Last night I offhandedly thought of a snide dig at One Piece’s current arc and general treatment of women. Half joke, half contemptuous observation. It was:
“This is actually the second time in the manga we’ve had a forced marriage story that revolves around Sanji”
This is a reference to Thriller Bark, when Sanji had to protect an unconscious Nami from Absalom. The “joke” was the observation that even though Nami was the one being forced to marry someone, the whole thing was still more about Sanji because Nami was unconscious nearly the whole time. And the more I thought about that, the more pissed off I got. Oda treated Nami’s experience with all this as though it didn’t really matter–didn’t really exist–because she was unconscious, and that’s appalling.
Let me walk through what happened to Nami. First she was sexually assaulted by Absalom. I’m just going to repost the whole scene
Absalom broke in while Nami was naked and taking a bath, pulled her out of the water, pinned her against a wall, and forced her mouth closed so that she couldn’t call for help. That’s horrifying. That’s traumatic.
Originally when I was first thinking about this scene, something I was going to say was “at least this scene overall treats this as something awful and scary for Nami.” But after reading the scene again, it really doesn’t. Yes, some of Nami’s facial expression express her terror with the situation here. However, the seriousness of the situation is completely undercut by multiple fart jokes and by Usopp’s extremely inappropriate “Thanks so much for this chance to see Nami’s naked body while she’s being sexually assaulted!” Of course Usopp didn’t realize (yet) that she was being assaulted, but all the same Oda still included that line and that reaction in there.
Why are those things a part of this scene? Simple: because Oda wanted us to laugh. Those parts weren’t mean to be serious–they were meant to be funny. Oda wanted us to laugh while Nami was being sexually assaulted. Those lines and reactions are supposed to add humor to this scene. To Oda, just because a woman is being sexually assaulted doesn’t mean we can’t still laugh at the same time.
Moving on to the forced wedding. As we know, Nami was forcibly abducted by Absalom. She was grabbed around the neck, rendered unconscious, and… I’m going to stop there. I’m going to stop there because that’s where Nami’s knowledge of what happened to her stopped. Think about that because I’m going to return to that point.
Now, I’ve written before about how disgusted I am with what Oda did with the whole fight between Sanji and Absalom over Nami. I want to remind people that Oda wrote a comedy routine between Sanji and Absalom that revolved around how beautiful both of them found Nami
This is gross as hell. Absalom literally sexually assaulted Nami, and yet he and Sanji are acting all goofy (for the purpose of making the readers laugh) over Nami’s beauty. And from there half of the rest of their fight is all about how Sanji’s other greatest dream in life was to use Absalom’s Devil Fruit to violate women’s privacy
All this is supposed to be hilarious. That’s the whole purpose of this stuff. That’s also the position that people take when defending Sanji’s character during these scenes–”It’s not serious and it doesn’t actually reflect Sanji’s character. It’s just a joke!” But even if you do take that position, that necessarily means that Oda thinks that violating women’s privacy shouldn’t be taken seriously. …Which is exactly what Oda thinks, given that he has directly said in the SBS
“The reason they were all peeping is because they are healthy boys. I don’t think there need be any other reason. But I think Chopper might have done it because the other guys were. Besides, not wanting to gaze upon the naked flesh of beautiful young women would be an insult to them! But that’s just my… Sanji’s opinion.”
All that stuff about Sanji and Absalom isn’t actually the point of this post. However, it’s important to include here because it is what Oda chose to focus on after Nami had been abducted and rendered unconscious by the man who sexually assaulted her. Oda treated the situation like a barrel of laughs. Sanji and Absalom talking together about how beautiful Nami is while they’re supposed to be fighting? Hilarious! Sanji talking about how one of his greatest dreams in life was to use Absalom’s powers to peep on women? Comedy gold! That makes me ill.
Let’s get back to Nami. What was going on when Nami regained consciousness?
The situation here is… almost slapstick. Absalom’s stupid looking kissy-face and whole dodging thing are silly looking. This scene isn’t meant to convey terror or fear. It’s mostly just a quick, semi-silly thing. Nami doesn’t actually get actually serious until Absalom hurts Lola
And then Nami promptly finishes off Absalom and that’s the end of this story
Oda also reminded us that Nami was only able to hurt Absalom at all because Sanji beat him up just minutes earlier
But that’s besides the point. The main point is that how Nami felt about everything that happened to her didn’t really matter. Rather, it didn’t even exist. It was just glossed over. The only expression of serious emotion we got from Nami was her feelings about Lola.
And that really bothers me. As we have hopefully established, Absalom is basically a rapist. He is the “we-can’t-actually-use-the-word-rapist-in-a-kids-story” version of a rapist. And Nami was completely at his mercy… completely helpless, unconscious, and vulnerable to whatever he wanted to do to her. But because this is a “kids” story, of course Oda didn’t actually show Absalom violating an unconscious Nami. But this is the point I raised earlier–Nami doesn’t know that. Nami doesn’t know what happened to her, because she was unconscious. That’s fucking terrifying. That kind of experience is traumatizing. A woman was sexually assaulted by a man, only to be completely abducted by him a couple hours later, and rendered unconscious by him. She wakes up an indeterminable about of time later in a different set of clothes being restrained from behind with the face of the man who assaulted her inches in front of her own. Nami has no way of knowing what was done to her while she was unconscious, and all she knows is that she was at the mercy of a violent sexual predator. I honestly cannot convey and stress enough just how horrifying and traumatic and damaging that kind of experience is. Even after everything is over, even after you’re safe again, you can’t escape what happened to you, not just because traumatic experiences stay with you, but because you don’t even know what was done to you. That’s a sentiment directly expressed by the woman who was raped by Brock Turner while she was unconscious:
“I stood there examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided, I don’t want my body anymore. I was terrified of it, I didn’t know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.“ (source)
This is why I’m livid about this entire subject and how Oda handled it. This is something that matters in the world. The Brock Turner case is one of the most recent examples of an incredibly widespread phenomenon in which the sexual assault of women is treated like it’s not really a big deal. Brock Turner raped an unconscious woman, was caught red-handed, and only had to serve 3 months in jail because the judge who sentenced him was sympathetic to him and didn’t want to “severely impact” him with a harsher sentence. This stuff isn’t uncommon either.
That’s why what Oda did here disgusts me so much. Oda wrote a story about a woman who is sexually assaulted, abducted, and rendered unconscious while at the mercy of a violent sexual predator… but treated it all like it wasn’t really a big deal. The experiences that Nami went through are a horrifying kids’ manga-style version of actual rape. Yet Nami’s thoughts and feelings about her experience were non-existent. The entire thing was filled with jokes and gags and Oda acted like Nami’s experience wouldn’t be damaging to her because she was unconscious, which is a horrifically damaging belief that ruins the lives of sexual assault victims. There was no recognition that what happened to Nami is a damaging and traumatic experience, because if Oda did acknowledge that in the manga then it would have cast all the jokes and gags he pulled earlier as being as awful, inappropriate, and repulsive as they truly were.
And yet most OP fans never give a second thought to this stuff. And part of that is precisely because Oda treated it all like it wasn’t really a big deal. So fans internalize that attitude. So a lot of people’s reaction to this post is going to be, “why are you getting bent out of shape over this? It wasn’t a big deal so I don’t know why you’re making a big deal out of it.” And that’s the problem. I didn’t used to think this was a problem either. I never liked the whole thing with Absalom and Sanji and the unconscious Nami, but it didn’t bother me that much until I sat down and really thought about it and processed just how horrifyingly fucked up it was. When you’re in love with something like One Piece, it’s easy to just gloss over the stuff that maybe wasn’t okay and quickly forget about it while focusing on the good stuff that you actually enjoyed.
That used to be me. But thinking seriously about many of the things that Oda has done in this series makes me sick to my stomach. I have every right to look at Oda making fart jokes while Nami is being assaulted by a sexual predator and be sick to my stomach, and every person who looks at everything laid out here and claims that there isn’t really any kind of problem with all this is only going to make me even more repulsed. It’s so frustrating to me that many people feel it is more important to advocate the idea “One Piece is perfect in every way” than it is for them to acknowledge that sexual assault should never be used as an opportunity to make jokes.
