basil hawkins' cartomancy (it sucks)

spoilers for wano arc, especially onigashima.

hawkins only draws and interprets four cards during one piece and all major arcana, which is statistically improbable (a 28% chance from a standard deck), and none of them make any damn sense. when he falls to killer in 1029, the cards fluttering around him include some iconic waite-smith style minor arcana, so they exist in his deck! it isn't stacked with only majors! oda knows about the nine of swords! ugh. anyway.

disclaimer that i personally don't read reversals because i think positive and negative qualities of each card are always present, but context points us in either direction, whether in the question being posed to the cards or the structure of the spread around it. that said, these are almost all single-card draws.

1. the fool reversed (913)

• his interpretation: "the card of infighting"
• my interpretation: at its best (upright), the fool is pure and trusting, really like any guileless shounen protagonist who others try to take advantage of. the major arcana can be read as the fool's journey through the ages of man, like stupid campbell's the hero's journey. we can look at the fool nostalgically as someone who isn't jaded yet, but i hope it's a nika-like figure who's hopeful and trusting to spite the world's cruelty, having learned about it intimately. reversed, i think it's unflattering things onlookers and enemies say about luffy: naive, unprepared, in for a rude awakening.
• cards that fit his better: there are cards that are closer to betrayal or deception, like the seven of cups or the moon, but the imagery of hawkins' beasts pirates underlings (we never know what happens to his crew) looks like the five of wands, despite their swords.

2. the hierophant reversed and upright (913)

this is why i suspected he stacked his deck because how does he draw the hierophant twice

• his interpretation, reversed: "the card of pursuit"
• his interpretation, upright: "a card of reinforcements"
• my interpretation: sorry but i have to say that in older decks this was called the pope, and who the hell does the pope help other than serial abusers? but i digress. somewhere around the turn of the century, someone likely associated with the golden dawn came up with correspondences between 12 of the major arcana and the signs of the zodiac, and taurus got the hierophant, which i plainly disagree with. the hierophant is much more saturnine, much closer to capricorn which is also an earth sign, so melancholic, cold, and dry. saturn has associations with organized religions, higher education, and really anything traditional and structured. associating any of that with otsuru is... unflattering, in my opinion. the most saturnine institution in one piece is certainly the five elders, hi saint saturn. i would even say otsuru should be the hierophant reversed as someone with ties to a rebellion! but one to restore a dynasty. so...
• cards that fit his better: for "pursuit," i'd say six of wands. for "reinforcements", maybe the star, two of coins, two of cups, three of coins, three of cups.

3. death (1029)

• his interpretation: "the card of destruction"
• my interpretation: death is about endings of any kind. it can be about a breakup, or graduation, or just... a fight ending. it says nothing about the result in favor of one party or another. death and loss are necessary to life, so reading it as simply bad news for killer, good news for hawkins is immature and simplistic. we don't know exactly what happened to kid's arm when they fought against shanks, but he lost an arm and kept his life. that's still a kind of death, though. killer eating the SMILE was a kind of death, and so is the kid pirates declaring they'll be a cheerful crew.
• cards that fit his better: oh, i don't know. the TOWER

overall, i have major umbrage with straw man cards as an attack. if the point is that every other card is drawn to affect the enemy and the others can "expand one's (the reader's) power beyond their natural limit," we never see it win hawkins any fights. straw man cards creates reality instead of just describing it, which is not what i think divination should be. instead of death or the tower to describe killer's position with kid's straw doll, i'd choose the hanged man or the eight of swords. they're both cards about being stuck, the former about being suspended in limbo before some sort of breakthrough, and the latter about being trapped in a situation you can't see the way out of—but there is a way out.

4. the tower (1029)

• the narrator's interpretation: "the collapse of the old and the brittle, and its hidden meaning is a new way forward"
• my interpretation: i'd link this to the modern planet uranus, which has come to mean revolution in large part because it was first discovered during the enlightenment and before the european revolutions of the 19th century, and indeed the 20th. the tower sucks if you're a romanov, in this narrow view, but it does indeed spell calamity and disaster, which is a fair way to describe what happens to hawkins' effigy, though there are other options, like...
• cards that fit this moment of this fight: DEATH. just death, you got it damn backwards, my love. the narrator's description matches mine, sure, but someone could just as easily argue the shogunate as an institution is old and brittle. but i think it's describing linlin, which is so rude. straw is brittle, i grant you...

anime-only bonus: strength reversed, or a theory on his percentage system (1001)

he doesn't interpret this out loud and it isn't part of straw man cards, but it's part of his "1 percent" calculation. i have to assume that his percentage system works similar to astrological condition, e.g. a reversed major arcana must subtract more favor than a reversed minor? if he draws 10 cards starting with 100% or maybe 50% for 1:1 odds and say, a bunch of of them were reversed majors and the last was a kind of shitty upright minor arcana... maybe that's how it starts. (i think aces are generally lovely cards, so it can't be by pip value). i theorized another more convoluted system involving decimal places when i first watched wano and this blond hack gripped me, but this makes marginally more sense

a conclusion

tarot is a narrative art, whether you believe in divination or not. it's a palette to tell stories with. it's for chatty cathys and people who write in journals by hand. hawkins' generally one-word descriptions do it a major disservice, and oda's bizarre percentage system makes hawkins more of a gambler than anything mystical

even if his single word choices were at all traditionally correct, i'd still be dissatisfied because a good tarot reading is a conversation, and i want to hear more! hence my answer is writing x reader fanfiction where he is better at this and has a partner (me). just like most people interested enough in astrology to get a reading know their big three, most people i read tarot with are other tarot readers or have a passing familiarity with it, whereas hawkins is only shown lording his insider knowledge over enemies. but maybe my approach to divination is pedagogical because i don't believe in it earnestly and want to "show my work," as it were. i want to be questioned because i'm more than willing to question, evidenced here