User blog:Kaido King of the Beasts/Big Mom Will Betray Kaido

I noticed upon going to the blogs page prior to writing this that there are now 6,000 blogs on the wiki! So of course I deleted a blog to make this one the 6000th am writing the extremely special 6001st blog! What a milestone, amirite?

Discussion and speculation are still high in the air over how Luffy and his army are going to take down Kaido. Oda himself wasn't even sure just a few years ago how Kaido was going to go down. Kaido shrugged off everything Luffy threw at him and beat him with one hit. This isn't a particularly new situation, given that a huge element of One Piece is the heroes getting trounced by the bad guys in their first battle, but then using willpower and new techniques (whose origins can at times be questionable) to emerge triumphant in the end. If anything, Wano actually feels like the most realistic of these kinds of plots so far, as weeks have passed since the first encounter with Kaido and we have explicitly seen Luffy, Zoro, and Sanji receiving upgrades to their abilities, not to mention they have many competent allies. But still, Kaido's power level continues to feel sort of unattainable. Maybe it's Oda's fault, maybe it's the fanbase and their hype level. But even though I could perfectly see Wano being another story of Luffy and his comrades rising past the steep odds to triumph over their biggest challenge yet, part of me wonders if the story could go another way. And the key to that other path lies in Big Mom.

Honestly, beating Kaido seems nearly impossible on its own, and I've struggled to try and predict how both Kaido AND Big Mom could lose in this arc as I honestly can't comprehend any natural or satisfying way that supreme victory could be achieved. However, I then started contemplating the possibility of Big Mom turning on Kaido and aiding in his downfall, and the more I think about it, the more sense I think it could make. Here are the reasons why.


 * To be clear, I do think forming an alliance with Kaido to take over the world is perfectly in-character for Big Mom, given her past with the Rocks Pirates and the values she has as a pirate. So if this prediction ends up being wrong, I'm not gonna view their alliance as bad writing or anything. However, I do think Big Mom could also serve her interests by betraying Kaido.
 * The Whole Cake Island Arc showed that Big Mom can be an extremely treacherous woman despite her outward appearance as a fair businesswoman. She wanted Germa's technology much more than she actually wanted Germa as allies, and so attempted to cut out the middleman during the wedding. So the question here is, does Kaido possess anything that Big Mom might consider to be more worthwhile than he himself is? I think so.
 * That thing is his Road Poneglyph. Big Mom has no better opportunity than now to snag it, and get two Road Poneglyphs in her possession. In my opinion, this would help the structure of the story for multiple reasons:
 * Currently, it feels to me like the Straw Hats are the only ones with any sort of real shot at acquiring all four Road Poneglyphs, while the Yonko have been locked in a stalemate for decades and have served as little more than roadblocks for the stones. Big Mom acquiring multiple Road Poneglyphs would make her a more serious contender for Pirate King, and given that the world is on a crash course to great change I think that the stakes in the race to Laugh Tale need to be raised appropriately by having more of the top contenders hatch and execute unprecedented plots. I expect Blackbeard to find his way to Laugh Tale through some sort of means by the climax of the series, but Big Mom becoming a contender would help add more layers to the tension.
 * Given most fan predictions on how the remainder of the series is going to go, the most popular speculated location for the lost Road Poneglyph is Elbaf. It has long been expected that Big Mom would factor heavily into the future "Elbaf Arc" ever since we saw her flashback, and so if the last Road Poneglyph is indeed connected to Elbaf, everything would be set up perfectly for Big Mom to return there.

But wouldn't that be cheap?

Obviously, Luffy and his allies receiving help from another Yonko against a Yonko would likely not please certain fans. I personally don't wish for Big Mom to become an ally of the Straw Hats, like some fans are predicting. However, I think Big Mom turning on Kaido and aiding in his defeat could still be handled relatively well without making anything feel cheap or undeserved. To start, if she does indeed turn on Kaido, I wouldn't expect her to actually fight alongside the alliance. Rather, it seems more likely that she would turn on him prior to the final battle, weaken him with a powerful attack, and then leave him to the alliance while she goes to steal his Road Poneglyph. So basically, she would do something similar to what Law did on Dressrosa: weaken the villain which aids the hero later on.

Though even then, you may not like the idea of the alliance taking down a weakened Kaido. However, I think this situation would provide a more clear stepping stone towards battling the other Yonko on the way to Laugh Tale, and also answer concerns over whether the alliance can realistically beat Kaido. If Luffy and his alliance army can take down Kaido with a little help from Big Mom, then a logical next step would be Luffy and his crew and maybe some allies fighting a healthier, more dangerous Big Mom on Elbaf. Following that would be the Straw Hats taking on the Blackbeard Pirates by themselves during or near the series climax, and Luffy getting a 1v1 against his greatest challenger in Blackbeard.

Obviously there are still a lot of variables that should be factoring into this arc and the story in the future, particularly the Marines and World Government, and Kaido seems to have a big plan that could very well send things in an entirely different direction. But out of all my speculation about how Wano will end, this theory feels the most logical and the most satisfying to me. I look forward to all of you disagreeing in the comments and telling me I'm a clown.

Will Big Mom betray Kaido? Yes No

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