To no one’s surprise, the insight into the Straw Hats’ families is limited — exactly as Oda intended when writing One Piece. After all, let’s not forget that the reason we still don’t know Luffy’s mother is because Oda believes mothers always oppose fun and adventure.
Generally speaking, Oda only includes information he deems relevant to the story. While we can appreciate this pragmatic approach, we still crave the nitty-gritty details about these characters. For instance, it’s fully confirmed that Ryuma is Zoro’s ancestor — but we only got this confirmation through an SBS, much to my own chagrin.
Now, there has been some speculation going around social media about Queen being Franky’s father, but is it confirmed? Why is it even a theory? Let’s go over that real quick and put an end to the rumors.
Who is Franky’s dad in One Piece?
We still don’t know if Queen is truly Franky’s father, but it is possible. The theory originated from the Vivre Cards, the One Piece Visual Dictionary, which is essentially a collection of cards that provide information about characters and even islands. You might have seen translations of these cards circulating on social media already, and in Queen’s Vivre Card, there’s a timeline indicating that 36 years ago — three years before being recruited by Kaidou — Queen had a child.
This immediately raised eyebrows, as Franky was born exactly 36 years ago. But the eerie part comes next. The Vivre Card states that 26 years ago, Queen abandoned his child to join the Beast Pirates. As we know from Water 7, Franky was 10 years old when he was abandoned by his parents, who threw him off a ship to pursue a life of piracy. This oddly specific timeline in Queen’s life perfectly aligns with Franky’s birth and subsequent abandonment, and the stories seem to match.
For this reason, many fans did the math, and it seems likely that the Vivre Card was hinting that Queen is indeed Franky’s father. However, here’s the catch: while the Vivre Cards are supervised and sometimes even written by Oda himself, they can contain outdated or incorrect information — and it does happen quite often.
In fact, there’s a specific section for redacted and wrong information on the Vivre Card’s website. For instance, a Vivre Card indicated that Momonosuke’s fruit was a SMILE, and later on, Oda confirmed and corrected, through a SBS, that Momo’s devil fruit had a different composition from SMILEs.
So while the timelines of events match — almost perfectly — there is no exact confirmation that Queen is Franky’s father. We also don’t know for sure if this kind of connection was even considered by Oda during Wano, as there wasn’t a single moment of interaction between Queen and Franky. For now, we’ll have to wait until someone asks Oda during an SBS, and if it turns out to be true, we were definitely robbed of a personal fight in Wano.