I know Greg thinks that’s just Caribou but did we see him near Zoro last time we saw him?
Oh, you haven't heard my latest takes?
Anyway, the question was about what Zoro meant. Here's a little bit of a meandering path but this is the 'why' of what Zoro said.
Zoro and Sanji are the qualities of a main character hero that Oda likes, enjoys, and appreciates, but doesn't want to thematically overwhelm his series. Zoro being raw savage power with a samurai-like cool-headedness. Sanji being a suave hero who knows how to read a room. Oda likes those qualities but he can't fully explore them in his hero because his hero sets the tone for the entire series.
It's when people confuse Zoro's tone for the tone of the series that you get stuff like ZKK. Not knocking it. I'm not really anti-ANY theory these days. If you wanna believe it, I support that! But, it's not the tone of the series Oda is aiming for. If a reader is attached to characters like Katakuri, Zoro, King, or Shiryu, it's easy to feel like the series could/should be different, but while Oda likes those elements, they're not the core of what he wants to portray.
By the way, notice anything curious about those names?
Zoro….King....Katakuri....Shiryu.
They're all right-hands. That's no coincidence. That is the specific role in which Oda wants to make those characters shine.
Part of this is because of that tone's importance in a crew.
The other part is, those characters will (almost) always be foils for Zoro, so it's clear that they should have personalities that overlap with his own.
Remember the 'right-hand' spread from a while back? In the weeks leading up to that I started to get a strange feeling about Zoro's quest and that spread pulled it all together in something of a moment of enlightenment regarding all of this and Zoro's path to being the 'Judge of Hell' (aka Enma).
If you look at who is arguably the most powerful character in the right-hand role, there's none other than Rayleigh. Now consider his oddly chosen epithet: 冥王 Many people (including myself) looked at that as face value for years and years as 'Dark Lord'. Partially because of translation choices and people didn't know better, and partially because people thought 'Pluto' sounded dumb.
But...what IS Pluto? Pluto isn't just a dwarf planet (or whatever it is this week according to SCIENCE) it's the Latin name for freaking Hades.
Hades being the epitome of Oda's classic (ie. not romantic like Lucifer) Western view on the leader of the underworld. But Zoro's Wano roots would obviously take him in the direction of a logical Japanese equivalent, Enma.
Taking this further, we have BB's right-hand who, despite a thematically different epithet, is basically the cigar-chomping Merry Melodies-style Satan who literally came from the lowest depth of Hell on Earth (Impel Down).
Interestingly enough, and I dunno if Oda will take it this far, Enma isn't the only judge of Buddhist hell. He's one of many. He's just the best well-known because he's the one that most humans get caught up on as they go through the process of judgement. So theoretically, Oda has an entire panel of judges he can go through.
Wanna take this super tinfoil?
Little-known fact that Enma and Jizou Bosatsu are actually THE SAME ENTITY. Enma is his form in Buddhist hell but on earth he's best known as the bodhisattva guardian of children and travelers (probably exactly what it says on the wiki). I'm hesitant to bring up that being a saint of children, Jizo is also commonly associated with children who die young, including abortions. I'm only mentioning it because I'd rather have you hear it here than when this is regurgitated on YouTube or elsewhere someday. There's basically no way Oda would explore that aspect in the series. He only gets a pass on the Mom eating kids thing because she's been painted as a villain. So no, it's not some sort of dark foreshadowing.
Rather, I'd suggest that since Zoro and his attack names have all been delving deeper and deeper into hell, if Zoro does have a power awakening moment (perhaps involving that eye?) he might ascend from hell and display a Jizo-associated attack/form similar to Asura.
Just food for thought.
