 So with this whole emperor system it's fun to note that at this point we've had five four emperors and one fifth emperor thus giving us a six emperor total. However that doesn't even begin to touch on the potential of what could have been because there are an awful lot of other emperor candidates in this world some of which resemble fruit and others of whom do not. Hello and welcome to the Grand Line review your source for everything one piece and today we are going to be revising history just a little bit because knowing how things are well that's great no but knowing how things could have been is significantly more exciting and in some cases significantly more terrifying and with terror in mind we're going to be specifically examining the four emperors and which figures throughout history could have attained this title because there's quite a few some that might have made this world a lot better and others that would have made it unfathomably worse so maybe just maybe an overweight literal soul eater isn't the worst the world could have had profound thoughts to think about as we prepare for a quick round of emperorite or emperor wrong a very simple minigame the rules of which are as follows I am going to give you a quote from a one piece character and is going to be your job to guess whether the character who said the statement is an emperor or not and if you guess emperor wrong then your punishment will be to subscribe to the Grand Line review which will also result in consistent injections of one piece culture administered straight into your youtube feed. Meanwhile if you guess emperor right then you will be spared an excruciatingly painful demise so yeah the stakes well they're pretty high this time around but this is our one piece quote for the day oh my what a mess was this said by an emperor of the sea or by another character please do make your decision now and we shall reveal the answer in three two one and bam it was actually said by an emperor shanks to be specific in chapter one of the series so if you were emperor wrong then you know the thing you need to do so please do say hi in the comments below if you are a new member of the Grand Fleet welcome but to examine our would-be emperors it's important to set rules and standards because there's a very basic problem with this kind of topic which is that with enough speculation just about any character could qualify so here is my vague checklist for an emperor candidate throughout history first and foremost they need to have been a pirate without this restriction the conversation just becomes a little too wild introducing figures like garps and goku im sakazuki all the admirals in fact and we can go on and on like this which is why we won't but an emperor of the sea at their very core is a pirate so that is exactly what we're looking for secondly we need to have evidence of widespread influence a great empire that a figure could command or call upon if need be white beard had his divisions and allies big mom has the realm of totland and kaito has 20 000 members of the beast pirates as well as the samurai of wano so something along those lines which very notably automatically excludes a very popular candidate one and rickuel me hawk he will not be featured here because he is an individual actor and does not satisfy the second criteria but thirdly the emperor candidate themselves needs to possess a reasonable degree of individual strength and power this is mostly to prevent characters like foxy who actually satisfies the first two criteria on this is pretty well but it's to prevent characters like him from being you know considered in any way relevant to this discussion and finally this is not a strict requirement but should a pirate command territory of their own like an island or series of islands then that will be worth considering but it is not strictly speaking necessary there it is though being a pirate having influence and being individually powerful are the key trio so let's step back in time now roughly four decades before modern events when the four emperors would begin to emerge we have no idea how long this institution has existed but at this point we have to assume that it began with our original four interestingly enough those shanks of the og-4 is a very recent emperor having only been crowned about six years ago which means that for quite some time the new world may have been ruled by three emperors however there were other historical pirates that could have filled that fourth slot and if we do go back far enough an obvious choice would be roc steve zbeck he satisfyingly satisfies our first three primary criteria and should he not gone on that whole you know well domination tangent then zbeck would have been the most natural candidate for such position however we know very vaguely how this story goes and his reign was put to an end by roger and garb and speaking of the former roger does not actually qualify as a candidate for this video roger's problem being that we don't know if he had an extended following as of right now if he did have his own set of allies or a form of grand fleet then yes of course he automatically becomes the next best emperor candidate but in absence of that i'm afraid roger is just not quite doing it which is fine because he would never have his sights set on such a lowly achievement anyway pirate king all the way so we're going to have to dive a bit deeper into the remnants of the rox pirates to find another reasonable contender which we do hit very quickly with golden lion sheiky where it not for a rather unfortunate incident with roger sheiky would have very easily risen to the same level of prominence that we now see in characters like big mom and kydo this man at the height of his power and with a head that was 100% wheel free had a fleet consisting of 50 divisions it was a truly colossal crew so much so that sheiky was even labeled as the admiral of the golden lion pirates which is a very fun indicator of his potential as an emperor given that every canon emperor in the series goes by a title other than captain then again don creek was also considered the admiral of the greek pirates so maybe not read into that too too much but sheiky commanded overwhelming levels of influence and in terms of his own individual power well i think it's quite telling that he was able to hold his own in a two-on-one fight against both garb and sengoku and we're talking old school rather than old man garb here and sheiky did lose but this fight destroyed half of marineford and sheiky had no backup whatsoever he was functioning as a one-man army had his fleet not been sunk by fate during the battle of edward we would probably be looking at a radically different emperor power structure today and i guess the key thing to remember is that sheiky in one piece stronghold is not at all representative of canon sheiky in that film he was turned into more of an old decrepit and unrefined combatant still a very solid and influential leader i suppose but it's not an accurate depiction of him but moving on i have noticed that a lot of people will throw kozuki odin's name into the emperor ring as well and i think that he is well he's very borderline but it's definitely worth addressing so odin for part of his life anyway was a pirate not only that he was a pirate aboard two of the world's most famous of crews meanwhile odin had a large degree of influence and his own following on wanoh and in terms of individual power while manga readers will know that that is never anything that will ever be in question there's only really two characters capable of putting odin in his place being both roger and white beard it's still a big stretch though the problem is that odin's following doesn't match up with his pirate in career when he was a pirate he didn't have a following and when he had a following he wasn't a pirate so odin would have needed to turn wanoh into a more piracy-based country like say the kooja tribe of amazon lily which seems like an unlikely move but odin certainly isn't the worst candidate because you can make at least a semi reasonable case and if you dear viewer are in the market for semi reasonable cases then i would recommend checking out the top 20 worst devil fruit users in one piece a semi reasonable case is exactly what i promise in that video but from here we are going to briefly examine gecko moria which may seem like a bit of a joke moria emperor oh no but that's mainly because of how we know him in the modern day because during his younger days moria well he was quite the rising star in many ways he had a bit of a cheeky style situation happening where his path forward was irrevocably altered by a single incident which of course was his clash with kydo that was the moment that really halted moria's development although interestingly enough i suppose that his neck did continue to grow and evolve into this uh this phallic vampire peen that we see here today but this event scarred him to the point where he changed his entire philosophy completely stunting his own individual growth and settling into a comfortable position as a wallet of the sea rather than continuously pushing forward however i really don't think it's all that unreasonable to picture some sort of alternate reality where moria was allowed to grow a lot more and coming to a critical mass of dominance with enough clout to be considered an emperor although it is definitely not this reality and you can say the same for many of the warlords really they all tend to fail quite harshly in one of our three established criteria you know with the aforementioned moria that issue became individual strength meanwhile with me hawk his issue was a lack of influence or i guess the lack of drive to achieve actual influence however the warlord who arguably came the closest to becoming an emperor of the sea is undoubtedly sir crocodile he does often get forgotten about in discussions like these because he is quite an early villain but in terms of the network he implemented baroque works that was every bit as impressive as the extended empire of any emperor perhaps even more so given that crocodile was able to plant baroque works agents seemingly any way in the world he desired and no look they weren't the most of individual powerhouses but together the officer agents the millions and the billions had the supreme power of numbers that almost allow crocodile to overthrow an entire kingdom and get his hands or i guess i should say hand singular on an ancient weapon which speaking of pluton is the factor that would have made up for crocodile's lack of individual power on his own crocodile doesn't quite reach the standards we're looking for not really anywhere close but had he achieved one times pluton it would have become completely irrelevant because that's just what ancient weapons tend to do with pluton there's even a pretty decent chance the crocodile would have gone on to have a serious shot at becoming the next pirate king and to this day the world really has no idea just how close they came to a terrifying crocodile based regime but thankfully crocodile was stopped by a rubber boy and five of his closest non-rubbery friends continuing through the timeline though i also don't think it's an incredibly wild idea to suggest that nl also had the potential to reach the sort of position he had quite a large religious following easily able to convince people that he was a quite literal god and he likely could have gotten quite far through the power of his devil fruit alone combined with his insane observation hockey i mean yes he is certainly lacking in the armament field as well as general combat but the gorogoronomy is so absurdly powerful that i would be surprised if nl wasn't swiftly considered an emperor candidate on the blue sea he'd expand his influence without issue through shea terra as most emperors tend to do and well that would kind of be that the only problem would be if he ever had to face off against another emperor or even an admiral at which point nl would be quite promptly screwed moving to one of the more realistic candidates now we have marco the phoenix of everyone here today he is the one who truly came within grasp of achieving the status after the death of whitebeard marco more or less inherited whitebeard's entire empire he became the de facto leader for the whitebeard pirates as well as every island under that umbrella the one thing marco needed all he really needed to do was win that tiny little payback war that's the event that solidified blackbeard's position as an emperor so naturally it would have done the same for marco had things gone a bit differently just imagine a scenario where marco smacks down the up-and-coming blackbeard pirate successfully defending his former captain's legacy and is basically hailed as the inheritor of whitebeard's will marco is just one conflict away from that really but unfortunately what we got instead was the dark reign of blackbeard filling the new world with shenaniganry on drunk party island with scantily clan ladies which i have to say not sounding terrible at all at the moment maybe just maybe blackbeard was right and he's who we should have been rooting for all along now at this point you may think that there's no one really left to consider because that brings us to the modern day however one charlotte kata curry begs to differ like marco and like cheeky there is just one tiny alteration needed to fate for him to be potentially considered an emperor and in kata curry's case that would be on wanno where king rather unceremoniously dinosaur booted the queen mama chanta off a waterfall which led to big mom falling in water water being very bad for the devil fruit users of which big mom is one however she miraculously washed up on the shore of the island with amnesia very much doing what luffy did just without the amnesia in his case but if big mom had drowned like many devil fruit users probably should have then that would have left an immediate power vacuum in the world one that charlotte barris barrow the eldest of sons would have attempted to fill but the vast majority of the charlotte children and residents of totterland no doubt would have thrown their support behind kata curry not only would he become their ultimate fighter but he's also just genuinely kind of a nice guy and he will become your best friend immediately upon presentation with a delicious forbidden donut and most of the big mom pirates understand that he operates with their best interests at heart however nasty those best interests may be so kata curry would probably find himself in a spot of inheritance but it wouldn't quite be that easy he'd also probably have to face a real challenge like the payback war to consolidate the position but for one fleeting moment in history it was certainly a possibility for other fun possibilities though i highly recommend you check out this video of what would have happened if everyone luffy invited to join the straw hats actually did join the crew this series certainly would not have been the same so i look forward to seeing you over there