Matching crews and drawing parallels became the norme in our community and with the recent chapters people became very toxic about how certain Yonko Commanders aren't living up to their names like King and expecting more comparing him to the likes of Katakuri or Marco
And in this thread I wanted to show that there's no "YC1 level" it's simplistic view that got built inside the community and it stuck but if you look deep in the story Oda never portrayed YC1 as a faction and grouping ppl like Beckman , Marco , Katakuri , King , Shiryu , Sabo , Zoro etc together as equals or at same level ... I would go as far as say that some of these are leagues above others in the "YC1 level" that ppl use regularly
Let's start by the variant Crew structures and dynamics that Oda presented in the series by using the 8 strongest crews we know of and I divided them into 2 groups :
- Very Small Compact Group with really strong top individuals like
Roger Pirates ,
Rocks Pirates ,
Red Haired Pirates and
StrawHat Pirates
Each of these crew share almost the same dynamic of having very few crew members but to compensate for that have extremely strong individuals at the helm and the difference between the Captain and his Vice-Captain is almost non-existant and is portrayed by Oda in numerous occassions as duos/partners , Luffy/Zoro , Shanks/Beckman , Roger/Rayleigh (we still dont know much about Rocks but I'm assuming the same dynamic)
- Large Organization from top to bottom , that has much less emphasis on it's top combatant and there's a clear distinct gap between the Captain and his top subordinates and these crews would be
WhiteBeard Pirates ,
BlackBeard Pirates ,
Big Mom Pirates and
Beast Pirates
These Crew share a very close general idea but obviously a few differences in the specific structures like the DC/TC system of WB/BB and the AllStar/SC system of Kaido/BM ... But even with those differenecs it's still the same with the fact that the Captain in these crews clearly distances himself from the rest of the crew
WhiteBeard calls Marco and the rest of his commanders as his sons , Big Mom looks down on her children and doesn't consider Katakuri an equal to her , BB doesn't care about crewmates and only power hungry and Kaido is the clearly the guy that has most distance with his crewmates as with the general ideology of his crew being a Meritocracy
With this being said we have 2 very different visions that Oda presents us in the story and the terms of YC1 YC2 YC3 etc were never mentioned in the manga at all but just fan made and concluded off either strength or bounty and I think it's far from the truth to say someone like Beckman who's more close to the Emperors themselves should be compared to King or Katakuri
For Shanks' crew for example to make any sense as a
Yonko of the sea , they need to bridge the military gap and have quality over quantity thus making Benn Beckman , Lucky Roo and Yassopp all superior to every single other First-Mate of other Yonko crews (King/Katakuri/Shiryu?) ... This was put most clearly by Oda in chapter 957 when he presented each Emperor bounty he made sure to mention what made each Emperors the powerhouse they are right now and for Shanks it was his crewmmates that got most of the hype like I wouldn't be surprised if Beckman , Roux or Yasopp had higher bounty than BB himself a rival Emperor.
At the end please stop wanting to match each crew ignoring their background and their system/structure and make it simple like :
Beckman = Katakuri = King = Marco = Shiryu = Zoro
Roux = Smoothie = Queen = Vista = Pizzaro = Sanji
Yasopp = Cracker = Jack = Jozu = Vasco = Jinbei
That's not how Oda presented in the story nor would it make sense trying to put it as simple as that (ppl in every top 30 list do the same cliché of listing the "3rd"s from each crew than the "2nd"s than the "1st"s than start scaling to Admirals and Emperors without putting any thought into it ) ...
YC are not same level so stop comparing them to each other expecting the same thing and lastly because Luffy's crew fits the first category I believe Zoro/Sanji/Jinbei will be much closer to Luffy than ppl expect them to be and they will surpass every YC very soon and by the end of the series just like Rayleigh/Gaban/Oden they would be comparable to Emperors themselves.
