Player nickname: Orlando
Player DW: paperback
Way to contact you:
Email: agreylady@gmail.com
AIM: Elspeth Vimes
Plurk: ElspethVimes
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Are you at least 15?: Y.
Current Characters: Masamori Sumimura, Orlando Gardiner, Takiko Okuda, Michael Westen, Anthy Himemiya, David Webb, Sayaka Miki, Mikasa Ackerman

Character: Crocodile
Fandom: One Piece

History:
On the One Piece wiki, though I'm afraid you'll have to scroll down and put up with some typos. If accepted, I'd be starting him from before the Straw Hats have arrived on the Grand Line, so definitely before his first canon appearance.

Personality:
"Ideals can only be spoken by those powerful enough to carry them out. And that excludes you!"

Crocodile is one part Bond villain, one part the magnificent bastard that Bond villains think they are but aren't actually smart enough to be, and one part bitter disillusioned teenager (even though he's in his 40s).

Crocodile is a very cynical individual. Dreams? Yeah, sure, he had those once too. It was worthless. Now, he believes in strength. Not just power- that can come with money or land, but can also easily be taken from you- the ability to use force. Any idea someone may have is just an idea, and no matter how much sense it may make or potentially benefit people it is nothing unless that person has the power to make reality conform to that idea. Companions? As worthless as dreams. Unreliable at best, people who will cause you to be hurt at worst. In a lot of ways, the only thing he really relies on is the fact that things and people can be used. And use them he will- mostly so that people destroy each other and clear the path for him. From criminal desires to hopeless idealism, the attachments and ideals of others are something to be exploited for his gain. And if these tools prove ineffective, the best thing to do is dispose of them, whether they are things or people.

While he may not have confidence in much, he certainly has confidence in himself. Crocodile has a lot of pride in his abilities, and has no problem telling you that you are far beneath him. His pride can actually push him in to some moments of relative nobility- if his arch-nemesis is in a state that makes him an inferior arch-nemesis, he'll call off the fight (and does, with Whitebeard). And there's his pride as a superior pirate, which demands that get rid of those who insult him, get rid of upstarts, and (once he is no longer associated with the government) keep the marines in their place. You could say he's arrogant.

But then, how much can it be called arrogance when you really are that good? Crocodile is an extremely intelligent man, and that comes out in anything he invests himself in. He has an eye for detail and the ability to make quick, accurate inferences from it (for example, noting the bandages on the Straw Hats' arms and that it must indicate a countermeasure against the shapeshifter working for him). He is incredibly skilled at setup and planning- he runs Baroque Works, a criminal organization with hundreds of members, for at least four years with only one person knowing his actual identity and without the World Government hearing anything about it.

His intelligence and his cynicism meet to make him frighteningly well-prepared. Putting the heroes in a cage designed to keep them from breaking out, in a room set to self destruct, and feeding the key to giant crocodiles that the one free person would have to kill in order to free her friends, well that's just part of being a Bond villain. Keeping the real key to yourself and having the one the crocodile ate be a fake? That's Crocodile. He's extremely prepared on a more physical level too. He's trained his devil-fruit ability so that he can turn into sand as a reflex, preventing people from sneakily assassinating him. He's also trained to be able to use his power's full destructive force, and use it consistently. But then, just in case he ends up in a situation where his power's weakness makes it useless, he's also strong in his own right, and that hook that replaced his left hand is sharp. And then just in case sharp objects and brute force aren't enough, he has a poisoned hook under his main hook. (AND THEN he has a knife under that.) The Straw Hats spend about 95% of the Alabasta arc trying to prevent a civil war from starting and a giant bomb from going off. While they do manage to mitigate a lot of the potential damage, defeat Crocodile, and eventually re-establish peace, they don't actually manage to stop either of those two things, because Crocodile had planned for interference and made plans to make that interference completely ineffective. (If at this point you are thinking Crocodile could outdo Auric Goldfinger, Blofeld, and Raoul Silva combined, I am doing this app right.)

For all his intelligence, he is also malicious in petty ways (hence the "disillusioned teenager" part). He has a definite love of mockery- if you have dreams, ideals, or particular attachments to others, he'll laugh and talk about how stupid it is (even in prison. kuhaha you think Whitebeard is a great guy, Ace? plenty of people want to kill him, here let Crocodile prove his point.). At one point, Crocodile repeatedly sends sandstorms to a particular town just to crush the hopes and efforts of the one old man still trying to find water and make it a habitable place.

He is not really a people person, as you might be guessing. Even when he's being hailed by the people of Alabasta as the hero who saves them from pirates (since he takes care to get there before the military), he has a tendency to do things like basically tell the people he's saving to shut up. (The people seem to think this is basically him pulling an antihero act. That was a mistake.) As the owner of the casino Rain Dinners (just...don't think about the name. Oda.), Crocodile is withdrawn and rarely seen or contacted directly. When he's not mocking others or giving the occasional villain monologue, he's really pretty taciturn. Trusting people is just not something he does. In spite of this, he does have a certain charisma, or perhaps he just inspires loyalty by being really good at what he does. The highest ranked Baroque Works agents do display loyalty to him. And Crocodile himself displays loyalty to at least one of them, "Mr. 1" Daz Bones. Respect for another's strength and efforts seems to be about the only basis for real interpersonal relationships Crocodile has.

Honestly, for all that he masterminds huge plans that cause a lot of action, Crocodile is a rather apathetic type. When Miss Goldenweek and co. try to break him out of prison along with them, he decides to stay, not out of any sense of remorse but simply because he's gotten bored with the world. When he does break out of prison, it's because the idea of being able to fight Whitebeard again interests him enough for him to make an effort. He's hard to move in his pride, unfaltering in his confidence in things such as his ability to kill others. But he's also hard to move in his indifference. He just doesn't care about, well, most people in the world, or their actions. It can take a lot of effort on the part of others to make him curious or angry. Or even just surprised.

Like a good number of One Piece villains, Crocodile serves in some ways as a warning. He is what happens when someone like Luffy gets so worn down by the world that they repudiate the two most important themes of the series- dreams and friendship. This act of repudiation, though, still gives him an active role to play with these themes. He doesn't just think that dreams are stupid (like Doflamingo does), he wants to prove it. By crushing peoples' dreams, Crocodile confirms that the world is what he came to believe it to be. It's a way of validating himself as well as destroying others. It's the active nature of his relationship to the themes, perhaps, that later in the series gives him room to (maybe) start turning around. He may be coming to see that relationships with others and the pursuit of dreams aren't as worthless as he had come to assert. ...Or he may just be out to crush a lot more dreams and find new sources of power in the New World, the jury's still out on this one.

Other:
Crocodile's standard outfit includes a full-length fur coat. In the desert. Because Oda he's just that hardcore.

He keeps monstrously huge crocodiles with a banana-shaped growth on their heads as pets. They're a species called bananawani ("bananadiles"). Because Bond villain Oda.

From his reaction to Iva threatening to talk about his past during the Impel Down arc, I (and others) suspect that he got into some rather goofy or otherwise embarrassing situations as a rookie.

One Piece translations/Romanizations can be...inconsistent and inaccurate, even if your source is "official." I'll be going by what the One Piece wikia calls things, so as to at least be internally consistent.

Additional Links:
T.V. tropes, under "former members."
Tiny Crocodile. Not really relevant, but it amuses me.

First Person:
Do you believe in fate? Why or why not?
No. The idea that some great power determines who wins and loses is ridiculous. The only ones who decide what happen to people are themselves.

You're faced with a crisis of faith. What pulls you back to solidify your beliefs and find strength in them again?
Faith?

Hnn, if there was something that made me question my "beliefs," then those "beliefs" should be abandoned. You can't "find strength" in something that weak.

Summer and winter are the most popular seasons, but what about spring and autumn? Which do you prefer and what is your favorite activity to do during that season?
I live on a desert island, so it doesn't really matter.

Though I guess that of the spring and autumn islands I've been to, I preferred the autumn ones. They were drier, and some of their festivals had good food.

If you have any secrets, how far would you go to keep them from being revealed?
Whatever is necessary.

People don't talk much when they're dead.

You find a wallet on the side of the road, but there's no one around. What do you do with it?
Take it, naturally.

Do you have any dreams or ambitions? How do you intend to achieve them?
For now, I would simply like to continue in my position as Shichibukai. [liar]

You're at the scene of a robbery, but you manage to get the upper hand; you're holding the gun. The robber is at your mercy. What do you do?
Kill him.

What would you like to be remembered for after your death?
...I would like to be recognized as one of the strongest of this age.

If you were to die right now, what would you have to say about your life? What have you achieved? Would you be content?
I have no intention of dying. There are still things that I plan to accomplish.

If you had the chance to change any one thing about yourself, would you take it? What would you change?
I would keep my younger self from being such an idiot. I wasted time, and other things, that could have been put to use.

Third Person:
The silence was thick, in this room beneath the clatter and glitter of the casino, surrounded by the lake. It lay soft and deep on the stone, broken only by the sounds of the bananawani powering slowly through the water outside. Here, you could be uninterrupted. Here, you could think.

Miss Allsunday had asked, soon after being recruited, when she was more eager to talk, why any Devil Fruit user would surround themselves with water. He in particular should find the presence of water worrying. But it helped the silence, and he knew the strength of these walls. Nothing here would threaten him, though if others found it intimidating...well, that didn't hurt him either. And who would even suspect this room existed?

But he wouldn't need it for much longer. The room would outlive its usefulness along with most of Baroque Works. The rebellion was progressing nicely, and the government continued to fail to address its peoples' concerns. It wouldn't take much more for it to be easy enough to push them over, each side destroying the country with their love for it, their attempts to protect it. They would be blown away, idiots who failed to find shelter during a sandstorm. But he would remain. And the rest of Alabasta would remain, his for the taking, for the establishment of a new military power. And, if he was correct, and if Miss Allsunday - if Nico Robin- could be used for that long, perhaps Pluton would remain as well.

In the silence beneath Rain Dinners, Crocodile laughed.