 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything One Piece, and today we are here to do the impossible and rank every character who has ever held the title of Emperor in the series. Now to some of you that term may be better known as Yonko, which literally means four emperors, however over the course of the series there have been five characters who have held the esteem of being one of said four emperors, as well as a super sixth character who has even been labeled as the fifth emperor. But these are going to be the biggest of mums and the whitest of beards, and with that in mind before we begin it's time to play a round of Big Beard, a very simple minigame the rules of which are as follows. I am going to present you with a character and then we are going to adorn them with either a Big Beard or a Little Beard. You simply need to guess whether or not the beard will be big or little, and should you guess incorrectly then your punishment will be to subscribe to the Grand Line Review as well as forever be ostracized from the facial hair community. And if you do guess correctly then you will be awarded the title of beard master. But today our character is going to be Boa Hancock. Will she be given a Big Beard or a Little Beard? Make your choice now and we shall reveal the answer in three, two, one, and it's a Little Beard. I suppose that's because Boa Hancock prefers that kind of sleek, well maintained style. So if you guess incorrectly then you know what to do and please do say hi in the comments below if you are a new member of the Grand Fleet. Welcome. But back to emperors exactly how will we be ranking these stellar existences? Well the same way we generally go about these videos which is by me asking you to choose your favorite. And so I put up a poll in my community section which had just over 9,000 respondents who cast a total of almost 14,000 votes. And the discrepancy for these numbers is because multiple votes were allowed so if you simply could not choose between two, three, four, perhaps five or even all six then you could just go ahead and do your thing. Although selecting all six would have had a net impact of absolutely nothing so I hope you didn't do that and if you did your vote was pointless. But let's go ahead and discover just how popular our emperors are commencing with the six and last place which will be Charlotte Lynn Lynn who managed to acquire a fairly meager 869 votes. And look I'm not necessarily surprised that Big Mom ended up in last place because my anecdotal experiences would suggest that she is by far the most unpopular of the emperors and even quite unpopular as a one-piece character in general. There is a fair bit of hate for the Big Mom however with almost 14,000 votes delegated I still didn't quite expect her to do this profoundly terribly because for some perspective on that 869 votes works out to about 6.25% of the overall votes which is not great is it. And as for why this is Big Mom is definitely a polarizing figure there's a fairly large faction of the online one-piece fan base that get incredibly frustrated when Big Mom gets used for any sort of comic purpose because they view it as demeaning or undervaluing her status as an emperor. The idea being that one of the four most powerful pirates in the world should be serious business at all times. Or as Big Mom or even Big Meme as she is sometimes known is a bit of a joke. It's a thought I disagree with quite a bit because I actually really enjoy the variety that Big Mom brings to this group. I do like how she's pretty much the most powerful human being on the planet but isn't quite mentally capable of using that power to its full potential. There's a very nice balance of character there for me. But Big Mom also has a bit of a tough time because the only two arcs that have really heavily featured her are also quite polarizing being Hulkic Island and Ilwano. Both mega arcs that can at times feel very slow moving and there may be a lot of inherent association of the character to those experiences. And I'm also going to go out on limb here and say stuff like the amnesia incident on Ilwano probably did not help the Big Mom case here. Once again it was one of those things that I really enjoyed because we got to return to and explore the more innocent child side of Big Mom but with that said if asked I would be highly unlikely to label her as my favorite emperor so there's that. Also this poll isn't no way representative of how many people like or dislike Big Mom. People en masse just seem to prefer every other emperor a bit more. In some cases a lot more. Although that's not so much the case for our number five finisher Marshall Deteach also known as the man with the beard that is black. And he got and also quite disappointing 980 votes which isn't terribly far from Big Mom's total just over a hundred votes away really. And again it's not so much a case of being surprised at the positioning but rather at the sheer lack of votes for this man. Blackbeard is like a thirsty gent stranded in a hot desert craving the sustenance of your votes for mere survival and all of you decided to abandon him offering only seven percent of the total votes shame on each and every one of you. To be fair though Blackbeard has a pretty purposely grotesque design so that's always going to be a barrier to like ship for him and he really does represent the very traditional image of a pirate a filthy missing teeth alcoholic gun toting party maniac which the more I think about it the more fun it sounds. Still there is a lot of intrigue surrounding him he actually presents one of the biggest mystery existences in the series and every time more information is given about Blackbeard it only brings up further questions. Plus as someone set up to be the final antagonist of the series you'd figure that popularity was a thing that each may have some access to. Interestingly enough though even if we aren't talking about the emperor specifically Blackbeard has never really been a popular character in one piece and the highest he has ever ranked in an officially conducted poll was 49th place which was during the sixth poll where he was quite notably beaten by Farafra in 48th place that's right Farafra. Although to be fair to Blackbeard there was a very strong meme campaign in Japan trying to push Farafra to the top but still Blackbeard is very much sitting on the boundaries here. Edging rather dangerously between the very concepts of popularity and unpopularity. Blackbeard does also have a major disadvantage here though being that he is one of the most underexplored of the emperors so there's just not a lot to work with. However at the same time we had plenty to work with with the very well explored Big Mom and that didn't really end up helping her so who's to say how that would impact things. So only time will tell if Blackbeard will ever rise in the ranks however this snapshot is not favorable for him. So moving into fourth place we have at the time of this recording our current major antagonist Mr. Kaido who managed to secure 1,363 votes which is still not super amazing but a definite step up from our prior two contenders. And Kaido is interesting because quite frankly I can tell that he's a fairly unpopular existence in the fanbase because every time I make a video focusing on Kaido it does some pretty sadly average numbers. Whereas making videos focusing on any of the other emperors including Blackbeard can be the equivalent of YouTube Gold. Still I think that Kaido is definitely rising in popularity slowly, very slowly mind you but steadily. And I think that if I presented this poll a year ago Blackbeard probably would have defeated him. But recent events on Wano has given this emperor some much needed focus because for a lot of his time in the series Kaido was just sort of the blank slate emperor. He wasn't the inspirational figure of Shanks nor the ultimate generational presence of Whitebeard, not set up to be the final antagonist like Blackbeard and certainly not the zany character of Big Mom. Kaido was just sort of there being Kaido, whatever that is. The most underdeveloped of the four emperors and that was certainly reflected in his official popularity poll results where he has only been ranked once and he landed in 97th place. So all of a sudden Blackbeard's 49th place finish looks pretty all right. Notably this official poll took place in 2017 prior to the Wano arc so I think that pretty much says it all. The determining factor will likely be when we see some kind of Kaido specific flashback but even then there's no guarantee of a rise in popularity because once again the Big Mom example proves that having a fairly well fleshed out character does not equate to people automatically loving said character. Unfortunately for her and potentially unfortunately for Kaido. But heading into our top contenders now we landed the bronze medal which will be awarded to a certain monkey D. Luffy who has invoked the gear third equivalent of vote securement lashing out with a gigantic 2941 ticks of approval. And here is where the comment shall begin. Luffy isn't a real emperor, fake news Morgan's Luffy is an unofficial emperor you can't have a fifth yonko etc I've heard them all especially that last one actually because Luffy was never declared one of the yonko he was called the fifth emperor. So the yonko arguers just have a fundamental misunderstanding of one piece and potentially even life itself but regardless of whether you think he deserves to be here or not that's where he is and we do need to recognize it. But because I was curious I decided to put up a poll to determine where the fan base currently sits on the issue and 110,000 votes later which is a lot. It's looking like the overwhelming majority of you agree with Luffy's emperosity and I'd like to thank everyone who voted in that poll I was honestly expecting about 10,000 so 110,000 is just pretty well. Now granted it also might be unfair to put our main protagonist on a poll like this but after seeing his position I really don't think that it is. Most voters seem to have taken this question quite seriously as selecting their favorite emperor rather than character otherwise I have no doubt that Luffy would have won which means that we are evaluating him at least somewhat on the criteria of existing as an emperor. That or the reason why Luffy didn't reach first place is because the voters refusing to recognize him as a candidate although with the benefit of knowing on with the results I can tell you that 22% of emperor deniers would not have made the difference here. In any case it's hard to say anything more about Luffy that hasn't already been said in 700 of my other one piece videos as well as those of every other one piece youtuber on the platform so I think I'll just leave things here as we move on to our top two candidates and with that our second place is none other than Edward Newgate with a very well-deserved 3,213 votes almost a quarter of the overall total and really this is because Whitebeard was not only an emperor of the sea he was pretty much the emperor. He is the bar that we measure all other emperors to because Whitebeard was the first to be exhaustively explored in terms of individual power greater military might and overall character which of course occurred during the paramount war and in a really weird way you could say that Whitebeard is the character responsible for the more underwhelming impressions of Big Mom, Kaido and Blackbeard because how is any one of them meant to compete with him? Whitebeard was just so well-rounded with a superbly compelling history and personality and this gets to the point where even to this day Whitebeard's legacy is still active and felt throughout the world his actions in life and in death are continuing to help shape modern events as we know them and speaking of death I would also flag that as a pretty huge contributing factor for Whitebeard's popularity. I recently made a video on the most rewatched scenes in the entire series and Whitebeard's death was stated by an astounding amount of people as one of their go-to scenes so I guess one of the greatest and most accurate things you could say about Whitebeard is that he has had a colossal impact on the hearts and minds of One Piece fans which, Luffy aside, I'm not sure we could so conclusively state about anyone else featured on this ranking. Well, until we reach our number one position that is and you've probably figured it out by now but it is of course one red-haired Shanks. Utterly dominating this poll with 4535 votes we have the emperor we first met all the way back in chapter one of the series and despite it looking quite obvious in retrospect Shanks ranking in first place was a bit of a shock to me because he is surprisingly enough probably by far the least export of the emperors. We know very little about his capabilities, his forces, territory and all that fun stuff but at the same time that mystery is probably one of Shanks's greatest assets in a poll like this because previously I stated the characters like Big Mom, Kaido and Blackbeard had no hope of living up to the standards that Whitebeard set but because we know so little about Shanks there is still the potential for him to not only meet but exceed those standards and without the curse of knowledge the imagination is free to perceive Shanks exactly as one sees fit which means that the entirety of the One Piece fanbase likely has a universally great opinion of Shanks's emperor because he is currently able to fill all of their ideal individual criteria simply through omission and of course I do need to mention the obvious which is that the readers and watchers have a clear emotional connection to Shanks which was always going to help just as it did with Whitebeard but the relationship with Shanks runs to an even deeper core because he really is the reason why Luffy embarked on this journey in the first place so he really has this disgustingly perfect combination going on he's still mysterious enough to inhabit the role of an emperor not risk disappointing anyone but he's also heavily bonded to the audience resulting in a clear undisputed number one emperor of the sea 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 ground line review and I'll see you next time