Crocodile is definitely a villain.
This guy was willing to starve an entire country simply because of his own agenda to rule the world.
He took rain from a country in a desert meaning:
- They can't grow crops.
- They can't eat.
- They can't drink.
People were dying like flies. Kids were dying. Dude staged a civil war and was about to throw a bomb that would kill the people fighting in this civil war which included both adults and kids.
This thread isn't really about Croc being a villain or not by our moral standards.
Was his agenda simply to rule the world? Few megalomaniacs think that way, be it Caesar, Napoleon or Hitler.
We saw Alabasta - Elumalu dried out, Yuba was on the brink of collapse, the inland Katorea, the base of the rebells might have been in crisis, too -
but not as severe as that it couldn't sustain an army of 1 million rebells with as many horses and camels.
However, other cities were still thriving, the port town of Nanohana was as busy as usual, Rainbase is sitting on a water source, and Alubarna was manipulated to be rainy (and you can get that water to other places, and that's how they have to handle rain in the desert anyways)
I think you can answer yourself how severe the crisis actually was.
In other words, based on how Alabasta's population is distributed and the sheer size of the rebell army, I don't think we had this severe crisis. Don't think rain is the norm in Alabasta anyways.
The bomb didn't even kill Pell in close proximity. Possible that it was just a giant flashlight to make a good show. Would have created the opposite of how it actually ended (which is actually antithetical to Skypea's ending - Luffy brings the sun, but Vivi makes it rain. Croc is a Luffy-type character, they are both out for the same thing...)
ANYONE who does anything with good intentions (which he never had BTW, but for the sake of argument let's assume it was), but with evil methods... that person is inherently evil.
He's a villain, I am baffled that anyone could claim Crocodile isn't a villain simply because there is a supposed pairing of what is LGBTQ based.
Would be like saying someone wanted more christian or religious values which are quite righteous and promotes goodwill amongst people for the most part, but is fine with killing millions of innocent people? Crocodile is not a good person whether he was LGBTQ or some other movement.
And this is our real world moral standard. Based on the same standards of villainness, Vegapunk would be an archfiend for creating atrocious WMD and performing inhumane experiments with no regard for the consequences. Right now we are rooting for someone responsible for blasting an entire nation to the seafloor - or below.
He also isn't fighting for LGBT, he's just inclusive of it. He's trying to create a country with gender parity in the leadership. Why is this important? Well it is important...
Would be like saying someone wanted more christian or religious values which are quite righteous and promotes goodwill amongst people for the most part, but is fine with killing millions of innocent people?
That actually more or less happens with the churches anti-condom agenda in HIV plagued countries.
Also the previous two popes, John Paul and Ratzinger were responsible for covering up thousands of cases of child abuse, yet any pious catholic would never question them.
Good and Evil aren't as easy to define as we would like it.
We have our western based, international online reading manga community values here, but what about Crocodile, he's a Pirate...
What? He just wanted her because he could get something from her, and the moment she became useless to him... he attempted to kill her. That isn't love. This is psychopathy.
Robin had no where to go, so of course she would work with Crocodile, she'd have been stupid, and if she didn't obey him, he'd have tortured her. Crocodile is no saint, dude is a villain, and the finest.
Patient enough to scheme up a plan for 15 years? He's a villain of the finest order.
No, as I said, he never did torture her. He remained distanced, but was the first person to genuine protect her without kicking her out after a while or selling her out.
He gifted her expensive designer clothes, gave her a job in the casino bought her an S-Class
Mercedes Benz Banawani. It's clear that he tried to gain enough trust with her to gain her cooperation non-violently, despite this not being precautious at all and a risk to the entire plan.
His entire plan crafted and prepared for years relied on her translating the Poneglyph for him. Why not torture a 16 year old, get what you want, kill her and then its your ultimate secret that you can read Poneglyphs?
He also never made any double checks wether he would actually have that trust, which is kinda naive considering Robin was allowed to go where she wanted and could have escaped unchecked and with no means of getting her back any time.
Croc is soft, through and through (as far as Pirate Warlords go) and probably thought "Well, I hate the WG, she must hate the WG..."
Remember how he snapped when they tried to execute Ace and actually saved him? He got all emotionally upset all of a sudden despite his initial goal being assassinating Whitebeard. Knowing how Haki works, Ace's death would have been beneficial to that goal, the entire Pirate side would be under shock, then panicked retreat.
People died, there was a famine and drought.
He tried to drop a NUKE, the only reason more people didn't die is because Luffy and co. stopped his madness.
By your logic, barely anyone died in Dressrosa, so we could argue Joker is also an anti-hero if he had hypothetical good intentions which he was willing to achieve by wiping out an ENTIRE nation of people.
We've seen life in Alabasta, wasn't that worse. If you can sustain an army of 1 Million rebells, complete with as many horses and camels, the drought and famine cannot be that severe.
At most, Crocodile displaced a lot of people by drieing out their oasis villages with sandstorms, the oasises, ground water, are the main lifesource in the desert, not the rain. He didn't dry out the central desert hub Rainbase, and when we where there, there were no signs of a humanitarian crisis.
The rainpowder was for political framing, it never rains that much in the desert anyways and we know the additional sandstorms were artificial. No sandstorms, no noticeable damage from rainpowder either as they just have their groundwater to drink. They also had freshwater from the Sandora River source all the time.
I mean, we have this situation right now, 2,5 Million people stranded in an arid area with no water supply and its a severe humanitarian crisis, didn't happen in Katorea.
The bomb didn't even kill Pell. Nothing suggests Mr. 7 and Miss Halloween were on a willful suicide mission. The latter alone proves its not a nuke. Realistically, Croc was trying to stage a revolution, he would have gotten rid of the royal army and palace - the symbols of the monarchy, and the rebel army, the latter likely to be mystified as martyrs, and then he would have installed his dictatorship with the officer agents as Politbüro and the Frontier agents as Kandidaten.
And unlike Dressrosa, the majority of civilians left Alubarna prior to the battle. The above is also a contrasting point as Dressrosa is known to be based on Francoist Spain.
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Don't get me wrong, by our moral standards Crocodile is a villain. By the standards this narrative sets he is temperate.
We are also too quick to saintify others, like Whitebeard, who also was a military dictator said to have never really shared anything and instead put it into booze and his almland home paradise built around naive dreams.
After his reckless and unnecessary death to save someone (just 1) he believed would be "Pirate King", a superstitious myth installed to him by someone objectively mad and insane no matter the knowledge gained at Laugh Tale, his territories got raided and torn apart. Good job, dude!
The guy was in Rocks who most likely have not been the nicest persons either.