- When given the opportunity, Marco flies Zoro to the roof and stays back himself to support.
- When he is about to send Zoro up he literally says he is not going after Kaido himself at this point.
- Takes a step back and says its “time for the stars to take the stage”.
While Marco can fit the description as Momotaro’s Pheasant companion, I don’t think that’s the role he has been presented to play in this raid. I would like to challenge the common assumption of Marco as the “Pheasant”
I think there is someone much more thematically fitting for the role – Hiyori.
The Three Divine Siblings
Recently we got some exposition about Yamato’s backstory and it seemed to draw some heavy parallels to the Amaterasu story where they’re locked in Ame-no-Iwayato the Heavenly Rock Cave.
Amaterasu was one of the “three divine siblings” of Japanese lore who was related to both Susanoo and Tsukiyomi.
In One Piece, so far it has been Momonosuke that has taken a bit of inspiration from Susanoo, one of the other siblings. In folklore, Susanoo slays the 8-headed snake Yamata no Orochi using his blade, the Ame-No-Habakiri. This is the same name of the blade that was passed to Momonosuke and as we’re aware the usurper of Wano is the one who has the power of the Yamata no Orochi and has a single head remaining.
Rather than having actual siblings share qualities with these two sibling deities, instead it is both Yamato and Momonosuke who are drawing inspiration from them. Two characters of the same age born to rivals (who they willingly or unwillingly emulated) that share the same purpose of opening Wano’s borders. Actually, in a roundabout way Momonosuke and Yamato are “siblings” now that it’s been confirmed that Momonosuke’s Devil Fruit was made from Kaido’s, each of them is made up of some part of Kaido.
So what I want to get at is the following – If Momonosuke and Yamato are drawing influences from two of the three “divine siblings” and there are three of them, does Hiyori draw influences from the last sibling – Tsukiyomi who was a deity of the moon?
The most glaring inspiration to me is the connection between Hiyori and the song she plays on her shamisen, titled “Tsukihime” or Moon Princess, as Tsukuyomi was also the deity related to the moon.
Like the other two, I found that Hiyori shares some parallels with the most common story of Tsukuyomi as well. Amaterasu sent Tsukuyomi to the terrestrial world to visit Ukemochi, goddess of food. At a banquet prepared by Ukemochi, Tsukuyomi kills Ukemochi during the feast they prepared after being disgusted by the way Ukemochi produces the food (via regurgitation). In one of our first introductions to Hiyori she attends a feast thrown by Orochi (while certainly not a goddess of food, he controls all food production in Wano) only to be the one to slap him clear across the face after he tried to kill O-Toko.
Establishing Hiyori as the Pheasant
There are a few details in particular that lead me to Hiyori being the “Pheasant”
First, her introduction in which she has a giant Peafowl sort of bird on her Kimono.
