Curate, connect, and discover
I love feral Ace he’s beautiful
Not only should Ace be more of a feral unhinged jungle child who’s like barely wearing a mask of civility for convenience sake, but also: it should be kind of a Bit.
Like, Ace learned the absolute bare minimum of socialization (meaning, wipe your ass and wash your hands) from Dadan and the bandits, but that was literally it until he met Sabo. Ace knew like a sparse handful of words — enough to get his point across, but it’s not like he really wanted to have conversations with the bandits anyway — but the infinite majority of his early childhood was spent alone in the jungle. Then he teams up with Sabo, who arguably has too much socializing, and while they do trade skills and teach each other some stuff, for the most part they comfortably fill their niches. Sabo can do all the talking and manipulating for both of them. Ace is more than happy to stand at his shoulder and bare his teeth like the wild animal he is.
He asks Makino for a manners lesson literally exclusively so he can thank the dude who saved Luffy’s life, and then later when Sabo is gone Ace sticks with the lessons because now he has to be the brother who’s good at talking, and then it ends up being actually pretty convenient a skill to have, so he sticks with it.
But it is all very much pretend to him. Ace is putting on a front.
And I love thinking about the Whitebeards not only realizing the full extent to which their newest littlest brother was Literally Raised By Tigers but also that Ace is humoring them. He thinks they are the ones being ridiculous and crazy for all their societal rules (and they’re pirates! They barely even have those!) and he’s just playing along for his own entertainment. He’s making fun of them.
Ace runs up and playfully bites Thatch’s face as a greeting and while Thatch is yelling at him that people don’t do that Ace is just like oh haha that’s so silly you guys are so silly for that. Anyway. And then he bites Whitebeard, who just laughs.