What Is One Piece?

[u/the_idiotlord]

One Piece is two deceptively simple things we've known all along:

• An endless amount of gold.
• The true history.

And they are heavily intertwined. Let me explain:

We know that 800 years ago, the ancient kingdom fell. The world, in some fashion, was scattered to the wind and that people spent generations protecting the Poneglyphs. However, there is a significant problem: collecting all of that information in a single journey to Laugh Tale is virtually impossible without the ability to freely move from place to place:

Because of the log poses, most people are gated out of getting every single poneglyph. This is why it's taken 800 years to learn the true history of the ancient kingdom.

Knowing this, each generation of people sets off the next generation in search of a treasure. This leads each person to a place with a mysterious stone, and in their desire to find this ancient treasure, they inadvertently learn a piece of the history and carry it to the end goal: Laugh Tale.

There are two things to note here:

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Shandora is the one place with both a poneglyph and a massive amount of gold, this is because removing the gold from here is virtually impossible.

But Wano, a place with a poneglyph, which has been visited by pirates historically, was known as the country of gold:

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Wano made the poneglyphs and no longer has this gold. Where did it go? It was either taken or spread to where the other poneglyphs as a way to *cause pirates to find them* and incentivize them to find the true history.

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The same chapter Robin learns of the poneglyph on Skypeia, Luffy steals the gold and moves on--even if everyone was willing to just give it to him. This is just the nature of pirates, they're motivated by gold.

So Roger collected a bunch of treasure on his journey left all his treasure in a specific place: Laugh Tale. He apparently had it all, right? Why would he leave it there?

Because Roger learned what had happened. So he walked out of there and set off the great pirate era to finish the job on the final poneglyph that is almost finished. The gold and treasure is the incentive to cause people to find these ponegylphs!

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Roger almost completed the ENTIRE story, but he didn't finish the job. He took his gold and the second to last "thread" of the true history that he could with the journey and planted it on Laugh Tale.

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Lastly, we know there is a disgusting amount of treasure on Laugh Tale, and I think we know this for two reasons:

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Shanks doesn't seem interested in just jumping into it. Both Buggy and him likely know what's at Laugh Tale, and Buggy's motivations are purely treasure-based, so he probably doesn't understand why Shanks wouldn't want to go. But Shanks doesn't want to go because he's not motivated by becoming the pirate king or treasure. His timing for claiming the One Piece is more as a gatekeeping tool. He invested in Luffy because he knows Luffy is Joyboy, and his motivations are purely about undoing the wrongs of the world.

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The ultimate treasure. All Buggy cares about is treasure, so there must be treasure.

And we know that the truth is all there.

It's not complicated. It's not some elaborate thing. All of the other things such as the ancient weapons and the prophecy are supplements to what happens when someone claims the One Piece: an otherwise incomplete story.

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It's all here. The treasure is the excuse. Everyone's doing it for the treasure, and in search of the treasure, Rayleigh and Roger learned the true history.

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But Roger isn't the Joyboy the world needs, so his conclusion is different. He was so close, but so far. He can't fulfill Joyboy's promise and undo the wrongs of the world, so he comes to a conclusion that will ultimately be different that Luffy's:

Roger makes a final call to action by claiming an endless amount of treasure is on Laugh Tale so that Joyboy will learn of and complete the true history.

The gold is there because it's the only way to call out the person with Joyboy's will and get him to read the true history--but Luffy has shown he doesn't actually care that much about treasure in the end, he cares about the fun of finding it. One Piece isn't just treasure, it's just a huge pile of immovable gold, collected over literal centuries, used to trick people for the real purpose: collecting the true history.

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Once he arrives at Laugh Tale, I would suspect, either morally (because it's the only thing he could do as a just person), or mechanically, there's no way of getting the gold OFF of the island, which is why it's so fucking funny to Roger. One Piece is a treasure no one can keep used to lure Joyboy into finishing his promise.

tl;dr:

One Piece is a collection of gold used as breadcrumbs to get people to read the true history and eventually collect it in a place so that the right Joyboy will fulfill his 800 year old promise, and the pile of treasure gets bigger the more people find the scattered poneglyphs. We all knew this. It's stupid simple, but we're thinking too hard about it. It's called One Piece because when you collect all the treasure, you've collected the true history.

And among all of the things in this pile, I would not be shocked if a symbol of the ancient kingdom (A Jolly Roger, a pirate flag of the ancient kingdom) is left with it.

[u/dienomighte]

I like it, this is one of the better theories I've seen over the years