Animate Times published a feature on October 13, 2026 that works through six long-running reader theories about the identity of Monkey D. Luffy's mother in One Piece and concludes that none of them hold up. The Animate Times feature notes that the only blood relatives shown in the manga so far are Luffy's father, Dragon, and his grandfather, Garp, alongside his sworn brothers Ace and Sabo.
The article tests the theories against two statements by series author Eiichiro Oda. Asked in the SBS reader column of volume 78 why so many characters' mothers are dead or unidentified, Oda answered that it was simple: the opposite of "adventure" is "mother." In 2008, answering a reader question in the North American edition of Jump about what Luffy's mother is like and whether she is still alive, Oda said he had not decided whether to introduce her at all; if she did appear, she would be a tough woman, not a beauty, a typical middle-aged woman with a perm, and he thought she was alive. Animate Times points out that Dadan, whom Garp personally asked to look after the young Luffy, fits that image closely.
The six candidates
- Nerona Imu. Readers paired the backwards romanization of IMU as UMI, or sea, with the names of Zoro's mother Terra and Sanji's mother Sora. The manga later established that Imu is male and one of the 20 kings who created the world 800 years ago.
- Sir Crocodile. The theory rests on the idea that Ivankov's gender-switching Devil Fruit once turned Crocodile from a woman into a man, supported by Ivankov's line in volume 55 about holding one of Crocodile's weaknesses. Crocodile had already debuted around 2000 as the Alabasta arc villain, which the feature treats as ruling him out given Oda's 2008 remark that he had yet to decide whether to introduce the mother.
- Jewelry Bonney and Ginny. Bonney's appetite and her age-changing Devil Fruit fed the theory, but the Egghead arc revealed her as Bartholomew Kuma's daughter and 12 years old, younger than the 19-year-old Luffy. Her mother Ginny spent time in the same Revolutionary Army as Dragon, yet she was taken away by Celestial Dragons during a mission and went on to give birth to Bonney, which the feature says leaves no window for Luffy.
- Portgas D. Rouge. Ace's mother died 22 years ago, immediately after giving birth, and Luffy was born three years later.
- Alvida. Her appearance before she ate the Sube Sube no Mi matched Oda's physical description, but she had already appeared in 1997.
- Tritoma. The previous empress of Amazon Lily was named in the volume 109 SBS. The feature says she died without ever going to the person she loved, so she could not have joined Dragon and borne his child, and it notes that the SBS art shows her as a beauty rather than the woman Oda described.
The feature concludes that no character already in the manga fits Oda's description without running into a contradiction, and that Luffy's mother has not appeared in the story so far. It adds that, after the complicated origins the manga has given Bonney and Shanks, the idea that she is a former Celestial Dragon or a woman who had been enslaved by them appears to be gaining support among readers.