I saw your Revolutionary Twins au on my dash and I gotta ask: in the absence of Shanks on the Oro Jackson, does BUGGY end up with the strawhat? There’s no way he would ever befriend baby Luffy, so does that mean Luffy isn’t a pirate in this au, or does it just take him longer to settle on his dream?
Also, unrelated, I’m DYING to know what the twins’ (both amazing swordsmen) dynamic with Mihawk looks like, given that Mihawk is a Warlord who works for the government.
ohh i honestly hadn't thought about most of these things but they are very fascinating to consider...i guess it is completely possible that buggy would end up with the straw hat; it would just depend on whether roger would want to do that lol.
i'm not sure whether shanks just got the hat because he was the first apprentice or because roger saw specific potential in him that he may or may not have seen in buggy. after all, shanks is also a sword user and was clearly specifically inspired by roger (he learned/copied one of his main moves, divine departure) and i'm not sure that buggy would have been as close with him even if shanks weren't there to steal the spotlight.
i DO think luffy would end up as a pirate eventually. i reckon garp still would have at least brought him to visit dadan & ace at some point, and ace wanted to be a pirate, so i reckon luffy would just end up with the same co-captains dream with ASL. his motivation to become the pirate king might not be quite as strong though, and there'd be some gaps in his convictions and code of ethics without shanks there to emulate.
...okay the thought of shanks and mihawk still being rivals in this AU is hilarious and i kind of love it. i don't think the revs have much interaction with the warlords unless the warlord is like actively doing oppression but it's fun to think they might run into each other and clash now and then. when the twins get tired of dueling each other they just take turns dueling mihawk. they like trying to bother him into telling them which one of them he thinks is stronger, too. (also, now the shared mihawk/shanks bday can be a shared mihawk, shanks AND shamrock bday lmao)
then again, this begs the question: WOULD the twins be swordsmen? i drew shanks with a sword in the art and my instinct is yes, but also both of them were raised under swordsmen in canon (roger and garling respectively) and it's likely both of their canon swords are holy knight blades, so it's possible that without that influence they'd use a different fighting style entirely. come to think of it, i can't think of a single rev who uses a sword....
