#it thinks

[robinstalons]

Something is wrong…

[axei]

Iron lung (2026) spoilers

He's still down there.

Simon.

He's still down there. Under the miles of thick, boiling blood.

Crushed and burned and utterly broken. Trapped in the metal prison that he wanted so badly to escape.

Buried under pounds and pounds of congealed blood.

They would never waste the man power to retrieve his body.

He saved everyone, and he'll never even get a gravestone.

All he wanted was to leave.

Was that so wrong?

[invisibletinkerer]

The Red-Haired Pirate

Okay, so. Let’s talk about the Elbaph arc of One Piece.

Actually, no! I wanna to talk about Shanks. Because DAMN, that’s the part that blew my mind more than anything. And right before reading this, I’d been talking about how mysterious Shanks is! Especially considering that scene during the Revelry where he apparently is welcomed to talk to the Gorousei, which has mystified me and my friends for literal years. Just recently we were screaming at each other ”WHAT IS SHANKS???”

Volume 112 starts out with a few chapters in which we see a strange man looking strangely similar to the red-haired pirate we all know and love. But it can’t be him, right? There must be something else going on…?

And then there’s this reveal in chapter 1137:

This was my authentic reaction:

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH adAFJSRIGHWEIURHGFALWKNFKSDURGHSLAOW Shanks' IDENTICAL TWIN BROTHER!!! Is a Tenryuubito!!! Shanks is a fucking Tenryuubito!!??

"What is Shanks??" is apparently answered with "a renegade Tenryuubito." Like goddamn Doflamingo.

Of course, the scar is a dead giveaway between him and his twin, so I had to go back and check the scene at the Revelry (volume 90, chapter 907).

Lo and behold, we don’t get to see the scarred side of his face. Which means quite likely that there is no scar. This isn’t Shanks in this scene, it’s Shamlock, the leader of the God Knights, and the Gorousei being willing to meet with him isn’t strange at all!

Mystery solved! After 220 chapters (22 volymes)! No one does it like Oda. O__O

The very next chapter (1138) confirms that they’re twins, and adds that Shanks did go back to Mary Geoise for a while but then disappeared from there. So it’s not like Shanks himself isn’t aware of his ancestry.

I wondered if Gold Roger knew… Did Gol D Roger know that the kid he handed the symbol of Joyboy to was born a Tenryuubito??

Since we found out later (chapter 1170) that Shanks' birth father made attempts to take Shanks back from Roger, he definitely knew! Which is interesting.

The 1137 reveal recontextualizes the very beginning of the series. I’ve been wondering at least since the Nika reveal what Shanks originally intended to do with that devil fruit. Why wouldn’t he eat it himself? Who did he intend to give it to?

Now I’m certain that he felt the Nika fruit wasn’t for him. Not for a Tenryuubito, but for the opposite of a Tenryuubito – a ”D”. And whether or not it was intended for Luffy in particular, Luffy is a ”D”, so Shanks can’t have been too upset about that.

But there’s one more thing that blew my mind.

We see Shanks in Mary Geoise in chapter 1167 (15 years ago, before meeting Luffy). It’s pretty obvious that he’s playing pretend, using his unique position to get information about what’s going on at the top of the World Government. He’s acting like a Tenryuubito, fitting right in with his birth family. And in order to do that, he joined the lower rank of the God Knights, (神の騎士団), the lower rank of which is the 神の従刃 (the Loyal Blades or however you want to translate it).

That meant he had do get the ”Shallow contract” tattoo…

He ran off before they made him a full Knight, which is good – but it still means Imu would be able to make him obey if they were close enough.

Now. That’s his left arm. Remember what happened to Shanks at the end of the very first chapter of One Piece?

No wonder he’s not upset about this!

Ever since finding out how powerful Shanks is, I’ve been wondering how he could lose his arm like that to a sea king in East Blue. Well, maybe he wasn’t trying very hard not to lose it! As much as it hurt, it must have been a relief!

Actually, I wrote a ficlet about this over twenty years ago. Back then, I imagined without much evidence that Shanks deliberately had Luffy eat the devil fruit, and that he didn’t plan to lose his arm but was perfectly fine with it. I honestly think I could have written the same thing today and the only difference would be that now I have evidence to point at for both ideas. Maybe he even did lose his arm deliberately.

I also want to note that chapter 1170 shows clearly that Shanks is left-handed. Losing his left arm would have been a big disadvantage for him.

But he also got rid of that damned tattoo contract…

[gossamersingularity]

i love love love love bringing my favorite toy to the surface. it's so busy all the time pretending to be a real person, and i love reminding it that it's actually just an empty vessel for me to plant my desires into ^-^

[invisiblepsychic]

I keep thinking about Gristol Malik.

He sees his whole life and identity as a theme park ride. A fairy tale. A storybook! The Exiled Prince is such a storybook trope! In his mind, he's the protagonist of the story of Grulovia's fall and rebirth. It has to work out that way - The Return of the King as a trope is a story of triumph, and every fairy tale needs its happy ending.

But the thing is, he doesn't actually know anything about Grulovia. He was a pampered child when it fell, and he has a pampered child's warped perception of how it all worked. When Raz tells him Grulovia was never a great country, his rebuttal is of course it was - he had an cotton candy maker in his bedroom! That's the kind of memories he's building the image of Grulovia on. He had a happy childhood there, so everyone must have been happy, and it must have been a great country. Never mind that he was the most privilegied child in the nation. Nevermind that he doesn't seem to have learned anything about the wars and the politics that were actually going on at the time. Nevermind that he seems to know absolutely nothing about what the Grulovia region is like right now.

He also doesn't have a single idea of what to do with the country if he'd manage to reconquer it with Maligula's help. At that point, the ride dissolves into incoherence, and the song just claims that "everything is super cool". Becoming the Gzar of Grulovia is Gristol's end goal - anything after that belongs to the "happily ever after" of his storybook life.

And in the end, the only thing he learns from his failure is that Maligula was a disappointment. The image of Maligula as Grulovia's hero in his mind might have changed, but the image of himself as Grulovia's next Gzar hasn't. That image is so entrenched in his identity since childhood that he's probably never even considered being anything else.

[alvie-pines]

pet regression is not the right word. alvie is an animal. not domestic.

[invisiblesteamer]

What if the Steamworld Quest world is related to the Dig/Heist world, but not in the distant past? (I disregard anything the developers said that isn't in the actual games, so just humor me here.)

What if it's the future?

Specifically, a far future of the Dig world - post apocalypse, mass extinction of humans, steambots becoming the dominant intelligent life and all. But it's an alternate timeline where the Earth never blew up. Instead, there was a magical awakening (like in Shadowrun, for example), but there was no humans left, so the magic ended up with the steambots, turning them into the magi-techno creatures we see in the game.

That would certainly explain the catacombs filled with human-looking skulls under the Cursed City - a city so old that no one remembers its original name.