So something I’ve been realizing, (after rereading Law’s flashback for like the 20th time) is that fanon vs canon interpretation of Rocinante is very… different. Like occasionally, are we even talking about the same person kind of different. I feel like a lot of people overplay him as sweet and gentle and clumsy, while at the same time downgrading his competence. Like, yes, Roci can be sweet and gentle (and the clumsiness is ingrained) but 92% of the time he’s not.
Canon Rosi is harsh. He curses like a sailor and smokes like a chimney. He has the strength to toss grown men around like toys and he uses it. The first few months of the Find-Law-a-Cure Roadtrip he basically lugged Law around like a sack of misbehaving rice with a exasperated look, through screaming protests and 10 different assassination/escape attempts. If we’re talking about competence: this is the guy who fooled Donquixote Doflamingo for four years. That’s not even counting Minion island, where Rocinante both outwitted AND out-gambitted his older brother, while half dead and with the entire Donquixote Family on his ass. He would have gotten away too, if it weren’t for the extremely inopportune coincidence with Vergo.
So give me this Rocinante. Give me Rocinante who has a mind like a steel trap and a look that can freeze a grown-man cold at thirty paces. Give me Rocinante who was Heart Executive for four years and Doflamingo’s right hand; an executive who more than lived up to his title. Give me Rocinante who is Doflamingo’s younger brother, with that same incendiary temper. That same capacity for whip-crack violence if you shove fast and hard enough at his few (present, specific) triggers. Remember: burning hospitals, the staff cowering in the aftermath. Give me Donquixote Rocinante.
And, despite this, inspite of this, because of this, give me Rocinante who has a moral compass that points unshakeably north; give me Rocinante with a conviction of bedrock, a patience deep and steely and unshakable as a seabed. (there is no room for anything less, see, when you grow up with Doffy at two points and have Garp as one of three primary adult figures in the interim.) Give me Rocinante who gives up his career, his mission, his loyalties, his life for the sake of one angry dying boy. Give me the Roci who crawled from the wreck and ruin of his childhood with his empathy burning, even when the rest of him was nothing but skin and bones and heartache.
(Give me the Roci who loves too much. He does not know how to forget, even when he should, even when it would have been a kindness. This is a truth: he never could have pulled that trigger, on Minion. Roci can learn to hate his older brother but he can never unlearn what it means to love him, and he definitely does not know how to bury him. So give me Roci who cries for the caustic little boy who’s done nothing but give him grief over the past months and months, the Roci who’s last actions are used to oversee that Law will be safe and free and beholden to no one.)
And they’re the same person. And that’s the point. That’s what makes him such a powerful character. Roci is harsh edges and whip-smarts and military training, the smoke to his brother’s fire. He can be brutally cold; he can be explosively irritated; he can out-stubborn a D. That’s why his overwhelming empathy and compassion is so powerful. It’s the juxtaposition: between both his exterior countenance and his inner capacity for kindness, between him and Doflamingo, whom he both mirrors and diametrically counters.
TLDR: give me DONQUIXOTE ROCINANTE YOU COWARDS. Oda gifted this guy eighty layers in eight chapters and NO ONE’S USING HIM TO HIS CANON POTENTIAL WHY??
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