 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything One Piece, and today I want to delve into the hellscape of a mind possessed by a certain Sakazuki, specifically examining his ideal of absolute justice, how he may have adopted this view, as well as asking ourselves whether or not Sakazuki is a villain or hero of this series. Which might sound like a laughable question at first, but Sakazuki is a far more complex character than most would give him credit for. Many fans tend to view him through the lens of the hole in Ace's body, which to be fair was a very naughty thing for Sakazuki to do. Bad magma man. You're going to be punished with a promotion to Fleet Admiral. That'll show him. But Sakazuki may very well be one of the most truly hated characters in One Piece, and that is by design. But what I want to know is why he does what he does, what is absolute justice, and why does he practice it. But before we get into it, it's time to spin the wheel of justice. And the rules for this mini-game are very simple. I need you to choose an admiral, either Akainu, Kuzan, or Kizaru. We will then spin the wheel, and if it lands on your chosen admiral, then you will win a vacation to the Holy Land of Marijouar, where disclaimer, you may or may not be enslaved. However, if the wheel does not land on your chosen admiral, then you need to subscribe to the Grand Line Review, which will also result in regular One Piece content being uploaded straight into your YouTube feed. So choose your admiral and let's spin the wheel. And bam, it's Kizaru. Good old unclear justice. So congrats to the winners on their vacations, and to those of you who chose Kuzan and Sakazuki, welcome to the Grand Fleet. But right now it's just as a clock, and let's begin this discussion by defining absolute justice. Almost every prominent marine has their own individual brand of justice, and this one happens to be one of the more tyrannical and terrifying options. And in many ways, you can call this a very black and white approach to life. Absolute justice seeks to define good and evil via law. If you obey the law, then you are good. If you disobey the law, then you are bad. There is no leeway to discuss motivations, circumstance, or even the nature of the law itself. And in many ways, it is a very straightforward approach, and this is why of all of the admirals, Sakazuki is the one scene acting with the most clarity. In theory, there is no situation where he needs to hesitate because the very idea of absolute justice essentially makes all of his decisions for him. Meanwhile, in stark contrast, you'll have figures like Garp, Kuzan, and Fujitora, who often struggle deeply in their decision-making and have been known to commonly break the law in pursuit of their own individual brands of justice. But a good example of Sakazuki's absolute justice in theory was his response to seeing Luffy for the first time at the Battle of Marineford. When Luffy rather unceremoniously crashed the war, Sakazuki's immediate thought was the following. So that's the grandson of Garp, the hero, and the son of dragon. He has to be eliminated as well. And I know that there are many, many other actually shocking actions to examine in regards to Sakazuki, but this statement is every bit as powerful as anything we've seen him perform. And that's because this is absolute justice in its most startlingly casual form. Sakazuki doesn't know Luffy, he isn't intimately familiar with his actions. All he knows is that Luffy is a pirate and that he is the son of dragon. And via the equation of absolute justice, that means therefore he should die. And Sakazuki quite relentlessly attempts to make good on that thought near the end of the arc. And thinking about it, I really don't know if any other opponent has ever expressed such a core desire to kill Luffy. Like Luffy's been up against some truly horrible personalities, but the only one who has been so unwaveringly and actively determined to kill him was Sakazuki. And he was the opponent who knew the least about Luffy as well. So that is absolute justice. Luffy is evil and he needs to die simply because of what he is. And of course, that doesn't just extend to Luffy because Sakazuki also had some choice words concerning the entirety of the Whitebeard Pirates being the following. People who live outside the law are worthless. You pirates don't deserve a happy home. Whitebeard will die a loser, a fitting end for the leader of a band of human trash. So yeah, that's a pretty vehement presentation of Sakazuki's beliefs, but it also reveals his underlying rage. In many cases, Sakazuki can rather ironically be seen as a rather cold and calculated man. Someone who is willing to do the bad thing for what they perceive to be the greater good, but there's actually a lot more to it than that. This statement from Sakazuki is less about justice as a concept and more of a very personal thought. There is a lot of emotion injected in lines like pirates don't deserve a happy home because all of a sudden it's not really about serving justice anymore. You know, it's not about having the goal to ensure happy homes for lawful citizens. It's about actively denying happiness to those who are deemed evil, which is quite a twisted perspective. The first of many, many twists really, because in pursuit of absolute justice, Sakazuki isn't just hyper-focused on those who do evil in the world. He's also greatly concerned with punishing those who do nothing. Like for example, the random Marine who was terrified during the Paramount War and fled from battle. This man hadn't broken any law, nor was he the embodiment of evil, but Sakazuki ruthlessly punished him regardless. And when I say punished, I mean, Sakazuki executed him on the spot. And this really is a whole new venture into darkness because depending on your own personal morality, yeah, it's one thing to condone or even participate in punishing those who do wrong, but it's a completely different discussion to punish those who do not do the right thing or what you view as the right thing. It's always a very gray area when you get into persecuting in action, but absolute justice once again, well, luckily enough, it clears all of those problems up because under this system, there is only one right way to act in this world. And that is to fight honorably against evil even if it costs you your life, which might be easy for someone like Sakazuki to say given that he is one of the most powerful individuals in one piece, but in his defense, he does very much lead by example. During the paramount war, Sakazuki was one of the very few people to engage in one-on-one combat against white beard, the strongest man in the world, an absolutely insurmountable task that saw Sakazuki get utterly destroyed in the process. But at the very least, this made it evident that there was no hypocrisy in Sakazuki's absolute justice. He was very much willing to lose his life in what he would deem as the act of quailing evil. However, in addition to inaction, absolute justice does not even allow for hypothetical disagreement, because in this case, Sakazuki is more than willing to punish someone on the same level as that of a criminal, such as when Kobe briefly prevented him from killing Luffy, using the logic that they had already won the war and everything from here on out was needless, innocent bloodshed. And to that, Sakazuki said, you've cost me precious seconds. A soldier who doesn't serve justice has no place in the Navy. And if Shanks had not stepped in, then well, that would be the end of Kobe and I guess the end of Luffy as well, because that is absolute justice. It doesn't matter what you're doing, why you're doing it, right now you're standing in the way of my justice, so therefore you are also evil. And I say my justice because it's very hard to look at it in any other way. For Sakazuki to hold this belief, he must have something quite close to a God complex. Always confident that he is initiating the correct course of action with no chance of mistake. And it should be said that those with God complexes are generally quite narcissistic and Sakazuki certainly is not immune from that. No, not at all. He very much has his own profound sense of honor and prestige which he wishes to project over the world, something which he touched on in his conversations to the five older stars during the Dressroserah. In this case, he said, tell me, how does a rat like Dolflamingo bend the world to his will? If this kind of nonsense keeps happening on my watch, I will be a laughing stock of a fleet admiral. And I want you to note the important part here. This issue isn't so much that Dolflamingo is using the world government for his own personal and nefarious purposes, it's more that Sakazuki's authority is coming almost comically into question, which I guess does make sense because if you are not the ultimate authority, then how can you be sure that you are the correct vessel to administer justice? So Sakazuki must quite profoundly believe in himself to a very unhealthy level. At the same time though, it's hard to know if what we're talking about here could be defined as a sense of honor because Sakazuki is more than willing to perform any and every dishonorable action to achieve his outcomes. For example, tricking squad into attacking white beard or taunting ace to make him turn around and engage in a disadvantageous fight. All of this is of course simple mind games, but where the dishonorable aspect of Sakazuki really shines is when he displays what he is willing to do to lawful innocent bystanders. And this would come into play during the Ohara instant where it would be Sakazuki who ensured the genocide of the people of Ohara. Unwilling to risk even a single scholar escaping, he invoked a scorched earth policy resulting in the murder of hundreds of innocent people simply to prevent the chance of evil, which he makes clear with the following statement. If you're gonna do it, finish the job. If by chance a single scholar is hiding out on that ship, then all of this sacrifice will be for naught. You must destroy evil at its very roots. And this is another really fascinating insight into this man because I would like to note the use of the word sacrifice. All this sacrifice will be for naught. This is Sakazuki registering that he understands what he is doing is somehow innately wrong. Those people did not deserve to die, but they had to for the greater good. And that does make me genuinely wonder if he has any sense of regret for these actions, any empathy for those he slaughtered undeservedly in the name of justice. It really would not surprise me if underneath his tough magma-ish exterior, there lived a man full of despair carrying the weight of every sacrifice he's carried out on his shoulders. Because how can one possibly believe in justice via injustice? The lines of black and white are not as clear as absolute justice would make them out to be. And for this philosophy to really work, Sakazuki needs to favor pursuit of one side or the other. Because here's another fun line. During Marineford when all of the white-bid pirates stepped in to stop him pursuing Luffy, he said, who would have guessed that you of all people would be fighting for a noble cause? Once again, indicating that Sakazuki knows that what he's currently doing is wrong. Killing Luffy in this situation is like the Ohara incident. He wants to kill Luffy solely to prevent the chance of evil happening in the future. And then he actively admits that the white-bid pirates fighting to protect Luffy is a noble cause. So I just find it fascinating that Sakazuki's moral compass does not appear to align with his desired course. He's more or less made a choice to embrace evil for the purpose of eradicating evil. And it's quite sacrificial really. And it may very well indicate a potentially very, very tragic childhood. Which speaking of, let's take a look at this brief snapshot of absolute justice in bloom. This here is currently the only image we have of Sakazuki in his childhood years. Take special note of his hat, which has justice printed on it. So even at this early age, Sakazuki was heavily invested in this idea, which can be further gleamed by his determined expression that still hasn't changed to this very day. He looks like he came from a rather poor upbringing with the ragged clothes and other dirt marks everywhere. And I swear, you can just tell that something horrific has happened to this boy. For him to be so determined to carry out justice, he must have either witnessed or experienced profound injustice at this early age. For example, as situations say where his parents were murdered and the killer failed to be prosecuted due to some sort of corrupt ruling system on whatever island Sakazuki hails from. Then maybe in his desperation, he takes up that knife and delivers his first taste of absolute justice, himself, thus setting him up for where he is in the world today or something along those lines. Could be anything, but it's gonna be bad because I just refuse to believe that such a fundamental nature spawned organically. And I think that we should brace ourselves for an eventual Sakazuki flashback, which will in no way absolve his actions in the story, but it should make them more understandable. This man is not necessarily evil, even if he does quite frequently commit evil. And I guess from here, the question becomes, is Sakazuki too far gone? And I would say, yes, yes he is. In terms of thinking about this as a story, I find it hard to believe that an antagonist could be brought back into favorability after doing something like killing Ace, nor would I necessarily want him to be. I think it would be far more interesting to watch Sakazuki drive the train of absolute justice to its conclusion. And I suppose eventually be defeated by a countervailing force of justice. At the same time though, I don't think the satisfaction of defeating him is going to be anywhere near as potent as many think. As intimidating and as abhorrent as Sakazuki is, behind all of this is probably one of the most tragic stories in the series. I have a hard time believing that absolute justice can be born out of anything other than experiencing absolute injustice. This man has probably lived quite a torturously tough life, but unfortunately, this is almost certainly one of those scenarios where the hero has lived more than long enough to see themselves become the villain. 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 feeds. But for now, this has been the Grand Line Review and I'll see you next time.