Merry

Always in formal butler dress and quite tall, Merry is defined above all by a lamb motif. Tight curls suggest a sheep's fleece, a pair of small horns push up from his head, and even his mouth takes an ovine curve while a woolly trim borders his collar. Footage from twenty years prior depicts those horns much shorter. After the time skip he grows his hair longer, sprouts a faint mustache and goatee, and his horns swell larger. The whole design works as wordplay, since the Japanese term for butler sounds almost the same as the one for sheep.

Everything Merry does flows from treating Kaya's well-being as his foremost duty. That instinct long led him to read Usopp as a corrupting, dishonest influence, prompting him once to brand the boy a criminal and aim a gun his way. With colleagues he trusts, though, he is warm and cheerful, laughing alongside Klahadore and waving off Usopp's charge that the man was secretly a pirate as ridiculous. The instant Klahadore's real identity as the pirate Kuro emerged, Merry recognized his blunder and shrieked at Kaya to escape. Looking past the household to the entire village, he concluded it would be smarter to simply give Kuro the estate and fortune in trade for their lives, never grasping that Kuro needed Kaya dead so he could slide cleanly into a life of comfort. His bonds run several ways: fiercely protective of Kaya and ready to die for her, openly hostile at first to Usopp, and warmly trusting toward Klahadore across three years of shared service before that trust flipped instantly into terror and hatred. Kuro, by contrast, felt no real sympathy, striking Merry purely for cruel pleasure beneath the crescent moon and resenting that the butler survived at all.

About two years past Gold Roger's execution, around the same stretch when Shiki fled Impel Down, a youthful Merry started drafting an early prototype of the Going Merry, later finishing it as an upscale ship built for Kaya. When the Straw Hats reached Syrup Village hunting a proper ship on Usopp's counsel, Merry tipped off Kaya's most trusted servant, Klahadore, then fetched the custom eyeglasses she had ordered to mark the butler's third year of service. Right around then, Usopp stumbled onto the fact that Klahadore was in truth the dreaded Captain Kuro, set on butchering the village and stealing Kaya's inheritance; the town dismissed his warnings, and when the frantic Usopp tried to haul Kaya away, Merry took him for a kidnapper and fired, grazing his arm before Kaya's pleading made him hold back. That night, after settling Kaya to sleep, Merry recounted the day to Klahadore, who, energized by the crescent moon and his approaching former crew, calmly admitted Usopp had been right all along and smashed the present Kaya had made. As the stunned butler tried to shout a warning, Kuro slipped on his Cat Claws and cut him down, leaving him bleeding and seemingly finished. Merry clung to life into the following day, when Kaya found him; despite his injuries he explained the truth and urged her to willingly give up her inheritance for the village's sake. Her surrender failed to appease Kuro, yet her presence drew off the Black Cat Pirates long enough that the Straw Hats, together with the Usopp Pirates, could rout them and rescue the town. Afterward Kaya tended his wounds and passed along Usopp's two wishes, that the near-invasion stay secret and that the Going Merry be handed to the Straw Hats, both of which Merry gladly accepted. Once he had stocked the ship and walked Nami through its workings, the crew set sail with Usopp newly aboard, and Merry, noticing Kaya's heartbreak, shared the boy's past and dream of piracy and nudged her toward a dream of her own, leading her to resolve to train as the village doctor. Later non-canon moments show him rushing a copy of Luffy's debut bounty poster over to Kaya and, roughly two years on near the Sabaody reunion, tirelessly shielding the now-popular Kaya from swarms of suitors. He likewise sits with her listening to Uta's song in a film, and during the Egghead broadcast he steps off to fetch tea while Kaya and the others tune in.