@SunnyBlue:
Based on the path Oda has taken with her character for the past 100+ chapters, I think it likely she will be a supporting character.
Oda let his supporting characters have dream to fulfil. I could see Carrot travelling to explore the world, just not with the strawhats.:ninja:
Understandable. Rather than her dream of travelling to explore the world, what stands out here to me is that she is set and expected to do something relevant and to help Luffy reach his goals. Those are Pedro's words, not mine.
With that considered, we could consider several possible outcomes. Becoming a supporting character is plausible if it manages to fulfill both her vague dream and her expectations of plot relevance. But I really think becoming a Straw Hat is the easiest solution. Of course, that may be my bias.
Oda make Chopper & Carrot have a 'sibling' relationship because they could pass on as actual siblings. They look very alike & have similar traits. There is a reason why some of us keep calling her a chopper clone.
Yeah, and this reason is one of my pet peeves with this thread.
Carrot and Chopper have similar traits. With that much I can agree. But the differences are key and people here treat them like they are diluted or have no meaning, while Oda himself takes Carrot and Chopper in last week's chapter and draws their reactions to an uncertain danger twice, juxtaposed to further emphasize how polar opposite they are. Personality-wise, there's not much of an overlap. Chopper is insecure and shy, Carrot is self-confident and hyperactive. Chopper typically acts nervous and coward towards a threat, Carrot acts all excited and impulsive. Chopper is gullible, Carrot shows curiosity. Sure, they share traits: both are naïve, both are interested on the outside world due to living in a single island their whole lives, would like to explore it and knew nothing about its reach. There are parallels in their stories, like how they finally managed to leave their country for the first time with Luffy, or (a kind of anecdotal one) the way their respective mentors ended up dying. These parallels aside, though, the characters are similar on a surface level, not more. Once you bother to dig even a slight deeper this comparison doesn't hold water.
And it makes sense because their backgrounds are similar but different. Chopper was trained as a doctor and Carrot was trained as a warrior, that alone makes their attitude entirely different, specially when a threat is approaching. We could also speculate that Pedro as a mentor and the surroundings of Carrot were at least slightly different than what Chopper got; after all, Zou is an "island" in the New World, and we know of various members of the Mink Tribe who navigated around the world (Carrot in chapter 858: "Giants! So they exist"), Pedro for starters.
In terms of physical aspect… ugh. I can't take that seriously, I'm sorry. Body complexion? No. Height? No. Gender? No. Color scheme? No. Identifying details? No. Their resemblance is: both have fur and both are cute animal/human hybrids. People who claim that they can't pick them apart are either blind or trolling. Just like how people don't mistake Pedro with Chopper or Pedro with Carrot, they shouldn't be able to mistake Chopper with Carrot. I'm sorry I sound so worked up about this but there are limits I just can't bring myself to find worthy of respect. Not to mention when this supposed clonal resemblance is used to push headcanon stuff like "Chopper can learn Electro or Sulong" that doesn't make any narrative sense with the current information and only barely as a speculation.
And this whole talk is not denying that they are similar, and that Oda perhaps intended to develop a sibling relationship between them because they could connect on a deeper level. I'm fine with that. The same as Luffy and Usopp sharing a bond that none of the crew share because they are the same age, they both wanted to be pirates their whole lives, they share a connection with Shanks and the Red Hair Pirates and, on a more basic level, they are fun-loving and would spend all day doing stupid slapstick things together.
So in short: Carrot and Chopper are similar, and that may be the narrative or at least extradiegetic reason why they get along so well. They are not clones. That is a hyperbole I can't take seriously at all.
I will admit that I don't like the lookout argument & don't buy it either. It is one of the most mundane task that not a single crew in the series has a dedicated lookout. The strawhats also have a rotating system for a lookout which make it for even more redundant. The lookout argument also has a bad history of being used to push nonsensical candidate.
(At least Burgess was a helmsman. So Jinbe being one was acceptable. Jinbe also has tons of other qualities to be a strawhat.)
My position with the job arguments in general and in specific for Carrot is more of a passive one. First, we'll see if she joins or not. Then, if she joins, being a lookout doesn't sound bad, so why not. Basically I don't think Carrot being a lookout should be a factor in her nakamization, but if it gives her a clear role to perform once she's there, then it's okay.
And yes, I know that the lookout argument has been used to push candidates pretty often. But to dismiss the argument just because it was used to push other candidates that perhaps made much less sense, or at least made sense in a different way than Carrot, is a fallacy. If the characters that are on the spotlight change, the reasons and their validity, both narrative and speculative, change. I see this fallacy brought too often in this thread.
What makes it all more questionable is that now people are assuming that lookouts don't exist in the One Piece world. Which is a huge stretch. We are not talking about a made up position here. It is an iconic element of pirate crews.
Funny enough, Pedro was one of them. There was this user that was insistent that Pedro standing high up in the tree & being on the crew nest means he is the LOOKOUT!!! He also frequently linked images of Pedro being somewhere high up showing his potential as a lookout.
Pedro was nicknamed "Pedro of the Treetops" and his love for high places as well as his surveillance tasks in the forest were the first that stood out. Just because he didn't end up joining the crew as a lookout doesn't mean that he isn't very specifically associated with the task. We can all trace back to previous theories and speculations and dumb them down now that we know they didn't become true, but that's a kind of terrible methodology and doesn't tackle how plausible and how much sense they made with the available information at the time.
This is a speculative thread and speculations should be judged based on the current elements and prospects. I'm sure most of the things that have been said in this or other speculative threads will be false in a few years but they won't be automatically dumb if they had an understandable ground with the information we had back then.
Carrot has never been acknowledge as a lookout by anyone in-universe. She is only doing the job because she's free.
The first is true, if you don't count Wanda asking her to do it in their very first scene together. The second is an incomplete answer. True, Carrot started performing as a lookout because she wanted to help. The question is why a lookout. She is fast and agile enough to be of help in several other tasks of the ship, yet she constantly picks the crow's nest. Explain that association in a way that doesn't sound like the classic condescending and plain false "she can't do anything else" and doesn't imply that she really is inclined to lookout tasks, and I'll give your point.
Carrot as the lookout argument has never came out until Pedro blew himself up.
As far as I can remember, that is false. It made of course more sense from chapter 879 in advance, but it was brought before. Carrot was doing lookout tasks in her very first appearance. And early in the WC arc she first took the position. The argument existed back then.
After that incident, there was a lot of push for her as the lookout. She HAS to be the lookout because Oda put her there. Maybe she is just there as because Pedro, the other 'lookout' is dead…
Well, Oda doesn't help to keep this argument down because she has been featured A LOT OF TIMES since.
Fair enough. But panel time is just not a good argument for anything. I mean, Vegapunk is super important but his panel time is incredibly low. lol
Yep! Though I'd agree, the relevance of Vegapunk so far has been more implied than direct. We know he's invented a lot of crazy stuff, but we don't even know the nature of most of these inventions.
There are lot of factors to be a potential candidate. Character design, importance in the plot & bonds with the crew are the first 3 things I look at. It doesn't automatically mean they are the next nakama. There were a few characters that hit the mark but they failed other aspect. I kinda rule out Carrot since Zou arc based on these 3 factors.
I genuinely like Carrot as a character. She is a fun character hence I don't mind discussing about whether she is the next crewmate. But I really don't think she is the one.
I think most of us have already make up our mind about her after 200+ pages. I think I have engaged in a discussion with you before regarding her potential? So, we will just agree to disagree at this point.
Yep, agree to disagree. Heavy disagreements on specifics aside (like the resemblance with Chopper or the role of lookout), this thread and the discussion are purely speculative. None of us are right till Oda proves wrong, and it's obvious that none of our conclusions will change the determined path the author intends for this series.
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