Zoro is not the first mate of the straw hat Pirates or the Vice Captain deputy director co-chairman or number two in the L Zoro is simply Zoro and this is one of the biggest misconceptions in all of the one piece in Canon material Zoro has never not once been referred to as the first mate and that's because zor's position in the crew was not intentional it was the result of a series of pre-production incidents which pushed air oda's preferred Vice Captain out of the role had a massive effect on the series as a whole and
completely changed how Oda viewed the structure of piracy so what we should do first is we should actually Define what a first mate is to the uncultured swine this might seem like a fairly straightforward discussion because Zoro heill he was the first to join Luffy's crew and they're both very good friends one even might say mates if you were particularly Australian but the actual meaning of the first mate title has nothing to do with the order in which people join a crew it signifies the individual with the most responsibility and Authority behind the captain which
you may think was zor but that was not the original plan when Odo was still planning and sketching out one piece he had a fairly clear idea of what would eventually come to pass which can be seen in the early known sketches of the straw hat crew which not only includes the OG East Blue 5 but we also see prototypes of smoking Chopper thin Frankie Cowboy Brooke and a Fishman that would evolve into a jinbe the only unplanned crew member was Nik Robin but in addition to their designs Oda had also quite clearly planned out
each crew member's role and what has always struck me as endlessly fascinating is that the Prototype Usopp character was the Vice Captain Andor first M of the crew which I think is why Usopp and Luffy have inherited one of the strongest Dynamics within the straw hats the two of them they were instant best friends so Zoro wasn't actually supposed to have as big of a role on the crew as he does in one piece not originally in fact I'd say he was probably intended to be around equal waiting with Sanji and one of the reasons
why I say that is because Oda also made a prototype manga called the Great swordsman about a rivalry between a Samurai and a knight which is the earliest known appearance of a prototype son Ani named Romeo who was going to have a bitter rivalry with RMA the character who inspired Zoro so what changed what ultimately elevated Zoro to that second in command position that we all assume he has in theory if Odo wanted to go with his original idea then he probably would have had Luffy meet Usopp first and that could very well have been
the plan but what changed is that during the Prototype years Oda briefly had the idea of turning one piece into a dual protagonist series like the great swordsman focusing on both Luffy and Zoro the idea being that Oda was a bit nervous that Luffy was too goofy of a main character to carry the series on his shoulders alone so for a while Oda was very intent on introducing a more traditionally cool character as soon as possible to balance out Luffy's wackiness and add a bit more broad appeal to the early days of One Piece obviously
the Dual protagonist idea never quite came to fruition but that is why Luffy meet Zora first because Oda felt that the series needed that contrast to soon as possible and so zor swooped in to take that second in command position away from Uso and at one stage he was was also going to take it away from Moji because there was also a point where Zoro was going to be a member of the buggy pirates in what has been described as an elder brother role so that's how all of the that happened and what we now
have to deal with is the aftermath which is The Accidental placement of Zoro in a role that Oda didn't originally intend for him and as a result there isn't a single occasion in one piece where Zoro is referred to as the first mate or the Vice Captain there were certainly a lot of times where Zoro is mistaken by other characters as the captain because he is ever so Powers some but my personal speculation is that Oda has never labeled Zoro as the first M of Vice Captain because in the early days he may still have
been planning to give Usopp that role however as things progressed Oda stopped seeing a need to define the first mate position before I continue I would be remiss not to mention that there is a piece of officialish media where Zoro is stated to be the first mate and that would be the one piece live action in episode five Luffy's feeling a bit down after the gar incident and so Nami Zoro and Usopp agree that someone should have a talk with him with nami stating to Zoro you're his first mate kind of seems like that falls
under your job description which is a line that kind of annoys me not because they're defining Zoro as the first mate in this universe that's cool but because it's not consistent with the previous four episodes Zoro begrudgingly accepts nami's logic here and goes to have a very brief talk with Luffy but he shouldn't have because in the live action at this stage he still hasn't actually joined the crew yet let alone taken on a role after Shell's Town Zoro and Nami were still insisting that they weren't a crew and Zoro doesn't actually officially join until
episode 6 so calling him the first mate here doesn't make any sense what I think happened here is that the writer for episode 5 assumed that Zoro was going to join the crew after shelltown because that's out happened in the manga however the writers of episodes 1 to 4 didn't do that at any stage because they wanted to keep the whole not a crew gag going instead and so what you end up with here is a fairly gaping plot hole but the tldr is that in the live action yes Zoro is the first mate but
it makes no sense and in the manga Zoro isn't the first mate but also kind of is thanks to a potentially confusing series of reproduction events and this really hasn't become any clearer over time these days whenever the first mate question comes up people are very quick to point their hand sausages at the color spread of chapter 131 very lovely piece of artwork featuring many familiar fan favorites but hang on a second have you noticed the trend with all of these characters silvas Ray Lee Ben Beckman king kakori and the rest ah these are all
of the characters who are either labeled as or assumed to be the right-hand men of their respective captains although in kak Casey's less of a first mate and takes on the role of an Asian firstborn charged with the sacred duty of honoring his mother although he's not actually the firstborn child that would be Charlotte periso and he's busy luring children onto his candy escalator which is the thing that actually happened he told the children to quote lick his candy escalator but here Zoro is smack bang in the middle and thus confirmed as the first mate
viice captain of the straw hats Done Deal Video over internet man like And subscribe but there's just one big problem here which is is that Oda then went on to go out of his way to confirm that Zoro isn't the first mate as a result of this color spread in the SPs of volume 102 a very excitable fictional pirate fan asks the following question hello adachi looking at the cover page of chapter 131 it seems like beo is the number two of the hot Pirates right I was surprised because I thought that penguin shachi and
beo were all tied for number two are you saying that beo with sulong is the strongest between them and to this OD replies that cover huh similar to Zoro not all of those characters have the title of first mate I selected the number twos as I saw fit usually shachi and penguin are more dependable but those two who have seen beo sulong form are no match for beo in terms of fighting Power I acknowledge Him so if anything what we have here is a power scaling diagram and not a first mate Vice Captain diagram and
another interesting point is that Oda post time-lapses of the production process of all of his color spreads and the idea of drawing all of these number twos was a bit of an accident if you look at the time-lapse the original idea was to draw all of the important Swordsmen in one piece which at one stage included characters like mihawk and tashigi but Oda abandoned that idea and use the leftover Zoro to spawn the eventual color spread and really it's just fascinating that Odin not only goes out of his way in series not to Define Zoro
as the first mate but actively confirms that he doesn't have this title in extended media and on top of that and this is something that we rarely think about Oda almost never uses the first mate or Vice Captain titles in one piece in general there are shockingly few characters in the series as a whole who have the title of first mate or Vice Captain in fact almost no pirate Crews use those titles I can only give you eight characters who have been defined as such and now to be fair one of them is Silva Ry
who was formerly introduced as the first mate of the Roger Pirates and another very prominent figure is Ben Beckman who was labeled as the first mate of the redhair Pirates all the way back in the SPs of Volume 5 but beyond the original concepts of One Piece the title usage here gets a bit more shaky during East blue we encounter Moji and Jango both of whom were first mates of the buggy and black cat Pirates respectively and then we don't see a single other first mate again until G where we meet big knife sarus first
mate of the Bellamy Pirates and a character who I don't think anyone even knows exists named okame who was given the title of first mate of the hakah Haka pirates in the grand blue daa file that's an example of how far I have to dig to find first mates in the series they are exceedingly rare and I'll tell you why in a second but our final Cannon first mates Abu who was said to be the first mate of the hoo Navy that we met andr Rosa and Aladdin who was the first mate of the sun
Pirates during gin base captaincy and is now assumably the captain himself but that's it that's all I got for you out of over a thousand characters in 27 years of fictional pirate storytelling there are only eight first mates Andor Vice captains and I think a big reason for this is that very early on Oda accidentally broke the pirate mold with his awkward zor situation and it made him realize is that each pirate crew operates differently according to the values of their Captain this can be seen most prominently with the four Emperors Whitebeard doesn't have a
first mate because the goal of his crew is to have and nurture a family Whitebeard was a father who loved all of his sons equally with the responsibility of a first mate being divided over his 16 Division commanders and Marco might be the first division commander and he did inherit captaincy after whitebeard's death but the division numbers themselves do not dictate hierarchy there's also no functional difference between the first Division and the 16th division they were all loved equally by Daddy Whitebeard for a more dysfunctional family Dynamic you have the big mom Pirates who also
follow a non-traditional structure with the sweet Commander system which designated Vice Captain responsibility between four individuals however it also gets a bit complicated because the big mom Pirates follow a family hierarchy as well we've mentioned him before in this video but although he wasn't a sweet Commander Charlotte peris perah the first born held more Authority than kakuri the Charlotte family were a bit of a big mess there was no clearly defined second in command it really was just a system designed to play Kate their mother as best they could then with kaido you've got the
Beast Pirates Who value only strength but again divide the first mate role across three calamities Blackbeard then has his 10 Titanic captains cross Guild has probably the most shall we say unique command structure in modern piracy do Flamingo had his four card suit officers and so on and so forth the whole idea of having a first mate almost seems like an outdated relic of an idea in one piece which is why we only tend to encounter them in the old days of Roger and silv RI in the modern day we've evolved beyond that and that
is seen most clearly within the straw hats themselves the straw hats are a crew focused on dreams and adventure and so Luffy doesn't refer to people by their traditional roles aboard a pirate vessel but instead by their Ambitions and a lot of the time these do crossover like Frankie's dream of wanting to build a ship that can sail around the world you know makes sense to call him the ship right but there are some where it doesn't make sense and Zoro is one of them his dream is to become the world's greatest swordsman so to
Luffy he doesn't see Zoro as a first mate he sees Zoro as a swordsman which is incredibly respectful he doesn't try to force Zoro into a traditional pirate structure instead he SE zor's dream and actively supports it creating a new role as he does with each and every other crew member when it comes to the issue of trust I often say this with Luffy but you either have it or you don't there are no levels of trust and so there's not really any need to designate a second in command either because each Straw Hat has
their moments where they fulfill that role and as much as you can definitely say that Zoro often becomes the default second in command there are so many situations where that role Falls to Sanji in fact I think if you went through and tallied all the moments where they each take on that position they probably be about equal but each Straw Hat has at some point taken on that second in command position and that is why this crew is particularly unbeatable the straw hats are extremely modular and can function perfectly in any configuration to the point
where there's no need for a traditional hierarchy aside from the captain because putting people in cleanly defined boxes like first mate or Vice Captain is the antithesis of Freedom Luffy would never do such a thing which is why Zoro has never been the first mate and will simply Always Be The Swordsman of the straw hat Pirates
