Why One Piece is a personally inspiring story
Sept 22. 2021
During the past couple of months, I have become absolutely obsessed with One Piece. For those unfamiliar – One Piece is a Manga Series written and illustrated by Eiichiro Oda with an anime adaptation that has been running since 1997. One Piece takes place in a fantasy world where many pirates are on an epic quest to sail the ocean and to find the legendary pirate treasure of The One Piece. The protagonist is Monkey D. Luffy, a straw-hat-wearing boy with the ability to stretch his whole body who possesses the dream is to find the One Piece and become the Pirate King. During his quest, he gathers a crew of individuals each with their own dreams and faces against forces of evil such as other malignant pirate crews, The World Government, and other greater powers. As of writing this the series has over 1000 installments and does not look close to ending. And while the story revolves around pirates, the world contains nearly everything from fantasy and narrative worlds – cyborgs, zombies, giants, fish-people, samurai, magical fruits, candy people, etc. It’s truly an epic.
The catch for me is that perhaps counterintuitively, I have not been watching the anime or reading the manga. Rather I watched the first couple of arcs but then have been watching YouTube fan theories and arc reviews and reading the Fandom pages and listicles. It’s not that the content is not good, it’s just that there are a lot of barriers for entry for me (which I think are also shared by others): 1) the absolute length of it is impressive and 2) I really don’t like the fight sequences that are in nearly every episode (plus, according to Youtube videos, there is an awful amount of filler in the anime adaptions). I say that my relationship to One Piece is like a lot of Christians with the Bible: I am very familiar with the content, but I haven’t actually consumed the whole central canon piece front to back.
Despite not fully engaging with the content, I love it. I love the world it creates, the ethos of creativity within the world, the size of the characters, the “anything could happen” of it all (it reminds me a lot of Adventure Time in this sense). I especially love the names in the series – between the names of the islands and the people there is simply loads of quality content. The thing I respect the most of it all is the concept of Arcs, which exists in all anime, but one piece for some reason makes it feel much more visceral, perhaps because rather than the arc being the “enemy” the protagonists need to fight, the arcs are all islands in their own right with their individual worlds and designs. Regardless, I find One Piece to be rather motivational because of the positive outlook it has on the human experience.
The ideas in the series brought forward are, as said, inspiring. Inspiring in that I want to keep the core ideas in my head as I navigate throughout my own life (which I think is the goal of good fiction). I developed the motto “Be The Pirate” to remember these ideas and to use as a mantra when I am feeling unsure about life choices. Yes, maybe I am thinking too much into One Piece – but I think it’s more me recognizing my own values and beliefs within the work than the inverse. So what follows are the themes, world elements, and general concepts in One Piece that I find motivating and that I like to apply to my own lived experience.
The Freedom Theme
The central theme of One Piece is following ones’ dreams; the freedom to do this. Being the pirate involves having the freedom to accomplish what one wants to do, and therefore freedom becomes one of the major themes within the One Piece World – the central narrative of the various arcs entails antagonistical forces (e.g. The World Government, Enemy Pirate Crews, The Global Elite Class Called the Celestial Dragons, etc.) oppressing a community or individual and it is up for the Straw Hat Pirates and their allies to free the group or individual from these forces. Examples of this include Straw hats freeing the people of Allabasta/Dressrosa/Wano from the evil clutches of Crocodile/Donquiote Doflamingo/Kaido, Strawhats rescuing Robin as a captive of The World Government from Enies Lobby, Luffy freeing Nami from Arlong’s contract, etc. The majority of conflicts are the quest to relinquish oppressive forces from not allowing people to accomplish their dreams.
I find this a very inspiring theme because while it is a rather common theme in fiction, One Piece’s Freedom theme really manifests in several different archetypes of freedom. Freedom can be the ability to be sailing the ocean with no rules, or the escape from slavery, or just being able to be a citizen in a nation that is not being dominated by a fascist. Being the pirate is thus having the freedom to be a pirate – liberty, etc. There is also the concept of freedom of selfhood; so many characters are simply “themselves” (i.e. true self) in that they have the personal freedom to exist as they want to in the world (and if they do not initially have this, it is resolved that they develop this sense of individual freedom). The theory of self in one piece is that freedom, or personhood, is having the ability to follow one’s dreams. Just how forefront freedom is here allows me to think about how I approach the world and how much I value freedom as an individual.
Arc Structure
While Arcs are a major part of every anime and long story – One Piece’s ridiculous lengths allow each arc to really feel like major major periods of time. For example, the Dressrosa Arcs and Wano arcs reach took 2 years of real-time to be told. And as stated earlier, each arc really is on a set boundary island. As someone who really likes “framing time” (see Fun with Time) the arc structure of the series is just so enjoyable and I think reflects real life. Each period of one’s life is like its own little arc with its own theme its own goals but it’s all part of a larger story, a larger theme, a larger goal.
During this whole “Be The Pirate” mentality I decided to break up my past experience from the past 7 years into arcs and naming them in the One Piece style. This has been such a fascinating and mentally rewarding project – a) it makes my life seem much more adventurous b) it constructs a narrative of how I got from point a to point b and c) it’s just fun to think about all the different “themes” that occurred in different stages of my life. I’ve spoken to the people close to me about my arcs, and it’s just a great way to reflect on the past in a much less streamlined way and adds to constructing a more solid narrative re: one’s own personal past experiences. As someone who does not engage with that much anime, the diversity and fun environments of the arcs inspires me to find this same type of mixture of setting in time in my own life.
Larger Historical Contexts
Oda’s ability to world build is incredibly impressive – the world he has created is just so vast and multilayered; it truly feels lived in. While the narrative of the series mostly follows the Straw Hats Arc to Arc – however in this period of time it is revealed that other things are happening all over the one-piece world that often has nothing to do with the protagonists. In addition to this, Oda’s flashbacks reveal the larger historical contexts to One Piece (e.g. the void decade, Gol D. Rogers, etc.). Further, other pirate crews are often introduced, and it is implied that they all have their own stories and past/histories. When other characters interact with the Strawhats, the person engaging with One Piece truly recognizes what feels like a proper interaction of complex histories rather than two characters being thrown together. This is especially true as the result of the 2 year time jump in the narrative – a whole lot of events happen in that time period that is revealed to the reader slowly and authentically.
This element of One Piece is additionally attractive to me because it is the rare case of a narrative where the world is just so big that while one can make things happen to drive the narrative forward, there are also a whole series of interconnecting narratives and histories that shape the larger adventure. I think this is such a wonderful way to approach the world and one’s interactions and recognizing one’s place in the world – not a center but rather a moving point moving in tandem to other moving points all wrapped up in a larger historical context that simply does not stop.
The Crew
The final element of One Piece which I will address is the Straw Hat Crew. The crew that Luffy has is, at its core, a diverse bunch of weirdos. At the moment, the Straw Hat Pirates Include A 3-sword samurai with green hair, a clepto navigator, a long-nosed fib-telling coward, a chef who fights with his feet, an anthropomorphic reindeer doctor, a historian who can summon extra limbs, a cyborg shipwright, a skeleton musician, and a Fishman helmsman. Each one is unique and strange in their own ways – generally a complex crew of misfits.
While Luffy is without a doubt a strong pirate captain in his own right, he would be nothing without his crew – as oftentimes he is entirely reliant on them. Luffy’s talent is thus choosing the right people to align and become friends with. Together the crew helps each other in the quest to fulfill their dreams. And again, I find this so inspirational because it just shows the value of the people one chooses to align with.
“Be The Pirate” is simply a way to view the world through the lens of One Piece’s values, which basically boils down to radical individual freedom. Thinking like this has been a great framing technique for perceiving my life as more adventurous. So in the end I am grateful for engaging with this content, even loosely, because it is a thought tool to better engage in creative re-framing of life.
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