One Piece Vol. 60: My Little Brother
- ISBN
- 9781421540856
- Publisher
- VIZ Media
- English release
- Pages
- 208
- Chapters
- 585–594
- Anime
- Season 14: Marineford ep. 457–516
Ten chapters that finish the war's aftermath, and the last volume sitting entirely on the old side of the two-year break. Chapters 585 to 594 complete the childhood flashback begun at the end of Vol. 59, and then return to a present in which Luffy has to decide whether there is anything left to do. Season 14 still covers all of it; the anime boundary falls three chapters into the next book, not this one. As an arc edge it closes cleanly and stops badly: the flashback ends, the post-war story ends, and the decision the volume arrives at is acted on in Vol. 61. A reader who owns Vols. 53 to 59 is not finished, and a reader who owns none of them should not begin here.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
Sabo is why the flashback exists. He is assumed dead at the hands of a Celestial Dragon, for being what the story calls human garbage, and the two boys left make a promise to each other that Vol. 59 has already broken. Grief is not the subject for long. Luffy works out that he still has a crew, decides to go straight back to the archipelago, and is told by Rayleigh that doing so would see them defeated again. What replaces the plan is stagecraft: Luffy attacks Marine Headquarters for no military purpose whatever, in public, so that a crew scattered across the world will read the news correctly.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Links on this page are affiliate links, which cost you nothing extra. They never influence what appears on this site or what the commentary says about it.
Lines from this volume
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“I may not be an orphan, but I've always been alone.”
“I want to see the world and write a book about it!”
Set beside a boy who wants to be King of the Pirates, wanting to travel and write a book sounds like a school essay. It is the most modest dream on the page, and that is the strongest case against it. The answer is on the page before it. Sabo's childhood, as he tells it, was lessons every single day under parents who wanted him fit to marry royalty, and one flashback panel has an adult telling him that if he has time to draw pictures he can go to his room and study. The book is what that education looks like when he gets to keep it. Navigation, he says in the same panel, is the one thing he likes to study, and he wants to be a pirate who writes. The dream does not reject the highland's schooling. It steals it. That is a sharper escape than the grand version, because it keeps the one part of the old life that was his and throws out the purpose it was meant to serve. The concession stands too: as a slogan it is small. It was never meant to be one. It was said in a forest by a boy who had admitted two pages earlier that his parents were alive.
The kingdom is introduced on page 12 as thought to be the most beautiful land of the East Blue, spotlessly clean, a successful example of a society where everything unnecessary is removed. Sabo's history, as he finally tells it, is that he was the unnecessary thing inside one of its good houses. His parents are alive; his father has just recognized him in the street and called him home. What the flashback shows is what home meant: lessons every single day, fights when he could not learn fast enough, a father who wants him worthy to marry a daughter of the royal family so that the family will be set. He was a nuisance in that house, he says. The line is the summary of that childhood, and it turns the word orphan inside out. Ace has to threaten to beat the truth out of him, and the truth is that he came to Trash Mountain with two parents and the same condition as the orphans he lived among. His father, in the flashback, calls the mountain's people trash in the shape of people, and his own measure at home, without a royal marriage, was no better than trash. He chose the place where the word was at least said to his face.