#i also have not read the ace book (or most op secondary canon) so i can't speak to any of that

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

I hope it’s alright to ask about my favourite minor theory

Do you think Makinos child is Shanks? I kinda believe it because of the hair colour being brownish RED in official colouring, the fact that Oda himself said the father is “that person” so probably someone we know, in Ace novel there’s a moment when Benn asks Shanks if he thinks Makino got prettier and he agrees (teasing?), and on one of the cover pages makino is seen with a ring on her finger and on the other Shanks was attending some wedding 👀.

Do you think there’s actually something going on or it’s just wishful thinking?

I kinda like the idea of Luffy giving the hat to that kid at the end to start a new cycle y know. Thoughts?

hmm. not sure what i've done to make people think i have authoritative knowledge of one piece! let me assure you otherwise by revealing i straight up did not know makino had a kid until i got this message. just overlooked those pages, i guess?

buuut i'm always happy to speculate! so let's do that.

a bit of wiki searching tells me the kid is a post-timeskip development, which makes the kid being shanks' a bit... logistically challenging, to me? makino doesn't seem to ever leave windmill village, and i can't see shanks leaving the grand line for long during that post-marineford upheaval time period. he's got whitebeard's old territories to claim/protect on top of his own, yknow? he seems very busy.

so… hard to see how a shanks/makino baby (a/o wedding) happens in that time period. i guess anything's possible? really, they would only need to meet up once to make it happen.

and at the same time… who else is there, lmao

like, i guess oda could be trolling with the "that person" comment and just mean "her husband"? but i think you're right, the phrase is suggestive that the father should be someone we'd know, and adult men in windmill are thin on the ground. it's like, woop slap? garp? a couple shopkeepers? some unnamed background citizens and mountain bandits??? maybe the party of party's bar is a person, and makino's running the place with her husband? why wouldn't we have seen him on screen though, that one seems like a stretch.

so i'd say the theory is… plausible? i'm not wild about it—the Absent Father Because He's Too Busy Being A Pirate trope pisses me off, i don't like the idea of shanks joining their number—but yknow, them's the breaks.

as to your "passing it on to the next generation" idea: that's really sweet! tbh i think i'd like that ending (luffy returning to windmill, meeting a kid at party's bar who is eager to be a pirate, and giving them the hat) regardless of who the kid's father is! one piece does a lot with "heir to your spirit, not your blood" as a concept, so the kid's dad not being relevant or revealed would play into that nicely, however frustrating it might be for theorists.

[jeanmoreaux]

The specific part being discussed:

"this will upset a lot of people, but it isn't canon that neil is demisexual. the label isn't mentioned once in the books. can it be inferred? ABSOLUTELY. he's demi in all of my fanfics because i personally love it. but nora mentioning it in extra content does not make it canon, in the same way that jkr telling everyone she saw dumbledore as gay after the books, does not make it canon. (...)

my point is just that canon doesn’t always matter. collectively most of us have decided neil is demi, which is important rep to a lot of people without rep. how sexy of us."

thank you for the quote! i kinda skimmed the og post and this part doesn’t change my stance on anything i have said on the definition of canon and what i think about the ‘the word is not explicitly used so it’s not canon’ way of approaching literary analysis. inference is part of the established canon(s) when certain conditions ae met. you can read that post here if you haven’t already. to summarize, it’s basically ‘if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck; even if no one is recorded saying ‘that’s a duck.’ ((i think it’s beneficial to know my opinions on what is/should be considered canon bc it’s also touched upon here.))

i rather wanna talk about the comparison made between jkr telling people dumbledore is gay and nora going ‘oh demisexual seems like a fitting word for what i wrote neil to be’ in her extra content. i’m really sorry and no offense to the op of the original post bc i don’t think they had any harmful intentions but the comparison with the gay dumbledore clusterfuck is badly lacking and honestly quite ridiculous bc it’s just not the same situation. i agree that the author claiming something outside of the text does not make it canon but if the text agrees with the claim things are a little different in my opinion bc the canon still holds up when removing the authors claim from the equation. the textual evidence still supports the reading of neil as demisexual—whether you take nora’s claims into acoount or not—so it’s (still) canon. neil’s experiences are portrayed in the narrative and they reflect the content of the definition ‘demisexuality’ so you can infer things from the text without needing nora’s extra-textual comment. with dumbledore, you would never be able to infer from the text alone that he’s a gay man, so jkr can claim whatever she wants to get wokeness points but if it’s not in the text it’s not canon. and let’s not pretend she couldn’t have worked this into the story somehow and make it clear to readers that dumbledore is a gay man. she had plenty opportunity to do so but she chose not to while nora had a clear goal to write neil in a certain way and she followed through.

and not to mention the simple fact that, jkr—a straight woman—retroactively claiming dumbledore is a gay man with no textual evidence to back it up is not the same as nora—someone who identifies as aroace—setting out to write a character with a specific set of traits and characteristics but not knowing the exact term until after publication and thus not mentioning it in her work explicitly. i mean you also have to consider that the ace spectrum wasn’t much discussed in online/other spaces at the time nora was writing these books. 'demisexuality’ and similar words only quite recently entered the mainstream vocabulary of sexual identities. so even if nora had wanted to put an explicit label for neil in the text she didn’t have the vocabulary to do so. but the thing is it doesn’t even make sense for the text to mention a specific label anyway?? i know some people like to give nora shit for her writing but it’s honestly pretty fitting for the narrative to gloss over these things bc sexuality and explicitly defining this sexuality is secondary to neil as a character. and he’s the narrator. not focusing on sexual identity and the politics thereof is pretty in character for him. additionally, like an other anon mentioned, the series is set in the early 2000s where no one was that aware of the ace spectrum and it’s labels, least of all someone as isolated from popular—or really all—culture as neil.

so yeah, jkr saying dumbledore is gay and nora confirming neil is demisexual with these exact labels outside the texts are completely different. it’s just not the same, i am sorry. you just can’t compare the two.