Vander Decken IX

The trait that sets this fish-man apart from every other is his pair of extra legs, four in total, an arrangement unique among his kind. He is built tall and slim with stretched, lanky limbs, beige skin in the anime that reads darker brown in the manga, and a heavy stoop that sinks his head to shoulder height. On his face sit sharp teeth, a narrow pointed nose, and broader-than-usual webbing along the fingers. His chin carries a thin, untidy goatee; above the mouth runs a wavy mustache that ends in jagged points, echoed by the black hair tumbling from his scalp in the same spiked, rippling style. When Shirahoshi turns him away, grief drives him to shave his crown down to bare skin.

His wardrobe centers on frilled green overalls cut just past the knee, fastened with ornamental buttons and worn above a pale green shirt that the anime renders white. A ruffled yellow cape drapes his shoulders, two bulky beaded necklaces sit at his chest, and a purple-banded yellow fedora, owned for upward of a decade, tops the ensemble. Three gold bands circle each ankle, two pairs of sandals cover his front feet, and a red glove stays fixed on his right hand to hold his power steady on the princess. He first turns up shrouded in dark cloth, pretending to be his haunted forebear.

Stiffly formal, he greets others with ceremony and closes his sentences with a verbal tic rendered roughly as I think. Subordination repels him, which explains his refusal of Arlong, yet he will treat with anyone who shares his goal provided he is regarded as nothing less than an equal. A would-be poet, he composes haiku in his low moments. His obsession with Shirahoshi clouds his judgment so badly that he drafts marriage invitations before any proposal and calls Neptune father ahead of any wedding. Where most of his species harbor resentment toward humanity, that cause means nothing to him; his entire drive is to wed the mermaid princess and finish what his ancestors began.

Branded a robber of the ocean depths, he terrified the people of Fish-Man Island for years. He answers nearly everything with force, going so far as to court Shirahoshi by chucking enormous weapons in her direction. His tendency to collapse into theatrical despair, weeping and shaving his scalp after being refused, slots him beside Buggy and Spandam among the franchise's more clownish villains. His laughter opens on the syllable Ba.

Holding both the family bloodline and the captaincy, he commands his crew, the vast vessel Flying Dutchman, the giant anglerfish Ankoro, and the fish-man Wadatsumi. The strength of a fish-man, roughly tenfold an ordinary person's, lets him swing a battle-axe taller than himself and snap coral with one kick. His resilience is striking: he shrugs off Luffy's Jet Hammer, weathers Hody's trident, a slash from his own axe, and long falls, though slipping and cracking his head against a step is enough to knock him senseless.

His signature gift traces to a Paramecia-type power called Mato Mato no Mi. One bare-handed touch brands a target, after which anything hurled by that hand locks on and chases the mark until it strikes or hits an obstacle. He need not throw the object at all; merely contacting it with the marking hand launches it, demonstrated when he sets the colossal ship Noah flying toward the princess. The effect dissolves the instant he dies or blacks out. The fruit also strips away the swimming his heritage would have granted. Out of sight he stockpiles rose-etched axes and knives, with blades even fitted inside his forward sandals.