WHAT ONE PIECE IS TRULY ABOUT AND ITS FANBASE
It is without a doubt known by most people that One Piece is one of the most popular animanga series of all time, but its fanbase is unfortunately infested with powerscalers and people who only watch because of FOMO, that I feel barely understand its themes. So firstly, I'll talk about what One Piece truly is, what the powerscalers and tourists with no media literacy glossed over.
One Piece is an adventure manga about this highly cartoonish world that we slowly find, despite its fantastic elements, is a reflection of our own in many ways. It is a highly political work literally focused on a group of criminals (The Strawhats) fighting against an oppressive and overbearing government whose only purpose is to protect the rich and intimidate the poor into submission, clearly a fictional concept ohoho.
The World of One Piece, despite how wondrous it may look on the surface, I feel like is genuinely one of the most terrible fictional words to live in. If you're a regular citizen in this world, there is a 50% chance you'll be enslaved, and the other 50 that you'll be killed, don't even get me started in races like the buccaneers which are basically gone or the fishmen, which can literally get shot publicly and tortured and no one gives a fuck since they're "less than human", another clearly fictional thing.
It is a dark fucking work all things considered, but what appeals to me the most about it is that it is a story that tells a message I really resonate with personally:
"The world is a shithole, people are bad, god isn't real and if he is he hates us, but that doesn't give us less of an excuse to love, to laugh, and to make connections with people you truly care about."
We can still allow ourselves to experience all that is human and in our range, to dream, to find purpose, to live, and that is a very fucking beautiful message that I barely see anyone discuss in depth, something that is overshadowed by all the talk of powerscaling and "hype moments". One Piece is a work about finding joy even in the worst situations through dreaming and companionship, you can literally see that in everything in the story, it is one of its core themes.
I'm sure from that you can get at least an idea of what One Piece is truly about, so now we need to talk about the fanbase. After Dragon Ball, Naruto, Bleach, MHA and JJK ended, annoying shonen fans had to find a new victim to powerscale their meats to. Since One Piece is one of the longest running manga of all time it was an obvious choice, specifically around Wano and Gear 5, which i'm definitely going to go into detail about soon, the Gear 5 era especially being known for everyone going "THIS WILL BREAK THE INTERNET BIGGEST REVEAL SINCE SUPER SAIYAN OMFG WAAAAA" and talking about how badass and powerful Kaido is and how his aura solo no diffs other verses (I hate using this terminology), this migration can be seen especially in places like Reddit and YouTube with the surge of One Piece powerscaling content.
Let's get into the powerscaling discussion before I go insane. I despise powerscaling. It is something so absolutely completely undoubtedly USELESS and a disgrace to the art of storytelling itself. Yes, fights in fiction can be "hype", but ranking characters in a fucking list then getting mad or disappointed when said work contradicts your list while not paying attention to any of the story's themes and only focusing on the slight details of the fight that indicates when someone is using haki and what type and the attacks that land and the ones they dont, like oh my god can you just enjoy a work for what it is instead of putting each character in these scenarios "omg let people have fun" NO YKNOW WHAT THESE ARE THE ONLY INTERNET GROUP I WILL NEVER TOLERATE YOU CAN LITERALLY LIKE SHIT AND PISS AND ILL STILL TOLERATE YOU BUT IF YOU START TALKING ABOUT HOW MIHAWK SCALING IS COMPARED TO POST-TIMESKIP ZORO I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU sorry got a little too heated there anyways i stand by all i said :3
These new fans and even some old fans feel like they have no media literacy whatsoever, their brain has atrophied from the slop of JJK and Demon Slayer making them incapable of comprehending any sort of nuance and visual storytelling. It feels like they don't even like the story outside of the scenes that further their powerscaling agendas, one of the most popular memes in the community "Dragon always lets us down" is literally saying he let them down solely because he's a character that doesn't go around fighting everything with a pulse and instead takes his time and plans things like the actual fucking leader of an army, do these ape-brained idiots not realize the story Oda is trying to tell and instead think he "does nothing" and "is useless" just because he's not part of their dick measuring contest.
Then there's people talking about Bonney's powers and how she "breaks the power system" and "ruins the story by being too op", this pisses me off so hard, THE POINT OF HER POWERS IS NOT SO YOU IDIOTS CAN PUT HER ON A LIST, when she discovers the true length of her powers and becomes "like Nika" it is a closing point for the character arc she undergoes throughout the whole fucking story, an inspiring and genuine moment of joy and whimsy after the absolute and unwavering darkness of Kuma's backstory, Vegapunk's death and Egghead's destruction, a moment wherein she realizes that for once in her life she is truly, TRULY free as well as fulfilling her late father's wish, but the fucking fanbase, as they always do, whined and whined about it to no end, saying she "broke the story", that Oda fell off, that Bonney is annoying and she shouldn't have gotten her way and I just wonder if this is some genuine deep-rooted misogyny within the fanbase.
It wouldn't be the first time, with a fanbase that calls Nami annoying and bitchy for genuinely worrying about her crew at all times and wanting them to be safe as much as she tries to act tough, or calling Shirahoshi whiny
and annoying for being sensitive when she literally has not experienced adversity from others since she was a little kid with her mother's death, she's afraid of losing more people and afraid of others. Calling her design
weirdly sexualized I can accept, but the rest, come on.
Usopp is also a prime example of this, the "fanbase" dislikes him because he doesn't get involved in big flashy fights, that he displays genuine weakness and that he's
the most human and relatable of the crew. This displays some genuine fragile masculinity on their part, they see a man that cries more than twice throughout the series and that uses his wits to fight instead of brute force and
therefore assume he's "useless and gay", how mature and masculine. Anyways, Usopp is the goat, moving on.
Since I'm on the topic of characters and character development that is missed by this dumb part of the fanbase, the take that "One Piece's characters are one note and have no development" is just INSANE, like are we reading the same
fucking story wherein the MC throughout its entirety learns from others as well as the situations he goes through and becomes a better captain in the process thus displaying all he's learned throughout the entirety of post-timeskip...
Besides that, there's also the delusional take that "the story is boring before timeskip, therefore you should just skip to post-timeskip"... If you say that to my face, I will hunt you for sport and then TICKLE YOU (roflmao). Pre-timeskip is
the foundation of the story, and has some of the most amazing characters, art, worldbuilding, art and sense of progression I have ever seen in any fictional work in my life. Getting to see this group of unexperienced teenagers/adults slowly rise
to fame and suffer more and more as they realize the government they have lived under their whole lives uses censorship, torture and genocide to establish their own agenda and protect their elite while everyone lower are oppressed and suffer as
their leaders neglect their struggles, the common folk's salvation being them, this group of people who set out to sea to dream once again, its AMAZING.
But just because there are no super flashy fights and they aren't fighting the most powerful figures yet all that can be thrown in the garbage, as One Piece is a shonen battle manga after all, totally not an adventure manga that constantly gets
mislabeled by everyone because of its fandom.
Honestly, since I've been hating so hard let me clarify, I don't actually hate these people. I couldn't care less. I don't even hate the bad reputation One Piece gets nowadays, honestly there are very few things I do hate.
At this point, I'm just glad I could experience such an incredible work in my lifetime. Never has any work of art in my short life left me so utterly in shock, entranced, amazed like this one. It is something that people would give everything to be able to
experience for the first time again.
I can without a doubt say that, as much as I complain about its fanbase, One Piece is my favorite work of art ever created. There is absolutely no other work with the same mix of joy and whimsy with deep, soulcrushing darkness and that resonated more with me than this one.
