For all the flack I throw at One Piece, at least it commits to its plot lines. Like, if a character is dead, they stay dead. I can commend a Shonen for sticking to its guns because a lot of them didn’t use to. Especially when it’s, like, major characters that have been a constant since the manga first started, back in the 90s. So, when the recent Wano arc concluded, fans were left wondering over the fates of both Big Mom and Kaido.

Honestly, a lot of people were so sure that both Charlotte Linlin, aka Big Mom, and Kaido Of The Beasts somehow escaped the lava lake unscathed and were just lying low, recuperating after Wano was done. So, when the Road to Laugh Tale vol. 2, a One Piece special being published in Weekly Shonen Jump, confirmed that two Yonko had been defeated and not coming back? It sealed the deal. Big Mom and Kaido are officially dead.

To put to scale how big this is, the Yonko are the Four Emperors of the high seas. They are the meanest, most notorious Pirates in all of the Pirate world, ruling over the second half of the Grand Line, aka the New World. And Big Mom and Kaido were part of them. That’s an entire half of the ruling power of the New World gone, within one arc. Both of them were hyped as some of the biggest antagonists in the story for so long that to see them confirmed as not coming back is more of a shock than you can imagine.

This fundamentally shifted the direction where One Piece was going. After all, the entire plot is centered around Monkey D. Luffy and him going against the Yonko and the World Government to become the best Pirate in the world. And suddenly, two of the Yonko have been decimated, leaving a power vacuum. So, in today’s Lore Analysis, let’s discuss what the defeat of Big Mom and Kaido could mean for One Piece in the long run.

Big Mom And Kaido: What Happens To the Yonko Now?

As stated before, the Yonko are four of the most powerful characters in One Piece. For any of them to go down, it should’ve been a huge battle where Luffy and the rest of Straw Hat Pirates went against them one on one.

Except that didn’t happen. During the events of Chapter 1050, the volcano lake that Big Mom and Kaido had disappeared into, suddenly erupted. This eruption was a disaster on a massive scale that could not be contained. At first, fans thought that they may be escaped into the blanket of fuming clouds that came from the volcano, but the eruption would still mean they were burnt to a crisp.

At that point, their fates remained fairly undecided. I mean, this was Big Mom and Kaido we’re talking about here. The two happen to be more than resilient than others and their characters had been in working for so long. Surely, we had to get a big showdown, much bigger than having them comically explode in lava. They had to come back, right?

Why Eiichiro Oda Had To Kill Two Of The Yonko Off:

So, they aren’t coming back. And the fault is no one’s but Eiichiro Oda, aka the mangaka for One Piece, and his writing expertise. Because while he set them up as these untouchable foes that will meet Luffy would meet at the end, nothing is more damning to their demise than the fact that the One Piece Special opens with ‘The two Emperors have fallen!’.

So, why did they have to go? Simple, they got too powerful. We already know the final battle will be extremely detailed, the culmination of more than two decades of story writing. It will have so many characters to give an end to. I’m talking about the Admirals, Blackbeard, Shanks, and the like, that would be Luffy’s main focus. So, Big Mom and Kaido would fall flat when compared, they’d just add too much noise to a climax that’s already super complicated.  

Their combined ambition would detract from the final conflict, so they needed to be killed off. However, it’s not all bad. They had gotten enough attention as a villain in One Piece, so laying them to rest now seems right.