#specifically it was about like... how similar he is to joyboy

[witchof-hearts]

so my brother was talking about the chances of luffy retroactively becoming a Chosen One type situation bc of his devil fruit... which made me go Oh no say it isnt so not freedom boy! whats the point of the freedom then! does anyone who knows more than i do have input on this

[joy-girl]

Not to sound too insane or delusional right now BUT...

I was looking at pictures of Roger and my attention got caught by the jolly roger on his hat.

Specifically on the mustache of his jolly roger, and suddenly I realised that it reminded me of something...

Luffy's twirly eyebrows during the gear 5's transformation!

And that's even more weird because if you think about it, jolly rogers are supposed to represent the captain of a crew, right? Like Whitebeard's jolly roger has exactly the same type of mustache he has, Luffy's one has a straw hat, Shank's one has his three scars and so on...

But Roger doesn't have his mustache curved like that or even of that white/light colour. He has normal (and beautiful) black mustache!

So... Why did Roger choose that kind of jolly roger, when it doesn't represent how he normally looks? 👀

You know what I'm hinting at right? Even without taking into account all the similarities between Luffy and Roger's behaviour...

Also I know that the fruit hasn't been awakened in 800 years, but it can't be a coincidence that the moustache on his jolly roger looks exactly like it would've looked like if he ate the fruit (and then awakened it)... even if we know that nobody between the era of Joyboy from 800 years ago and Luffy in the present has ever awakened the fruit, Oda might have still drawn his jolly roger like that for a reason that is linked to that specific devil fruit...

Or I might be wrong and it doesn't have anything to do with it, but in that case the question still remains... why did he choose a jolly roger that is so different from him?

[spam-monster]

Theorydump about One Piece post Vegapunk loredump

not-as-spoilery theory/headcanons first:

Garp didn't used to be this much of a hardass when it came to his family, the reason he was so aggressive towards Ace and Luffy was because he blamed himself for Dragon defecting from the Marines and thought he had been too soft on him.

There's a lore reason why Garp named his kid Dragon even though he's always disliked the Celestial Dragons - maybe a run-in with the actual mythical beast?

The elephant was cursed because he was friends with Joyboy.

ONE PIECE MANGA SPOILERS UP TO 1121

The big one: The Five Elders are not the human forms, but the demon creatures that attacked Egghead Island.

-- I feel like someone would have said something if the 5 elders had been alive for 800+ years, so people must think they're human at least.

-- People are selected to become an elder when one of them "dies"; in reality, they become the new host body for the demon. They also take on a new name - the name of the demon.

-- The 20 original royal families that became the Celestial Dragons made a deal with the demons to defeat Joyboy in return for becoming hosts to demons themselves. The reason the Elders keep the CD all in one place and keep them dumb and ignorant is so that it will be easy for them to find new host bodies.

Devil fruit powers come from the dreams of humans, and although some of them have minds of their own, they ultimately follow the will of the human that eats them. In contrast, the demons that the 5 Elders host are actual mythical creatures that possess humans and enslave their will. The idea of Zoan fruits was based off them, which explains the similarities.

The original Joyboy was a giant, and the giant straw hat hidden away by the nobles belonged to them. Nika is a god of the giants, and his known friends are a giant elephant and a giant robot. And the awakened power lets Luffy turn giant himself.

Joyboy was also the first Devil Fruit user, and the Nika model was the first Devil Fruit.

The reason D is hated is because of Lily, who "betrayed" the alliance of 20 who formed the World Government and covered up the Void Century by spreading the Poneglyphs.

The D stands for Demon/Devil (connection to the original nobles and the fruits), or Dragon (because they were descendants of someone who could have been a Celestial Dragon but chose to defect).

Rocks had the same Devil Fruit power Blackbeard specifically sought out , which is part of the reason he was so dangerous.

There are other Devil Fruits whose powers are based off deities - Blackbeard's is from a god/demon of darkness who was the enemy of Nika, and the Flame fruit is a fire god who was brothers with the god of the sun.

Joyboy did not preserve the Ancient Weapons because of nefarious reasons, it was because the Ancient Weapons were all living/sentient beings and he wanted them to live freely. Since Poseidon is a power inherited by fishmen, Pluton could be some kind of ship spirit that possesses vessels, and Uranus is a sky creature.

Saving the world from flooding will not only involve building massive ships/arks, but sending landmasses into the sky to become Sky Islands.

The One Piece is/was the Nika/Gum-Gum fruit and it's true meaning - Roger found it at Laugh Tale but left it alone because he was already old and terminally ill and couldn't use it properly, setting off a search for it instead so that others would seek the truth.

There is a Sea Goddess who is connected to Imu and the Celestial Dragons and opposed to Nika, the reason Devil Fruit users cannot swim is because of them and they also might be behind the water levels rising. It's possible they are not on any one side and just go along with the Elders because they know how not to anger her.

The ending is gonna have some Fire Force-ass trippy bs in it.

[doctortonytchopper]

Hmmmmm ok ok ok ok so hear me out. (Me, addressing myself)

So it occurred to me earlier that what orochi did to ebisu village - being infuriated by their suffering and specifically their crying, tricking them into eating defective smile fruits - is a pretty damn good mirror for how people like koala and Kuma have now been shown to have a similar thing inflicted on them by the celestial dragons, in childhood especially.

It also occurs to me that Wano was a pretty god damn good mirror and/or just a straight up micro version for the world at large.

Wano's government: many heads of a snake, attached to the same body, who is extremely difficult to kill due to some supernatural (devil fruit) quasi-immortality quality, and who pretends to rule the country; meanwhile, a Much Larger Threat (one single man) is the actual real power. Not that their cruelty is much different, in ideology or practice.

The world government: multiple men who seem to be mentally connected in some mysterious way (finishing each others' sentences) who are extremely difficult to kill partly due to some supernatural (???) quasi-immortality quality, and who pretend to rule the world; meanwhile, a Much Larger Threat (one single shadowy thing) is the actual real power. Not that their cruelty is much different, in ideology or practice.

But while some part of me has been chewing on that, and this next part, none of them had any real cohesion until I really sat with st. Saturn's absolute insistence on not ever being called or considered human, and then him calling Nika a "god", specifically in quotation marks in the translation I read.

So here's the thing: after his first defeat, while imprisoned in Udon, Luffy has a really important speech to the other prisoners. They are trying to fight him because the jailers have pointed out that luffy isn't a Wano native and so like, why should he help you? And what if you killed him and then we cured the plague we just infected you with, hmm? Why should you trust him? At which point Luffy says some beautiful things about how it doesn't matter where he comes from, and why should they reject help from an outside source just on principle if the end result is the liberation they're so desperate for they've stopped even hoping it'll come true?

So I'm not necessarily saying that luffy will fail the first time he goes up against the world government and be imprisoned, though there is significant precedent for that. I just literally have no idea how likely that is, beyond "that would be a cool parallel thing" which is in fact not a form of evidence.

I'm also not saying I have any real basis for anything else here. But I AM saying that the fact that the original Nika was clearly not a stock standard no-mods homo sapien analogue human from this planet like, say, most of the strawhats as an example.

But there is certainly precedent for at least one race of this planet to not be from the planet. Skypiea residents were from the moon, as one example.

And in the same way, I have no real evidence here, but I do wonder if there have been enough hints to begin to posit that maybe Nika, the five elders, and maybe even the earliest ancestors of the celestial dragons, were not strictly from this earth.

I don't know if that would mean other planets or moons or anything like that. I don't know if it's a supernatural deal or aliens or whatever.

I'm just saying that luffys speech, that just because he's an outsider doesn't mean he can't help depose the tyrannical rule of *other outsiders*, in the same arc where his desperation to bring freedom to the citizens cause him to awaken his Nika form, might have some pretty deep punch if it comes right before we find out that was the original Nika's deal too.

I mean...if Zunesha and Lili and D's "betrayal" was because Joyboy was part of whatever same group - species?? - the five elders were from. And now Zunesha, as punishment for a betrayal, is condemned to walk the earth forever, unless *specifically a member of the true ruling class* (which ostensibly momo would be) gives him permission to fight back against Jack.

I hate writing this god damn essay so much I am procrastinating to the actual outer space right now god fucking bless