Nico Robin Quotes

Franky builds the trap this line walks into. On p. 13, chained beside her, he tells her she is still running away from something, asks whether she is afraid her friends will die there, and sets a condition: if she keeps turning away, they won't be able to save her. A rescue, in his account, needs her consent. She gives him no answer in words. Eight pages later Luffy is across the gap, having shouted that he is glad she is still there, and the condition comes due. This is her answer, and it is aimed at the premise rather than at Luffy: nobody asked for this, so nobody is owed it. The page plays it as fury (mouth wide, sweat flying, Franky's "...?!" in the panel beside it), but the punctuation gives her away. A refusal would end on the exclamation mark; this one puts a question mark first, and a question is something a person can answer. Luffy's reply, in the next panel, is an ellipsis.

Read cold, the scene argues against her. On p. 17 a soldier reports that she and Franky have broken their chains and are out on the balcony; on p. 19 Luffy calls across that it is kinda far but he will try to jump over; and she spends the moment telling him to go home. Taken at face value this is a woman refusing a rescue she plainly needs, and the speech printed just below it, that she does not even want to see their faces anymore, makes the refusal look final. The objection mostly survives. What the pages add is the phrase "how many times". A person whose mind is made up says no once; this is someone who has had to keep making the same refusal, and Franky has just spent pp. 12 and 13 telling her that her agreement with the government was reversed by that idiot and that if she keeps turning away, they won't be able to save her. Her face in the panel before this one is not anger but strain: eyes shut, teeth gritted, breath lettered beside her. The line is an order she is giving herself as much as the crew.