(SPOILERS FOR CHAPTER 1169)
This pretty much confirms that Shanks was in the East Blue searching for Ace, right? Since Garp is from there and he's the one who had the information about Roger's son. This also makes Ace's childhood even sadder, because here are all these people who loved his father and were excited about Ace's existence and could have told him what Roger was really like... and yet. None of the older Roger Pirates went looking for him (and I don't necessarily fault them for that, it's established that the Navy was hunting them and it would've brought so much attention on Ace and put him in danger, plus none of them had any reason to suspect he wasn't being raised properly) and Shanks spent a whole year on the same island without meeting him (which really puts faith into this equation)
Shanks must have at least thought about giving Ace the Nika fruit, given that he assumed Ace would inherit the Pirate King title, and who better to have the fruit of the Warrior of Liberation than the King of the Pirates. It's interesting that he's putting this much emphasis on bloodline, since he just finished cutting ties with his own
What Gaban says on that left bubble is
期待された者は…意外と天下を取らねェもんだ…!!
People with expectations placed upon them... unexpectedly fail to take control of the world...!!
The verb 取る (toru) means to take, obtain, win, take control of, etc. And 天下 (tenka) means the whole world, society, or the ruling power. So basically just because a person is promising, doesn't mean they will be able to live up to those expectations. But the thing about taking over the world reminds me of Rocks and his supposed successor Teach, and makes me wonder if Teach will also fail to live up to his father's image and dreams
The sad thing is that Ace died specifically because of those expectations, because of the burden of being considered the heir to Roger's title, regardless of what Ace himself felt about that. It didn't really matter, what mattered where other people's expecations of him, the image of The Son of The Pirate King that the world cloaked him in, and in that sense he failed to live up to that because he didn't want it. But if you really want to get tragic about it, he kind of did live up to it in the sense that his death is also the catalyst of an event that ended up shaking the world just like Roger did. Even in death, he still didn't escape his father's shadow and the world's expectations
Shanks calls Imu 御大 (ontai), which a familiar/affectionate way of saying boss or leader. It's what all the God's Knights so far have called Imu, so he probably learned it from Garling and Shamrock. It makes me wonder if Shanks knows who exactly this Great One is, but he must at least suspect the amount of power they have, as the owner of the contracts
I don't know if I'd personally use the word "freak" here, since Shanks only says 奴 (yatsu) with emphasis, so it's more like that person or that guy. At most, you could say that bastard, I think. Yatsu is slightly derogatory, but Shanks doesn't really talk in a polite way to begin with (unlike Koby, for example), so it doesn't read as any more rude than the way he normally talks
So Shanks himself cannot create and Abyss and wouldn't have to obey Imu's orders unless they were close by, so he probably felt safe enough in the East Blue to spend a year in Luffy's village. Given his power level, I do still think that when he tells Whitebeard that he gave up his arm for the new era, he means the connection to the Holy Land and not the pitifully weak sea monster that ate it. Fate or the Fruit itself chose Luffy, so Shanks chose him too and took a more visible stance against his birth family, since after this is when he becomes an Emperor and kind of symbolically declares he is a part of this "lower world" they hate so much up there
Really, asking Loki to be the one to stop him was such a cruel thing for Harald to do. I get that in terms of strength Loki was probably the only one that could, but even inside the castle you can already see the information being distorted. It went from "help Loki stop the king" to "Loki must be fighting with the king, we must protect the king" without even leaving the premises. Of course when the news got out it would distort in a way that painted Loki as the bad guy, even if other people had survived. You don't just erase 60+ years of hatred with a single order from Harald that almost no one heard
Harald doesn't necessarily call this a mistake, he calls it
取り返しのつかない事
something that cannot be undone
The idea is basically the same, but calling it a mistake made me want to think about how Imu and Sommers called what Harald did a mistake/blunder, and how ironic it would be if all of them thought of this day as a mistake, but for different reasons
Harald, my guy. In what world would people ever believe him? With Loki and Harald's respective reputations, who was going to believe him when he said that everything his father was working towards was a mistake and his father had lost control and killed all his guards? I get that you're desperate, but you yourself have never once believed or listened to your own son, even while loving him, so what chance did he have with the rest of the country?
It's interesting that Loki calls the Devil Fruit 禁断 (kindan), which means forbidden. Harald had called it Elbaf's 秘宝 (hihou), or hidden treasure. Is it forbidden because it's supposed to stay hidden? There must be some circumstances where it's ok to eat it, like what's happening right now. Or was it supposed to stay hidden until the right time for the end of the world mentioned in the Harley text? Harald said he would eat the fruit and take Ragnir for himself, so are those two things related? Was Rocks hoping for the power of the fruit, or Ragnir, or both?
