#oh no. i want to spec buggy as a dnd character now.

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

ppl tend to understate Buggy's intelligence in fanworks sometimes I find. Like he was able for 25 years to both hide his devil fruit from the world, his connection to the Roger pirates, he can make bombs and he did hide his devil fruit while in impel down effectively so he wasn't put in seastone cuffs or tortured in a way that would affect him at all. Dude can be smart, he just has 0 foresight and is emotional and single-minded to the point of short-sightedness. Even his initial plan with the chop chop fruit and the map was very smart for a boy his age, he just freaked out when shanks showed up and deliberately sabotaged himself, like that's his thing. He also got really close to killing Luffy in Loguetown, if not for the convenient lightning strike, Luffy could have died there. Buggy contains multitudes, he can both be insanely stupid and very smart.

...we must be using very different search terms to find buggy fic, anon.

but you're right, buggy is smart and stupid simultaneously! high INT/low WIS, i think is how the modern nerd would put it: he can come up with a good plan, but he does not think it through long enough to consider any bad outcomes, so they always take him by surprise. like, the muggy bomb is much easier to hide on his person than the og buggy bomb - it fits in the tip of his shoe! how convenient! but that also makes it easier for someone to just swat it back at buggy, to literally blow up in his face.

and buggy would have killed luffy in roguetown, for sure. the marines had no interest in intervening, and luffy's crew weren't gonna get to him fast enough. if it weren't for luffy's uncanny luck (or his dad literally conjuring up a storm, depending on what you think really happened in roguetown), that would've been a win for buggy.

...that said, i don't think the chop-chop fruit plan was a good one. i know the art style suggests buggy's an older teen, but per later canon buggy is at most twelve years old in that moment. and he's gonna sell a devil fruit, and with those funds get himself a ship and a crew of treasure-greedy pirates to follow his treasure map? at twelve? that boy is not gonna be a preteen pirate captain, he's gonna get his throat slit.