Shanks Having a Twin Sounded Crazy — Then ONE PIECE Confirmed It

MONSTERsJOHN did not necessarily originate this theory. But his thumbnails became one of its most recognizable forms online — and, as the next section shows, the thumbnails travelled without the argument attached to them.

One limit on this, stated plainly. We could not retrieve what was argued inside the videos. The only captions are auto-generated, YouTube no longer serves them to a reader, and the transcript panel does not load. Everything above comes from the channel's own title, description and thumbnail text — the author's own framing of his own claim, which is citable — but we have not verified the internal reasoning, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

December 2018: knocked down as an artefact

The scar observation did not survive contact with people who looked at it closely. A Japanese blog post dated 6 December 2018 records the rumour — that the trademark scar had vanished at the Reverie, and that this might be a different man — and then closes it, calling the difference a misunderstanding produced by a horizontally flipped image.

So within six weeks, the load-bearing visual evidence had already been challenged in public.

2019: what the internet actually did with it

This is the part that gets sanded off when a theory is retold after it lands.

On 1 October 2019, a thread on 5ch's なんJ board about the channel's posting volume turned into an assessment of the theories themselves. What it shows is more specific than "people laughed."

The thing that spread was the thumbnail, not the argument. Commenters said so directly — that the garbage-thumbnail series was great and they would never once play the video, and that they had assumed it was a one-note thumbnail gag until they noticed someone was talking over it for ten-odd minutes. One post is simply: saw a thumbnail the other day that was like "there are loads of Shanks" and it cracked me up.

The multiple-Shanks idea circulated as a punchline. One commenter noted, with a laugh, that because of this channel the theory that Shanks is a Celestial Dragon who took Kid's arm had become the prevailing reading. The reply under it is deadpan: apparently there are several Shanks.

The objection was to the category, not to this specific claim. The recurring line is that this is not analysis at all — 「考察芸」, analysis-as-shtick, and 「妄想を考察という日本語の崩壊」, calling delusion "analysis" is the collapse of the Japanese language. Two years later a Yahoo! Chiebukuro thread dated 31 August 2021 lists the same complaint among the reasons the channel gets attacked: that it is presented as analysis but is mostly the author's own wishes.

It was not unanimous, and that matters. In the same 2019 thread other posters said the theories were genuinely sharp and entertaining, and one landed on something more useful than either camp: what he says is somewhat absurd, but the love for One Piece comes through, which makes it charming, which makes it worse.

And he was not necessarily the origin. One commenter accused the channel of harvesting theory material from spoiler threads and firing it out at volume. That is an accusation, not a finding, and we cannot verify it — but combined with the December 2018 post treating the idea as an existing rumour, it is enough to say that the videos are the earliest dated copy we can point at, which is not the same thing as being the source.

What the videos did do is give the theory a face. Before them it was a thing some people were saying. After them it was an image of Shanks multiplying, and that image is what got passed around.

2023: God Valley gives it a real foundation

Chapter 1096 changed the footing. In the God Valley flashback, Garling addresses children — plural — while Shanks is one year old.

A theory post dated 1 November 2023 built on exactly that. Its argument: the plural means Garling had more than one child present at God Valley, so Shanks has at least one sibling. The same post then revisited the Reverie scene with a sharper version of the 2018 idea — not "the scar looks different," but "a pirate could not safely take a meeting with the Five Elders, so the man in that room may be a sibling who holds Celestial Dragon standing."

It named no one. It had no character to point at. Shamrock would not appear for another fourteen months.

THEORY (Nov 2023) — unconfirmed at the time. Shanks has a sibling, possibly a twin, and the figure who met the Five Elders may be that sibling. Evidence cited: Garling's plural address in ch. 1096, Shanks' age at God Valley, and the implausibility of a pirate's audience with the Gorosei.

December 2024: the closest call on record

Chapter 1134 ended on the hooded man, and Japanese readers immediately nicknamed him シャンク2 — "Shanks 2."

On 25 December 2024, a month before the hood came off, the theory channel とーやチャンネル posted a 24-minute breakdown that now has around 165,000 views. Working only from ch. 1134, it argued:

• The hooded man is not Shanks. Reason: Shanks had already left Elbaf after the encounter with Kid and had been shown back in his own territory, so an immediate return made no sense.
• He is Shanks' sibling. The video allows for a twin or a clone but settles on brother.
• He is a Celestial Dragon and the commander of the God's Knights. Reason: the transport circle used to arrive is the kind only the God's Knights or the Five Elders can use, and Garling, as the Knights' supreme commander, would plausibly hand the field command to his own son.

Every one of those held.

What Japanese fans got right

Set against what chapters 1137 and 1138 confirmed, the December 2024 call was close to complete: the hooded man was a separate person, he was Shanks' sibling, he was a Celestial Dragon, he was Garling's son, he was the God's Knights commander, and he was the antagonist the Elbaf arc had been building toward.

The 2023 post deserves separate credit for a narrower reason. It reached "Shanks has a sibling" from a single plural noun in a flashback, fourteen months before there was a face to attach it to.

And the thing being laughed at in 2018 held a smaller piece that turned out to be real. Six years before Shamrock had a name, the claim on the table was that there is a second man who looks like Shanks, that he holds Celestial Dragon standing, and that he is on the other side. All three are now canon.

Note the phrasing. Not he called it — the idea was not his alone, and the reasoning attached to it was wrong. The core survived. The person who happened to be shouting it loudest is a separate question, and a less interesting one.

What they got wrong

This is the part that disappears when a theory gets retold after the fact.

The name. The December 2024 video predicted Figarland Crown. The reasoning was genuinely elegant: the parts of a ship's anchor are the crown, the shank and the fluke, so Oda would be naming Figarland's children after anchor parts, with Shanks as the shank. The real name is Shamrock — a clover. The anchor scheme does not survive contact with it.

Three siblings. The same anchor logic produced a third child, Fluke. No third Figarland sibling has been confirmed.

Twin versus brother. The 2024 video hedged and leaned toward "brother." The word twin belonged to the weaker 2018 version of the idea, which was working from bad evidence.

The 2018 evidence itself. Shamrock's existence does not retroactively vindicate the scar observation. And Shamrock's own line in ch. 1138 — that Shanks returned to the Holy Land once — supplies a mechanism by which the man at the Reverie could have been Shanks after all.

The whole 2018 mechanism. This is the big one, and it is why the joke was not unfair. Shamrock is not a duplicate of Shanks and was not produced by a Devil Fruit. He is a separate person with his own name, Garling's son, born a Celestial Dragon and raised in the Holy Land while Shanks was not. There is no Toki Toki no Mi anywhere in it. "Two Shanks" is wrong in the literal form it was argued: there are not two Shanks, there is Shanks and there is his brother.

Final boss. Shamrock is an antagonist, not the endgame. Nothing in the manga positions him where Im sits.

So the theory that landed was not the one that had been around longest, and being close is not the same as being right. The 2018 version arrived near a true conclusion by a route that does not exist. The version that actually holds up was rebuilt in 2023 and 2024 on different evidence — a plural noun, a transport circle, a chain of command — and happened to arrive at a similar place.

That distinction is the whole reason to keep dated records. A theory that is right for invented reasons will be indistinguishable, after the fact, from one that was right for good ones — unless somebody wrote down which was which at the time.

Why this matters

The reason to go back through dated Japanese posts is not to hand out credit. It is that the useful artefact is the shape of the argument, not the hit.

Three separate attempts reached "there is a second Shanks" from three different places: a suspected art inconsistency in 2018, a plural noun in 2023, and a logistics problem about travel time in 2024. Only the last two were built on evidence that survived. Reading them in order shows how a Japanese-language theory community actually converges — slowly, on rebuilt foundations, discarding its own earlier reasoning.

That is also why the retrospective version is misleading. Search now and you will find posts explaining that the twin was obvious all along. The dated record says otherwise: in 2018 it was a rumour one Japanese blogger closed as an art artefact and a board thread filed under analysis-as-shtick, and in 2024 the person who got closest still got the name and the sibling count wrong.

And there is a second thing the record protects, which is the joke itself. The temptation now is to go back and promote 2019's punchline into 2018's prophecy — to decide that the people laughing were the ones who were wrong. They were not especially wrong. They were laughing at a time-travel fruit that does not exist, at a thumbnail of a man duplicating himself, at the word analysis being applied to it. Every one of those was a fair read of what was in front of them.

What happened instead is stranger and better: the manga came around, six years later, and stopped a short distance from the joke. Not on top of it — Shamrock is a brother, not a copy, and no Devil Fruit made him. Just close enough that "there are several Shanks," typed as a throwaway line under a board post in October 2019, no longer reads as a punchline. That is not a theorist being vindicated. That is a piece of internet culture ageing badly, in the most interesting direction available to it.

What could be next

Three questions the manga has not answered. None of this is confirmed.

THEORY / UNCONFIRMED — 1. Who actually met the Five Elders in chapter 907? Shamrock's existence makes him a candidate, and if it was him, the pirate he came to discuss reads very differently. But ch. 1138's line about Shanks returning to the Holy Land leaves the original reading open. The manga has not said.

THEORY / UNCONFIRMED — 2. Is there a third Figarland child? The anchor-naming theory that produced one is dead, but Garling's plural address at God Valley is still on the page and still unexplained.

THEORY / UNCONFIRMED — 3. Why did Shanks leave? Ch. 1138 establishes that he went back to the Holy Land and chose the world below it. What he learned there, and from whom, has not been shown.

We will keep these on the Theory Radar and update this article if any of them move.

Two related questions we have answered elsewhere. Shamrock leads the God's Knights, but he was recalled from Elbaf to Mary Geoise and has not been shown returning. That is why he does not appear in our ranking of the strongest Elbaf characters, and what would put him on it. And on the other twin: Shanks has exactly one attack the manga has ever named, which we go through in what is Shanks' strongest attack?