Theory: Caribou is secretly being set up as One Piece's "Gollum" and could be crucial to Blackbeard's downfall
I have a theory that sounds insane at first, but the more I think about it, the more it feels like the kind of thing Oda would actually do.
My core idea is simple: Caribou may end up being the unexpected key to Blackbeard's defeat.
The first question is: why is Caribou still here? He's been hanging around the story since Fishman Island. He's not particularly powerful, he isn't popular, he isn't part of the main cast, and yet Oda keeps bringing him back over and over again. What if Caribou's role is similar to Gollum or Gríma Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings? The sort of character most readers overlook because he seems too weak, too pathetic, or too irrelevant to matter, only to become unexpectedly pivotal when the story reaches its climax.
My crackpot extension of this theory is that Caribou could be connected to Ochoku (Wang Zhi). We know Ochoku was one of the Rocks Pirates and that Blackbeard somehow took control of Hachinosu after the Rocky Port Incident. I imagine that Ochoku was killed or overthrown because of Blackbeard, and if Caribou is actually Ochoku's son, that would suddenly give Caribou a hidden motivation. Recently, Caribou has been actively trying to get closer to Blackbeard's crew, and if he's Ochoku's son, he's doing exactly what a revenge-driven survivor would do: pretend to be useful, loyal, and gradually close enough to strike.
There's another detail I find interesting. Both Blackbeard and Caribou possess powers based around a kind of "bottomless storage space." Obviously they're not identical fruits, but thematically they overlap: Blackbeard's darkness absorbs everything, meanwhile Caribou's swamp stores seemingly limitless amounts of matter. It's almost as if Caribou is a distorted, weaker reflection of Blackbeard. Now imagine the final war. Suppose Blackbeard eventually surpasses every other antagonist and becomes an even greater threat than Imu, by that point he could be practically unstoppable. How do you defeat a character like that? Maybe not through a straight fight, but through betrayal, or information. Maybe through an overlooked character nobody considered important. Caribou already possesses some of the most dangerous information in the world. He knows about Poseidon and Pluton, and he's exactly the kind of character who can accidentally or deliberately change the balance of power.
I imagined several possibilities:
Caribou discovers and reveals Blackbeard's hidden weakness. Caribou steals and conceals an object capable of harming Blackbeard. Caribou gains Blackbeard's trust only to betray him at the decisive moment. Or, in the most extreme version of the theory, Caribou literally allows himself to be absorbed by Blackbeard and destroys him from the inside using something he had hidden within his swamp. That last idea sounds ridiculous, but so did the idea that the fate of the Ring would ultimately depend on Gollum rather than Aragorn, Gandalf, or Frodo.
What do you think?