Character · One Piece
Shanks
One arm, one hat and one promise, and the entire series has been paying that promise off ever since.
In Otakana the clue reads: Red-haired emperor who gave away his straw hat
- Type
- Character
- Series
- One Piece
- Letters
- 6 · Easy
Shanks commands the Red Hair Pirates and holds one of the four emperor seats in the New World, which he appears to treat as a way of keeping the peace rather than expanding anything. He rarely fights. When he arrives somewhere, wars tend to stop, largely because the people running them would rather not learn how that conversation ends.
Before any of that he spent a year drinking in a village bar, letting a child call him a coward for refusing to fight over a spilled drink. When a sea beast took Luffy, Shanks took him back and lost an arm doing it, then said an arm was a cheap price. He left his straw hat on the boy's head and asked for it back once he had become a great pirate.
He was a cabin boy on Gol D. Roger's ship, which means he watched the last era end and chose to start the next one quietly. Oda draws him sparingly on purpose, a few pages every few hundred chapters, each appearance raising his price. The story keeps insisting he matters enormously while almost never letting him do anything on the page.
Spelling SHANKS
SHANKS is six letters, an English word for the lower leg, and the S on the end has nothing to do with plurals. The Japanese writes that final S as its own kana, su, so hearing the name spoken will not mislead you. The trap is the K, sitting in an NKS cluster that English rarely types and that guesses reach for late.