will-of-his-own:

So I was thinking about Ace and I accidentally metaed until I made myself sad. 

So I very much headcanon Ace as having some fairly severe depression problems (I mean, I don’t think you can even argue about that) but for purposes of writing fanfiction I was digging more into that and how it manifests and I was thinking that I, personally, interpret him as having a lot of disassociation problems when having a depressive episode. 

I remember during my first watch I was really confused by the fact that Ace hated his father but was also following in his footsteps. I’ve thought about that a lot since, and it’s led me to a couple of things. 

First, literally all Ace wants, his whole life, is a sense of family and a sense of belonging. When he’s a kid, he hates Roger – but he’ll also beat the shit out of anyone who insults Roger. Because Roger is the closest thing to a familial connection Ace has. There’s Garp, but Garp is almost never around, and when he is around, he spends half his visit trying to get Ace to join the Marines (and Ace’s reasons for not wanting to do that are a whole other can of worms). Dadan and the rest of the mountain bandits are all he has, and they are not family. Ace wants Roger, because he wants a dad. But he also hates Roger, because Roger is the reason he doesn’t have that sense of family. It’s Roger’s fault he has to live with mountain bandits in the woods with no friends his own age and people who don’t really want to be taking care of him. 

In a similar vein, this is also why Ace chooses to go by the last name Portgas, rather than adopting Garp’s last name or reclaiming Roger’s. His mother loved, if not him – since she never got a chance to meet him – at least the idea of him, so much so that she was willing to die for him. Ace feels he doesn’t deserve that, but that does give him that sense of family that he is so desperate for. 

This, of course, is why he so readily joins the Whitebeard Pirates once Marco tells him that, yes, Whitebeard really does think of all of them as his sons. That gives Ace this massive sense of family, something he has been searching for literally his entire life. Sabo and Luffy helped immeasurably, but two brothers – one of whom he lost – are not enough to fill the space where his family is supposed to be. 

And the second point is that Ace identifies himself by what he is, rather than by what he’s done. He is Roger’s son. He is Whitebeard’s son. He is Luffy and Sabo’s brother. He is the captain of the Spade pirates, and then he is Whitebeard’s second division commander. And that’s why I headcanon him as having trouble with disassociating – he cannot reconcile his identities with each other and with what they imply. Roger’s son deserves to die; he’s been internalizing that for years. Whitebeard’s son does not. Luffy’s brother does not. And he views all of those things as integral parts of his identity – whether he wants to or not – and so he ends up disassociating because he has no other way of dealing with the fact that half of him thinks he should just kill himself and remove the ‘devil’s son’ from the world, and the other half can’t die, because he has people like Luffy who absolutely, one-hundred percent want him around. 

And all of this combines to make Ace either quick to shut down – as we see him do in Impel Down and at Marineford – or else quick to fly off the handle in a fit of rage, because he is trying to either focus on one of the aspects of his identity that he actually likes, or else trying to prove that the aspects he doesn’t like are wrong – even though he doesn’t believe that himself. 

And of course that means he’s at peace when he dies because he finally allows himself to reconcile all those things and accept that he doesn’t deserve to die, and therefore also deserves to live, and he can accept that people love him and then I cry for approximately forever because he didn’t get to live with that and learn how to love himself for himself, rather than what everyone else identifies him as.