Behind the bounty
A man with Shanks' face once climbed the stairs of Mary Geoise during the Levely, asked the Five Elders for an audience about a certain pirate, and was granted it. It was not the man on this poster. It was Figarland Shamrock, his twin brother and the commander of the Knights of God.
The mix-up is worth making, because Shanks does know the way in. He was born on God Valley into the Figarland family, went back to Mary Geoise as Saint Shanks, served as a Devoted Blade of God, and gave up his Celestial Dragon standing after working against the Holy Land from inside it. His father, Figarland Garling, sits among the Five Elders. Whoever signs off on this figure knows exactly whose head it is.
What the figure rests on is mostly interruptions. He turned Kaidou back on his way to Marineford, keeping him off a Navy that was already bleeding out. He walked into the closing minutes of the Summit War, stood in front of Blackbeard, and ended it, and nobody argued the point. He got Sengoku to release the bodies of Whitebeard and Ace for burial. None of that is a crime, which is rather the point: what is being priced is the power to stop a war rather than the power to start one.
The Elders settled their view of him years ago. A nuisance, but a man who will not try to overturn the world by himself; leave him alone, and put him down the day he goes too far. When the Navy laid the four Emperor posters side by side in a briefing room, he came third, behind Kaidou and Charlotte Linlin. Both were beaten at Onigashima, and in the new line-up of Emperors that followed, his figure is the highest of the four.
