Re: ONE PIECE Discussion thread!Ch.797: "Rebecca"
The Underground’s Jack theory
(The return of Wapol of Drum Kingdom)
Jack in One Piece seems to be portrayed as someone who you don’t want to piss off. Given the nature of his portrayal, I had originally disregarded any links to “Jack and the Beanstalk” because growing up the original story of “Jack and the Beanstalk” was lost in translation and distorted in order to make “Jack” seem like the good guy. But upon further digging, I have come to find out, that Jack was in fact that “Bad Guy” of the story the entire time. Let’s take a look:
In the tale, he is a very poor man (or boy) who lives with his widowed mother. With only a cow, he goes to the city hoping to get some money by selling it, but he is tricked into trading it with some supposed magical beans. His mother gets angry at him, throws the beans out the window and sends him to bed without supper. During night, while Jack was sleeping, the beans sprout a beanstalk who grows into gigantic proportions. Driven by curiosity, Jack climbs the beanstalk and finds himself in the Giant’s Realm, where there is a huge castle. There, he sees the owner of the castle, the Giant, who is a woodcutter. Jack notices the two possessions of the Giant, a magical harp who sings by himself, and a goose who puts golden eggs, which the Giant uses to make golden coins.
As the Giant goes to sleep, Jack steals a bag of golden coins and flees. Although the coins were very valuable, he soon ran out of money, and driven by his hunger and greed he once again climbs the beanstalk, this time with a objective in mind. Again in the castle, he waits for the Giant to sleep and steals his goose. Finally, despite knowing better, and due to desire for more adventure, Jack climbs the beanstalk a third time and steals the harp. However, the magical harp alerts the giant, who gives chase after him. Jack climbs down the beanstalk and once on the ground he uses an axe (which his mother has given to him) to cut the beanstalk, which makes the Giant drop to death.
Finally, promising his mother never to do anything like that again, Jack learns that need and greed are two different things, and that without knowing the difference between those two, what one chases ends up chasing him or her instead.
A Somewhat Unorthodox Explanation
Since many will question Jack’s inclusion on this wiki as a villain we shall try to explain his crimes in a rather humorous way, though this is a factual account: Jack basically climbed the beanstalk, broke into the giant’s home, stole his stuff, and then brutally murdered him; if he were to be tried by modern law, he’d be considered a dangerous criminal, and the giant would be considered a victim.
Jack’s Crimes: Theft, Trespass, Assault With A Deadly Weapon (wielding an axe) and Murder.
As you can tell, by no means was Jack a “good guy” at all, so this prompted me to do a little more digging. Jack actually appears in many different Fables, as a different character, who shares the same name. One story in particular that got me thinking though, was “Jack the Giant Killer” Now in this Story, Jack is also portrayed to be a “Hero” and the giants are portrayed to be the Villains, but there was on thing in the Wiki, that caught my eye.
Some parallels to elements and incidents in Norse mythology have been detected in the tale, and the trappings of Jack’s last adventure with the giant Galigantus suggest parallels with French and Breton fairy tales such as Bluebeard.
Up until this point, I had never heard any stories about this character named “Bluebeard” so I decided to look him up, and although not 100 percent accurate, he bares some striking similarities to another character in the series.
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It was actually very sneaky on Oda’s part when he had first introduced Wapol, because his chin was made of metal, so we didn’t know if he had a Beard or not, but he does, and it is the same exact color as his regular hair…. And that is of the colour blue… Now some people can argue that Wapol’s hair colour is violet, but in almost every depiction we have seen of his character, it is blue, or rather I should say indigo, which is the colour between blue and violet, and looks more blue than purple.
So lets look at the similarities between Wapol and Bluebeard:
Bluebeard is a wealthy aristocrat, feared and shunned because of his ugly, blue beard. In Charles Dickens’ short story, Bluebeard is described to be far more bloodthirsty that his other variations and even goes as far as to cannibalize his wives, whom he has killed.
We know that Wapol is a king, which coincides with Bluebeard being a wealthy aristocrat, and he is greatly feared by the people of Drum Kingdom for his ruthlessness, and Devil Fruit ability, a lot of you already know, gives him the ability to to eat anything, and turn it into a weapon, or whatever else Wapol so desires, including his own crew members. That right there coincides with Bluebeard being a cannibal.
In the Tale of Bluebeard, there was one room in his castle, that no one was allowed to enter. It was kept locked, and they only way to gain access to it was via the key he kept with him at all times. Behind this door was the bodies and skeletons of all of Bluebeard’s previously murdered wives. In One Piece, there is a similar room in Wapol’s castle that is kept locked at all times and no one is permitted to enter. This room contains all the military weapons Wapol had been storing up over time.
Now lets take a look at a depiction of Bluebeard which looks very similar to Wapol’s (while thin) :
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So now that we have established Wapol being inspired by Bluebeard and that there are parallels of Bluebeard in Jack the Giant Killer. Now, let’s connect Wapol to another Jack. And this Jack is that of Jack and the Beanstalk.
Now, I already pointed out that Jack from Jack and The Beanstalk was actually a villain, but how does Wapol connect? Well for that, we have to look towards Wapol’s cover story. Let’s take a look at the first and second page in Wapol’s cover story and note the name of the chapter titles:
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They are called “Ship is sailing in the sky” and “Up in the sky”. The following stories are similar: “The adventure in God’s land”, “Trial of balls” and “Ex-God vs God’s priest”.
So as we can see, Wapol, after losing everything has now become a peasant, living poorly on the streets, doing whatever he can to scrape by. This can be considered the “Jack” aspect of his character that coincides with the “Evil Jack” from Jack and the Beanstalk I pointed out earlier.
Now it’s time to establish how he is connected to the Brokers.
Lets take a look at how Wapol pulled himself out of the slums and managed to work his way back up to being a king. During Wapol’s cover story, Wapol had found out he had a knack for makings “toys” and selling them. He started his own little mini business and Wapol the toy maker was born.
During that time, however, a scientist discovered that the metal Wapol used to make his toys was unique, as it is damn near indestructible. We know this because it is the exact same metal Franky used to build his Franky Shogun.
With the discovery of Wapol metal, Wapol went on to rebuild his fortune and empire. He became rich beyond his dreams and was even granted by the Celestial Dragon’s his own Kingdom in which he would once again become king.
So what does this have to do with him being an underground Broker? Well think about it. When creating weapons, what is the one thing you need? Exceptionally fine metal in order to make sure you produce top quality weapons. We already know that Wapol can create weapons through the use of his Devil Fruit ability and that he is known to stock pile them. So what better way for a greedy king, who can produce durable weapons at will with the use of his Devil Fruit, to make even more money than to start dealing in underground weapons distribution. But he is just a supplier and he would need someone to distribute them for him. Someone extremely connected in the Underground. Someone known to distribute weapons to countries, in order to fuel wars.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, yes, I am speaking of Doflamingo. One thing we know about Doflamingo, is that he supplies countries with weapons, but we don’t know where exactly he gets those weapons from. He doesn’t produce them himself, because his factories and research go towards making SMILEs. This is established through Sabo’s words when he stated that the Revolutionaries came to Dressrosa in order to find the underground weapons factory, but the only thing they uncovered is that it wasn’t in Dressrosa.
When I look at how Wapol made his comeback through the use of selling “Toys” and thought about how Doflamingo used “Toys” in order to run his factories, it lead me to the conclusion that, the “Toys” in Wapol’s cover story could have been a foreshadow that Doflamingo would supply “real toys” to Wapol to work in his factories, in exchange for discounts on Wapol’s weapons. So I decided to do a little bit of digging in the Underground Port of Dressrosa and I was amazed by what I found:
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Now take a look at the animal Wapol used on Drum Island to move around and his cloak:
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All three are giant Hippos.
And before there is any people out there who want to disregard Wapol because they believe him to be to “weak” as a character to be someone like Jack, I will leave you with this:
“I get annoyed to hear people speaking ill of characters in ONE PIECE. For example, when they say ‘this villain is weak’, I can’t help thinking that then I’ll make him much stronger!” Eiichiro Oda – Color Walk 6 (2014)
All rights go to the maker of this theory.