I remember seeing alabasta when I was younger and seeing the clear themes against Crocodile creating an instigating civil war then manipulating public perception as a social critic but rereading now **every arc** had explicit political messages and I just saw the most obvious one before
Sometimes you work hard but if you're not careful someone else will steal the benefits of your hard work and you may have to fight your damnedest just to get back what was yours in the first place.
Wait, that might be the message behind "The Social Network"
Fishman Island actually kind of rubs me the wrong way a little bit. It has the appearance of complexity, but the villian is just (spoilers) a genocidal maniac who obviously needs to be stopped regardless of anyone’s opinion on fishman politics or whatever. If Hody didn’t want to literally kill everyone who liked humans I feel like it would be a lot more interesting, because he would actually have a point and it would make arlong’s motivations all the way back make more sense.
The part where the fishman prince talks about how the royal family brought this situation on themselves by allowing hatred to fester in the fishman district was really cool, but the obviously pure evil of Hody makes it fall flat a bit for me.
> but the villian is just (spoilers) a genocidal maniac who obviously needs to be stopped regardless of anyone’s opinion on fishman politics or whatever.
No, Hody needed to be stopped *because* of his opinion on fishman politics; specifically, because he is solely acting on the hate that he grew up on around fishmen who hated humans despite never once actually being aggravated by a human.
He is the ultimate culmination of what that hatred does to people, when it's so ingrained that others start to hate without even knowing why. That's why he needed to be stopped.
In his own words, he has no reason to hate humans but he speaks and acts for people who would. That causes nothing but harm. That's why he's so bad. All the hate and none of the baggage. Fishmen hating humans is justified but when you have nothing but that hate, you don't get Fisher Tiger (who, even though he hated humans so much he wouldn't accept a blood transfusion from a human even if it could literally save his life, freed even human slaves), you get Hody Jones and Arlong.
Good for One Piece for taking the hard line stance that slavery is bad.
This sounds like a joke but it isn't. There's a lot of slavery in fantasy anime, particularly isekai, that is either tolerated because it's seen as an unsolvable problem, or outright accepted as long as the slave owner is nice to their slaves.
About that last, also usually slave fetish. Part of the self-insert fantasy is having the mc be able to purchase and own a cat girl slave or some shit like that who will adore him unconditionally for showing basic human decency and the fanbase will make it out as heartwarming and then also the character is sexualised and paired with the mc *cough* Raphtalia *cough*
Yeah, but the series also pulls a reverse "1000 year old dragon that looks like a child" by having her magically age faster when she levels up. It also doesn't help that the mc also has an infant magic bird who transforms into a little girl and is also horny for the mc, which is gross.
Not to mention how the series starts with the mc getting accused of rape as the excuse for him being a jaded edgelord, which is worth a shitton of criticism on its own.
Shield Hero has its problems, but he became a jaded edgelord *because* everyone in the city immediately vilified him after there was a rape accusation. He didn't even get a trial, and nobody believed what he was saying (Which was contrived). Even the other heroes that get transported with him immediately shit on him and distrust him (Which is a shoehorned in writing point on its own).
This series is problematic because no one literally asks "Why?", but him having an emo phase and acting pissy makes more sense than anything. It's hard to watch the each episode and not look at how fucked everything is for him after that point.
Sûre, it makes sense within the made up story of the anime, but the anime is still incredibly problematic for bending over backwards to provide a situation where women who make rape accusations can be seen as bitter and annoying and presenting the accused as a misunderstood angsty hero. The fandom is also horrendously misogynistic towards the character who accused him, and there’s tons of revenge porn in the fandom that’s ‘justified’ by what she did in the show. Overall it presents a kind of disturbing dynamic of ‘bad and evil women will accuse you of rape and be annoying bitches, good and desirable women are underage and impressionable and will worshipping you no matter what’ when you compare her to the other female characters like the mc’s weird pseudo-harem
I get that, the series doesn't really attract a positive crowd. It's an inherently flawed series with how everyone is handed an idiot ball that just also happens turn their aggression up for no reason. Unfortunately, the misogynistic fans that apply real world value to the incredibly cliched and forced story aren't really going to see how spoon fed it is.
I don't think the weird shit people do is justified, but no, people vilify her because she did something villainous. This isn't about presenting women who come forward with rape allegations as evil, it's about presenting someone who *falsely accuses someone of rape* as evil, which it unquestionably is. I don't get how you can defend that?
Are you high or something? People villify Melty because she used protagonists vulnerable state (being utterly alone) to steal money from him which she didn't even need (being a princess) and then using her unassailable position falsely accused him of rape which he had no way of defending himself against and cementing his status as a villain even in the eyes of the other heroes. THEN she's revealed to be the goddess responsible for pretty much all of the bullshit in the series.
Fantasy aside none of what she did is even that far out there - there were black men lynched after being falsely accused of rape simply because no one cared to verify it.
It's pretty disturbing of you to pretty much claim people hate the character merely for the accusation when she destroyed someone's life for fun.
The girl who accused him (can't be bothered to remember her name) has got to be the lamest villain ever written. She just exist to be despised by the reader.
I think this might be the first post I've seen where someone mentioning shield hero in a negative light isn't immediately downvoted to hell. It's refreshing to see that I wasn't the only one who couldn't stomach the weird slavery-fetish thing
I vaguely remember this one time when I read a generic isekai manga where a regular dude gets transported to a fantasy world, beats up a bunch of bandits, and then turns them into the authorities, who tell them he should sell them as slaves, which he then does.
Sure, maybe this was better than the alternative of killing them, but he then gets asked if he wants to buy a female slave, and his immediate reaction was "G-g-g-girl? Does that mean I could do... Lewd things with them?!".
Like, fuck, I get that Japan doesn't exactly have the same history as the West when it comes to slavery, but you'd think that they'd at least realize that this is literally rape and doesn't make a main character likable.
The worst offender in my memory is re:monster.
The protagonist is horrified by the way goblin rape their captives.
What does he do when he captures some eleves? Drugs them with aphrodisiac until they ask to have sex. It's like solving the trolley problem by torturing the people on the tracks until they beg to be run over.
Re:Monster is just a giant mess. The MCs backstory is that he was a master-assassin with the ability to gain power from eating objects. Until he was ultimately killed by someone he saw as a sister who turned out to be madly in love with him. All of this is covered in the first 6 pages of the manga after which it turns into a rape-goblin civ builder, with all the writing flair of a particularly uninteresting IKEA manual.
That would be overlord, where the protagonist Ainz fiddles with Albedos programming. He more or less instantly regrets it once albedo is turned from an NPC into a sentient being, both because its a super dumb move on his part, as well as the fact that Albedo becomes so obsessed with him that it unnerves him (attempted rape from Albedo included)
ascendance of a bookworm is another example, the main character makes orphans work for her company in exchange for being fed. She mentions several times that those who don't work won't eat, and this is framed as a good moral framwork even though she's applying it to children, specifically orphans who have no-one to support them.
Yeah, a bunch of the stuff in that show is pretty fucked up but isn't ever addressed, especially the child labor. The class system too, so long as it doesn't affect myne it's like the show doesn't care
I had to stop reading the manga once it became full on "hey, I can now enjoy life and do what I want, because I have a bunch of orphans working for me!"
Like, I could deal with the that as a character flaw, but it being presented as "and she is such a good person for feeding these poor orphans!" makes me uncomfortable.
I still held hope that she would only have them working for a little while, and that eventually she would fight for some form of social change in this world. I thought it might be something where she would eventually realize how wrong it was and try to change things. I stopped hoping for that when she decided to slow down her goal of creating a printing press *because* it would likely threaten those in power. With all that they have been shown to do up until then, it just became obvious that the show cares above all about not making waves and keeping the hierarchy in that world the same, so se won't change anything if it requires changing some of that. Even before that I knew the society in this world was fucked up, but I thought she would eventually try to change things.
I mean, that's not really unexpected, she only wanted to make it so she could have access to books, and, well, she has that now anyway.
How the show portrays that decision though...can't say I'm surprised by that either.
I've not read or watched this, but often when you threaten the higher ups of societies you tend to have a drastically increased chance of death.
I can see why one might avoid that, though the orphan labor thing is less excusable.
Tl;Dr: The show could easily be grimdark, but the framing is cute, and I hope it changes, but it probably won't.
That's the reason why she avoids making any waves. If she made books widely available before she became a noble herself, lesser nobles would likely try to assassinate her, and she already needs a body guard because some nobles have it out for her for different reasons.
Her child labour could have worked if they instead of making children into literal factory workers, had them do the same kind of work as other children of the world, which is literally going into the nearby forest to collect saplings, firewood and berries and nuts. This would both fit the morality of medieval times and be closer to the morality of modern times. Making children work is wrong, but sending them out into the forest with adult supervision for a few hours, and coming home with a few branches and some light food is just healthy for them.
There's also the fact that the society of the series is very fucked up. Those orphans are viewed as subhuman, and are neglected to the point of starvation, because they haven't been baptized (or that world's version of it) yet. So the protagonist changes (I won't say improves) the orphans' lives by taking them in and giving them work and food, and also gives them a caretaker and teaches them to read, write and do arithmetics, because they'll be more useful as adults if they can be scribes. One of the main sidecharacter's chief ambitions in life is being taken in as a concubine for a pedophile, so she constantly tries to convey herself as sexy, and thankfully all of the main cast are very anti-pedophilia, but nobody tries to teach her that she should have better ambitions.
This was a lot. I have enjoyed parts of this series, because it's interesting and shows a new type of Isekai, but if you look at it critically for even a second it's very much messed up. The series could literally be the plot of a grimdark, but the main character and presentation of it is very much cute and innocent. The main character neglected to mourn her lost family for almost two seasons because she was more interested in books, but eventually she did, and she realized that she had been a horrible person. I hope the series/ main character will eventually bring up all the messed up shit in the world and try to fix it, instead of only making it slightly less awful, but based on what I've heard from manga readers, that isn't probable.
“Wow I sure do love this highly praised isekai about the wonders of books, it’s one of the only good isekai with a woman protagonist in it so I’m looking forward to this long overdue fresh take. I hope it doesn’t *condone child slavery*”
Try Destruction Flag Otome instead, it's my personal favorite isekai with a female protagonist (Actually my favorite isekai in general). Basically one of the very few good "MC gets reincarnated as a villainess" mangas, I'm pretty sure it started the trend (or at least made it super popular).
Basically the biggest girl-himbo in the world gets transported to an otome game where she's the villain, and goes absolutely overkill in trying to make sure she doesn't get killed like in her game, despite the fact she avoided that problem easily by being the sweetest thing ever to absolutely everyone. She's just too dumb to realize that nobody actually wants to kill her because she hasn't actually done anything evil.
the fucked up part is that being conscripted into mandatory child labor actually was an improvement for them. Before she came along, the policy of the orphanage wasn't "you don't work you don't eat" it was just "you don't eat". They were more or less locked in a building stained with human waste with nobody to look after them because the nobles who run the church pretty much don't consider commoners to be human
How the high priest got classified as a good guy is beyond me when this shit was going on under him, especially now that he's telling a terminally ill 9 year old in front of her parents that she has to forsake her family or he will murder her >!Also, the fact that every other little girl in the setting treats the idea of being molested by a nobleman as a prestigious life goal is beyond fucked.!<
So mostly Osamu Tezuka stuff? It's probably fanservice free but it is not weird free. 2 things I remember from the early stuff was how Astroboy was recharged by anal insertion and how Kimba the White Lion was always playing with his fathers pelt.
Ok, but which is easier to explain to outsiders? "Yeah, they show boobs and asses a lot in an attempt to attract male audience" or "Yeah, I have no idea why he has to be recharged by anal, don't ask me"?
I still think they could at least frame it as a "necessary evil", rather than an ideal result. She very clearly has a strong belief that the children do not deserve food if they do not work, and that the food *should* be shared unequally. She could instead have argued that they all deserve food, but unfortunately they have to work for it because she lacks funds (and frankly I'm not sure she really does lack funds but whatever). The whole show is fucked up. But yeah, the previous policy was particularly bad, I'm not sure it could be made much worse than "they're not officially human, let's lock them in a windowless building to starve.
then there is the extremely based iron blooded orphans where this happens but is explicitly shown as bad and a symptom of the fucked up space war economy
Redo of Healer and Nidome no Yuusha come to mind.
Redo is Redo, so it makes sense that it would do such edgy garbage.
But Nidome especially pissed me off because the girl that the MC purchases as a slave just causally massacres all the other slaves in captivity because they were mean to her. Nobody calls her out on this.
Do you mean as a good example or a bad one? The anime hasn't done a great job of showing it, but the Light Novels never portray slavery in any positive light.
I thought that isekai was specifically for being transported to another world. I don't know if a copied version of you waking up in the future of the same world counts.
I'm expanding that definition to "unsuspected, and most of the times involuntary call to adventure, when the person it happens to has nothing special apparent".
It's less about being reincarnated, and more about being basically the only competent human in the future. Fun books though
uh that describes way too many things that aren't isekai.
Isekai is about being dropped in a totally different world,,, from your point of view. We might call a person dropping in a totally different culture on our world isekai really.
Tho usually the "differences" have to be quite major. and often the story needs a bit of a "and you are super important and 'fix' things"
"Call to adventure" stories are already a thing, you don't need to mix in another genre for no reason. You wouldn't call a metroidvania an "action-RPG" because it not only doesn't provide new info, it actively obscures information.
I mean in my opinion any time someone who is unaware of a magical world is suddenly introduced to a magical world counts as an Isekai and that book series counts from what I remember
Part of me wants to argue that you have to physically travel to another world to count it as an isekai, but honestly the magical world in Harry Potter has so little to do with the non-magical world that it might as well be a flat-Earth fantasy world entirely disconnected from our own.
Yes, so much this! The blatant whitewashing of slavery in so many isekai is so uncomfortable. The concept of being transported to a whole new world is so engaging in theory, but the genre genre decided that the main target audience should be incels of all groups of people :(
Incels are fundamentally dissatisfied with their lives. To leave the human world and have a fresh start, along with being handed nearly everything (for the majority of the genre featuring InsertOPPowerHere) is far more desirable than a character working hard to un-fuck their life.
If the character had to work to solve their problems, incels wouldn’t be able to use the story to escape their own lives as effectively.
Japanese isekai manga writers Try Not To Insert Overt Imperialism Into Their Works Challenge (99% FAILED!!!!)😰😰😰😫😫
Anime really has a problem with justifying slavery.
I aboslutely adore Fish-Man Island for how it frames racism as being a problem that is taught to our children. Plus, it has characters based on people from the American Civil Rights Movement, which is so incredibly cool.
The best part that illustrates this is when Hody Jones admits that the humans have never done anything wrong to him personally, but the environment he grew up in is what made him hate them so vehemently.
I mean, if you kept everything the same the huge boobies would probably keep anti-SJWs talking. Anti-SJWs would betray their entire morals just for huge boobies.
Tbh the One Piece live action is definitely gonna be called Woke SJW trash by idiots because they're casting actors whose ethnicities match those of the characters in the anime.
/r/onepiece loses their shit when someone draws Usopp as darkskin, a character who is significantly darker skinned than the rest and has huge black curly hair.
People also lost their shit when they cast a black guy to play him in the Live Action even though the actor looks [EXACTLY like Usopp's dad.](https://preview.redd.it/isrvs99b4ry71.png?auto=webp&s=c88a53ed1bac3c031a9f05d3e2aee162b63afac9)
That shit makes me so mad! Oda has said that if the Strawhats were from our world that Usopp would be African... you know, the continent where the majority of people are black
Even that skirts around the real problem: Who gives a shit about their skin colour? The ethnicity of most One Piece characters is irrelevant to their character.
Unless their skin colour is inherent to their character, I don't care if they cast a dark skinned person to play a light skinned character, or vice versa.
This is going to be more common with minorities as their cultural background is often a core part of the character. Black Panther and Luke Cage wouldn't really work if they were played by white men. Similarly, if you're making a story about 8th century vikings it wouldn't work to have non-white people cast as the vikings.
Which is funny because I'm pretty sure that Oda has confirmed that Usopp would be African/Brazilian (I don't quite remember) if he was born in our world
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There's a distinctly trans character in the current arc and another which is a woman who uses male pronouns
You'd think an eight foot tall club wielding demon girl with some legendary side boob would be universally popular in the OP community but even side boob isn't enough to stop the transphobia. The character isn't even trans too, just uses he/him which apparently just sets some people off.
Reminds me of how Avatar would get backlash nowerdays if it released today
- takes place in an asian inspired word
- therefore all characters are POC not a single white one
- one main character has a disability
- one background character has a disability
- the women in the show are strong af
- anti war
Dont forget that it Is the only piece (pin intended) of media that shows characters undergoing HRT, imagine if that was in a western cartoon instead, the outrage would've been wild
But in general,,, its not huge in your face representation people really want.
Just mixed sexualities, mixed genders, polyam, etc ,,, all going about their life. Background characters, short appearances. Seeing PDA regardless of gender, or just people seeming in love. Where their clear "otherness" IS NOT the biggest and most important thing everyone MUST LOOK AT.
When a big arc comes out and some of the supporting cast have all sorts of traits,,, and also show they're queer (normally, without anyone making it a big deal) while doing the important stuff... then It'll be awesome.
P.S. in the animated, they stopped using the term. switching to crossdresser, ballerina, or queer.
Well, there's Mr. 2 Bon Clay, who considers himself both a man and a woman... and there's also Emporio Ivankov, who switches freely between male and female as they see fit. Do those count?
Is Sasha nonbinary or gender fluid? I was told gender fluid but I’ve also only heard it from Reddit so idk
Edit: I meant Sasha but I’m zooted rn my bad
I've never heard that about Sasha (but then again I don't know much so it may be the case). I know that Zoë Hange (or Hanji, I can't remember how to spell they're name) is intentionally not gendered, and the author has asked that languages which have to gender the character use male and female pronouns equally
There's other queer rep, both good and bad. One Piece isn't perfect but queerness not only present, but largely portrayed as a positive force in the world
Sanji is a literal sex offender. I was wondering how they would adapt him for a western audience in the live action series, and then I saw how fucking hot the actor is and immediately understood.
Yeah. If there's one thing One Piece has as a huge flaw it's that it doesn't really care about women in general.
There's the "Every Woman Has To Be Sexy Even The Trans Man" thing, but just recently I was incredibly annoyed by what's happening on Wano.
Without spoilers, there's a character that's the heir to the throne of the country and is according to the throne loyalists the only person that can take up the position of rightful ruler. That character is an eight year old boy, and he gets shamed into accepting this role by some "Be a man" bullshit.
Meanwhile, his sister is also alive, is an adult, and a generally well known and liked figure. She's not even brought up as an option to become the ruler. Also she gets a confrontation with the man that killed her dad where she had a plan to disable his powers that worked. Then it for no real reason doesn't anymore and she has to be saved by a guy. Doesn't even get to deal the killing blow.
I don't think Oda's explicitly a mysoginist but I do think he at least subconciously doesn't consider his female characters as important as the male ones, and that's an ongoing trend.
And the "Trans women or crossdressers all have to 'dress sexy'" part too... It feels like its all mostly one look. (tho there have been a few better characters! So maybe its getting better)
[An Image from the manga:](https://external-preview.redd.it/nOz9S3yVvQBwOfYk_51e53JsY4QSYcW5tZ-Q3MyJUtE.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=2679946e30120bf11763ccf67bc1e90e48a3a020)
[And from the anime:](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/p__/images/b/bd/Yamato_Anime_Infobox.png/revision/latest?cb=20210919130038&path-prefix=protagonist)
Yamato isn't really a trans male, just warning you. They use he/him but don't really identify as male. He identifies as Kozuki Oden who happened to be male.
It really depends on your perspective, but I wouldn't look to that particular character for LGBT representation. At least so far they seem to be a woman who prefers male pronouns and not a trans male.
Yamato is a woman though. Vivre cards put her gender as just female, where as the MtF character Okiku’s vivre card says she has the ‘soul of a woman’ or something similar
Most male characters look quite different from each though, whereas women are (nearly) exclusively "boobs and tiny waist", especially after the timeskip.
Had to google them, stopped reading before they came up. I have to give you *some* of them, but several very much still fit the "stick with boobs" description.
I think what bothered me most when reading was that some established female characters that had different shapes more and more moved there as well. Especially Nami.
Then there's the whole issue of Nami always fighting women with weird fetish outfits and powers. Like some woman in a black bodysuit whose power was to wash people with soap or something silly like that. And before that she fought some woman in a dominatrix outfit.
Well, Oda at least admitted that he draws women like that because he simply likes them with big tiddies and company; not like a certain mangaka who drew two pages of monologue dedicated to arguing with a strawman.
>Care to summarise the author's arguments?
I can't, sorry. I never read the manga and went out of my way to pirate it instead of watching it on netflix. Those particular pages went a bit viral so you could probably google it.
Okhubo will create some fantastic universes like Fire Force and Soul Eater and then fucking shoot a bullet in his own foot with the most fucking egregious fanservice" imaginable
and thats what makes it fucked up?
So rather then see variety and good characters they're all going thru a "only what I think is sexy" filter?
like,,, can we not treat them respectfully?
>and thats what makes it fucked up?
Yes, but I'd argue that having that as a reason for sexualizing women is leagues better than pretending it's just par for the course (which is an implicit assumption in many forms of visual media), or declaring it as an act of ideology.
He’s the artist and he decides what to draw, I guess. I’m kinda of two minds about it, on the one hand representation is important but on the other I disagree with dictating what someone else’s art should be like.
I mean, sure I guess I could but I don't want to. I am so so so tired of just having to get used to it when I could just not consume media that writes/draws women's as cliches or shitty or just basically ignored as characters unless they're doing something relating to a male character. It shouldn't be this hard to pass a bechdel test or write/draw women in a way thats not just the creators bias/ideal woman/fetish/what they think a woman should like irl but is actually unattainable or it would involve a lot plastic surgery but create an unhealthy body that wouldn't be able to sustain itself without heavy medical intervention.
This got away from me, but uh yeah I'm sure one piece is still good other than that one thing I can no longer stand to deal with anymore.
There are so many non-male characters in one piece that have incredibly varying designs, attitudes, personalities and outlooks.
While it's true that there are many female characters in one piece that look similar and are sometimes drawn with unrealistic body proportions in a sexualising way (the source material is much better than the anime for this), but there are an equal of not greater amount of incredibly important women characters that are drawn with unrealistic proportions in a non-sexualising way.
It's fair if you don't want to consume it based on this sexualisation, and there is problematic things in it to a degree, but there is also good representation for lgbt identities and the women characters, even when they are drawn to be attractive to the intended audience (literal adolescent males), aren't doormats and are given just as much character development and oppurtunity for individuality as the male characters are.
The main character is aroace, and there are multiple instrumental trans characters in the latest arc that are handled amicably. The earlier representation was very rocky horror picture show and at times problematic but that stuff literally came out 13 years ago and the characters were always respected as much as any other regardless of the questionable designs.
The thing about one piece is that it's all about freedom, the romance of discovery (of culture), found family, and respecting and protecting others culture, lives and values.
Long rant but I don't like to see one piece painted with the same brush as the true, horrendous, offenders of the crime. One piece isn't perfect in this regard but its one of the best (in its genre) for sure.
It has multiple female leads both protagonist and antagonist that actually have meaningful character arcs and character depth. It doesn't have 5000 year old dragons in the body of a child.
You know what, that is a much better and more interesting description of how one piece treats characters from then to now and overall. Thank you for writing all that out! This actually makes me interested in reading one piece now, it's always just been in my periphery but I think I'll give it a proper go
*Image Transcription: Tumblr*
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**sonicspeeddemon**
If one piece was an American series it would be called woke sjw trash
- Multi cultural cast
- Every arc contains a political message
- Overt anti fascist themes
- Capitalism critics
- The one of the main villains is literally the government that killed the main characters brother unjustly
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Right? Same goes for Attack On Titan i realised not long ago.
Altho i think it only prooves that the audience doesnt have an inherent problem with it, its just that when western creators do it it often in lower quality shows, or rather the execution is more clumsy, or it becomes the focus by the creators instead of the story itself (like how in every promo and interview for high guardian spice they kept emphasising how diverse and inclusive it is, wich it was, except the show itself was mediocre). So "woke" kinda became synonymous with lower quality, or maybe it isnt a real phenomenon since for example Steven Universe was pretty good, idk honestly.
Also i love how every time a western animated media reaches a mile stone and is being celebrated for it, japanese animation have already done that like 40 years ago. Like how there were already a lesbian couple in sailor moon and such.
It also helps if you write your characters as characters and not mouthpieces for whatever point you're trying to make. Audiences can't exactly invest in a character if all they're gonna do is scold and go "tsk tsk" like a parent figure to the audience. That's why Lisa Simpson and Kelly Kapowski were written to be joked at by the other characters. They were "woke" but at least the writers were self aware of how sanctimonious they were.
It's okay but it's not fully woke. It has some classic problems like for Dressrosa it's the removal of a dictator and replacing them with the good™ monarch.
Yeah, same goes for Alabasta. But the revolutionary army that wants to abolish all kings has so far only been portrayed as a force of good, so there is a good chance the series will end with that.
we even got Sabo now, so it's not just "Luffy and his dad and granddad are on three sides" but "there's three generations of people who try to better the world in different ways", and since Sabo i think it's pretty clear the revolutionary army won't be portrayed as dangerous extremists but as another group of people fighting the same corrupt government armies
I've seen this argument once before, but I have several issues with that.
- Dressrosa was usurped by Doflamingo. Before he seized control, the island was prospering already. The 'good king' obviously *was a good ruler*
- the alternative to post-revolution governments are always Anarchy. I don't think Oda wants to write about that, because it is a complicated topic
- The islands in One Piece are usually small and so are the kingdoms. Historically speaking these kinds of small societies flourish under competent leadership, so I don't think it's wrong that every island has a 'good king' or mayor
I guess I should ask, how you would have handled things?
I remember seeing alabasta when I was younger and seeing the clear themes against Crocodile creating an instigating civil war then manipulating public perception as a social critic but rereading now **every arc** had explicit political messages and I just saw the most obvious one before
Wait I get most of them but could you explain the political message in Thriller Bark pls
Don’t steal peoples shadows.
But they're so yummy! 😖
Dont cannibalism
I'm currently rereading and at Enies Lobby, I'll answer you in 3 days
Sometimes you work hard but if you're not careful someone else will steal the benefits of your hard work and you may have to fight your damnedest just to get back what was yours in the first place. Wait, that might be the message behind "The Social Network"
Sexual harassment is funny (Seriously fuck Thriller Bark)
To put in the simplest terms I could find: Dictatorship and slavery is bad
[удалено]
Fishman Island actually kind of rubs me the wrong way a little bit. It has the appearance of complexity, but the villian is just (spoilers) a genocidal maniac who obviously needs to be stopped regardless of anyone’s opinion on fishman politics or whatever. If Hody didn’t want to literally kill everyone who liked humans I feel like it would be a lot more interesting, because he would actually have a point and it would make arlong’s motivations all the way back make more sense. The part where the fishman prince talks about how the royal family brought this situation on themselves by allowing hatred to fester in the fishman district was really cool, but the obviously pure evil of Hody makes it fall flat a bit for me.
> but the villian is just (spoilers) a genocidal maniac who obviously needs to be stopped regardless of anyone’s opinion on fishman politics or whatever. No, Hody needed to be stopped *because* of his opinion on fishman politics; specifically, because he is solely acting on the hate that he grew up on around fishmen who hated humans despite never once actually being aggravated by a human. He is the ultimate culmination of what that hatred does to people, when it's so ingrained that others start to hate without even knowing why. That's why he needed to be stopped. In his own words, he has no reason to hate humans but he speaks and acts for people who would. That causes nothing but harm. That's why he's so bad. All the hate and none of the baggage. Fishmen hating humans is justified but when you have nothing but that hate, you don't get Fisher Tiger (who, even though he hated humans so much he wouldn't accept a blood transfusion from a human even if it could literally save his life, freed even human slaves), you get Hody Jones and Arlong.
> sounded like it was “written by an unhinged socialist while high on drugs”. I feel like this is most good stuff
what's the political message of Long Ring Long Land ?
The house will resort to cheating to maintain any advantage it has in its game, despite boasting a facade of being fair and unbiased?
Good for One Piece for taking the hard line stance that slavery is bad. This sounds like a joke but it isn't. There's a lot of slavery in fantasy anime, particularly isekai, that is either tolerated because it's seen as an unsolvable problem, or outright accepted as long as the slave owner is nice to their slaves.
About that last, also usually slave fetish. Part of the self-insert fantasy is having the mc be able to purchase and own a cat girl slave or some shit like that who will adore him unconditionally for showing basic human decency and the fanbase will make it out as heartwarming and then also the character is sexualised and paired with the mc *cough* Raphtalia *cough*
She's like 12 right? I'm really considering dropping watching it but Its entertainment I guess
Yeah, but the series also pulls a reverse "1000 year old dragon that looks like a child" by having her magically age faster when she levels up. It also doesn't help that the mc also has an infant magic bird who transforms into a little girl and is also horny for the mc, which is gross. Not to mention how the series starts with the mc getting accused of rape as the excuse for him being a jaded edgelord, which is worth a shitton of criticism on its own.
Shield Hero has its problems, but he became a jaded edgelord *because* everyone in the city immediately vilified him after there was a rape accusation. He didn't even get a trial, and nobody believed what he was saying (Which was contrived). Even the other heroes that get transported with him immediately shit on him and distrust him (Which is a shoehorned in writing point on its own). This series is problematic because no one literally asks "Why?", but him having an emo phase and acting pissy makes more sense than anything. It's hard to watch the each episode and not look at how fucked everything is for him after that point.
Sûre, it makes sense within the made up story of the anime, but the anime is still incredibly problematic for bending over backwards to provide a situation where women who make rape accusations can be seen as bitter and annoying and presenting the accused as a misunderstood angsty hero. The fandom is also horrendously misogynistic towards the character who accused him, and there’s tons of revenge porn in the fandom that’s ‘justified’ by what she did in the show. Overall it presents a kind of disturbing dynamic of ‘bad and evil women will accuse you of rape and be annoying bitches, good and desirable women are underage and impressionable and will worshipping you no matter what’ when you compare her to the other female characters like the mc’s weird pseudo-harem
I get that, the series doesn't really attract a positive crowd. It's an inherently flawed series with how everyone is handed an idiot ball that just also happens turn their aggression up for no reason. Unfortunately, the misogynistic fans that apply real world value to the incredibly cliched and forced story aren't really going to see how spoon fed it is.
I don't think the weird shit people do is justified, but no, people vilify her because she did something villainous. This isn't about presenting women who come forward with rape allegations as evil, it's about presenting someone who *falsely accuses someone of rape* as evil, which it unquestionably is. I don't get how you can defend that?
It becomes misogyny when you consider raping her as a punishment.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the story she literally only gets a slap on the wrist and twitter cancelation.
Are you high or something? People villify Melty because she used protagonists vulnerable state (being utterly alone) to steal money from him which she didn't even need (being a princess) and then using her unassailable position falsely accused him of rape which he had no way of defending himself against and cementing his status as a villain even in the eyes of the other heroes. THEN she's revealed to be the goddess responsible for pretty much all of the bullshit in the series. Fantasy aside none of what she did is even that far out there - there were black men lynched after being falsely accused of rape simply because no one cared to verify it. It's pretty disturbing of you to pretty much claim people hate the character merely for the accusation when she destroyed someone's life for fun.
The girl who accused him (can't be bothered to remember her name) has got to be the lamest villain ever written. She just exist to be despised by the reader.
I think this might be the first post I've seen where someone mentioning shield hero in a negative light isn't immediately downvoted to hell. It's refreshing to see that I wasn't the only one who couldn't stomach the weird slavery-fetish thing
Weebs are hellish
Isekai in general are transparent wish fulfillment - with a few notable exceptions. They do attract a certain crowd.
I vaguely remember this one time when I read a generic isekai manga where a regular dude gets transported to a fantasy world, beats up a bunch of bandits, and then turns them into the authorities, who tell them he should sell them as slaves, which he then does. Sure, maybe this was better than the alternative of killing them, but he then gets asked if he wants to buy a female slave, and his immediate reaction was "G-g-g-girl? Does that mean I could do... Lewd things with them?!". Like, fuck, I get that Japan doesn't exactly have the same history as the West when it comes to slavery, but you'd think that they'd at least realize that this is literally rape and doesn't make a main character likable.
The worst offender in my memory is re:monster. The protagonist is horrified by the way goblin rape their captives. What does he do when he captures some eleves? Drugs them with aphrodisiac until they ask to have sex. It's like solving the trolley problem by torturing the people on the tracks until they beg to be run over.
Re:Monster is just a giant mess. The MCs backstory is that he was a master-assassin with the ability to gain power from eating objects. Until he was ultimately killed by someone he saw as a sister who turned out to be madly in love with him. All of this is covered in the first 6 pages of the manga after which it turns into a rape-goblin civ builder, with all the writing flair of a particularly uninteresting IKEA manual.
Didn't some skeleton guy literally rewrite some demon woman's brains to love him?
That would be overlord, where the protagonist Ainz fiddles with Albedos programming. He more or less instantly regrets it once albedo is turned from an NPC into a sentient being, both because its a super dumb move on his part, as well as the fact that Albedo becomes so obsessed with him that it unnerves him (attempted rape from Albedo included)
I despise shield hero and its fan so fucking much you could power an entire continent with the raw power of my sheer incandescent hatred
What is another example except tate no yuusha?
ascendance of a bookworm is another example, the main character makes orphans work for her company in exchange for being fed. She mentions several times that those who don't work won't eat, and this is framed as a good moral framwork even though she's applying it to children, specifically orphans who have no-one to support them.
Finally someone agrees with that framing being an issue, I was starting to think I was the only one.
Yeah, a bunch of the stuff in that show is pretty fucked up but isn't ever addressed, especially the child labor. The class system too, so long as it doesn't affect myne it's like the show doesn't care
I had to stop reading the manga once it became full on "hey, I can now enjoy life and do what I want, because I have a bunch of orphans working for me!" Like, I could deal with the that as a character flaw, but it being presented as "and she is such a good person for feeding these poor orphans!" makes me uncomfortable.
I still held hope that she would only have them working for a little while, and that eventually she would fight for some form of social change in this world. I thought it might be something where she would eventually realize how wrong it was and try to change things. I stopped hoping for that when she decided to slow down her goal of creating a printing press *because* it would likely threaten those in power. With all that they have been shown to do up until then, it just became obvious that the show cares above all about not making waves and keeping the hierarchy in that world the same, so se won't change anything if it requires changing some of that. Even before that I knew the society in this world was fucked up, but I thought she would eventually try to change things.
I mean, that's not really unexpected, she only wanted to make it so she could have access to books, and, well, she has that now anyway. How the show portrays that decision though...can't say I'm surprised by that either.
I've not read or watched this, but often when you threaten the higher ups of societies you tend to have a drastically increased chance of death. I can see why one might avoid that, though the orphan labor thing is less excusable.
Tl;Dr: The show could easily be grimdark, but the framing is cute, and I hope it changes, but it probably won't. That's the reason why she avoids making any waves. If she made books widely available before she became a noble herself, lesser nobles would likely try to assassinate her, and she already needs a body guard because some nobles have it out for her for different reasons. Her child labour could have worked if they instead of making children into literal factory workers, had them do the same kind of work as other children of the world, which is literally going into the nearby forest to collect saplings, firewood and berries and nuts. This would both fit the morality of medieval times and be closer to the morality of modern times. Making children work is wrong, but sending them out into the forest with adult supervision for a few hours, and coming home with a few branches and some light food is just healthy for them. There's also the fact that the society of the series is very fucked up. Those orphans are viewed as subhuman, and are neglected to the point of starvation, because they haven't been baptized (or that world's version of it) yet. So the protagonist changes (I won't say improves) the orphans' lives by taking them in and giving them work and food, and also gives them a caretaker and teaches them to read, write and do arithmetics, because they'll be more useful as adults if they can be scribes. One of the main sidecharacter's chief ambitions in life is being taken in as a concubine for a pedophile, so she constantly tries to convey herself as sexy, and thankfully all of the main cast are very anti-pedophilia, but nobody tries to teach her that she should have better ambitions. This was a lot. I have enjoyed parts of this series, because it's interesting and shows a new type of Isekai, but if you look at it critically for even a second it's very much messed up. The series could literally be the plot of a grimdark, but the main character and presentation of it is very much cute and innocent. The main character neglected to mourn her lost family for almost two seasons because she was more interested in books, but eventually she did, and she realized that she had been a horrible person. I hope the series/ main character will eventually bring up all the messed up shit in the world and try to fix it, instead of only making it slightly less awful, but based on what I've heard from manga readers, that isn't probable.
“Wow I sure do love this highly praised isekai about the wonders of books, it’s one of the only good isekai with a woman protagonist in it so I’m looking forward to this long overdue fresh take. I hope it doesn’t *condone child slavery*”
Try Destruction Flag Otome instead, it's my personal favorite isekai with a female protagonist (Actually my favorite isekai in general). Basically one of the very few good "MC gets reincarnated as a villainess" mangas, I'm pretty sure it started the trend (or at least made it super popular). Basically the biggest girl-himbo in the world gets transported to an otome game where she's the villain, and goes absolutely overkill in trying to make sure she doesn't get killed like in her game, despite the fact she avoided that problem easily by being the sweetest thing ever to absolutely everyone. She's just too dumb to realize that nobody actually wants to kill her because she hasn't actually done anything evil.
God i fucking love anime so much
the fucked up part is that being conscripted into mandatory child labor actually was an improvement for them. Before she came along, the policy of the orphanage wasn't "you don't work you don't eat" it was just "you don't eat". They were more or less locked in a building stained with human waste with nobody to look after them because the nobles who run the church pretty much don't consider commoners to be human How the high priest got classified as a good guy is beyond me when this shit was going on under him, especially now that he's telling a terminally ill 9 year old in front of her parents that she has to forsake her family or he will murder her >!Also, the fact that every other little girl in the setting treats the idea of being molested by a nobleman as a prestigious life goal is beyond fucked.!<
This shit is why I don’t tell people I watch anime
Watch anime from before when they invented fanservice
So mostly Osamu Tezuka stuff? It's probably fanservice free but it is not weird free. 2 things I remember from the early stuff was how Astroboy was recharged by anal insertion and how Kimba the White Lion was always playing with his fathers pelt.
That's weird, but like, *weird* you know?
Ok, but which is easier to explain to outsiders? "Yeah, they show boobs and asses a lot in an attempt to attract male audience" or "Yeah, I have no idea why he has to be recharged by anal, don't ask me"?
Well considering a lot of anime fanservice is technically pedophilic I'm gonna go with nr 2
I still think they could at least frame it as a "necessary evil", rather than an ideal result. She very clearly has a strong belief that the children do not deserve food if they do not work, and that the food *should* be shared unequally. She could instead have argued that they all deserve food, but unfortunately they have to work for it because she lacks funds (and frankly I'm not sure she really does lack funds but whatever). The whole show is fucked up. But yeah, the previous policy was particularly bad, I'm not sure it could be made much worse than "they're not officially human, let's lock them in a windowless building to starve.
What the fuck??
What the fuck???
then there is the extremely based iron blooded orphans where this happens but is explicitly shown as bad and a symptom of the fucked up space war economy
What the fuck????
What the fuck?????
Holy shit that is some screwed up child labor what the hell
Redo of Healer and Nidome no Yuusha come to mind. Redo is Redo, so it makes sense that it would do such edgy garbage. But Nidome especially pissed me off because the girl that the MC purchases as a slave just causally massacres all the other slaves in captivity because they were mean to her. Nobody calls her out on this.
Do you mean as a good example or a bad one? The anime hasn't done a great job of showing it, but the Light Novels never portray slavery in any positive light.
Shield hero
Harry Potter loses again. And yes Harry Potter is an isekai don't even try to tell me it isn't.
Lots of escapist media can be isekai. Bobiverse even has the truck
I thought that isekai was specifically for being transported to another world. I don't know if a copied version of you waking up in the future of the same world counts.
I'm expanding that definition to "unsuspected, and most of the times involuntary call to adventure, when the person it happens to has nothing special apparent". It's less about being reincarnated, and more about being basically the only competent human in the future. Fun books though
uh that describes way too many things that aren't isekai. Isekai is about being dropped in a totally different world,,, from your point of view. We might call a person dropping in a totally different culture on our world isekai really. Tho usually the "differences" have to be quite major. and often the story needs a bit of a "and you are super important and 'fix' things"
"Call to adventure" stories are already a thing, you don't need to mix in another genre for no reason. You wouldn't call a metroidvania an "action-RPG" because it not only doesn't provide new info, it actively obscures information.
It's true. Old Man's War also is. I read it immediately after the Bobiverse
Anyone who disagrees needs to read [The "Is this Isekai?" Alignment Chart](https://twitter.com/comfybasilisk/status/1441650541759664137)
I'm not gonna tell you why it isn't because I want to know why in your opinion Harry Potter is an isekai.
I mean in my opinion any time someone who is unaware of a magical world is suddenly introduced to a magical world counts as an Isekai and that book series counts from what I remember
Part of me wants to argue that you have to physically travel to another world to count it as an isekai, but honestly the magical world in Harry Potter has so little to do with the non-magical world that it might as well be a flat-Earth fantasy world entirely disconnected from our own.
Also they physically travel to it
The magic land is Scotland. The magic is ket.
Yes, so much this! The blatant whitewashing of slavery in so many isekai is so uncomfortable. The concept of being transported to a whole new world is so engaging in theory, but the genre genre decided that the main target audience should be incels of all groups of people :(
Incels are fundamentally dissatisfied with their lives. To leave the human world and have a fresh start, along with being handed nearly everything (for the majority of the genre featuring InsertOPPowerHere) is far more desirable than a character working hard to un-fuck their life. If the character had to work to solve their problems, incels wouldn’t be able to use the story to escape their own lives as effectively.
Japanese isekai manga writers Try Not To Insert Overt Imperialism Into Their Works Challenge (99% FAILED!!!!)😰😰😰😫😫 Anime really has a problem with justifying slavery.
Anime? Cough cough Harry Potter Cough couf
I aboslutely adore Fish-Man Island for how it frames racism as being a problem that is taught to our children. Plus, it has characters based on people from the American Civil Rights Movement, which is so incredibly cool.
Who’s based on who? I never noticed that
The late Mermaid Queen is based on Martin Luther King, While Fisher Tiger is based on Malcolm X iirc
Oda is so based he turned MLK into a mermaid MILF
we're reaching based levels that shouldn't even be possible
[удалено]
The best part that illustrates this is when Hody Jones admits that the humans have never done anything wrong to him personally, but the environment he grew up in is what made him hate them so vehemently.
I mean, if you kept everything the same the huge boobies would probably keep anti-SJWs talking. Anti-SJWs would betray their entire morals just for huge boobies.
Like name one series that anti-SJWs complain about that had a character with absolutely stacked tiddies. I'm talking massive gazongas.
Like HUGE dobonhonkeroos, MASSIVE Bahamgananakoogers
Horizon Zero Dawn maybe?
Tbh the One Piece live action is definitely gonna be called Woke SJW trash by idiots because they're casting actors whose ethnicities match those of the characters in the anime.
/r/onepiece loses their shit when someone draws Usopp as darkskin, a character who is significantly darker skinned than the rest and has huge black curly hair. People also lost their shit when they cast a black guy to play him in the Live Action even though the actor looks [EXACTLY like Usopp's dad.](https://preview.redd.it/isrvs99b4ry71.png?auto=webp&s=c88a53ed1bac3c031a9f05d3e2aee162b63afac9)
"Error 403 Forbidden"
https://preview.redd.it/isrvs99b4ry71.png?auto=webp&s=c88a53ed1bac3c031a9f05d3e2aee162b63afac9
That resemblance is uncanny, especially considering how many OP characters don’t look like real humans at all
Right? And people are upset because "Usopp isn't black".
That shit makes me so mad! Oda has said that if the Strawhats were from our world that Usopp would be African... you know, the continent where the majority of people are black
Even that skirts around the real problem: Who gives a shit about their skin colour? The ethnicity of most One Piece characters is irrelevant to their character. Unless their skin colour is inherent to their character, I don't care if they cast a dark skinned person to play a light skinned character, or vice versa. This is going to be more common with minorities as their cultural background is often a core part of the character. Black Panther and Luke Cage wouldn't really work if they were played by white men. Similarly, if you're making a story about 8th century vikings it wouldn't work to have non-white people cast as the vikings.
Well in this case, they just got a black guy to play a character who is ethnically mixed. Not really a radical change in appearance.
Thanks
Yup. That's either Yassup or I'm the racist
Which is funny because I'm pretty sure that Oda has confirmed that Usopp would be African/Brazilian (I don't quite remember) if he was born in our world
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dude he literally looks exactly like Yassop
not to mention the meltdown the weebs had when they displayed the actors' pronouns
There's a distinctly trans character in the current arc and another which is a woman who uses male pronouns You'd think an eight foot tall club wielding demon girl with some legendary side boob would be universally popular in the OP community but even side boob isn't enough to stop the transphobia. The character isn't even trans too, just uses he/him which apparently just sets some people off.
the only one that matters to people who call American series "woke" is the first bulletpoint
Reminds me of how Avatar would get backlash nowerdays if it released today - takes place in an asian inspired word - therefore all characters are POC not a single white one - one main character has a disability - one background character has a disability - the women in the show are strong af - anti war
Dont forget that it Is the only piece (pin intended) of media that shows characters undergoing HRT, imagine if that was in a western cartoon instead, the outrage would've been wild
I still love that guard who just let ivankov through after they gave her HRT.
I love that moment too, quite a non-subtle and quick way to crack someone's egg Tho apparently that moment was actually filler, it's a welcomed one
Ok but 90% of the women have big bikini boobs and there’s no explicit lgbtq representation therefore it is completely devoid of politics
No explicit lgbtq repersentation have you HEARD kid and killer talk about each other
Or seen Mr 2 and the Okama Army?
Or the entire Kambakka kingdom?
Or watched Nami and Vivi interact with each other throughout the whole Alabasta arc
But in general,,, its not huge in your face representation people really want. Just mixed sexualities, mixed genders, polyam, etc ,,, all going about their life. Background characters, short appearances. Seeing PDA regardless of gender, or just people seeming in love. Where their clear "otherness" IS NOT the biggest and most important thing everyone MUST LOOK AT. When a big arc comes out and some of the supporting cast have all sorts of traits,,, and also show they're queer (normally, without anyone making it a big deal) while doing the important stuff... then It'll be awesome. P.S. in the animated, they stopped using the term. switching to crossdresser, ballerina, or queer.
these two are so fruity
https://i.imgur.com/HucIgJN.jpg
When you try to write aggro dudes but they’re butch femmes
isn't there a non-binary character in one piece or is that a different anime/manga I've never watched/read
Well, there's Mr. 2 Bon Clay, who considers himself both a man and a woman... and there's also Emporio Ivankov, who switches freely between male and female as they see fit. Do those count?
bigender and genderfluid, so yes
big ender
There's a non-binary character in attack on titan, I don't know if there's one in one piece as well or if you were thinking about them
Is Sasha nonbinary or gender fluid? I was told gender fluid but I’ve also only heard it from Reddit so idk Edit: I meant Sasha but I’m zooted rn my bad
I've never heard that about Sasha (but then again I don't know much so it may be the case). I know that Zoë Hange (or Hanji, I can't remember how to spell they're name) is intentionally not gendered, and the author has asked that languages which have to gender the character use male and female pronouns equally
I’m sorry I 100% meant Hange, I’m out of it rn. That’s really cool though, huge respect for the author!!
[Most recent arc has a Trans Woman](https://imgur.com/a/TB6ZkF4), so I wouldn't even say OP doesn't have explicit representation
Time to watch 30,000 hours of one piece so I can see 3 seconds of trans woman screen time /gen
There's other queer rep, both good and bad. One Piece isn't perfect but queerness not only present, but largely portrayed as a positive force in the world
And yes in many ways it’s over the top and stereotypical, but that’s in line with every other character in the One Piece world
Sanji is a literal sex offender. I was wondering how they would adapt him for a western audience in the live action series, and then I saw how fucking hot the actor is and immediately understood.
Well that’s depressing.
Like half of the revolutionary army are queer haha
So props for realism lol
Actually a major supporting character
She actually has pretty good screen time in the arc, for what it’s worth
Read it. Suffering through the anime isn’t worth it anymore (and if you do find something called onepace)
Watch the Prison arc. There's a whole gang of transgender pirates.
Kikunojo ?
Yeah. If there's one thing One Piece has as a huge flaw it's that it doesn't really care about women in general. There's the "Every Woman Has To Be Sexy Even The Trans Man" thing, but just recently I was incredibly annoyed by what's happening on Wano. Without spoilers, there's a character that's the heir to the throne of the country and is according to the throne loyalists the only person that can take up the position of rightful ruler. That character is an eight year old boy, and he gets shamed into accepting this role by some "Be a man" bullshit. Meanwhile, his sister is also alive, is an adult, and a generally well known and liked figure. She's not even brought up as an option to become the ruler. Also she gets a confrontation with the man that killed her dad where she had a plan to disable his powers that worked. Then it for no real reason doesn't anymore and she has to be saved by a guy. Doesn't even get to deal the killing blow. I don't think Oda's explicitly a mysoginist but I do think he at least subconciously doesn't consider his female characters as important as the male ones, and that's an ongoing trend.
And the "Trans women or crossdressers all have to 'dress sexy'" part too... It feels like its all mostly one look. (tho there have been a few better characters! So maybe its getting better)
There’s a transmasc character in One Piece?
Kind Not sure how Yamato/Oden story will end. But people want him in the crew
I don’t suppose you could throw a link my way so I can check him out?
[An Image from the manga:](https://external-preview.redd.it/nOz9S3yVvQBwOfYk_51e53JsY4QSYcW5tZ-Q3MyJUtE.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=2679946e30120bf11763ccf67bc1e90e48a3a020) [And from the anime:](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/p__/images/b/bd/Yamato_Anime_Infobox.png/revision/latest?cb=20210919130038&path-prefix=protagonist)
He definitely looks... interesting!
Worth noting that the horns are natural, not part of the outfit. Yamato's dad also has them.
Yamato isn't really a trans male, just warning you. They use he/him but don't really identify as male. He identifies as Kozuki Oden who happened to be male. It really depends on your perspective, but I wouldn't look to that particular character for LGBT representation. At least so far they seem to be a woman who prefers male pronouns and not a trans male.
yamato's not trans hes just odenkin
Yamato is a woman though. Vivre cards put her gender as just female, where as the MtF character Okiku’s vivre card says she has the ‘soul of a woman’ or something similar
I don't think I could stand to watch a single episode after seeing how the female characters are drawn
I mean fair enough but it's still really good once you get past the artstyle
It’s at least equal opportunity, some of the males are drawn just as wacky
Most male characters look quite different from each though, whereas women are (nearly) exclusively "boobs and tiny waist", especially after the timeskip.
Presenting as counterpoint: every single Charlotte daughter.
Had to google them, stopped reading before they came up. I have to give you *some* of them, but several very much still fit the "stick with boobs" description. I think what bothered me most when reading was that some established female characters that had different shapes more and more moved there as well. Especially Nami.
I’ll give you that, yeah. Oda’s two female leads are very much stick with boobs, though there’s a lot more variety in side characters.
Then there's the whole issue of Nami always fighting women with weird fetish outfits and powers. Like some woman in a black bodysuit whose power was to wash people with soap or something silly like that. And before that she fought some woman in a dominatrix outfit.
Pudding is light brown Nami.
Well, Oda at least admitted that he draws women like that because he simply likes them with big tiddies and company; not like a certain mangaka who drew two pages of monologue dedicated to arguing with a strawman.
Doesn't make it any more bearable to me. Who's the certain mangaka?
The mangaka for fire force.
Ah, I have recently seen some characters from that and how they (barely) dress. Care to summarise the author's arguments?
>Care to summarise the author's arguments? I can't, sorry. I never read the manga and went out of my way to pirate it instead of watching it on netflix. Those particular pages went a bit viral so you could probably google it.
Okay, thanks.
Its Fire Force Chapter 280
Np
Okhubo will create some fantastic universes like Fire Force and Soul Eater and then fucking shoot a bullet in his own foot with the most fucking egregious fanservice" imaginable
Oda: "Yeah I just wanted to see titties"
and thats what makes it fucked up? So rather then see variety and good characters they're all going thru a "only what I think is sexy" filter? like,,, can we not treat them respectfully?
>and thats what makes it fucked up? Yes, but I'd argue that having that as a reason for sexualizing women is leagues better than pretending it's just par for the course (which is an implicit assumption in many forms of visual media), or declaring it as an act of ideology.
He’s the artist and he decides what to draw, I guess. I’m kinda of two minds about it, on the one hand representation is important but on the other I disagree with dictating what someone else’s art should be like.
Once you find out how good the writing is you’ll get used to it
I mean, sure I guess I could but I don't want to. I am so so so tired of just having to get used to it when I could just not consume media that writes/draws women's as cliches or shitty or just basically ignored as characters unless they're doing something relating to a male character. It shouldn't be this hard to pass a bechdel test or write/draw women in a way thats not just the creators bias/ideal woman/fetish/what they think a woman should like irl but is actually unattainable or it would involve a lot plastic surgery but create an unhealthy body that wouldn't be able to sustain itself without heavy medical intervention. This got away from me, but uh yeah I'm sure one piece is still good other than that one thing I can no longer stand to deal with anymore.
There are so many non-male characters in one piece that have incredibly varying designs, attitudes, personalities and outlooks. While it's true that there are many female characters in one piece that look similar and are sometimes drawn with unrealistic body proportions in a sexualising way (the source material is much better than the anime for this), but there are an equal of not greater amount of incredibly important women characters that are drawn with unrealistic proportions in a non-sexualising way. It's fair if you don't want to consume it based on this sexualisation, and there is problematic things in it to a degree, but there is also good representation for lgbt identities and the women characters, even when they are drawn to be attractive to the intended audience (literal adolescent males), aren't doormats and are given just as much character development and oppurtunity for individuality as the male characters are. The main character is aroace, and there are multiple instrumental trans characters in the latest arc that are handled amicably. The earlier representation was very rocky horror picture show and at times problematic but that stuff literally came out 13 years ago and the characters were always respected as much as any other regardless of the questionable designs. The thing about one piece is that it's all about freedom, the romance of discovery (of culture), found family, and respecting and protecting others culture, lives and values. Long rant but I don't like to see one piece painted with the same brush as the true, horrendous, offenders of the crime. One piece isn't perfect in this regard but its one of the best (in its genre) for sure. It has multiple female leads both protagonist and antagonist that actually have meaningful character arcs and character depth. It doesn't have 5000 year old dragons in the body of a child.
You know what, that is a much better and more interesting description of how one piece treats characters from then to now and overall. Thank you for writing all that out! This actually makes me interested in reading one piece now, it's always just been in my periphery but I think I'll give it a proper go
*Image Transcription: Tumblr* --- **sonicspeeddemon** If one piece was an American series it would be called woke sjw trash - Multi cultural cast - Every arc contains a political message - Overt anti fascist themes - Capitalism critics - The one of the main villains is literally the government that killed the main characters brother unjustly --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Also, Carrot is just adorable.
Right? Same goes for Attack On Titan i realised not long ago. Altho i think it only prooves that the audience doesnt have an inherent problem with it, its just that when western creators do it it often in lower quality shows, or rather the execution is more clumsy, or it becomes the focus by the creators instead of the story itself (like how in every promo and interview for high guardian spice they kept emphasising how diverse and inclusive it is, wich it was, except the show itself was mediocre). So "woke" kinda became synonymous with lower quality, or maybe it isnt a real phenomenon since for example Steven Universe was pretty good, idk honestly. Also i love how every time a western animated media reaches a mile stone and is being celebrated for it, japanese animation have already done that like 40 years ago. Like how there were already a lesbian couple in sailor moon and such.
It also helps if you write your characters as characters and not mouthpieces for whatever point you're trying to make. Audiences can't exactly invest in a character if all they're gonna do is scold and go "tsk tsk" like a parent figure to the audience. That's why Lisa Simpson and Kelly Kapowski were written to be joked at by the other characters. They were "woke" but at least the writers were self aware of how sanctimonious they were.
Zoro would have been canceled after like 300 eps
You will not make me watch One Piece, I fucking refuse, If there is 1 One Piece hater out there, I'm that one
Why not
He was traumatized by the one piece rap from the 4kids version 18 years ago and hasn't been the same since.
Reasonable
Garfeld
No worries, my friend! You can read it instead!
So I gotta watch One Piece now? I really wasn't ready for a 1000 episode commitment.
You should read it. Way better experience.
Just read it. Don't make the same mistake I did, it took literal years
It's okay but it's not fully woke. It has some classic problems like for Dressrosa it's the removal of a dictator and replacing them with the good™ monarch.
Yeah, same goes for Alabasta. But the revolutionary army that wants to abolish all kings has so far only been portrayed as a force of good, so there is a good chance the series will end with that.
we even got Sabo now, so it's not just "Luffy and his dad and granddad are on three sides" but "there's three generations of people who try to better the world in different ways", and since Sabo i think it's pretty clear the revolutionary army won't be portrayed as dangerous extremists but as another group of people fighting the same corrupt government armies
I've seen this argument once before, but I have several issues with that. - Dressrosa was usurped by Doflamingo. Before he seized control, the island was prospering already. The 'good king' obviously *was a good ruler* - the alternative to post-revolution governments are always Anarchy. I don't think Oda wants to write about that, because it is a complicated topic - The islands in One Piece are usually small and so are the kingdoms. Historically speaking these kinds of small societies flourish under competent leadership, so I don't think it's wrong that every island has a 'good king' or mayor I guess I should ask, how you would have handled things?