You’ve kinda talked about some of your ideas on Kaido’s character but what is your actual perception of him and his life, what do you think of him and his relationship with those around him?
My second question is are you ever going to write a fic with your ideas about him in it or include your ideas in an existing fic?
Kaido is a man entirely shaped by his belief in "survival of the fittest" and "might makes right."
If I met him or someone like him in real life, I would hate him a lot because I find that mindset annoying. Thankfully he's fictional so I can look this over with wanting to stab him.
It's a belief system definitely introduced to him in his childhood in the Vodka Kingdom's treatment of him as a soldier and how Xebec 'recruits' him. But it's solidified by his later experience in the labs of MADS and the WG. Because it is his strength that allows him to survive, to break free, and it's that same thing that allows for the one survivor he finds to live as well, which is Alber. King.
To Kaido, honor is weak. It doesn't protect you. It's a concept that exists for the people on top to bind those below to them. The weak claim honor and it does not make them strong. The weak betray you the first chance they get.
Which is why Oden sticks in his mind. Because Oden is honorable and strong, strong enough to leave a mark on Kaido where none other has managed it. It's a contradiction.
The person that Kaido cares most about and is influenced by the most is King. Would Kaido not be so interested in the concept of Joyboy, if not King's strong belief in that?
Kaido also cares about Yamato, but that care is heavily disturbed by how much Kaido does not trust the world (he knows what the WG would do to someone related to him, after what happened at God Valley to Xebec) AND the fact that Yamato believes in honor. Honor that doesn't exist to Kaido. If Yamato proved he was strong to Kaido, then he would be free to do what he liked, because might is right. But since he isn't, Kaido has the right to lock him up to 'protect' him using whatever means he sees fit.
(Honestly, even if Kaido was a good guy, I think he and Yamato still would have clashed as parent and child. Personality types and all.)
Kaido also has found nothing worthwhile to use his strength on. All he's used it for is to fight and win, and in Wano, he's done that. He's won. There's nothing more for him to use his power on. Thus, the sinking into the depression from his trauma.
It's also important to me that Kaido has very much internalized that he's a monster. Everyone for his entire life has told him that and the people who admire him admires him for that monsterhood (example: Kaido killing all the scientists to free King). That's another reason he doesn't really go for honor, is because monsters are never honorable. He's a monster so he can't have honor.
He's a guy who has, had, the potential to be great. To help others with his strength, to want to free slaves and fight the WG's evil. He has reasons that would compel him to do good! But he chose otherwise, mostly because he believes that he has no other choice in what he is.
Ah, Inconvenient Miracles is THE fic that I'm investigating a lot of these aspects of Kaido, my Lunarian SI that gets picked up by King and brought to Wano.
In many ways that fic is going to force Kaido to more deeply confront his 'survival of the fittest' mindset, mostly because the SI, Amaya, is not considered the 'fittest' by any terms.
I also am working on a ficlet of Kaido from the Raising Storms/Rainmaker AU, where Shanks' mother survives to cause hell for the WG, and in there, it's more of an investigation of what if Kaido had another person that kept challenging him instead of stagnating in Wano?
