 Resurrection, a very questionable and often horrifically abused literary device. So as with all creators, I am going to use as well in order to resurrect your attention to the subscribe button for the Grand Line Review, the pressing of which will result in regular One Piece content uploaded straight into your YouTube feed. Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything One Piece and today I would like to discuss the rather well-heavy topic of death, that being death in the world of anime and manga anyway, and more specifically characters who have seemingly achieved the impossible and overcome the sweet embrace of demise through one reason or another or perhaps even no reason. And I'd like to do this because one of my personal grabs with storytelling in general is any time that a character's quote-unquote death is used for dramatic context only to eventually be revealed to be alive and thus undercutting any drama that they're perceived death created in the first place, which not only goes on to impact that specific moment but an entire series going forward. And that occurs through a very simple phenomena whereby if one character is shown to return from a quote-unquote death then that idea of death armour can then be applied to every other character in the series and from then on it becomes very difficult to create any perceived danger, which can very much hinder dramatic impact. One Piece is a horrendous offender of abusing the concept of death outside of flashbacks and of course outside of the Marineford arc in which it was rather uncharacteristically used masterfully. Marineford and flashbacks do not represent the majority of the series though and today I'm going to present to you five Captain Five characters who I believe would have been better off left dead. So the criteria for this list is very simple, to qualify a character needs to have had a heartstring tugging death scene only to not have actually died. And of course every character on this list must be canon because you cannot kill a character who never existed in the first place, much less bring them back from their non-existent death. So with that out of the way, let's begin. Welcome to the top five characters who should have died in One Piece. Number Five. Sabo. Alright, starting out strong with what I feel is a fairly predictable entry and if you've been watching this channel for any amount of time, then you'll probably be quite familiar with my feelings regarding Mr. Sabo. For the purposes of today though, Sabo serves as a fantastic example of how death can be used to impact and change the surrounding characters, as well as how a narrative resurrection can revoke any sense of drama it may have produced when the subject of death turns out to be alive all along. Now a lot of people will take issue with me bringing this up, primarily because I don't think there was a single manga reader or anime watcher who actually believed that young Sabo was killed after setting sail from the Goa Kingdom. And that brings us to a very interesting point. Nobody believed it because by this point in the series the concept of death had been so abused by Oda that fans needed very strict rules to accept the passing of a character and one commonly cited rule is being able to see the body. It really is as if we, as a fanbase, need to take a communal trip to the Grand Line Morgue and identify the corpse of a character for ourselves before we are allowed to accept it in any way because that's just what One Piece has become. And in many cases, including this one, it just makes you wonder why even bother pretending to kill Sabo. This is a death that was supposed to be felt hard by Ace and Luffy and the conduit to their growth into this harsh world. If Sabo had actually died on this day then this would probably be remembered as one of the most iconic scenes in the entire series alongside Ace's eventual death. But instead, the inevitable specter of narrative resurrection may as well have been literally drawn in every panel and it makes it harder to empathize with Ace and Luffy because Sabo's death here is very vapid and empty. As is his reintroduction into the series because it was 1 million percent expected. It's just a fantastic example of devaluing not only the drama of the quote-unquote death and yes it is a death scene because that is how Oda played it but also devaluing the character that it was applied to. Number four, Moscato. Yes, the minister of Gelato and the 16th son of Charlotte Linlin. Moscato is a character who I would actually credit as the being who put the true fear of Big Mom into me because he served as a tragic example of what would occur if you stood in the way of her hunger pangs and that example was a ruthless, nondiscriminatory and swift death. Death style effect. And this is really one of those moments where you just go, hi Oda, why? Moscato was a character who was both introduced and quote-unquote killed in the very same chapter. He served a technical purpose within the Whole Cake Island arc to demonstrate both Big Mom's abilities and personality. He was a mere stepping stone for her character which is fine. Minor characters are good like that and when he had 40 years of his life stolen and was for all intents and purposes portrayed as dead, I was left in a state of shock. Like after more than a decade of reading the series weekly, Oda finally summoned up the courage to just smack down a side character like this, highlighting how absurdly brutal the new world could be except then he just turned up again alive and well and all of that drama was completely undercut. There really was no reason whatsoever to bring Moscato back into the story. He played his role perfectly during his initial tenure and bringing him back feels very akin to a lot of four kids edits to me. You know the whole, oh dear, isn't this a bit dark for the children? Can we just edit him into another scene so that the children don't get scared or feel sad? In fact, I really do wonder if this was Oda's decision or not or if it was some sort of mandate from Shueisha or an editor who suggested that maybe this whole Moscato situation had gotten just a little bit dark. We'll probably never know, but what we do know though is that Moscato, from a narrative standpoint, would be better served in this series if he had just died. Number three, Pagaya. We're stepping back in time now to the Skypeer era and I should say that even by this time it had been pretty well established that it was practically impossible to die in this series unless you were caught in a flashback. With that said, this part of one piece got me. Pagaya and Conus are very much forgotten about and underrated features of Skypeer, however they do have a collective of fantastic moments, one of which is Pagaya's sacrifice and to set the scene this starts out by having both Pagaya and Conus questioning a member of God's militia who provides them with crucial information regarding Enel's ultimate plans and all of a sudden there are extraordinarily high stakes put onto this father-daughter duo and Enel wastes no time in attempting to rectify the situation by calling down a mighty blast of lightning. Then in a mixture of parental love and desperation to make sure that word gets out regarding Enel's plans, Pagaya's final action in this world was to push Conus out of the way of the blast and save her life, leaving Conus with the fate of Skypeer and possibly the world on her shoulders, as well as the inherited will of her father. Very classic one piece there or not because Pagaya didn't die because why would that ever be the result of any heroic sacrifice. But the best part is that Oda was very aware of what he was doing here and Pagaya even gets called out within the series itself by the straw hats for being alive. Like this is a scene where it shows that Oda is very much in on this and he's going to the audience, yeah I did it again. And once again Pagaya is just such a minor character that there really is no benefit to bringing him back beyond the gag that was played out by the straw hats. On the other hand if he had died right then and there once again he would join the ranks of some of the most memorable and incredible characters of One Piece and not only that but it would have served to develop Conus who would now be left in this situation where she has to embark on a new journey through life without her father and grow into her own person. But hey I guess drama in storytelling is a pretty overrated feature anyway. Number two. Igaram. So here we have a very rinse and repeat situation from Pagaya. Well because this occurred first I guess Pagaya is the rinse and repeat of Igaram. Food for thought. In any case Igaram had a pretty fantastic character arc that played out over the course of nine chapters on Whiskey Peak whereby he went from detestable enemy to trustworthy ally and all the way to achieving the title of hero by using himself to allow Princess Vivi to escape safely. In doing so Igaram kind of hilariously dressed up as Vivi with the intent of acting as a decoy which did work because Igaram did catch the attention of Baroque works and his ship was blown up by a certain Miss All Sunday leaving us with the impression that this charming old Igaram was no more until he all of a sudden showed up on the island of Alabasta after somehow getting there I mean having survived a deadly explosion and having no ship to actually set sail and not only that but he actually reached Alabasta at pretty much the exact same time the straw hats did despite these numerous disadvantages so this really is a case of making it just a little too difficult to suspend our disbelief especially when there is no actual explanation for his survival. I guess one could make the argument that because Robin was responsible for the explosion she somehow purposely catered it not to kill Igaram and yeah I can see the logic there but narratively it's an incredible stretch and in any case it would still leave Igaram with no ship and potentially no maternal post while Alabasta unless that was just somehow magically unharmed in the explosion as well and I guess since it is a magic explosion we're talking about which left Igaram unharmed then that's entirely possible well you could get even more convoluted and propose that Robin colluded with Igaram to stage the explosion but like what and all of my confused noises aside in the end that's not even the point the point is that Oda played this as a death scene and he milked every last drop of it before undermining the situation by having Igaram appear alive and well on Alabasta once again somehow and actually you know what he did actually show up with a single band-aid so I guess that explosion did do its fair share of damage to him after all in the end though Igaram does not serve enough of a purpose to justify ruining his moment of heroic sacrifice simply to have him continue to exist on the occasional cover story in one piece however I will say that neither Igaram nor anybody else I've spoken about could even hold a candle to number one Pell so here in the number one spot is the absolute worst example of death abuse I'm pretty sure in all of media as well as the moment where the entire concept of death became utterly meaningless within one piece and it's such a shame because Pell's sacrifice is one of the most heartfelt emotional scenes you will ever see in this series the first time you watched anyway no more times because it loses all of its impact upon reread and rewatch but that first time oh man is it gold he has this brief moment of reminiscence before ultimately deciding to take it upon himself to save the entirety of Alabasta by removing a bomb designed to destroy the whole city I repeat the whole city and it goes off at point blank range engulfing Pell right then and there and there is surely no way that he could have survived this because we saw the bomb go off right in his bird face but no as it turns out explosions in one piece actually scale very poorly one Igaram got caught in was solved with a single band-aid and as for Pell I guess he just needed a few days in desert hospital to recover from a city destroying explosion I mean thinking back on it why was anyone even afraid of that explosion the worst thing that it was ever going to do was like knock everyone out for a while thus ending the entire war which is exactly what Vivi wanted in the first place so in many ways Pell doing this is completely counterproductive but being serious again in a series that is so profoundly wonderful in almost every aspect of storytelling this event is a gigantic stain on one piece and I have seen people argue that well Pell's death wouldn't have contributed anything to the story so Oda did not kill him and I don't understand because it's the exact opposite the way I see it Pell being alive doesn't contribute anything to the story whereas his death would have provided a meaningful sacrifice to save an entire kingdom as well as leave Vivi with some inherited will which she could use to grow and inform her leadership of the nation you know maybe make a resolve like nobody will ever need to sacrifice themselves like Pell did or I'm doing this for you Pell or stuff like that but what does Pell being alive actually achieve I guess it provides a nice feeling of oh that's lovely I liked him he's a bird but it single-handedly undermined the entire concept of death going forward in one piece and it would take such a grand action of killing Ace just to balance this idea out and it doesn't do Pell any favors as a character either I mean for some comparison every time I think of Pedro I remember him fondly in a very bittersweet sort of way as a guy who lived life on his terms and made the impossible decision to sacrifice himself for the sake of others that is exactly how Pell should be remembered but instead when I think back on Pell he's just some bird dude who made a sacrifice but not really because the reasons you can actually make a solid argument for every other character on this list to have survived their experience but Pell is just impossible unless he transcends this world and is some sort of genuine spirit but right now that is just a bit of a stretch longer than Luffy could possibly stretch in fact and as such Pell's quote unquote sacrifice is going to be crowned as the ultimate contender of this list but what do you guys think please do leave your thoughts in the comments below or even join my discord server and if you'd like to see more videos like this then please do go and check out some of my other content or even subscribe to the channel for more glorious one piece business uploaded straight into your youtube feed but for now this has been the ground line review and I'll see you next time