Esthetically, the differences are obvious. One seems bathed in bright colors and Disney-like whimsy, the other shadowed in dark tones, barely concealing great savagery.
Totto Land looks like an overstuffed utopia, while Wano has grown desolate under the Beasts’ control.
The Big Mom Pirates look like a circus troupe on the verge of a big performance, while the Beasts Pirates look like a nightmarish army of Vikings, hungry for violence.
From a purely visual comparison, the major point of contrast is lighting. Totto Land looks sunny, bad weather notwithstanding, and Big Mom’s chateau feels bright and comfortable. Her throne room is well-lit and inviting, allowing her to greet guests formally.
Kaido’s cave has no formality; it’s a dark, dank pit, where he gets drunk and lashes out with abandon. Jack is introduced during a dark, stormy night, and we see his worst acts of torture on Zou in darkened flashback panels. Kaido arrives to Bakura Town in a swirling dark storm of his own creation, King is covered in a black suit, etc.
The Big Mom Pirates are colorful and jolly, but just like the fantasies that inspired this aesthetic, it’s just fiction. The crew’s hospitality is a front designed to lure in and exploit potential sources of power, a carefully crafted facade epitomized by Big Mom herself. Once you’re in, you cannot leave, and attempting to do so means death. But most don’t realize this until too late, taken in by the illusion of a dangerous but reasonable Emperor, one that seems willing to help accomplish yourgoals if you help accomplish hers.
But Kaido doesn’t use facades, and the dark violence he embodies is his genuine self. His only positive (or at least neutral) characteristic seen thus far is his honestly, and his inability to hide his emotions from others.
While this is partially due to his drunkenness, even sober he does not play politics, instead preferring to handle problems with his strength and military might. He’s not interested in luring you into his crew with promises and offers of support. He’ll either cow you into submission or kill you outright, and if you manage to impress him, he’ll throw you in prison and work you until you break and join anyway.
These antithetical ways of ruling have heavily influenced the crew’s approach to conflict . While the Big Mom Pirates are capable of using force to defeat their enemies, such as in the cases of Kid, Apoo, and Urouge, they’re go-to choice to eliminate potential threats is alliance, often through marriage to one of the daughters of Big Mom. Such alliances require detailed planning and cooperation, two things the Charlotte Family are good at…most of the time.
Unfortunately, the foundation of the Family’s trust in one another and themselves is based on their continued success at accomplishing their goals as individuals, and their records in this must be perfect. This is a mindset justified by Big Mom’s murderous reaction to failure. So when Opera failed to properly guard Nami and Luffy, instead of using the reasonable excuse that Jinbe’s betrayal surprised him, he lies and says he burned his prisoners to death, out of fear of what Big Mom were to do to him if she found out what happened. But Opera’s shaky demeanor causes Mont-d’Or to distrust him, and when Luffy reappears and his suspicions are confirmed, it unhinges him for the rest of the arc, hindering his ability to lead effectively.
This ineffectiveness because of potential failure explains many of the crew’s more unusual behaviors. Why is Smoothie so apathetic in battle, despite being one of the crew’s most powerful members? Because Cracker, a Sweet General with a decade more experience then her, fell in battle against a rookie that very morning, and she fears suffering a similar fate, followed by Big Mom’s fury. As a result, she only attempts things in which she has little chance of suffering damage or defeat, resulting in a passive, lackluster performance despite her title.
Or take Snack for example. There’s no indication he lost before Urouge bested him, and it’s outright stated that this defeat caused his demotion. While he escaped death by Big Mom’s hand, his new station far away from Whole Cake Island, only being brought in as a last resort at Cacao Island, implies a total loss of significance within the crew, despite his incredible strength remaining the same. Not to mention the Sweet Four becoming the Sweet Three; a single failure did more then demote him, it erased all memory of his existence as a figure of strength and respect, reducing him into the ranks of less capable siblings and crushing any confidence he may have had in his abilities.
And do I even have to mention Flampe’s reaction to Katakuri, when his perfection is stripped from him?
Our beloved donut-lover isn’t the only one suffering under the pressures of being perfect, the whole damn crew is. Because in the eyes of Big Mom, one failure is considered punishable by demotion at best and death at worst, a draconian edict that makes good cooperation between siblings difficult and trust almost impossible, because nobody can truly trust that their coworkers will get it right each and every time. The inability to make a mistake is the Big Mom Pirate’s greatest weakness, and the constant fear and anxiety caused by this, as well as the strength and ingenuity of the Straw Hats and their allies, is what ultimately gives them victory over the far more powerful pirate crew.
In short, the crew’s more diplomatic way of dealing with conflict requires cooperation and mutual trust, but the workplace culture’s emphasis on perfection damages the crew’s ability to learn from mistakes and causes suspicion over potential failures, leading to bad decisions and actual failures.
Now on to the Beasts Pirates, who, in my opinion, actually have a far more serious and pervasive problem.
While the Big Mom Pirates’ flaws are significant, they can still cooperate in order to accomplish goals, just not with a healthy, reasonable mindset. That’s because despite her horrible parenting Big Mom still encourages activities and goals that require unity; for the most part her children are on the same page, and not engaging in petty rivalries and grudges and dividing into factions. It would be all too easy for the likes of Smoothie and Cracker, leaders in the crew, to form their own little groups that begin to compete with each other, but for the most part this doesn’t happen because Big Mom wants her children to get along, and what she says goes.
But Kaido’s attitude toward conflict, that his power alone is enough to handle anything thrown at him, feeds a mindset that emphasizes personal ability to deal with issues at the cost of cooperation. All three All-Stars in the Beast Pirates despise each other, dividing the crew into three distinct armies with their own methods and practices.
Jack suffers from this workplace culture the most, as he has the most room to improve his leadership abilities. His suicidal recklessness, a trait also found in his subordinates Sheepshead and Holdem, constantly leads to him and them biting off more then they can chew, resulting in crushing defeats and the loss of man and naval power. If Jack has instead tried to call for backup from the other All-Stars in his attempt to rescue Doflamingo, they would have had a better chance of completing their objective, but his hatred of his co-workers, combined with a hot-blooded, Leroy-Jenkins style of planning, only lead to failure and the permanent loss of SMILES for the crew.
No man is an island, but Kaido has unintentionally created a system that espouses the opposite. With the exception of the Flying Six, most Headliners aren’t very strong, especially the SMILE users, but they follow the example of their captain and commanders by engaging in reckless combat without any assistance from others. The few times we do see cooperation in the crew, it’s strained and quick to fall apart, Page One and X Drake not even bothering to stay together, which could have won then the day against Soba Mask. Instead Page One charged in alone and got crushed.
Jack at the very least seems to now recognize why things went so poorly for him before, having been characterized in Wano as more willing to listen to subordinates, but even then he still fights recklessly and at great personal cost.
The crew’s dynamic has yet to be fully explored, and I could end up being wrong about a lot of this. But so far the Beast Pirates has been depicted as uncooperative and overconfident on nearly every level of the hierarchy, all stemming from the only person who’s arrogance is justified. This has led to Luffy steamrolling everyone in his way until Kaido showed up. Had the Headliners and Gifters worked together to defeat him, as the Big Mom Pirates at the tea party did, his fight would have been more difficult.
So, the Big Mom Pirates have a slightly better culture then the Beasts, because as flawed as it is, they are capable of working together and accomplishing their objectives, while the Beast Pirates struggle and ultimately fail alone.
*Theory by Yeomanaxel
