User blog comment:Yatanogarasu/Sabo: Dead or Alive?/@comment-1324071-20100619042821

I can't believe you guys are falling for this.

How many times has a major character died offscreen?

Zero.

How many times have we been suckered in into thinking "Oh, he must be dead!"?

Dalton? Pell? Pagaya? The Franky Family?

Just because he's killed somebody once doesn't mean Oda will suddenly start killing off characters offscreen. If he was really dead, then we would've seen the body, as was the case with Ace and Whitebeard. And in both of those cases, Oda made a point to specifically state "YES, THEY ARE DEFINITELY DEAD" to let us know.

Dogura saw the ship explode. Sabo's hat is floating in the water. These are all little things that would make you assume that he's dead.

The reason this happened was to explain why Luffy considered Ace to be "the only brother he has in the world"; because he THINKS that Sabo is dead (or, to be more precise, Oda hadn't thought of him yet). In order for Luffy to care that much about Ace and Ace alone, Luffy had to think that Sabo was dead, which is why we were given this false tease.