Minor spoilers ahead.
I intended to watch some of the backlog of prestige miniseries and other older shows I've been putting off while we were in a content lull. Instead, I've been bingeing "One Piece." A lot of "One Piece." In fact, I've watched so much that I want to put down some thoughts before I get any farther into this series.
The pirate adventure "One Piece" is notorious for being one of the longest continuous manga and anime series, with the anime running since 1999, and now having amassed over a thousand episodes. This makes it very intimidating for newcomers to approach, but since the live action version of "One Piece" premiered over the summer, there's been a lot of renewed interest in the franchise. I count myself as a casual fan of "One Piece," as it was the last anime that I regularly kept up with through fansubs, back in the era when the only legitimate releases of the show I could access were the severely edited 4Kids versions. My memory's not great, but I'm pretty sure I made it through the "Thriller Bark" story, which would have been in 2008. The show was less than 400 episodes at that point.
I stopped watching because I found out from the manga readers that there was going to be a big timeskip, and multiple story arcs where most of the regular characters were going to be benched for an extended period of time. I figured I could take a break until the gang got back together in the anime. However, this didn't happen for several seasons, and I lost track of the show. Fifteen years later, hearing nothing but good things about the later part of the series, I was finally ready to pick up where I had left off. The anime world is very different from what it was in 2008. Anime is a lot easier to access. Netflix and Hulu have a couple of seasons of "One Piece" each, and Crunchyroll has all the episodes, many of them offered on a free ad-supported tier. It has been very easy to binge a ton of the episodes, and I've churned through five major arcs in a little over a month - bringing me to the end of "Fishman Island," which seems to be the halfway point of the whole "One Piece" series.
Those five arcs of "One Piece" cover one hundred and eighty episodes that aired over roughly three years. They're very eventful and advance the series significantly. However, the individual episodes don't cover a lot, and "One Piece" is notorious for filler, recaps, previews, long opening credit sequences (some run two and a half minutes!), and "Dragonball Z" style fights that last multiple episodes. If you're good at skipping these (and I am) it's easy to blaze through a ton of episodes very quickly. Frankly, I don't know if I would have had the patience to wait for weekly releases - which looking back probably contributed to me dropping the show back in 2008. One of the biggest roadblocks to me picking up the show again was that I'd already learned most of what happened in these arcs - curiosity would get the better of me and I'd look up what the Straw Hat Crew were up to every few years. However, I wasn't sure I wanted to invest all the time to watch the events play out.
My perspective on "One Piece" has changed significantly. I'm even more obviously not the target audience anymore for a "shonen" series aimed at older boys and male teenagers. "One Piece" is better in handling female characters than many of these shows, but there's still a tendency to rely on bad tropes and sexed up character designs. The immature humor and over-the-top melodrama can be grating, and some of our hero characters are turning into silly caricatures of themselves - and many are very childish to begin with. The Sunny Go now has a nine person crew, and there's very little time for anyone to get the spotlight beyond Luffy and whoever he's trying to save at the moment. So Zoro gets lost more. Sanji's perviness is worse. Usopp and Chopper are always panicking. Most of the crew interactions are strictly comedic, which is fine, but this gets a little tedious as someone who loves "One Piece" for the ensemble.
Then again, the five arcs I watched represent one of the roughest parts of "One Piece" for Luffy's crew as a crew. They're only together in two of them - "Sabaody Archipelago" and "Fishman Island," with the two year timeskip happening in between. Nobody gets a real subplot or side mission, the way you'd see in previous arcs. "Fishman Island" is also one of the worst regarded "One Piece" stories, because it flubs an ambitious story about an oppressed community that had been set up in previous arcs of the show. One thing that "One Piece" has always done well has been its worldbuilding. It has a ton of interesting minor characters who keep coming back throughout the series, often changing and growing and revealing new sides to themselves. "Fishman Island" does offer some new background information for certain characters and conflicts, but there's nobody to really get emotionally invested in. The villains are dull, new friends like the Mermaid Princess are a bust, and the fights are nothing special.
But when the show is good, it's good. The three arcs where Luffy goes solo - "Amazon Lily," "Impel Down," and "Marineford," are really one, long, epic quest to save his brother Ace from execution. These have some of the best storytelling and payoffs in the whole show. The scale and the scope that "One Piece" does so well is fully on display as Luffy ends up in the middle of a literal war between different government and pirate factions. Tons of new characters are introduced, we learn much more about some of the familiar ones - including big chunks of Luffy and Ace's backstory - plus lots of future conflicts are set up. Unfortunately, it was almost impossible to avoid the spoilers for the end of "Marineford" back in 2010 if you were anywhere near the anime and manga fandoms when it happened.
Yeah, so the last big roadblock for me getting back into "One Piece" has been the "One Piece" fandom. I haven't seen too much really concerning behavior, but the "One Piece" fans are exactly what you'd expect for a series aimed at young male viewers. It's actually a plus for me that I'm so far behind, so I'll have less of a risk of running across spoilers for future arcs I know very little about, like "Dressrosa" and "Wano," and I can avoid the bulk of the insane hype and drama that seems to erupt on social media every few months. I get to be a casual fan of "One Piece" this way, and that's vital. I'm too old and too contrarian to deal with the die-hards anymore. My timing has been very deliberate too. Now that so many people are getting into "One Piece" via the live action series, the fandom spaces are seeing a welcome influx of newbies, and we're all just going to have to learn to get along.
I want to emphasize that I really do enjoy and appreciate this franchise. I love that "One Piece" has such a unique style all its own, that the heroes are so optimistic and spirited, and the series has been consistently fun to watch. It never gets bogged down in personal agendas or love quadrangles, never seems to run out of interesting characters, and knows how to play the long game when it comes to storytelling. I stuck with the show for years because I was so attached to the characters and it wasn't quite like any other anime running. It's managed to maintain a wonderful mix of absurdity and sincerity for decades now, and its creator Eiichiro Oda isn't slowing down. However, "One Piece" definitely has its rough spots, and is a challenge for even the most dedicated media fan to stick with.
I'm looking forward to the rest of "One Piece," and I intend to watch the remaining arcs much more slowly. Getting through this chunk of episodes was really me pushing to get the hard part done with, and hopefully I've managed to get across why this was the hard part for me. "One Piece" is far from the only fandom I've had some of these problems with, especially as I've been getting older. But "One Piece" is proving to be worth the effort - so I'm giving it another try. It will never be the best show, or my favorite, but I remain very fond of it.
I'll be back with updates, and maybe even a few reviews of future arcs. Stay tuned.
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