I've said it before: I think it's really cool that the One Piece live action has cast so many actors of different ethnicities. (Really adds to how big the world feels.) Furthermore, I love that they're all leaning into their accents, rather than all trying to sound as vaguely American as possible. I started thinking about that today, reflecting on how we've already gotten a Sabo tease, if not an official Sabo casting.
This newest addition to my OPLA wish-list goes back to something I was thinking about during the first season.
I've watched a lot of OPLA reactions, and I've seen people point out that it's kind of funny that Luffy and Garp don't have the same accent. Perhaps more interesting to people who know the source material a little better is that the woman they cast to play Makino doesn't have Luffy's accent. Child Luffy doesn't have present-day Luffy's accent, even.
You know who does kind of sound like teenage Luffy? The bandits who crash Makino's bar and mess with Shanks.
And okay, okay, okay, I KNOW it's all probably coincidence. But that can be viewed as such a cool easter egg type thing to fans who know that Luffy was sent up to live in the mountains with the bandits after Garp found out Shanks had basically taken him under his wing and inspired him to be a pirate. Ten years is absolutely enough time for him to have picked up their accent.
I know Ace has already been cast. And I'm not familiar with Xolo Mariduena... but I sure hope he sounds like Luffy. (Trying to sell a blind audience on the two of them being brothers? It would be weird if he didn't fake it, if he doesn't sound that way naturally.)
But the thought that hit me today...
I will bribe whoever needs to be bribed for SABO to share an accent with Ace and Luffy.
Come on, OPLA. Make my dreams come true. Give me the blondest white kid you can find... who sounds like he grew up speaking Spanish, even if he doesn't know a single word. Make it a really random thing, in-universe. No one knows why he sounds that way or where it came from... It's just something he picked up from his childhood with them that inexplicably survived the amnesia.
How many things in One Piece seem random or ridiculous when they're first introduced but are just... part of the world and the scenery and accepted canon by the time you've gotten a few episodes to get used to it? If any show could totally pull that off and make it work... it's One Piece.
