…dang… 

…dang… 

This is a graphic dedicated to what I would have liked to see from Doflamingo. I do love Doflamingo as an evil monster who gives great monologues, but I think that Oda let slip a very big and unique chance to cast Doflamingo as a sympathetic villain. Doflamingo did suffer a great deal in childhood, but characters keep saying over and over again that he was just born to be evil, and we’ve never gotten clear conformation (or denial) of if Doflamingo actually cares about anyone other than himself. 

So I tried my hand at rewriting things in a scene where Doflamingo actually does kill Law! Here, Doflamingo killed his father because the Celestial Dragons contacted him and told him that he and his brother could return to Mariejois if he killed his father. But instead it just cost him both his father and brother and set him even further down the path of no return. Having lost everything, he met his executives who put their faith in him and raised him to be a monster who would stop at nothing to rise to the top of the world. He took in children like Dellinger, Sugar, Monet, Baby 5 and Law because they too had lost everything and were demonized by the world, and he felt he could bring them with him to the top. And now that the ball’s gotten rolling, with everything his family has done for him, with all that they’ve sacrificed for him, and all the crimes they’ve committed, Doflamingo believes that he can only do right by them by committing atrocity after atrocity in order to take the throne of the world by force–the throne of a world that did nothing but make them suffer. So rather than planning to have Law or Cora die for him, he once simply wanted to raise Law to be his right hand so Law could triumph over the evils that destroyed him family, his home, and ostracized him from common society as a walking disease. 

He’d still be a terrible villain, but rather than being motivated by selfishness and innate cruelty, he’d be motivated by living up to the expectations of the family who gave him everything when he once had less than nothing. I wrote more on this general subject–what I would have changed if I could rewrite Dressrosa–in this post. Doflamingo being a good king, Sugar being his biological daughter… Doflamingo is still a fantastic villain and character, but all this is just a light that I would have loved so much to see him cast in. Doflamingo could have been one of the most morally complex characters in the series, but as it stands he’s mostly just a massive asshole, like almost all OP villains.