him. What a bastard Doflamingo is.
And speaking of Doflamingo, I love how he does things! Flying into the king's window and immediately telling him not to call for help, every time he’s on scream we know we know to expect something. He’s got connections, he’s got a diehard loyal family, he’s got immense power, and he’s a schemer with no sympathy. Put those together and you get one diabolical, cackling, and intimidating villain who is always putting people in a tight spot. It’s interesting that toy soldier mentioned Monet, I’m eager to see more of her. |