User blog comment:Videogamep/Why is Sabo Such a Big Deal?/@comment-1595565-20131212043834

I think (speaking retroactively before 731) Sabo was the one character from a flashback people genuinely liked and therefore wanted to see more of. Maybe they didn't want to think Oda would kill a kid that violently and specifically (he had already greased a bunch of rug rats in Ohara, but we didn't know anything about them except that some were mean to Robin). He was a character with wasted potential, but one who had served his purpose at the time of his "death." Also, with each flashback containing at least one significant death, Sabo was the one that people could cling to in order to feel like there was hope for the future or some bs like that. The tease with Dragon only strengthened that (from what I see) still baseless resolve. It gave people hope (the last evil thing set free from Pandora's Box) for the "what if". What if he somehow managed to survive his death? His living would break the common flashback pattern of someone dies, character grows stronger. It's a good thing Luffy isn't the existential quandary type (except that one time), or else he'd suddenly be wondering why and for whom he and Ace had gotten stronger all those years. Even if it doesn't affect Luffy like that, it still raises the question nonetheless. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Sabo as a character, but I think there are more reasons for him right now to be dead than alive, personally. I guess my dislike for it is more philosophical than anything. Death brought closure, but now all you have buried is an empty coffin, and there's no security in that. I realize I'm getting a little farfetched, but now that he's back, what's to stop Kuina, Tom, and Hiluluk from coming back from beyond the grave? There was closure in him being dead. The reason people were able to (for the most part) accept his death on here is very much related to what we're discussing on the talk page. Someone (Dogra) had acknowledged him as dead and there wasn't any sufficient explanation to argue otherwise. Eventually the debate became too big to die, but had nowhere to go with only occasional mentions and nods popping up here and there fueling the resolve of those on the side of the living.

In short, if you want to blame anybody, blame Pell. If Pell had just been a good martyr and died in that explosion, Sabo would have been written off before Jalmack could even reload. Pell was the cause of the unease people feel when calling someone dead in One Piece because it could just as easily come back to bite them in the ass 4 chapters later. What people don't realize is that if we believe it, then Oda's doing his job well. If he can convince us someone's dead, or someone's a traitor, or anything, even for a short while, then that only means he's doing a good job of writing the series.

There is nothing wrong with calling a character dead if it's acknowledged and accepted by the other characters. Brownbeard is a good example of this. Shot point blank with a gun whose barrel could house a bowling ball by a famed assassin. He even showed all the typical signs: He wasn't moving, there was a crispy burning smell coming off of his flesh, and everyone kept saying how dead he was (including but not limited to a doctor). What were we to do? Look like were better than the mangaka and deny what so many characters had just affirmed? Doing that would have been foolish for obvious reasons and would have made us look foolish. We're not better than the series. When there is no other alternative explanation available, the best thing we can do is sleep in the bed that's made for us. Oda wants us to think they're dead for so long, then we'll call them dead for so long until we have a reason to stop. There is nothing wrong with being wrong if the wrong thing was made to look right. An even more practical example would be Zoro's bounty in the magazine. The new wanted posters on Fishman Island said his bounty got bumped to 160 million. So what did we do? We changed his bounty to 160 million. It stayed this way for a number of months, leading people to ponder what he did to boost his numbers. Then the volume comes out. Turns out the 160 was a mistake and his bounty remains the same 120 as it does to this day. What were we to do? Leave it? No. We ran with what the manga gave us because that was the only thing we knew. Some might call this ignorance, but it can't be ignorance if no one knows the one true right answer and has no means of knowing it. I don't regret calling Sabo dead for these past three years, because I know that by doing so we were doing right by the story. If we're supposed to think something is a certain way, I say kick suspension of disbelief to the curb, throw caution to the wind, put your faith in the story, and believe whatever it is with all your heart. Who knows, you might just find that plot twists like this one are more enjoyable that way.