Verdict: that one gif of Danny DeVito saying “I get it now”
Now, mind you, I’m certainly no opponent of popular shounen manga – it wasn’t that long ago that I finished reading Fullmetal Alchemist, and I still keep up with new chapters of Chainsaw Man and Spy X Family. But like, One Piece is just so… massive. It’s a behemoth, culturally and in its sheer size. So I never really had the motivation to read it. Until this past Tuesday, anyway.
The fact that I’ve managed to get through 100 chapters in less than a week should probably tell you my impression: I think One Piece is very good. But most impressive is just how multifaceted it is.
It’s good because it delivers on the kind of catharsis that you can only get from seeing a real piece of shit villain getting clocked in the face from being a piece of shit – its action scenes are dynamic and very well paced with solid impact. It’s good because of how quickly it’s able to establish the complex political situation of its world – the two major warring forces of pirates and the navy are largely comprised of amoral bastards who only look out for themselves (Captain Nezumi in particular has particularly strong shades of ACAB).
It’s also good because the motivations of the main characters (barring Luffy) are all tragic but kind of varying degrees of mundane. Nami got caught in a debt trap for a pirate crew who run a racket on her village, Sanji wants to pay back the pirate who saved his life as a child, Usopp just wants to tell good stories in the hopes he can live up to the expectations set by his father, and Zoro wants to be the world’s greatest swordsman because his childhood rival tragically died… by falling down the stairs offscreen.
And then there’s Luffy, who has his fuckin Looney Tunes-ass superpowers because he saw a cursed fruit and instead of asking what it was, said “oohh, dessert!” Because he’s a fucking dumbass. And that is a huge part of what makes him so compelling as a protagonist. He is so straightforwardly simple-minded that what a pirate actually does in the eyes of other pirates and the navy is completely irrelevant to him – for Luffy, being a pirate is about making a bunch of friends, turning them into your crew, and then going to the Grand Line for a big adventure to find the One Piece and become king of the pirates.
But this kind of means that he has a very straightforward sense of justice, too. He knows when people are getting trampled on and fucked over, and he doesn’t bother trying to communicate his ideals to his opponents in the hopes that they’ll come around to his way of thinking: he just sees someone abusing their power to destroy other people’s dreams and says “you’re getting punched in the mouth now.” It’s honestly kind of refreshing.
But really, what really convinced me of the quality of this series was how quickly and solidly it was able to establish its emotional core, which all came together through the Arlong Park story – and yes, I’m talking about the moment where Luffy gives his hat to Nami and then gets the gang together to fuck up Arlong. But like my god that scene is so fucking good! It’s so emotionally resonant because for me, it’s the best execution of the shounen “friendship is power” trope. Because for how simple-minded Luffy is, he knows what he’s capable of, and he knows that he needs to rely on others to make up for the things he lacks, and he’s okay with that. So Nami asking Luffy for help hits so hard because it’s Nami, who has spent the majority of her life trying to fight her oppression by herself working within the structures of that oppression, finally admitting that she can’t do it all on her own. That’s what it means for friendship to be power, imo – it’s not some abstract concept that makes people stronger, it’s literally people coming together and fighting for each other, with each other. Shit just works, man.