Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd7ySB_ai9A&feature=youtu.be

Against all scientific explanations, Kuma managed to literally revive himself, heading to Egghead with his own powers to help protect Bonney. But how is that even possible? How was Kuma able to pass on his will after death to possess his body and take control of it?

What Happened to Kuma?

To understand exactly what happened to Kuma to start moving again, let’s first unpack the dialogue that Vegapunk gave us to explain this phenomenon:

What happened?
After all, I didn’t… install a self-destruct switch!!!
If you had become a walking bomb, then those guys would no doubt have used you as a kamikaze weapon…!!
But I still kept the condition!!
I gave you a Full-stop switch.
If it was pressed, then right now… beyond having no will, you should also be unable to follow any orders. You should be in a vegetative state…!!
Even putting aside the reason as to how he’s able to move…
there’s no way he would’ve known to get to this island where Bonney is!!
Scientifically speaking…!!
As I thought, could it be true…?
The key trait of the Buccaneer race is not their strong bodies…
Once upon a time, the Buccaneers…

Now unfortunately the dialogue cuts here, but let’s try to unpack it: essentially, Vegapunk is saying that to avoid the Government using Kuma as a bomber when they asked to give him a self-destruct switch, he instead gave him a “full-stop switch” that would completely block all his functions, shutting down the computer system that controls him and making it impossible for him to follow orders anymore.

However, this creates two problems: for one, he shouldn’t have been able to even know that he should come to Egghead. It’s obvious that he’s coming to the island for the sake of helping Bonney, but how did he even know that Bonney was on Egghead to begin with? That’s an information that only the Cipher Pol got after sighting her, but that’s not really the type of thing Kuma should have registered, especially without a conscience or a program.

The second issue is that Kuma shouldn’t be able to move at all to begin with. After all, he can’t follow orders, so the program wouldn’t even be able to work on its own to drive his body, but he also doesn’t have a will of his own anymore, so he wouldn’t be able to move his own body. You see, Kuma has essentially been killed, but his corpse is essentially being used now as a robot, being controlled by a computer program made to follow the orders of others. However, now that this computer possessing the body has been shut down too, his body should be just that, a corpse in a vegetative state, just a pile of inanimate metal.

And yet, clearly, some of his will still remains in his body. Kuma has visible memories of his past, and some emotion on his face, but at the same time, he can’t speak, he is being driven by pure animalistic instincts alone. So… how does he do this?

The Power of the Buccaneers

Well, evidently this has to do with what Vegapunk mentions is the key characteristic of the Buccaneer race, the race Kuma pertains to. As he explains, his sturdy body isn’t actually the key characteristic of the race. After all, we have often questioned what makes the Buccaneer race so special simply for having larger bodies, as it isn’t that particularly odd of a characteristic in the One Piece world. We have several characters such as Whitebeard or Kaidou who are around the same size and have similarly sturdy bodies, but are not Buccaneers. Many folks speculated that they may actually have been Buccaneers all along, but… what if we’re looking at it from the wrong perspective?

What if it’s not Kaidou and Whitebeard who are Buccaneers because of their strong bodies, but what if Kuma… doesn’t have a strong body because he is a Buccaneer? We always assumed, alongside characters like Vegapunk, that Kuma’s strong body was due to being a Buccaneer, but maybe it’s just the genes he gets from his dad for being a big person. After all, Big Mom already had a massive and incredibly powerful body when she was only 5, even larger than Kuma’s, but she is a confirmed human. A body that as an adult, was described as impenetrable unless it was particularly vulnerable. Furthermore, Kuma’s dad wasn’t exposed as a Buccaneer until a blood test from Kuma’s birth had leaked from the hospital, so his size wasn’t even seen as necessarily a trait of being a Buccaneer, it was only the confirmed blood, just like how Vegapunk later confirmed Kuma was a Buccaneer only through a blood test.

So either being large and sturdy is a side trait of the Buccaneers that isn’t that important, or maybe it was just a trait inherent to Kuma’s sturdy body to begin with. But that’s not what matters, what makes the Buccaneer race a unique race is a different ability, and it’s one that Vegapunk likens to what is happening to Kuma right now.

And what is it that’s happening to Kuma? Well, we can describe it fairly easily: biologically speaking, Kuma is dead now. There should be no consciousness to control it, and the program has shut down as well. So his body may as well just be an inanimate object now. And yet, this inanimate object has been possessed by Kuma’s own will, as it’s evidently his will controlling the body, a will that is driven by the memories and simple instinct of wishing to protect Bonney. But then that would mean that Kuma, as a Buccaneer, has the power… to allow his will to possess inanimate objects.

How Devil Fruits Possess a Will of Their Own

And for as bizarre as that sounds, that is an element that is already very present in the series in two forms: the first being… as Zoan fruits are also inanimate objects that possess a will of their own.

It’s been stated how Zoan fruits have an actual will that allows them to influence and draw themselves around. This is particularly seen present in the fact that Zoan fruits can be fed to inanimate objects, allowing them to come alive as inanimate creatures. Vegapunk used this technology to create Lassoo, the dog cannon of Mr. 4 and Miss Merrychristmas, as well as Funkfreed, Spandam’s elephant sword. Kouzuki Sukiyaki also accidentally triggered this effect when he tried boiling a devil fruit in his kettle, causing it to come to live as a racoon dog.

In the case of Lassoo specifically, it was even stated back then all the way back in 2001 that it was a certain scientist in the Grand Line who had discovered the technology of how Zoan fruits could be fed to inanimate objects. Something to which Usopp replied and I quote “there’s no way that devil fruits possess a will of their own”.

So not only do Zoan devil fruits possess a will of their own, but this will can also take over inanimate objects to take a life of its own, even if technically the original host has already died. This is likely what explains Devil Fruits being “reborn” even after a user dies, as the myth of devil fruits states that a “devil” possesses your body and when you die, it simply leaves it for a new host in a new fruit. This is also explained as the reason why eating two devil fruits causes death, as it causes two different devils to enter into conflict.

This is also the reason as to why Luffy’s personality changes so much when he awakens in Gear 5th, such as laughing all the time or mentioning random things, such as quoting the lyrics of Binks’s Sake or the Dawn of the World interestingly enough. As it was explained by Vegapunk Shaka and the Road to Laugh Tale databook, when a Zoan devil fruit user awakens, they achieve a transformation that draws out the will of the Zoan within.

If the user’s will is strong enough, they will be able to resist the devil’s will taking over, but in the case of a weak user, the will of the fruit will take over, essentially killing the one who ate the fruit and taking control of their body, almost like a parasite. The databook clarified this is what happened with the Impel Down Jailer Beasts like the Minotaurus, who were originally humans who ate Zoan fruits, but upon awakening, they failed due to having a weak will and the fruit took over control of their brain, hijacking their consciousness and leaving them with brutish animalistic instincts.

Does that sound familiar? Because it’s essentially what Kuma is doing here, in a sense. Despite having technically “died”, now that the programming has been turned off and his body is, essentially, empty of a host, his own will is taking over and exerting control over it to fulfill his own primal desires. Much like the jailer beasts, Kuma seems to be driven by his brutish animalistic instincts; he isn’t speaking, nor trying to really think much about the context of the situation, such as the danger that Sakazuki posed to him, but he is driven by the sole instinct of being drawn towards Bonney and aiming to protect her at all costs, driven by his core memories of everything that happened.

So does the power of the Buccaneers potentially tie with the ability to pass on one’s will even beyond death? Inherited will has always been taken as a philosophical concept, essentially that you only die when you are forgotten, so if people inherit your dreams, then they can keep you alive that way. But what if the Buccaneers found a very real way to achieve that, allowing will to possess inanimate objects, or even possess living beings? Your soul disappears as you die, but maybe your own memories and desires can find a way to survive and be inherited even beyond eath.

The myth of the creation of devil fruits mentions that the devil fruits are the incarnation of the Sea Devil, and it’s already been strongly implied in the story by this point that the Devil may be Imu directly, especially with the powers he is able to confer and his imagery as the Devil. But maybe Imu took advantage of Buccaneer technology, or even enslaved the race and took control of them to create devil fruits in some form or another. Regardless of how that happened, we still lack enough details to really fully make out the specifics, but what matters to us is one particular detail: the connection between Joyboy and the Buccaneers.

Who was Joyboy?

Because it’s been mentioned before how Kuma’s lifelong dream was to become a “Superhero” like Nika, but it was also mentioned how wanting to become like Nika is the reason behind why the Buccaneer race must be enslaved for their crime.

What this seems to imply is that the original Joyboy may actually have been a Buccaneer, which would also explain the big hat in Mary Geoise, as proportions wise it’s basically the perfect size for someone as big as Kuma, a Buccaneer.

So let’s recap for a moment about Nika: we now know that Nika was not a real person. We know this through the fact that we have been told that Mythical Zoan fruits incarnate fantastical beasts, creatures that never actually existed, but even beyond that, we’ve gotten direct statements confirming that Nika is “just a legend”, a character of fiction that never really existed. And the fact that Nika has been described as a “superhero” also implies the idea that it’s just a fictional cartoonish superhero, but one that people came to venerate as a god in the hopes that he could save them from their suffering by simply making them laugh.

However, there was one person during the Void Century that did literally become “Nika”, making the fictional superhero reality through the fruit that was the Hito Hito no Mi, Mythical Model: Nika. This person came to be known through the superhero nickname of “Joyboy”. The original user of the fruit, the first Joyboy, died during the Void Century, but the fruit would then use its will to escape from the Government for 800 years, causing no one to awaken it again until the present when it would draw itself to Luffy and choose him as its successor, making Luffy the second “Joyboy” of the present.

But as we see, part of Nika’s own personality has been passed onto the fruit itself, such as laughing all the time. It should be noted that this only manifests during Luffy’s awakening, not his normal usual satatee, and even when awakened Luffy still claimed to be himself, showing he still has control over the will within his fruit. Still, this explains why Luffy randomly starts mentioning lyrics of Binks’s Sake or brings up the Dawn of the World, as fragments of Nika’s character, and potentially maybe even Joyboy’s own original memories, still remain ingrained within the bloodline elements of the fruit.

After all, as Vegapunk mentioned, bloodline elements, the genetic code, do seem to retain the memories of their original hosts. Oda particularly expositioned this plot point through S-Snake, who despite being a clone, still retained the instinct of the original Hancock to have affection for Luffy. So similarly, it’s possible that devil fruits may very well retain some of the memories of their original hosts or creatures they incarnate, ones that may resurface when awakened, but are still vague and diluted enough that they are difficult to make out fully.

And perhaps the power of the Buccaneers played exactly into that, allowing in some form to pass on their will onto inanimate objects. Maybe it’s not necessarily that all Zoan fruits are Buccaneers who became fruit devils or anything, but rather it’s possible that whoever created the fruits was able to replicate the scientific phenomenon of will remaining after death to make devil fruits reincarnate themselves, with Zoan fruits in particular also becoming outright conscious due to the way they work by letting you transform into other creatures. Much in the same way that Vegapunk accidentally caused S-Snake to retain memories, and clone an actual Mythical devil fruit as well, maybe the original creator of devil fruits, likely Imu, found a way to replicate this power of the Buccaneers.

So similarly, through this power, Kuma may have been able to possess his own body after death by allowing its will to take over even after it technically died, just like in the same way that a dog like Lassoo was able to take over an inanimate gun. However, the computer system that Vegapunk built likely took priority over controlling Kuma’s body, causing him to blindly follow orders and unable to manifest his own will, but now that the computer system has been essentially shut down, Kuma was free once again to take control over his body, driving him to his instinct of being drawn towards Bonney to protect her.

Who is the iron giant?

And so this brings us around full circle onto the big elephant, nay, the big giant in the room. Because isn’t that also technically what happened to the iron giant? Vegapunk noted that the peculiar trait of the iron giant is that it doesn’t have a command cabin within it. So unlike the VegaForce or the Franky Shogun, the Iron Giant is not a mech meant to be piloted from within. It’s a robot that moves on its own right. We assumed this worked like Kuma, being a robot that follows orders from others, but what if it isn’t?

Vegapunk pointed out that he could never figure out what is it that drives the robot. He couldn’t get to command it or awaken it, and he could never figure out what power source was driving the robot to move on its own when, by all means, it’s just a hunk of junk that doesn’t have the circuits or electricity that would normally power a modern robot like the VegaForce.

But when you think about it… what if the robot has no power source? What if the robot simply has its own will. An aspect of science that even Vegapunk wasn’t able to fully figure out. Because the iron giant… is just like Kuma. It’s just a pile of metal that can’t be controlled or ordered anymore, yet it still moves… because it possesses a will of its own.

Think about it, the parallels between Kuma and the iron giant have been countless: the iron giant was essentially formally introduced and his role in the story explained on the exact same chapter as Kuma beginning to move and run away towards Egghead. Then Kuma repeated history by scaling the Red Line and assaulting Mary Geoise just like the original iron giant did, purely driven by instinct. Not saying there’s a reason behind it, but it’s definitely a relevant thematic parallel. And now both of them are awakened here on Egghead at the same time and both have a connection to the rhythm of the Drums of Liberation being so important to them that Oda has deliberately built up.

The iron giant awakened upon hearing the Drums of Liberation, its instincts being drawn to Joyboy. Meaning that this iron giant… may actually be a Buccaneer who has survived ever since the Void Century by passing its will onto this iron robot.

Admittedly, the iron giant is a bit bigger than the common Buccaneer, but there’s easy ways to explain this: either Buccaneers used to be a lot bigger, as they were believed by some to share blood with giants, but their blood got diluted over time with humans due to their species basically going extinct, or more simply this Buccaneer got augmented with a bigger body because why not, it’s cool.

But regardless, it would make perfect sense. Oda is introducing the narrative thread of a Buccaneer like Kuma being able to pass on his will beyond death onto his inanimate augment robotic body because he’s also trying to explain how a Buccaneer from the Void Century was able to pass on its will onto its own augmented robotic body and live on even beyond what counts as technical death.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean that these Buccaneers are still alive in the proper sense. Think of it more like their instincts living after death. So Kuma may actually be properly dead, but his own instinct of wishing to protect Bonney, the memories passed on through the bloodline elements, is still possessing and driving his body to fulfill his deepest desires. Perhaps in much the same way that the iron giant was also driven to climb the Red Line to attack Mary Geoise.

But okay, I know this may sound a bit crazy, in fact it could be completely off the mark, but… think about it. If this iron giant is actually a Buccaneer, then… who is he? He could just be some character from the Void Century we don’t yet know about, but what if he actually is someone we know? What if the will residing within the iron giant is actually… Joyboy himself?!!

Maybe the first user of the Nika fruit did indeed die and the fruit reincarnated, but its will remained lingering within this iron body. Then, 200 years ago, it reactivated, and its instinct drew it towards Mary Geoise. This is for two reasons: on one hand, Mary Geoise is obviously the home of its enemies. But for two, 900 years ago when this robot first came to be, there existed something before Mary Geoise was created 800 years ago. And that is the “God Country”, the nation of the Lunaria, which also served as a key central point for the people of the ancient kingdom, an immense kingdom which we know was formed by people of many races, but it kinda seems to imply that the God Country may have been a nexus for their kingdom.

Now I have a theory, which I know is wildly speculative, but I legitimately still like to think that Laugh Tale may actually be located where the God Country once was, but now it simply has been buried beneath Mary Geoise deep within the Red Line, where the Sun Tree Eve is. I know there’s a few things that may not add up about that, but let’s assume that Roger somehow found a secret passage or a way to enter that place within the Red Line and whatnot, as we still lack the details of how he got to the island.

So if that’s the case, and the One Piece still lays beneath Mary Geoise… what if that is what the iron giant was being drawn towards. What if the iron giant’s key instinct was to return towards the One Piece, its greatest desire, in the same way someone like Kuma is being drawn towards Bonney.

Well, we’re diving too deep into speculation here. Maybe the robot wasn’t after the One Piece, maybe the robot isn’t even Joyboy. But I think at least it’s quite likely that the iron giant is being driven by a buccaneer’s will, to parallel Kuma, or at the very least the same technology at play. It’s not just a robot following a set of programs, it’s a creature with its very own will, and one that may have witnessed some of the biggest secrets of the Void Century.

And think about it. Kuma arriving on Egghead and finally seeing Luffy transformed as Nika to the beat of the Drums of Liberation while the iron giant directly parallels him and also gets to witness Nika in action once more after 800 years. As everything falls into place, Oda may very well be setting up a plot twist of iron gigantic proportions in what may be one of the most cathartic payoffs in the entire series, and I can’t wait to see what he’s got in store.