I have not made the progress this week I wanted to, honestly. I got to the two-page montage sequence and stalled out. It’s so frustrating when you can’t even pinpoint what about a thing is so scary you can’t focus on it so that you can reassure yourself. Part of the issue, of course, is that I didn’t plan it out ahead of time. I wasn’t sure how exactly I was going to do it, or how to depict the one framing idea I had in mind, so I figured I would do it in the moment. Obvious mistake. I did completely change tact on a few things for it, so it’s all the same. I’m over halfway through the roughs for it now, so I’ll finish up soon and finally be done with it. This is the kind of challenge that I really need to know how to overcome if I want to do this more in the future.
A very definite sign that I’m stressed, I’ve been reading One Piece from the beginning lately. A few things stand out about it. The first is that basically every villain is a fascist. There are a lot of different flavors, but they all share important qualities. I do wonder if this is just me being a political person, or if it’s intentional. Oda clearly has more thought and vision put into his “stupid adventure book” than he likes to portray in many cases, but it could easily be that if you depict overblown cartoon evil, it inevitably looks like real world fascism. They all do it, though. All the villains of the series have an elite group that’s better than the rest of the world, which they can kill and destroy with impunity. They denigrate sentimentality and empathy, even citing their lack of such as strength. They revel in their superiority while flip-flopping from thinking the heroes are weak nothings to scary, superior, outside elements who will unseat them. This typically extends to some group of people they wish to eliminate, or at least find convenient to attack on their way to power. They often talk about their ideology as being too big for anyone to argue with, and refer to their group or country as an organism. They’re all big into mythmaking and self-aggrandizing.
Wapol is probably the most Trump-like of the group. He’s the corrupt king of the Drum Kingdom, who brought the kingdom to the brink of ruin before abandoning it in the face of the Blackbeard Pirate’s attack. There are a lot of aesthetic similarities, like the vanity, face and hair, ego, and obsession with wealth. One of his vassals, Chess, said that by ruling with an iron fist, Wapol was maintaining order and thus keeping the country safe and alive. That’s just “law and order” politics, right? “Tough on crime,” “guiding with a firm hand,” it all sounds like you could replace it with the phrase, “ruling with an iron fist,” and everyone would immediately understand why it’s a bad idea. The Drum Kingdom was the center of the greatest medical research in the world, and Wapol had the twenty best doctors brought to his castle and all the others either killed or chased out so he could hog all the good medicine and extort his population. If you recall, the Trump administration bought up a bunch of COVID supplies and then gave them to his rich friends so they could sell it back to us. You know, before and after he continuously lied about the disease and spread misinformation for petty revenge politics and, I guess, to avoid tanking the stock market with a “panic.” Of course, Wapol was made in the early 2000s, so he seems more predictive than pastiche, until you remember that so, so many American movies made in the eighties and nineties had deliberate Trump-pastiche villains. We’ve all been doing this for a very long time, we’ve always known.
The most sober representation of fascism in the series is the World Government and Navy, who are (if it doesn’t end up being Blackbeard) the ultimate villains of the series. I’ve just finished the Paramount War, so I’ve just gone through a long stretch of stories that center on the abject cruelty and emptiness of the World Government’s justice. In Water Seven and at Enies Lobby, the intelligence and assassin group CP9 and their idiotic coward leader Spandam showed the true depravity of the system. More notable than CP9’s actions was that the Navy, including common officers and sailors, were totally fine going along with a deliberate extermination of an island’s population simply because their bosses said a law was violated. They killed their own men for it, and do so again in other circumstances to ensure the enemy is eliminated. That level of pure hatred and violence being exercised on a hair trigger, just because the word “crime” was dropped, is appalling and unthinkable. Except that in real life, we’re seeing a movement to ethnically cleanse the country of brown people because the government can point to a law about what documents you’re supposed to have. We regularly talk about crime as pure evil that must be stopped at all costs. You know, most of American history. The great underwater prison Impel Down, a literal torture dungeon designed to be as Hell-like as possible, seems like the model prison for most conservative and centrist politicians. The Paramount War – a battle between the Navy and the Whitebeard Pirates over the execution of Ace – really shows how, no matter how much the story tries to paint them as “the good ones,” we can’t let anyone in the navy pretend they’re heroes. We all want to like Smoker, Tashigi, Koby, and Garp, but you know, ACAB; if the World Government is taken down at the end of the series and the Navy rebuilt, they can redeem themselves then, but not before. All the horrors and misdeeds being committed, all to maintain power and the status quo. Everything is an excuse to ratchet it up more and more.
I could go on, but I think I’ll leave it there. Another thing I want to talk about is the relationship between women and beauty in the series. It’s not a unique attitude by any stretch, but examining it shows the limitations of gender norms. Like, this is a cartoon world where, in theory, you could go to the gym for a long time and get strong enough to punch a mountain in half; the number of action manga series where that’s true and also women are framed as inherently weaker is staggering. Can’t we have gender equality in a fantasy combat story? But that’s what gender norms require. Men are the strong ones, women are the pretty ones. Whenever a man is handsome, he’s also a fool and not respectable as a man. The most desirable men are the strong ones, regardless of their appearance. Simultaneously, the most important women are the most attractive.
Pirate Empress Boa Hancock is the greatest example of this. Hancock is the ruler of Amazon Lily, the women-only warrior tribe, and the most beautiful woman in the world. Because of course both those things have to be true at once, right? As the ruler of the Amazons, Hancock is the “most woman,” and so has to be the most attractive. A big part of Amazon Lily and Boa Hancock is snakes, and so Hancock has an appropriate Medusa power to turn people to stone. However, for as easy as it would have been to simply give her stone powers, she technically has love powers, in that she can only turn you to stone if you feel lust for her in that moment (which I assume makes sense in Japan). Her most notable super power, then, is simply that people find her attractive, and she’s One Piece’s greatest woman pirate. She lives on an island where “strength is beauty,” and rather than playing that out to a logical conclusion of Hancock being some super tough, muscle-bound powerhouse, she’s the corollary. I’m not saying this to downplay her actual strength, of course, though it’s notable that the first thing we learn after the name for Supreme King haki is that Boa Hancock has it, and we’ve never seen her use it. Everything about her powers and how she fights would be better and less confusing if I didn’t have to assume that literally everyone all the time wants to have sex with her as they’re locked in life-and-death battle.
Hancock being the love pirate (because she’s a woman) continues with most of her depiction being centered around falling in love with Luffy. It’s the most annoying, degrading thing ever, and ultimately unnecessary for the larger story. Hancock has plenty of reason to ally herself with Luffy, without her becoming a stereotypical love-besotted maiden at the age of 29. Luffy protected her and her sister’s dignity and fought against the source of their greatest shame and weakness, at the risk of the entire world hunting him down. I don’t need more than that to believe Hancock would do all the things she’s done to help Luffy. It would have been enough if Hancock were a man; Bon Clay joked around with Luffy for ten minutes, and that was enough for me to believe their friendship would carry both of them to the depths of hell and back. But of course, the whole reason to go to the island of women is to have the most beautiful woman in the world fall in love with you, and for all the women there to jump all over you and touch you all over. Women are the pretty ones, which means half of most of the women characters in the series is sex with men. Nami is the world’s best navigator and cartographer with a weather-controlling staff, a tragic backstory, and a hard edge tinged with comical greed. But if you read the series, you’d mostly come away with her being sexy, because that’s most of the focus put on her character. On and on it goes, with Amazon Lily being the most concentrated version.
That brings us to the way beauty works. This isn’t a unique quality of One Piece, and I’ve actually been fascinated by this depiction in Japanese media and would love to know where this comes from. Beautiful women and girls are often depicted as the object of everyone’s attraction, regardless of gender, whereas hot guys only turn women’s heads. You commonly see this trope in high school romance stories. Like, it’s not uncommon in American media and real life for women and girls to talk about their peers being attractive, but it’s usually in the vein of admiration or jealousy or baseline acknowledgement; if a woman reacts to another woman with real sexual attraction, that’s not seen as “just what happens when you see a pretty woman.” There’s a long history of women with queer attractions being denigrated as overly-masculine, in Japan as well. Yet there’s that distinct trope in Japanese media where it’s totally normal for a woman to be attracted to another woman if that other woman is sufficiently hot, and no one questions how straight anyone is. I bring this up because, of course, that’s how Hancock’s beauty operates, and why she can turn women and even animals into stone. Beauty is an objective metric in the world which gives you unlimited manipulation powers. Despite the power that comes from this, the way people bend over backwards for pretty women is still played off as a joke. Beauty is held up in this way as an equal counter to men’s strength, but it’s also frivolous, because women are frivolous and weaker than men. Just like how the totally not secretly bisexual majority of women in Japanese media don’t actually want to have sex with other women, the supposed power granted to women by their beauty is ultimately an illusion.
All of this leads back into sexist attitudes. This is where Sanji comes in. He’s the ship’s cook and a loverboy with a chivalrous code of conduct. He refuses to hit a woman, even if his life is on the line. For many, that seems an admirable trait. But of course, it stems from a belief that women are inherently weaker and more fragile; more than that, in Sanji’s case, that women are works of art that exist to be seen, whose main value is in their sexual attractiveness, and thus he can’t mar their beauty with his kicks. Like, generally, I don’t think you should hit anyone, regardless of gender, in the sense that you shouldn’t be the aggressor. If it’s self-defense, then you follow the same rules for every opponent, to only hurt them as much as necessary to end the fight. That’s not just about a belief in gender equality, but in a basic sense of honor: If someone challenged me to a fight, I wouldn’t hold back against them because I assume they can’t take as much as I can dish out. This is a story soaked in honor and glory and dreams, so it’s actually pretty disgusting that Sanji would dishonor women warriors by refusing them battle. But that’s the way the world is, isn’t it? No matter how strong and powerful women get to be, their most important quality is their beauty, which makes them fragile yet irresistible works of art. The only truly powerful woman in the series is Big Mom, who’s not depicted as a sexual character in any way; in fact, her unattractiveness to most in the story is cited as a reason it’s ok not to think of her “as a woman.”
There’s a chapter called “Sanji’s Dream” where Sanji makes clear that his real dream was to get invisibility powers so he could violate the sexual autonomy of his friends with impunity. You know, because he “respects women” so much. It’s an attitude men commonly have about women in One Piece and other manga, that they openly discuss how they want to peek at them and grope them and whatnot without consent, and often try to. It’s written off as a joke, like, “Don’t we all want to do this? Aren’t we owed this?” But having this happen constantly and writing it off as a joke, with a bonk on the head punchline, doesn’t really work. It, in fact, exemplifies why the seemingly positive aspects of and respectful attitudes towards women are an extension of this sexually dominant mindset. Men are scared and angry that women are attractive to them because it’s a vulnerability, so they want to assert their “inherent superiority” over them to make up for that while also stealing their sexual satisfaction from women so they don’t have to ask for it. As long as those are the rules of engagement, it doesn’t matter how much lip service you pay towards respect and equality. Women can be strong, men getting hurt is also scary, and sex isn’t a weapon.
Life in the Gutters 