The Romanticism of One Piece
I’m always amazed by how Oda has managed to stay thematically consistent for more than two decades while writing a thousand plus chapter epic about silly pirates having fun chasing their dreams. One Piece, at its core, is about the dawn of a romantic adventure, and its been that way since volume one, chapter one.
But romance is one of those terms whose meaning as shifted over the years and is drastically misunderstood. So what is literary romance, and how does One Piece fit within its framework?
Well buckle up, folks. This is gonna be a long one.
Romanticism as a movement started in the late 18th century, and is described by Isaiah Berlin as the “the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West”. The modern ideas of childhood, imagination, and sentimentality were born here. It’s a rejection of society’s constraints in favor of impossible yearning for impossible goals. Romantics were restless and passionate, and embraced the magnitude of their feeling over the scientific rigors of the Age of Reason.
Sound familiar?
Romanticism gets its name from the old medieval ballads (themselves written in the Romantic languages) that became popular with the growing movement. The 19th century was a period of incredible change. Industrialization, urbanization, and the development of the middle class were all new. Revolution, both industrial and political, was changing the course of the world forever. The Romantics worshiped heroes of the past (in fact, the term hero worship was coined during this time) and sought a return to nature. William Wordsworth famously lobbied against the building of railways in his beloved Lake District, and much of the art of the time, whether it be painting or poetry, focused heavily on man’s relation with nature
In addition to rebelling against traditional political structures, the Romantics also broke away from the traditional religious teaching, many believing that man found enlightenment not through theology or the bible, but by study and attunement with nature. One of proto-Romantic writer Jean-Jaques Rousseau’s most influential works Emile, or On Education was banned in parts of Europe and even publicly burned due to its ideas on natural religion.
All of this leads to the Romantic pursuit of the sublime. While Enlightenment thinkers would often attempt to remove themselves emotionally from what they were experiencing in order to understand said experience through objective, immutable fact, the Romantics sought emotion, awe, and reverence that transcended rational thought. They celebrated and marveled at the wonders of creation, allowing themselves to be consumed by emotion and experience. These were not stoic people, and its here where One Piece truly begins to shine as a work of Romantic art
The world of One Piece, particularly once the story gets to the Grand Line, is chalk full of impossible wonder and whimsy. Each island visited along the journey is a feast for the eyes, and Oda’s art does each distinct and incredible location every justice. Luffy has no desire to see the boring or everyday, and he has no qualm in expressing his excitement everywhere he goes. Oda has made the conscious decision never to let the reader look into Luffy’s thoughts via thought bubbles, but the audience is still able to connect with him because they are always aware of what he he is feeling. Every smile takes up half his face, every sadness drawn as a sniveling wreck. Logical ideas are routinely rejected in favor of desired experiences, and Luffy himself rejects the opportunity to hear the answer to the series’s biggest questions because to him, the journey is more important.
It’s important that Luffy’s mindset isn’t all that common, even a world as wild and wacky as One Piece. As the Jaya arc proves, Roger’s execution initially inspired a generation of pirates to go out and follow their dreams, but in the twenty years since his death that ideaolgy has crumbled under the weight of a new wave of dreamless pragmaticism, the same way the Romantic movement gave way to the Realists who followed.
Luffy’s Romantic spirit stands out, even amongst the Straw Hat Pirates. Many of the Straw Hat’s character arcs involve Luffy helping to remove the blocks that prevent them from living out their Romantic ideals. As the series progresses, the crew inches towards embodying that freedom of spirit that Luffy exemplifies. What that looks like for each crewmate is different (Romanticism is highly individualistic, after all) but they’re given the opportunity to live out that ideal because of their association with Luffy.
This theme of freedom of expression and pursuit of dreams follows the Straw Hats wherever they go on both the micro and macro level. The Romantic pursuit of self-determination bleeds over nearly every arc with Luffy at its epicenter, until it comes to a crescendo during the Wano arc, when the true nature of Luffy’s fruit comes to light for the first time.
Luffy is the beating heart of One Piece’s Romanticism. He specifically imbues many of the Romantic ideals of childhood, such as innocence, joy, and being unprejudiced by a corrupting society. He’s uncomplicated yet passionate, without a care in the world for what anyone else thinks about him, and because of that disregard for authority he comes off as equal parts wise and naive.
In Emile, Rousseau lays out his idea of childhood education, which doesn’t include a classroom so much as the child’s interaction with the world, emphasizing the senses and building on the child’s own observations and inferences. The Romantic child was instinctual and in tune with nature, and a character like Luffy growing up on the fringes of society while spending most of his time romping around in the woods would not be out of place (see Mary Robinson’s The Savage of Aveyron, based on the real story of a feral boy that had been found in France).
What makes Luffy different is that he never loses that simplicity of character even as he interacts with an increasingly complex world. Yes, he matures both as a person and a captain, bearing the weight of terrible loss and difficult decisions, but he does it still while maintaining that curious mix of selfish desire to do whatever he wants and selfless sacrifice towards the people he cares about. Luffy doesn’t want to be a hero, but remains uncorrupted by the malevolent social hierarchies that rule One Piece’s world.
But for all the ways One Piece is a Romantic story, the philosophy of the series departs in several key places. The Romantics of the late 18th and 19th centuries were reacting to the anxieties brought around by the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent urbanization that came along with it, while One Piece belongs squarely to the post-modern era of the 21st. While both glorify a long-gone past, what that past looks like is very different. One Piece fully embraces technology and progress, as best seen during the conflict between Noland and Calgura in the Skypia flashback. While industrialization is sometimes portrayed negatively (see Wano) it’s just as likely to be seen in a positive light (Water 7), and the mysterious civilization of the Void Century was more technologically advanced than the present day manga, not less.
What’s more important than modernization and technological advance is the ways people use said technology. The beautifully rendered locations along the Straw Hat’s journey are just as likely to be vast stretches of wilderness as bustling metropolises, and that search of wonder and the sublime is equally likely to be found in both.
More importantly, I think, is that the Romantics of old were solitary creatures, brooding and isolated from the people around them. There was a preoccupation of creating art devoid of outside influence. The sublime was a deeply personal experience that by its very nature could not be shared with others. Melancholy, loss, solitude, and death were preoccupations of the Romantic mind, the price of visionary genius being social isolation.
One of the most famous Romantic heroes of the 19th century was Thomas Chatterton, a young genius of a poet who, in the midst of poverty and depression killed himself at the age of 17. He was immortalized in paintings and poems, and his influence can be felt to this day by the persistence of the trope of the suffering artist that he, and countless others, helped codify.
One Piece is the story of a boy who rejects the confines of society in search of his own freedom, but he does not do so alone. Luffy is driven as much by the desire to be with his friends as he is by his desire to find the One Piece. The series agrees that risking death is an acceptable part of chasing ones dream, but rejects the notion that it should be sought out or celebrated. It’s better to live an undignified life in the hope of a better tomorrow than to give into an easy death.
And that’s the fascinating part about how philosophies evolve over time, because as much as One Piece borrows from the Romantic era of the 18 and 19th centuries, it isn’t a Romantic story, just as how no amount of research and copying of style could ever turn a historical novel written today into a product of the era its trying to emulate. Oda has taken an old idea and made it into something new, using that idea as the guide for the entire series. Like sun, guiding to the dawn of a new era.
A Romance dawn, if you will.