@RobZilla:
Look, I'm just going by the old adage that the most obvious explanation is usually the right one. When you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras and all that.
Entertaining every theory just because of ambiguity is the kind of thinking that lead to half the forum believing that Meadows had knocked out all of Block D and was a commander on Kaido's crew.
Let's not do things like that.
Well, I can't help it if other people overemphasize or leap to drastic conclusions.
I'm just keeping my mind open to the possibility that hey, Blackbeard may have a dumb twist involving the multiple ambiguous statements about him, and that the limited information we have on him is potential for interesting discussions on if its foreshadowing. We know he's special, or knows something other people don't, and when there's multiple statements in the manga about his character that are possible allusion towards his specialness, yeah, I don't think it's ridiculous to discuss them. We're on the same page here, but I think you've just ingrained the absoluteness that tends to happen in arguments around here.
So is Blackbeard a crazy doubleperson? My thought on the matter is: probably not. but it's fun to discuss with what we have, yeah? :)@dailyfiber:
Actually I think it's pretty much 100% possible to figure out they were referring to the fact that they realized he was part of a crew and that there were others around.
Because the thing is, reread Marineford Arc. When Blackbeard absorbs the Gura Gura no Mi, Marco says something about Blackbeard having an atypical body structure. But he says something along the lines of "No! this isn't weird at all, you guys should all know about his atypical body structure" or something like that. I got the impression from this that Blackbeard's secret is something ONLY the Whitebeard Pirates know about, cause they were shipmates with him. It could have accidentally been revealed to them, or maybe they figured it out when he killed Thatch and ate the Yami Yami no Mi. Regardless, BB was with WB's crew for 20 years! So I got the vibe that secret is something only they know about, which makes sense as to why Ace knows about it too and references it (maybe–probably) on Banaro Island. He's part of the Whitebeard crew after all, and Teach's commander. He'd know about it.
But there's literally no way Luffy and Zoro could have picked up on it all the way back on Jaya. They had already come across two members of BB's crew. Burgess comes across as strong, sure, but I'm willing to bet money they could even tell Doc Q was strong himself, despite his appearance. They simply put two and two together and figured out he's part of a crew, likely the weird but strong guys they had just come across. It's not ambiguous at all, the wording is just bad. Maybe in the original Japanese it's worded better?
I know Oda is infamous for putting details like this waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay in advance, but people are reading too much into it.
A) It would be haki foreshadowing B) When you allude to a fact, or include double-statements in your works, the person making the double sttatement doesn't necessarily have to know it's a double statement. That's what makes foreshadowing a twist work. You need to leave key pieces to the puzzle lying around so when the reader discovers something crazy, in world, it wasn't crazy at all as it was presented. This grounds the twist in the rules of the fiction created. If Blackbeard was, I dunno, actually Gol D Roger, if we found that out right now, without any other evidence, everyone would go "what the fuck", but if you revealed Blackbeard had chimerism, upon explanation on the spot, it would probably be much more sound of a twist because we already have evidence to support that in the work, even it's tinfoil hat crazy.
My argument on the matter here, which is sort of a combination of devil's advocate and trying to explain how open details and foreshadowing work, is that the ambiguous nature of the things said about Blackbeard creates enough wiggle room that if we get more supporting evidence, the potential twist of Blackbeard having a special double body of some sort is possible, and that they could very well just be general statements that are ambiguous as red herrings, or they don't mean anything at all. But we don't know that, so we're talking about it like proper, cool people, yeah?
Oda's drawing of Teach as a child crying also suggests he had a tragic past, I'm certain that within sadness the darkness found Teach and consumed him, making him a much different person than before leaving Shanks powerless to stop him at the time, represented by his 'ache'. Shanks' scar has 3 slashes, reflecting the 3 skulls on Blackbeard's flag, again perhaps farfetched, but you cannot deny that there is a huge foreshadowing.
