blorboscope: x drake

the birth time and year i've given x drake make him a leo rising. the reason is pretty arbitrary: i made basil hawkins a cancer rising, and the moon and sun respectively rule cancer and leo. they have parallel but opposite fates serving under kaidou, and the battle of onigashima takes place on the full moon, when the moon is in the opposite sign to the sun.

besides all that, leo and the sun are traditionally quite… noble. (when i say "traditional," i always mean various medieval european and arabic and classical sources.) short of being a world noble, drake the undercover marine is functionally a privateer, the historical mold on which the warlords of the sea are based, many of whom were knighted by the monarchs they served. this is probably the reason the early english manga's jaya arc introduces kuma and mihawk with "sir" like crocodile. drake's namesake, francis drake, had a letter of marque from elizabeth i to pillage and subjugate the caribbean like drake does amigasa village early in his service to kaidou. i'm also just stupid and want to avoid any associate with aubrey graham and sometimes misremember drake as "x duke," then i remember nick drake, then i get distracted by nick cave. his crew at sabaody (really never seen again) dress in early modern silhouettes, which we only really know from looking at the educated and noble classes of european society.

drake is a leo rising to me for his annoyingly regal bearing; not sanji's bishounen princeliness, but something rougher and more bestial. his leadership of SWORD is a kind of lordship. even though prince grus and kujaku are also rear admirals, they hesitate to save koby without drake. the marine, a military institution, is about as archaic as feudalism.

a leo ascendant puts is scorpio sun in his 4th house, which is loaded. the sun's location tells us where we derive a lot of our identity. the 4th house rules both your literal home you live in right now and the home you came from, your family of origin. unusual for most of the worst generation, we know quite a bit about drake thanks to his tie to law, further explained in SBS answers. his father, diez barrels, was a marine who defected to become a pirate while drake was a child. drake repeats this course of action for his pirate cover; a very literal, comprehensive version of the sun as identity. couple all this with scorpio's propensity for secrets, and this is the chart of a double agent several times over that zoro and jinbe and the other straw hats are not unreasonable to suspect.

another significant placement drake has is saturn in aquarius, or his 7th house. saturn i the daddiest planet of all who devours his son, in the sense of mitski "i am not gonna be what my daddy wants me to be," in the sense of logan roy. saturn rules rules, tradition, structure—the rank and file of the navy. so i take the 4th house and this 7th house saturn to mean either diez barrels or the marine itself in all its corruption and indoctrination, arguably more of a father to drake than any one figure. the 7th house is meant for marriage and close relationships, and does drake have any? no. his mistress is the saturnine navy, or he's drawn to a particularly saturnine type, someone with heavy capricorn or aquarius. (me)

drake's moon is in libra, his 3rd house. libra's symbol is the scales of justice. i frankly don't know what else to say about that for this guy, i'm sick of him. the moon rules emotions because it rules changes and the tides, and drake's concept of justice and who to ally with are much more flexible than those of older marines. his cover is more or less blown by kizaru immediately in sabaody, and drake's response to marineford is "the marine needs to change, too." there's diplomacy and moderation to libra; it has quite a lot to do with temperance, the tarot major arcana about taking a middle way between two extremes. that's just drake toeing the double agent line between piracy and akainu's bloody brand of justice. this libra moon forms a more pleasant angle to saturn, both being air signs, so drake's emotions are measured, tempered by saturn's austerity, except for his performance in the bathhouse; this just means he shouldn't be overwhelmed by personal grudges the way akainu and other, older marines are.

the last interesting angle i'll point out is his mercury, also in scorpio, forming a trine to mars in cancer. mercury or hermes being messenger between realms. there's a rebel quality to drake's rhetoric and reasoning. he's as indepndent a thinker as the navy can produce from a child soldier, but he still hesitates to enact real change or actually rebel. mars is the driest, hottest planet, here submerged in a water sign, so SWORD is moderate, just like him.