One Piece Vol. 57: Paramount War

By the crew's own count, Ace has tried to kill Whitebeard about a hundred times by this page, and nobody treats it as an event any more. One crewman asks whether that was the 100th, another thinks so, and a third wonders whether he ever quits. That running count is the machinery. The question about why everybody calls the captain Pops can only be asked by someone who has lost often enough to sit down with a bowl beside the people he came to fight, and Ace asks it from exactly there. Marco's answer works because it declines an offer Ace has already refused. Two pages earlier Whitebeard held out a hand and told him to become his son, and Ace said no way. Marco does not repeat the invitation. He describes the crew from below, as strays, which puts Ace among them before Ace has agreed to anything. Son is a claim someone else makes on him; stray is a word he can recognize himself in. The sentence recruits without asking, and the grin on Marco's face two panels later says he knows it.

This gets filed with the warm lines about the Whitebeard Pirates as a family, and it is the least sentimental thing said on the ship. Marco has just explained the name Pops: the old man considers them his sons. Then he adds the clause that matters. Whether Whitebeard is sincere is left open, and the good feeling is declared independent of the answer. That is a man who has thought about being used and decided the arrangement is worth it anyway. The pitch that follows is just as practical. Ace cannot kill Pops in his condition, so he can get off the ship and try again later, or stay and take the mark of Whitebeard on his back. Nobody tells him the captain means it. He is offered a place where being called a son feels good, with an exit attached, and the doubt is stated out loud by Marco himself. That candor is what makes the offer believable. A recruiter who swore the love was real would be selling something, and the chapter has already reported that Ace turned down a seat among the Seven Warlords.

The debt is his whole position, and he states it before he states any threat. Jinbe is not a member of Whitebeard's crew, so the fight he offers is one nobody ordered and nobody would blame him for skipping. The next page shows what the offer costs: someone shouts that they will kill each other, and someone else reports that they have been fighting for five days. Five days is a long time to spend on a stranger in defense of a man he is not sworn to. The consequence runs further than the flashback. The volume's own cast page, set in the present, describes Jinbe as a prisoner of Impel Down who met Luffy there and went with him to save Ace. The rookie he tried to stop is now the man he leaves prison to rescue. The cast page gives no reason, and the one this line offers is the obvious reading: what he owes Whitebeard has grown to include the young man he once fought on Whitebeard's behalf. The line reads like a bouncer's warning. On the evidence of this volume it is closer to a contract, and he keeps its terms long after anyone could have held him to them.