One Piece is a huge story with a lot of myths and secrets evolving around it. Some of the biggest are:
1-What is the One Piece?
2-What happened during the Void Century?
3-The origin of Devil Fruits
In this post I will be taking a closer look on the last two.
We do not know much about the Void Century, but what we know is that there was a war between the Ancient Kingdom and the Twenty Kingdoms(which is now the World Government) and the World Government won at the end, despite the Ancient Kingdom possessing three powerful weapons called “Ancient Weapons” which the World Government still fear to this date.
But how did they manage to win, because the Ancient Weapons were known to be very destructive and powerful? Ok get ready because now it’s going to get… “crazy”. This is were the Devil Fruits come in, but not the way you expect them to come in.
I believe that the World Government created the devil fruits and gave it to the Ancient Kingdom. I know what you are thinking right now… Why would they give potentially incredibly strong devil fruits to the enemy? Because this would make them vulnerable to Im (or his ancestors). According to my previous theory Im is a reference to the god of sea Ym (Yam) who fought against Baal, son of Dagon the storm bringer (Monkey D. Dragon!!), which would be another reference between One Piece and the Ancient Canaanite religion. Yam represents the power of the sea and was able to create storms and disasters on the sea.
What if Im has a similar power? What if he was somehow able to control the sea? Now imagine your enemies can’t swim… This would make it quite easy for Im to defeat them and quite handy if you take into consideration that your enemy has three very powerful weapons.
It’s hard to tell how the Ancient Kingdom obtained the devil fruits, but I can imagine that someone high ranked in the Ancient Kingdom got manipulated/tricked by the World Government and was told to spread these fruits among his people and promise them that they will obtain incredible powers which would make the war even easier for the Ancient Kingdom. I know what you are thinking right now… Why would the World Government give them devil fruits with POWERS, couldn’t they have simply given them a fruit which would steal them the ability to swim but on top of that NOT give them a power? I think that because the fruits gave them a power the Ancient Kingdom got more confident and attacked the World Government with their fleet and Im used this opportunity to destroy the entire fleet by creating a Vortex or something similar.
Have you never wondered why the World Government tries to hide the Void Century and forbid any research about the Void Century? Because usually the winner of a war/fight proudly shows everyone that they have won (Both World Wars, Franco-Prussian War, etc.). I think the World Government tries to hide it because they did and are still doing something shady. All the devil fruit users are very vulnerable to Im and that’s why Im IS the biggest enemy for all devil fruit users, because he could theoretically kill all of them. Have you never wondered what would happen if all the Admirals would suddenly rebel against the Government?
I always thought that this is something the World Government should really fear, especially because every Admiral has an extremely strong devil fruit (we don’t know about Green Bull, I know, but there are already some facts which indicate towards the fact that he also a devil fruit), but now if you think about it, why would they fear them if all of them could be easily killed by Im? If the public would find out about the true history they would stop eating devil fruits and the World Government would lose power and influence. As long as the public doesn’t know about it, people will keep on trying to get a devil fruit with strong abilities (another reason why devil fruits have powers), and as long as that happens the World Government will be able to control the public.
Another thing I would like to mention is that, as we all know, Im doesn’t go around and starts killing devil fruit users as he likes. But why? Because if he did people might find out about it and this could lead to another Void Century where the World Government just has to go everywhere and destroy every piece of information until there is no evidence left. This is too much work and too risky to do regularly and thats why the Admiral take care of the bad guys and the Cipher Pol make sure that no one has any clue about what happened in the Void Century and what exactly the World Government is hiding.
This could also be the reason why no one from Shanks Crew has a devil fruit (I know that its not confirmed, but it’s probably the case), because they know the true history and they know in order to defeat the World Government it would be more useful to have no devil fruit. Do you all remember in the first chapter when Luffy ate his devil fruit? Shanks and his entire crew was in shock and angry.
You could say that they were angry because Luffy ate their treasure, but Shanks is not the kind of guy who cares about valuable stuff. I think he was angry because Luffy ruined his chance of defeating Im by A LOT.
*Theory by Aleeex-
