Hello, everyone!
As some of you may know (or may have guessed from the rest of my content), my favorite arc in One Piece is easily Punk Hazard. Yes, it's almost entirely because it's the only arc that actually features Monet at present, but other than that, it's pretty much the single most important arc in the entirety of the New World Saga because it sets up important plot points for the remainder of the series. Luffy's alliance with Law, the conflict with Doflamingo and by extension Kaido, the artificial SMILE Devil Fruit, Big Mom's desire for artificial gigantification, the events of Wano, the current state of the Marines including Akainu's reign as Fleet Admiral and Aokiji's defection to piracy (which may also be related to SWORD), and likely a litany of other plot points we haven't even gotten to yet, like whatever's next for Smoker and Tashigi's storyline, the room of frozen bodies which hasn't really been elaborate on much yet as near as I can recall, Monet's hidden tattoo, etc. etc.
But we're not talking about any of that right now.
No, today we're going to talk about a question I've had ever since first reading Punk Hazard that only just clicked for me the other day: where did Law get all of those animal legs to turn Caesar and Brownbeard's men into centaurs on such short notice? Other people may have already come to the same conclusion as I have, but I've never seen any discussion on it and I've certainly never seen it said in canon, so here we go.
Now that we've been in Wano for a while and dealt with the Beasts Pirates for a while, the answer is actually abundantly obvious: Caesar most likely used his connections with Doflamingo or Kaido to smuggle animals (most likely preserved corpses) into the supposedly abandoned Punk Hazard. But why? Well, to extract DNA from to put into the SMILEs, of course.
We know that Devil Fruit in general, SMILEs included, interact with the eater by changing their DNA based on Law's analysis that Caesar adapted his design of SMILEs from Vegapunk's research on "Lineage Factors," or "Bloodline Elements" in some translations. We also know that Lineage Factors is the term that the One Piece world uses for DNA based on Yonji's explanation for Germa's usage of the same concept to create an army of clones.
Have you ever considered why SMILEs are only able to replicate Zoan abilities? And how? It's almost certainly that the SMILEs contain animal DNA and use it to rewrite the eater's DNA, and it's much easier to add existing DNA to other DNA than it is to, say, make new DNA from scratch that gives a human the stretchy and insulating properties of rubber or the intangible properties of fire.
DNA splicing, or rather, the creation of recombinant DNA (rDNA), is very much a real procedure, though usually it's done on a much smaller scale than making an entire hippo sprout out of someone's waist. Mice have been made bio-luminescent with jellyfish DNA, and goats have been given the spinnerets of spiders to produce spider silk on much more sustainable levels. As far as I know, rDNA isn't typically introduced to full-grown organisms, but you also can't turn a human being into electricity and back in our world, so we're going to ignore that.
I think the basic process probably goes like this: Caesar extracts DNA from different parts of the animals, then mixes all of it at once into the SAD, which I can only assume is a mutagenic or nuclease that deconstructs the DNA of the one who ingests it and then reconstructs it into rDNA with the disparate animal DNA. Because different DNA sequences are present at different points in the SAD, both the animal and specific part of the animal that the consumer receives will vary, allowing multiple Gifters to have different parts of the same animal. This is also probably why many SMILEs are defective, as each individual fruit doesn't necessarily receive any usable DNA from the slurry, but likely all cause some level of DNA degradation.
This degradation, the inability to express emotions other than joy, seems to be a common side effect of tampering with Lineage Factors, as not only do those who eat defective SMILEs, the Pleasures, exhibit this trait, but so too do the elite modified humans of Germa 66.
Whether faced with their own mortality or the loss of a cherished friend, it is not uncommon for one whose Lineage Factors have been altered to only be able to laugh. That said, similarly to the successfully altered Gifters, Reiju, whose DNA was altered after birth, still retains her emotions, and even the other Vinsmoke children have been shown to at least scowl. This is likely due in part to differences in the processes used by Vinsmoke Judge and Caesar, with the DNA potentially being repaired more effectively in the successful cases than in the failed ones,
but either way the results are undeniably similar given their nearly identical origins.
The complete overwriting of DNA may also explain why many Gifters can't seem to shapeshift, but instead permanently display animal traits. What this means for partial shapeshifters like Sheepshead or Ginrummy, I don't exactly know, maybe they had slightly better luck in the chemical makeup of their SMILEs, but I don't imagine that most other Gifters would want to keep a lion that constantly threatens to punch them in the genitals activated at all times.
Since SAD isn't the only thing necessary to create a Gifter, I imagine that the reason each SMILE only grants one power rather than a weird chimerical mishmash is probably related to the process of growing the fruit itself. If I had to guess, I'd say that the process of refining SAD and converting it into a fruit sees one particular sequence of animal DNA forming a base that the rest of the fruit grows from. Every cell of the SMILE holds that one specific sequence, and only that sequence along with the nuclease for binding it to human DNA. The defective SMILEs, along with being ones without the DNA, may also be the ones that hold multiple sequences which accidentally bound themselves together, thus making them incapable of binding to the consumer's DNA.
There's also probably some chemical that makes the user susceptible to seawater and maybe for making them incapable of eating another SMILE, but there currently isn't any reason to believe the latter other than Caesar was trying to perfectly recreate a standard Devil Fruit. It wouldn't surprise me if no one's tried eating multiple SMILEs on the basis that they're both a commodity and a roll of the dice, so it would actually be too risky to either expend a usable SMILE on an existing Gifter when a new one could just as easily be created or potentially turn them into a Pleasure. Those things probably cost a lot of money!
Let's review: Basing his design around Lineage Factors, or DNA, Caesar most likely used his underworld connections to illegally import animal corpses to the supposedly abandoned Punk Hazard, haphazardly tossed the DNA of those animals into the probably mutagenic SAD, which then replicates each individual sequence of animal DNA until they form the cells of a full SMILE fruit. When one eats the SMILE, they either have the animal DNA bind with their own, creating rDNA and turning them into a Gifter, or there isn't any viable DNA within the SMILE and their base DNA ends up damaged, causing them to become a Pleasure. Since the animals were already dead and Caesar had extracted all the DNA he needed, Law used the corpses to replace the legs of the disabled inhabitants of Punk Hazard. Why there were seemingly more goats than anything else in particular I'm not sure, probably because they're relatively easy to run rDNA experiments on. Or Caesar just likes goats.
This ended up being a pretty short one, but that's all I really wanted it to be. I have other big theories planned, but I don't want to become known as the guy who writes a 4000-word essay every other day, so I'm going to try to pepper the simpler ones in between when I can. Still, regardless of depth, I hope you all enjoyed reading this one, and I hope I didn't say something that everyone else already figured out eight years ago.
Until next time.
-Tokiro Oumaga
As some of you may know (or may have guessed from the rest of my content), my favorite arc in One Piece is easily Punk Hazard. Yes, it's almost entirely because it's the only arc that actually features Monet at present, but other than that, it's pretty much the single most important arc in the entirety of the New World Saga because it sets up important plot points for the remainder of the series. Luffy's alliance with Law, the conflict with Doflamingo and by extension Kaido, the artificial SMILE Devil Fruit, Big Mom's desire for artificial gigantification, the events of Wano, the current state of the Marines including Akainu's reign as Fleet Admiral and Aokiji's defection to piracy (which may also be related to SWORD), and likely a litany of other plot points we haven't even gotten to yet, like whatever's next for Smoker and Tashigi's storyline, the room of frozen bodies which hasn't really been elaborate on much yet as near as I can recall, Monet's hidden tattoo, etc. etc.
But we're not talking about any of that right now.
No, today we're going to talk about a question I've had ever since first reading Punk Hazard that only just clicked for me the other day: where did Law get all of those animal legs to turn Caesar and Brownbeard's men into centaurs on such short notice? Other people may have already come to the same conclusion as I have, but I've never seen any discussion on it and I've certainly never seen it said in canon, so here we go.
Now that we've been in Wano for a while and dealt with the Beasts Pirates for a while, the answer is actually abundantly obvious: Caesar most likely used his connections with Doflamingo or Kaido to smuggle animals (most likely preserved corpses) into the supposedly abandoned Punk Hazard. But why? Well, to extract DNA from to put into the SMILEs, of course.
We know that Devil Fruit in general, SMILEs included, interact with the eater by changing their DNA based on Law's analysis that Caesar adapted his design of SMILEs from Vegapunk's research on "Lineage Factors," or "Bloodline Elements" in some translations. We also know that Lineage Factors is the term that the One Piece world uses for DNA based on Yonji's explanation for Germa's usage of the same concept to create an army of clones.
Have you ever considered why SMILEs are only able to replicate Zoan abilities? And how? It's almost certainly that the SMILEs contain animal DNA and use it to rewrite the eater's DNA, and it's much easier to add existing DNA to other DNA than it is to, say, make new DNA from scratch that gives a human the stretchy and insulating properties of rubber or the intangible properties of fire.
DNA splicing, or rather, the creation of recombinant DNA (rDNA), is very much a real procedure, though usually it's done on a much smaller scale than making an entire hippo sprout out of someone's waist. Mice have been made bio-luminescent with jellyfish DNA, and goats have been given the spinnerets of spiders to produce spider silk on much more sustainable levels. As far as I know, rDNA isn't typically introduced to full-grown organisms, but you also can't turn a human being into electricity and back in our world, so we're going to ignore that.
I think the basic process probably goes like this: Caesar extracts DNA from different parts of the animals, then mixes all of it at once into the SAD, which I can only assume is a mutagenic or nuclease that deconstructs the DNA of the one who ingests it and then reconstructs it into rDNA with the disparate animal DNA. Because different DNA sequences are present at different points in the SAD, both the animal and specific part of the animal that the consumer receives will vary, allowing multiple Gifters to have different parts of the same animal. This is also probably why many SMILEs are defective, as each individual fruit doesn't necessarily receive any usable DNA from the slurry, but likely all cause some level of DNA degradation.
This degradation, the inability to express emotions other than joy, seems to be a common side effect of tampering with Lineage Factors, as not only do those who eat defective SMILEs, the Pleasures, exhibit this trait, but so too do the elite modified humans of Germa 66.
Whether faced with their own mortality or the loss of a cherished friend, it is not uncommon for one whose Lineage Factors have been altered to only be able to laugh. That said, similarly to the successfully altered Gifters, Reiju, whose DNA was altered after birth, still retains her emotions, and even the other Vinsmoke children have been shown to at least scowl. This is likely due in part to differences in the processes used by Vinsmoke Judge and Caesar, with the DNA potentially being repaired more effectively in the successful cases than in the failed ones,
but either way the results are undeniably similar given their nearly identical origins.
The complete overwriting of DNA may also explain why many Gifters can't seem to shapeshift, but instead permanently display animal traits. What this means for partial shapeshifters like Sheepshead or Ginrummy, I don't exactly know, maybe they had slightly better luck in the chemical makeup of their SMILEs, but I don't imagine that most other Gifters would want to keep a lion that constantly threatens to punch them in the genitals activated at all times.
Since SAD isn't the only thing necessary to create a Gifter, I imagine that the reason each SMILE only grants one power rather than a weird chimerical mishmash is probably related to the process of growing the fruit itself. If I had to guess, I'd say that the process of refining SAD and converting it into a fruit sees one particular sequence of animal DNA forming a base that the rest of the fruit grows from. Every cell of the SMILE holds that one specific sequence, and only that sequence along with the nuclease for binding it to human DNA. The defective SMILEs, along with being ones without the DNA, may also be the ones that hold multiple sequences which accidentally bound themselves together, thus making them incapable of binding to the consumer's DNA.
There's also probably some chemical that makes the user susceptible to seawater and maybe for making them incapable of eating another SMILE, but there currently isn't any reason to believe the latter other than Caesar was trying to perfectly recreate a standard Devil Fruit. It wouldn't surprise me if no one's tried eating multiple SMILEs on the basis that they're both a commodity and a roll of the dice, so it would actually be too risky to either expend a usable SMILE on an existing Gifter when a new one could just as easily be created or potentially turn them into a Pleasure. Those things probably cost a lot of money!
Let's review: Basing his design around Lineage Factors, or DNA, Caesar most likely used his underworld connections to illegally import animal corpses to the supposedly abandoned Punk Hazard, haphazardly tossed the DNA of those animals into the probably mutagenic SAD, which then replicates each individual sequence of animal DNA until they form the cells of a full SMILE fruit. When one eats the SMILE, they either have the animal DNA bind with their own, creating rDNA and turning them into a Gifter, or there isn't any viable DNA within the SMILE and their base DNA ends up damaged, causing them to become a Pleasure. Since the animals were already dead and Caesar had extracted all the DNA he needed, Law used the corpses to replace the legs of the disabled inhabitants of Punk Hazard. Why there were seemingly more goats than anything else in particular I'm not sure, probably because they're relatively easy to run rDNA experiments on. Or Caesar just likes goats.
This ended up being a pretty short one, but that's all I really wanted it to be. I have other big theories planned, but I don't want to become known as the guy who writes a 4000-word essay every other day, so I'm going to try to pepper the simpler ones in between when I can. Still, regardless of depth, I hope you all enjoyed reading this one, and I hope I didn't say something that everyone else already figured out eight years ago.
Until next time.
-Tokiro Oumaga
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