Something I’ve realized about Crocodile that maybe is obvious to other people but I’ve never paid enough attention too is how much value he places in competence.
For example, when he shanks Robin, one of the things Crocodile complements her for is the fact that she was a good partner and employee. Crocodile doesn’t trust people, and he doesn’t value loyalty. After all, Mr. 3 knows that he’s a wanted man within the company and is risking his life to make sure Crocodile knows that the Straw Hats and Vivi are still alive, and Crocodile does his damnedest to kill him for his efforts.
So if Crocodile want personal loyalty from his minions, what does he want? Nothing more than a job well done. There’s no questioning that Mr. 3 completely botched his mission at Little Garden, and when he lays out the depth of his failure Croc flips his shit.
But the failure isn’t just Mr. 3′s, is it? Crocodile was the one who didn’t recognize that Mr. 3 wasn’t the person who was talking with him over the phone, and it’s Crocodile who didn’t pay enough attention to the mysterious disappearance of the Unluckies. It’s Crocodile’s own punishment-driven policies that prevented Mr. 3 from reporting the truth until it’s almost too late, and his paranoid secrecy that resulted in Mr. 2 not recognizing Vivi and the Straw Hats as enemies of Baroque Works.
There are many ways where Crocodile foils both Vivi and Luffy, but as we’ll see later on in this chapter when those two have their big fight, one of the things that separates them is that both Vivi and Luffy cop up to their mistakes and they make the changes needed to become better leaders, whereas Crocodile can never be wrong. He’s like Kuro in that way--always believing himself to be the smartest man in the room, someone who can’t fail because he’s planned for every contingency.
But you can’t plan for the Straw Hats, and judging by how Crocodile acts when Sanji pulls his Mr. Prince gambit later on, he can’t stand that, and it results in his undoing.
