One Piece Vol. 58: The Name of This Era Is "Whitebeard"
- ISBN
- 9781421539263
- Publisher
- VIZ Media
- English release
- Pages
- 208
- Chapters
- 563–573
- Anime
- Season 14: Marineford ep. 457–516
Chapters 563 to 573, and the volume One Piece is a different series after. What changes is not the size of a fight but its terms: up to this book the series has settled its largest battles by getting Luffy to the person he came for, and this one tests that arrangement to destruction. Whether it holds belongs in the section below, because it is among the two or three facts about One Piece that readers most want to meet in the book rather than in a thumbnail. Structurally, Whitebeard goes on the offensive, the pirates rally behind Luffy, and the telecast the navy cut in Vol. 57 comes back on in the closing chapters. Season 14 runs through the whole volume. Chapter 573, the last one here, gives the book its English title.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
Portgas D. Ace is freed in this book and fatally wounded in it, and the order is the point: the rescue succeeds, so the loss cannot be filed as arriving too late. Akainu goes for Luffy, Ace takes the blow, and the telecast the navy shut off in Vol. 57 has been restored by then, so the world is watching. Whitebeard is mortally wounded earlier in the volume and keeps standing, which is the same argument made twice. Up to here the series has resolved its largest fights by getting Luffy to the person he was trying to reach; it does that here and charges him for it anyway. The two years the following volumes spend elsewhere follow from a fight the cast lost while winning it.
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Lines from this volume
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“You may be a fool... ...but I still love you.”
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“I know how much you hate Gold Roger... But it's wrong to condemn a child for the sins of his father, Squard. What did Ace ever do to you?!”
Squard's complaint, made in full on page 12, is not quite the one this answers. The crew he had fought beside for so long was annihilated by Gold Roger himself, he says, and Whitebeard knew he hated the man; what he cannot forgive is being kept in the dark, laughed at when he became friends with Ace, and never told. He should have been told the truth, he shouts. Whitebeard replies to a different charge, whether a son can be blamed for a father, and on that charge he is plainly right and not especially brave. The strongest objection to the line is that it wins the easy argument and leaves the hard one standing. There is an answer, and it sits in Squard's own speech. He became friends with Ace before he knew whose son Ace was, which makes the closing question more than rhetoric: nothing Ace did has changed since that friendship, only a piece of information has. The concealment is not defended on these two pages, and the silence is the honest part. Whitebeard does not pretend the secret was fair. He only refuses to let it make Ace guilty.
The embrace is usually read as pure forgiveness, and the pages around it make it something harder. Squard has driven a sword into him on the strength of a story: that Whitebeard traded the 43 allied captains to Sengoku in exchange for Ace and his own crew. He was told his men would be spared if he stabbed Whitebeard, the fighting seems to bear the story out (pirates shout that the Navy does seem to be attacking only them), and crowds watching on the screens are already repeating that Whitebeard sold out his friends. A father who wanted only to comfort one son could have done it quietly. Whitebeard does it on a battlefield, and within a page he has named the authors, asking whether Akainu told him this and calling Sengoku as cunning as ever. The tenderness is real. It is also the only rebuttal that could work in that moment, because no denial from the accused outweighs a stab wound, and an embrace of the man who inflicted it does. Squard's reply, that he tried to kill him, is the reader's objection spoken aloud, and the answer he gets is a question about who put the idea in his head.