Crocodile Quotes

Crocodile invites contempt and gets agreement. Luffy has just described Vivi as someone who does not want a single person killed in the rebellion, and when Crocodile sneers at that and asks whether he agrees, Luffy says that's right. The villain's point deserves its strongest form, because it is half true. Stopping a civil war without casualties is the kind of plan a person makes before seeing one. Luffy's reply is best taken as a concession. He grants the naivety and keeps the conclusion: as long as Crocodile is around she will kill herself trying to stop him, so he will finish Crocodile himself. That answers the objection without denying it. Idealism can be foolish and still be worth protecting, by someone prepared to do the fighting it refuses. Crocodile's reply on the next page, that he has deserted dozens of fools like Luffy, shows why he cannot follow the argument. To him attaching yourself to a stranger is the mistake. To Luffy it is the reason he is in this desert at all.

Over the previous two pages Crocodile was sorting everyone into types with total confidence: Vivi a peace-loving fool, Luffy an incorrigible one, dozens more like him already deserted. Then his own partner declines to fit. When Luffy calls Crocodile the fool, Nico Robin laughs. Crocodile asks whether she wants to die too; she smiles, says so be it if that is his wish, and leaves, pausing only to remind him that he promised not to call her by that name. A threat that frightens nobody has failed, and this is the one thing in these pages he admits he does not know. It also does structural work. Oda needs Robin unreadable for now, and the cleanest way to establish that is to let the man who reads everyone else confess he cannot read her. The page gives the reader no more access than it gives him. Her motives stay offstage, and the villain is made to say so.