One Piece Multi-Piece #1: East Blue

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ambitious Animeister.

So, I succumbed to "peer" pressure from fellow content creators, Mother's Basement and Totally Not Mark, and I've been watching One Piece since November, when I began it as a palate cleanser for DanMachi and RWBY (and especially for Children Of the Corn). Until recently, I had no intention of giving it any critical attention because it was just a fun but daunting form of audio-visual therapy, and there wasn't much to talk about in the seasons before the die-hard fans say it "really gets good."

I see where they're coming from, but I think it gets good a little earlier than that...just not in today's material.

That said, every story must begin somewhere, and I would appreciate it if you began this particular story by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, commenting at the bottom of this post, helping out my ad revenue as you read, and following me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

The story of One Piece (which is over a thousand episodes and still running since 1999, to say nothing of the source manga) begins in the East Blue. Though why they call it the East Blue is anyone's guess, considering the orientation of the world map in the series.

See, the One Piece world is divided in half vertically by the Red Line (a meridian continent of almost solid rock) and horizontally by the Grand Line (an equatorial body of water flanked above and below by doldrum zones (Calm Belts) full of giant sea monsters (Sea Kings). So the East Blue is more like a Northeast Blue (as the series goes on, the map makes even less sense, and that's ignoring the cursed super-power-giving fruits, flying islands, psychosomatic animal mutations, globally unsustainable weather events, and other shonen-level cartoon absurdity that makes the series a visual and conceptual marvel that not even an artificial intelligence playing MadLibs could come up with). Our requisite knuckleheaded protag-kun with protag-kun hair is "Straw Hat" Monkey D. Luffy (voiced in the Funimation dub by Colleen Clinkenbeard, who has done VA and direction work on RWBY, My Hero Academia, and as kid Goku in various Dragon Ball media), a wannabe King Of the Pirates who can't swim because he ate one of the aforementioned Devil Fruits and gained the ability to stretch his body like rubber so he can shout attack names that start with Gum-Gum. Aside from wanting to be the next King Of the Pirates and find the titular treasure left behind by the previous Pirate King (who has the same middle initial as him for reasons that I haven't gotten to in the series yet), Luffy is very simple as shonen heroes go. He wants meat when he's hungry, water when he's thirsty, people on his crew that he thinks are awesome, to protect his friends and crew, and to kick the asses of bastards who suck.

He almost immediately recruits Roronoa Zoro (Chris Sabat, Vegeta and Piccolo in Dragon Ball), a notorious bounty hunter who dual-wields swords and holds a third one in his mouth so he can look badass but sound ridiculous when he calls out his attack names. He has no sense of direction, sleeps all day when he's not wandering aimlessly, lifting weights half the size of a small pirate ship, or fighting to become the world's greatest swordsman so he can honor his dead childhood crush's final wish.

Next is Nami (Luci Christian, Kaname in Full Metal Panic! and Hestia in DanMachi), a money-obsessed cat-burgular and navigator with a dark past and a near-precognitive understanding of the weather.

Next comes Usopp (Sonny Strait, Krillin in Dragon Ball), a cowardly, Pinocchio-inspired liar with a long nose who serves as the crew's sniper, makeshift shipwright, gadget man, and comedy relief. He ultimately decides to join the Straw Hat Crew so he can become a "brave warrior of the sea." I hated him in the 4kids edit and the East Blue arc in general.

And finally (for this arc), there's Sanji (Eric Vale, Future Trunks in Dragon Ball), a chef with worse customer service skills and better cooking skills than me who turns into an obedient blob of romantic horniness at the sight of the opposite sex and fights exclusively with kicks because a chef's hands are for cooking (even though his early signature move involves him breakdance fighting with his hands touching the ground; add in that he cooks with expired or spoiled ingredients for his male customers, and I wouldn't hire him to scrub my toilet...). He wants to find the "All Blue," a geographically impossible (unless I haven't gotten to it yet) convergence of all four directional seas where every species of fish on the planet coexists.

Though he is not one of the Straw Hat Pirates, it's important to also acknowledge Coby (Leah Clark, who has done voices for many of the anime I've Spotlighted, including the A Certain franchise), a chubby, cowardly, but driven boy who gets rescued by Luffy in the first episode and aspires to become a Marine (the moral opposite to Pirates, though the grey areas proliferate as the series goes on) despite his friendship with Luffy. It's a sweet rival chemistry even though young Coby can get on my nerves at times.

The villains this early on are scaled well to the crew's capabilities, but mostly feel like jobber-of-the-week fare for Luffy to demonstrate his various Gum-Gum attacks on. Even fan-favorite Captain Buggy (an over-designed, John Gacy-esque clown pirate--voiced by Master Roshi himself, Mike McFarland--with self-dismemberment and self-telekinesis Devil Fruit powers that make him almost immune to cutting weapons, unlike Luffy) and his circus performer-themed crew are underwhelming. The exceptions to this are Kuro, a blade-fingered pirate captain engaged in a long con of an heiress from Usopp's home village, who poses a genuine psychological threat to the Straw Hats, Hawk-Eye Mihawk (a powerful swordsman who introduces the concept of the Seven Warlords Of the Sea into the series and hands Zoro his first real, near-death defeat), the living weapon Don Kreig (a Wolfgang Krauser-alike pirate captain who fights dirty and wears armor that would put the entire TriGun series to shame in terms of concealed weaponry), and especially the Fishman Pirate Crew led by Arlong (Chris Rager, Mr. Satan in Dragon Ball). Of all the East Blue villains, Arlong has the best buildup, the best arc, the best intimidation factor, and poses the biggest physical, psychological, and emotional threat. The Arlong Park arc (say that without sounding like a yodeling seal) is East Blue at its peak, and I'm not going to spoil it.

There is also the Loguetown mini-arc, which serves as a winding-down for East Blue (not counting the filler story that comes afterward) and has a few highlights, but mostly feels like a "when can we get on with it?" stretch. Loguetown is where Gold D. Roger (the previous King Of the Pirates) was born and executed, and Luffy runs ahead to see the execution platform, where he is ambushed by Buggy and a Devil Fruit-powered Marine named Smoker, and announces to the town that he will be the next King Of the Pirates. It's one hell of a moment! Meanwhile, Zoro goes looking for new swords and runs into a subordinate of Smoker's who looks like his childhood crush, and infuriating Japanese rom-com miscommunication and mistaken identity shenanigans ensue. Usopp and Sanji get into their own filler battles while Nami goes shopping offscreen, and Luffy and Zoro are rescued from the Marines by a mystery man named Dragon (who will get a great identity reveal in about four hundred episodes). And finally, when everyone is back on the Going Merry (a ship that was given to them upon saving Usopp's heiress friend and her real butler from Kuro earlier in the season), they all share their aspirations and make a vow as a crew before heading for the Grand Line.

I watched a little of the filler afterward, but it was more of the same and I was itching to get to the Grand Line episodes, so even though one of the characters was voiced by the instantly recognizable Brittany Karbowski, I skipped ahead and didn't feel like I missed a thing.

For anyone who doesn't know, Japan approaches visual media nearly the opposite of how America does it. We start with comic books as a way of focus-grouping concepts and characters for live-action movies. But in Japan, manga is the chief content and they use anime as a manga commercial, only having long-running anime in a relatively few lucrative cases, and even more rarely going the live-action route for further adaptation. In cases where a manga and its anime are stupid-successful do the creators of both media run into situations where the anime catches up to the manga's "canon" story, forcing the anime team to create original content so the series' revenue stream remains constant while the manga pulls ahead. This original content is termed "filler" (which can be "the other F-word" to print media purists). It can either be cumulative, such as by repeating animation frames or extending conversations, staredowns, or power-up sequences, or it can be entire unique stories. The "problem" with filler is that while it needs to be entertaining, it is limited by whatever status quo the arcs around it have established, so things like new forms or attacks that don't appear in later material are out of the question, and the filler story must end in the same place it began.

If I feel like it, I may go back and watch the filler, movies, and specials when I've caught up to the present. But for now, I am using Anime Filler List to narrow things down to "manga canon" and "anime canon" episodes (which are designated differently from filler because they are anime-only, but tie directly into "canon" events, whereas filler can stand alone). As of this writing, I am almost done with the Impel Down arc, and I'm having fun!

If you are also having fun, or you are wondering if you should invest any time in One Piece, I'd say "get started before it gets any bigger!" Also, I hear the live-action adaptation is one of the only such good ones Netflix has ever done, so if a thousand-plus-episode anime seems too daunting, hand some positive analytics to the Netflix show, and there's supposed to be a remastered, no-filler anime coming out this year called The One Piece. And also again, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Next time in the One Piece Multi-Piece, the Red Line, Baroque Works, and Alabasta.

I'm gonna be Master Of the Tickets!