 Angry Kaido. Happy Kaido. Sad Kaido. Drunk Kaido. High Kaido or Haido for short. No matter what iteration we see of this man beast, one thing remains universally true, which is that Kaido is a stunningly unpopular character. Hello and welcome to the groundline review or source for everything one piece. My name is Liam and up until today I had no idea that nar walls are like real creatures that blows my mind. But today we are here to talk about something I did know, something that has perplexed me for as long as I've known about this particular thing and that particular thing is Kaido, specifically the incredible unpopularity and perhaps even failure of Kaido as an antagonist in one piece. Now that might seem like a bit of a harsh thing to say but let's remember that Kaido is a big boy and I'm sure that he can take a bit of criticism here and there and if not then I won't be alive much longer anyway so let's all just enjoy the video while we can because the fact is that Kaido is not a popular villain and we can empirically prove this using official popularity polls which is specifically designed to measure the metric of popularity. In the most recent globally conducted poll Kaido ranked in 65th place, which to be fair out of over 1000 characters to choose from honestly that's not too bad. However and you knew there was a however coming otherwise this video wouldn't exist, however it's far from great and even good considering his role in the series as some sort of ultimate antagonist guy helming an entire saga which has spanned over a decade at this point. To put a character in that kind of position you'd probably want them to be more popular than say a polar bear, a koala or even men in boxes which Kaido is not. So today we're going to figure out why Kaido hasn't quite landed with the fan base as well as how that's affected Wano and whether or not that can be salvaged going forward. And it's all going to begin with a quick round of Kaido or some Gaido, a very simple minigame the rules of which are as follows. In an alternate universe the straw hats arrive at alternate Wano and are about to encounter their main arc villain. But your job is going to be to guess whether that villain will be Kaido or just some guy. Because according to a lot of the data available that's how we tend to view Kaido. He's there. Should you guess incorrectly then your punishment will be to subscribe to the ground line review resulting in consistent injections of one piece culture administered directly into your youtube feed. And if you do guess correctly then you will become the main antagonist of Wano. All hail you whoever you are. So who will it be? Kaido or some Gaido? Choose now and we shall reveal the answer in three, two, one and bam it was some guy. I think his name is uh I don't know Chris. Sure that'll do. So if you guessed incorrectly then you know the thing to do and please do say hi in the comments below if you are a new member of the Grand Fleet. Welcome. Now to further emphasize Kaido's unpopularity I think that a comparison is in order. Like I said before Kaido is very much our king daddy villain of this whole new world saga. Everything in every one we've done has been leading straight into his dragon roost. And in an ideal world that would involve a steady incline of quality antagonists that lead us to this ultimate of destinations. In our case those quality antagonists include other names such as Don Quixote Doflamingo and Charlotte Cardacuri. You may have heard of them because in the world top 100 character poll Doflamingo is 20th and Cardacuri ranked in absolutely absurd 14th. Which is amazing for our blonde and our redhead but it does leave our brunette fairly overshadowed. And yes the male adjective is also brunette albeit spelled differently but pronounced the same way which is not confusing at all so thank you English. But ideally what we would want is a situation where Doflamingo was a great villain with Cardacuri being a step above him and Kaido managing to outshine both of them. Instead what's happened is that after Cardacuri we've had a bit of an accident fall off the stairs landing straight on the flight below us. Because according to all data Kaido is a fair few steps down. And you might at this stage be asking but Grandline Reviewman is it really fair to compare Kaido when his story hasn't fully been told yet and I would answer yes yes it is. If only for the reason that we are roughly 100,000 chapters into one right now and I do think that by this point we should have a solid sense of our main antagonist. Which is actually something that both Doflamingo and Cardacuri excelled at. Long before their stories actually concluded or really got fleshed out at all giving us that full picture of them they still managed to garner absurd popularity. And I'm certain that our opinions of Kaido can and will change in the future due to that missing information. But one who is now officially the longest arc in one piece and evidently Kaido still has yet to really surpass the antagonist that were meant to build up to him. It's a very bizarre situation. So let's see why Kaido doesn't quite stack up. Now I'm sure that everyone has their own criteria but for me there are four things that I look for in a solid antagonist. The first of which is it's admittedly extremely shallow but it is design. A good antagonist is visually arresting and compelling without being over engineered. For example Doflamingo is our obvious success story here. The components of his design are deceptively simple. Big fluffy pink feathers and some schmick sunglasses. Add his eternal smile into the mix and he will instantly take command of any scene he's featured in. The same thing goes for Cardacuri I mean yes he is a bit more ornate with certain features but he's basically an imposing tattooed guy in tight black pants who hides his mouth. And just to dwell on that last feature there that creates a glorious amount of intrigue. In very much the same way that Doflamingo always hiding his eyes adds a wonderful layer of mystery to his character. So I'll definitely say right here and now that that sort of mystery is definitely something that Kaido's raw aesthetic is missing. Not that it's essential but it's an advantage that the other two have. When we look at Kaido in theory he does follow the simplistic yet cool design idea but I do think he suffers from a couple of aesthetic issues. One of which is that he is a clear case of big dude syndrome. His combined height and width don't produce that same sort of schmick feel that classically popular villains tend to embody. And not just Doflamingo or Cardacuri either you can look all over one piece. Crocodile, Rob Luchimi, Hawk and L, any of the marine admirals. Whoever it is most of the characters that tend to soar in popularity share the slimmer more human physiques. As Lady Gaga would say, walk, walk fashion baby and then other things. The characters that don't follow this model of fashion however creative they may be tend to sink to the bottom of the popularity bucket and it is in the depths of this bucket that we find large mothers, phallic, vampire, neck, things and of course the Hody Joneses. And Hody Jones by the way is a perfect example of failed villain aesthetics. Something that Oda and all his editors realized which is why Hody Jones went through a radical redesign right before the climax of Fishman Island. Not that it helped much but it did help some. But back to Kaido, I love his design, I love it so much they even have this fun figure of him which never quite sits right on its base which really annoys me but I'm not gonna blame Kaido for that because he does admittedly look pretty damn cool. But if we're talking about setting someone up to be a top tier memorable villain then whether we consciously realize it or not this design is going to be more of a roadblock than others and when we're talking about others they specifically mean others like this. This is a good example of other. Alright now let's make them fight. Of course design is far from everything and the second thing I look for in a great antagonist is some kind of profound feeling. I want to look at an antagonist and feel something. With Crocodile during alabaster that feeling was one of disgust and hatred to the point where I needed to see him get whacked in the face, chest and balls approximately 5,600 times each. Meanwhile with Carter Curry that feeling for me tends to be one of empathy. At his call Carter Curry is not an evil man and so I end up sympathizing with his situation. Then with Dolph Lamingo it is pure intrigue. I don't understand him, I can never predict him. All I know is he's going to do some wildly outrageous crap and I am here for it. And this is actually kind of why Rob Lucci doesn't do a whole lot for me in retrospect because he's such a blank slate of a character. The person I really hated during any sobby was Spandam and Luchi was more of a punching bag style main antagonist. And right now I feel like we're in a very similar situation. The antagonist on Wano I have a strong feeling about is Orochi. I am heavily invested in causing him as much pain and suffering as possible. But Kaido is tricky. Like he does despicable things but he also has a strong coat of honor. He's not entirely stiff and stoic but his other emotional ranges are well like quite limited. So it's hard to truly hate him but it's also hard to really like him because it's hard to you know feel anything about him. As it is I just feel like I don't know him. Kaido is something of a stranger, a big vat of neutrality that I'm consistently waiting for him to break in some way shape or form. However there is one thing that Kaido does excel at which is the third feature I look for being fear. I've kept this separate from general feeling generation because I think that no matter who you are an antagonist in this context needs to be capable of conjuring fear. As for why you need such a thing let's take Caesar Clown. He has a cool enough design and he elicits a very strong emotion from all over the spectrum from utter disgust to his kind of glorious hilarity. He's funny. Clowns are funny. What Caesar does not have though is fear. At no point was I ever afraid of Caesar Clown which negates any actual power he may have had as an antagonist and thus kind of makes me feel like parts of Punk Hazard were a bit of a waste of time. But Kaido excels at fear. At this stage it's what sustains his role in the series. He is a brutal all-powerful seemingly immortal force that no individual can take down. He is unstoppably ruthless and that is terrifying. Whenever one of our good dude guys is on the same page as Kaido I do legitimately fear for them because chances are it's not going to end well. So Kaido does genuinely have that factor going for it. But our final component is motivation. To me antagonists can live or die based on their goals and Kaido's ambition is quite stereotypical honestly. In the end what he wants to do is cause a big old war, do general bad things and yeah look I know it's a bit more complicated than that. But what it boils down to is bad guy doing bad things for the sake of being a bad boy. Compare that to someone like Carter Curry whose actions were all committed to protect his family. That sort of motivation is easily identifiable to most readers or watches which automatically makes Carter Curry more compelling because you understand him. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that's the standard for all of One Piece though. Most major antagonists tend to share the Kaido style goals like Crocodile who wanted a big super weapon to take over the world and such. Dolph Lamingo sure he's slightly more interesting because he's sort of like the middle management equivalent of a bad guy constantly juggling the world government and Kaido so that he can survive and thrive. And actually just a warning I've got some Hody Jones praise incoming so just be prepared for that because I would actually say that by far the strongest aspect of the Hody Jones character was his motivation of being a racist zealot. It's not at all empathizable but it's something that we know and face in reality thus making it more understandable and allowing us to have some sort of stake in whatever it is he's doing whereas Kaido's plunge the war into world ambition is so far out of the realm of what we know that it does fall a little bit flat as do the goals of many other One Piece antagonists mind you but for our ultimate saga bad guy antagonist dude I think he needs a bit more than that. Like an MCU Thanos sort of drive something not justifiable but at the very least comprehensible and I don't comprehend Kaido's war desire because this does have a massive effect on Wano as a whole because this is his story. The narrative of Wano is not about Luffy or the straw hats it's about Kaido in addition to other things of course like it's about Odin the vassals the nation's citizens but the only reason why any of that story is important at all or needs to be told to begin with is because of Kaido. He is the fearsome man creature at the helm of everything and that means that he needs to command this story but right now he feels like more of a side character caught up in crazy events like he just sort of accidentally found himself in the role of main antagonist. He doesn't have the same weight that Dolph Lamingo did on Dressrosa or Crocodile on Alabasta or even Carter Curry's position on Hawkeye Island. There's a lot of factors that are currently missing from Kaido that his more successful predecessors managed to carry and even embody. Yes I fear Kaido he is a big scary dude bro his design helps a lot with that but it's not as effective as the design of others have been and other than fear I don't have any strong feelings regarding Kaido whatsoever. I do like those rare moments where he reveals a sliver of personality but those are few and far between and as for why Kaido is doing what he's doing I can only say that I care so much as it affects other characters that I actually well do care about and that's just not a great position for this grand antagonist to be in and once again this is all liable to change with a very simple flashback at some point. In fact Kaido could even go full senor pink and become the most sympathetic man baby who has ever lived in the span of a single chapter but I do think it's a big ask. One that Oda is fully equipped to pull off and who knows a year a month maybe even a week from now I do expect this video to be peppered with comments like lol this didn't age well but this is the state that we're in right here and now. Over 100 chapters into an arc well and truly into the action packed climax and our ultimate enemy to overcome is still such a neutral existence and it shows not only in popularity polls but every time I make a video focusing solely on Kaido it heavily underperforms which tells me that people see Kaido as a topic and a lot of them just choose not to click. Now that could also be an issue with me not making the titles and thumbnails appealing enough but at the same time what exactly is it that I'm supposed to sell you? Kaido as a character currently just doesn't have access to the full narrative arsenal the previous antagonists have had at their disposal meaning that there is very very little for me to be capable of selling about him. It's hard to create an intriguing title involving Kaido because he is fundamentally a sort of plain entity right now so I haven't made it yet but I fully expect to make this video a bit more appealing by adding Dorflamingo, Kartakuri or even both into the thumbnail because Kaido cannot carry this on his own and that's also potentially an issue with Wano as an arc. It's very much carried more by the lingering presence of Kozuki Oden at this stage than it is by our primary antagonist and I do think it's about time that Kaido started to put in his fair share of heavy lifting. So all I can really do is look forward to the day when Etrura Oda decides to reveal a little bit more about Kaido thus making this video entirely pointless. But for a video that will never be pointless do check out this discussion about how Ace ruined everything and I mean everything in one piece. Who would have thought that one man could have screwed things up so astoundingly so I look forward to seeing you there.