#optow

[calgaras]

This week’s chapter is the exact reason why this blog is on hiatus. The longer One Piece has gone on, and the more closely I’ve looked at the series, the more disappointed I’ve gotten. 

So many people were thrilled to finally have a character like Pudding in One Piece. A female character who starts out acting like an innocent, helpless damsel in distress but who turned out to be a unscrupulousness and cruel villain? She seemed like a deliberate attempt by Oda to subvert and change the predictable pattern he had fallen into. You know, the one where Dressrosa had 5 different damsels in distress on it, and not a single woman who defeated an important enemy during the entire 100 chapter arc. The pattern where Nami, Vivi, Robin, Hancock, Viola, Baby 5, and Reiju are all female characters who Oda took and went “Look at this dangerous female villain! Lamo jk they’re actually all victims who were either actually good the whole time or who switched sides.” 

Not only that, Pudding seemed like a female character who might actually be used to address some of the problems with Sanji’s character and force him to develop and change. Some people were hoping that Pudding would cause Sanji to go from his “All women are innocent and sweet delicate little flowers who need men to protect them” mentality to, you know, seeing women as actual people who deserve to be viewed and treated according to their actions.

However, despite the big, exciting twist of Pudding turning out to be evil, I still couldn’t—wouldn’t—get my hopes up precisely because of Oda’s track record. And sure enough, what do we get?

We get, “That confident and malicious queen of deception? Guess what! She’s actually a sad girl who is insecure about her physical appearance and just needs to be told by a gross man who she hates that she’s beautiful!” 

The only reason I’m not disappointed is because I never got my hopes up in the first place. Oda’s handling of the female characters in One Piece ranges from outstanding to depressing to infuriating. But on the whole, Oda has left me distrusting and disillusioned. I’ve long since lost my respect for how Oda writes/treats women. I’m still reading, but so much of the passion I used to have for the series is gone, and I am perpetually on my guard now so that I won’t be hit by the same intense disappointment that I've been hit by too many times already. 

[calgaras]

kyogre-blue replied to your post “Pudding: *is a highly intelligent, cunning and cruel woman who is the...”

OK, but the weirdest part is that a third eye somehow makes her ugly, in this world? There's fish people, mermaids, people who are furry for no clear reason, etc. A third eye is nothing and Pudding is so conventionally attractive otherwise, this is just wild.

Yeeep. This is crappy on two levels. One is that, like you said, the Grand Line is just filled with non-typical humans. We’ve got mermaids, fishmen (and women), giants, dwarfs, actual literal furries, Longarms and Longlegs, Snakenecks, and plenty of people who are just have unusual shapes and features! And nearly all of those people are a part of Big Mom’s kingdom. Regardless of her motives (which pretty much boil down to self-advancement and greed), her kingdom is possibly the most diverse place in the world. 

But despite that, we’re supposed to believe that Pudding, a DAUGHTER OF BIG MOM and a person who is simply half descended from a group of people who all have 3 eyes (and are literally called the Three-Eye Tribe), was ostracized and bulled since her childhood for having one extra eye? Her oldest brother has a tongue that’s like as big as his arm. She has a sister who is half shark. She has another brother who looks like some kind of dripping muck monster. Oh, but Pudding having a third eye is just too much. It’s the crap with Baby 5 all over again but actually even less well developed this time. 

And it’s not just unbelievable within the story. It’s unbelievable to the audience. No one—NO ONE—looked at Pudding when we first met her and went “Oh wow that third eye is so weird/ugly. Poor her I bet she gets a lot of shit for that.” Most people just thought, “Oh cool, a cute girl with 3 eyes.” And yet now we have a feature that absolutely no one thought lessened Pudding’s attractiveness in any way being treated like some horrible deformity that Sanji should be lauded and applauded for for finding beautiful. It doesn’t work. At all. 

Sanji and his reaction to Pudding’s eye, compared to his and other characters’ reactions to other women in the story is the other problem here. A woman is half fish? A woman is half dog is covered from head to toe in fur? A woman has 3 eyes? All great, all wonderful, all hot and beautiful and Sanji is going to drool all over them. 

A woman who isn’t young, thin, and cis?

Oda treats women with fictional qualities better then he treats actual, realistic women. Don’t worry female readers of all ages! Oda wants you to know that if you have a third eye or are literally half dog or fish, Sanji will blown away by how gorgeous you are! 

But do you weigh any more than a woman with a waist like this? 

Lamo it’s time for *jokes*

[calgaras]

Sorry if you have answered a question like this before but in your opinion do you think the Enies Lobby arc was good character building wise for Robin or was it just more of Oda's typical "damsel in distress" nonsense?

Ahh this is a complicated subject. To start off, objectively the arc was all about saving a helpless woman. The arc even started out with Franky being held prisoner as well, but he was quickly able to free himself and right away started fighting back and defeated one of the CP9 members. Robin did one thing of breaking Spandam’s spine at the end, which was hardly a fight since Spandam is weak as hell, and it didn’t even have any long term consequences for him. 

I’ve been told before “But all the the Straw Hats were ‘rescued’! It’s not like it just happens to the women. It’s a gender equal thing and you’re complaining about nothing.” That’s not really the case though, and it’s all about how things are done. 

Zoro: He was tied to a stake and scheduled to be executed and Luffy did have to free him. Nonetheless, he made a voluntary choice to be placed in that situation in order to protect a little girl, and immediately upon being freed started fighting and was the one who cut down the villain of the arc. 

Usopp: 100% fought to protect his home. He had a very hard time with it, got beat up a lot and couldn’t have done it without Zoro and Luffy’s help, but he still fought and put his life on the line and protected Kaya and his village. He wasn’t at all put in a position of “Oh poor Usopp he needs to be saved.” 

Sanji: Same as Usopp. The Baratie would have been lost if Luffy wasn’t there, but at the same time he fought and put his life on the line to defend what was important to him. 

Chopper: Same situation again. Luffy defeated Wapol, but Chopper still fought and was a protector and defeated Wapol’s two (combined) right hand men all by himself. 

Franky: As I said, Franky wasn’t really even rescued. He escaped from his chains by himself and fought back and helped save the day and protect Robin. 

Brook: This time it was Zoro who defeated the enemy Brook couldn’t defeat, and got Brook’s shadow back. Still, Brook put up a valiant fight first, and even before that had saved Robin and Franky from the big zombie spider and afterwards joined the fight against Oz. 

So really, the only two who were put in any kind of “help save me” position were Zoro and Brook, and those were only brief moments that quickly passed–not entire huge arcs dedicated to them being helpless and needing to be saved. All the other boys were presented as needing help (from Luffy), but were still put in positions of strength and agency and took a strong prominent stand in protecting what they cared about with their fists and were never made to be helpless victims against their will. Those are very different positions than the ones that Nami and Robin were placed in during Arlong Park and Enies Lobby, where they were absolutely helpless, could not fight for themselves in any way that made a difference, and pleaded to be saved while crying their eyes out. 

What makes this such a complex and frustrating subject for me is that I still want Nami and Robin during those arcs to be respected and appreciated. Because even though Nami didn’t rip out any of Arlong’s officers’ spines, and Robin didn’t solo one of the CP9 assassins, and even though they cried, they still displayed tremendous character depth and inner strength. I know full well how important Robin is to a lot of fans because they look at her during Enies Lobby, look how how she was prepared to resign herself to torture and death because she didn’t believe her life had value, that her friends were better off without her, and the fact that she overcame and and found her strength to live with the horrors of her past. Robin WAS amazing during Enies Lobby, and I will absolutely never dismiss her and tell people that they shouldn’t appreciate that arc. 

I’ve talked about this with Vivi (here and here) and Conis (here) too. And heck, I’ve talked about it with Hancock too. Those all characters who also showed their strength not with their fists, but with their character and their actions that had significance far beyond simply beating someone up. It is important to respect this stuff too, which unfortunately a lot of fans don’t. A lot of fans fall into this “unless you’re beating up super strong enemies you’re useless, and if you cry then you’re weak and pathetic” way of thinking about these women and it is gross as hell. Real people cry, and real people can’t go around beating the shit out of people to solve their problems. Real people need to be told that it is okay to cry (both men and women), and that you can be strong and stand up for yourself and others in other ways than with your fists. That even if you’re not physically strong you can still be amazing and make a difference and that you deserve respect. 

That’s why all this is so complicated. Because I respect and very much appreciate the development and character that Robin showed during Enies Lobby, but at the same time it is still a part of a larger trend of making women into damsels. It’s a trend that has only gotten worse over time, where at this point we have characters like Rebecca who were ultimately stripped off all agency and strength of character so that they were left with absolutely nothing for me to appreciate about them. And as a general matter I am extremely sick of stories about brave men saving helpless women. It is one of the most overtold stories in all of human history, and we get it already. More incarnations of that exact same story contribute nothing to the world while maintaining shitty cultural gender dynamics that place women in a secondary position in society

[calgaras]

hi!! you've written before about female villains and how oda will find a way to avoid having a real fight w/ them (e.g. perona and sugar). how do you think this will work out with big mom as one of the main antagonists of the arc?

Oda already worked out the solution to this a loooong time ago. He solved his problem simply by making her big and ugly. Because it isn’t that Oda refuses to EVER let his male protagonists hurt female villains. Rather, it is something he most specifically only does for cute, conventionally attractive women. This is something I have written about in detail before. 

I think it is pretty obvious to everyone that Oda believes in ideas like that men should treat women differently–that men need to protect women and that women shouldn’t fight and all that stuff. That’s why he keeps putting those things in the manga–Sanji’s “noble” refusal to ever hurt women, Whitebeard–one of the most respected figures in the series–refused to let women in his crew fight, Rebecca was praised for staying “pure” and not hurting people, and plenty of other examples. Oda includes this stuff in his story because he believes it himself. 

So to Oda, a male protagonist hurting a female villain, even though she’s awful and evil and horrible and strong, is somehow wrong and he doesn’t like to do it. That’s why the token female villains are either fought by Nami (like Miss Doublefinger and Kalifa), or defeated through non-violent means. That was what was done with Perona, Monet, Sugar, and even Miss Goldenweek, who was defeated off screen by a duck. And then there are all the female villains who turn out to be good and thus don’t have to be fought, such as Cindry the zombie and Baby 5 and Viola, and even Vivi and Nami and Robin as well. Oh, and there’s Sadi-chan too. She wasn’t defeated violently, so much as she was defeated “sexually,” and even then Oda had to make a “woman” do it. The only time in the manga that Iva ever actually changed their body to make it “female” was when it came time to fight Sadi-chan. 

But wait, there has actually been several instances of male protagonists actually hurting female enemies with no hesitation. What do all of those instances have in common? 

A woman who was so fat she was round, a huge heavily muscled black woman (literally the only character in the entire series Oda has drawn to be dark skinned), a woman who is fat, older, AND turns into a mole, two giant snake monster women, and an elderly fat woman. 

They weren’t conventionally attractive, so to Oda it was okay for men to hurt them. Oda doesn’t feel the need to treat them like the majority of his other female characters, the ones he designs to be sexy bombshells–the “real women” of the series. Just like how Sanji will fawn and dote on and try to be all Prince Charming with most women he meets, yet he was fine with calling Dr. Kureha a hag. He did still acknowledge her as a lady and protect her (unnecessarily) from Wapol’s men, but the point is that because she’s not attractive to Sanji or to Oda, she didn’t need to be treated the same way and there’s no problem if Sanji is rude to her like he is to men. The only instance of a male protagonist actually hurting a conventionally attractive female villain in the series was when Luffy punched out Miss Valentine at Whiskey Peak, which is 1 small exception to a very consistent trend that Oda has been doing for over 800 chapters now. Oda has a long history to treating women differently based on their appearance. It is specifically the women he finds attractive that Oda feels are the ones most “deserving” of being treated like how he thinks women should be treated. 

So, there isn’t going to be any problem for fighting Big Mom to Oda. Oda took care of that the second he decided to make her a giant monster who can barely be described as human 

That’s probably a good chunk of why she has the design she has in the first place–so that Oda can have Luffy punch her in the face as many times as he wants without feeling bad about it. 

[calgaras]

it's true that op is male dominated but it's just because it's shounen so it's made for younger boys ya know?

Well duh. (FYI, this is follow up to this post that illustrates that in One Piece, women only make up a sad 1/5th of the total cast, and a pathetic less than 7 percent of positions like pirate Captains and Marine officers.) 

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. And it also doesn’t mean that I have to be on board with women getting put in the back seat of all things that are not women-focused media. It doesn’t matter if something is targeted to a male audience, or made with the expectation that it’s supposed to be gender neutral–men absolutely dominate these fields. Harry Potter, Danny Phantom, Star Wars, the main gangs in media like this usually only have one woman and two or more men but are presented as “gender equal” because there is one girl at all among them. Sci-fai, fantasy, comics, movies, TV, video games in general, etc–everything is dominated by male characters, and when female characters do lead they need to be uber sexy for the sake of straight guys’ enjoyment. 

Basically, there is a cultural belief that men and boys can be related to and appreciated by both men and women, but that women and girls can only be appreciated by other women and girls, and that boys can and should only be concerned about women for fanservice.

Women are supposed to happy if there is even one woman in the Justice League, or even one woman in the Avengers. Women are supposed to be happy that there are even any women at all in Lord of the Rings even though the Fellowship was all male. Women are supposed to be happy that there is even one woman of any significance in each of the Star Wars installments. 

My overall point is this: fuck the idea that men and boys shouldn’t be expected to give a shit about women. Women are grossly underrepresented in media (both as characters and as writers/directors/producers who actually get to create media), politics, STEM fields, business, and so much more. FUCK MEDIA THAT NORMALIZES THE ABSENCE OF WOMEN. What does it say about men when their ideal fantasy world is one in which women are barely present and have little to no roles of prominence? Boys are not born believing that girls suck and are boring and don’t matter. Boys are taught shit like that by stories that only ever feature boys as heroes and girls as princess that needs to be rescued. Boys are taught that girls are weak and that things associated with femininity are beneath them. Boys are taught that they have agency and importance and that girls are simply supporting characters in the cast of their lives. 

And I hate that. I hate that male dominated media and disinterest and disregard for women is regarded as expected, normal, and unchangeable. So yeah. One Piece is a male dominated series because it is written by a man for a male target audience. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t raise two big middle fingers at the societal expectation that men and boys shouldn’t give a shit about women. Oda isn’t just responding to young boys lack of interest in women as figures of prominence and agency. He’s helping create it. 

[calgaras]

Would I be right in saying that no woman in One Piece has ever expressed desire to become Pirate King/Queen? I guess from the characters we've seen so far, only Big Mom could be a potential candidate based on her status and supposed strength, but we don't have any reason to believe she has such ambitions yet. Right?

Yep. We haven’t seen a single female pirate in One Piece who has expressed a desire to find One Piece and be Pirate Monarch. Maybe that is Big Mom’s endgame goal, or maybe she thinks it’s a waste of time and wants to focus on more tangible goals. We dunno yet. 

The lack of ambitious women searching for One Piece who are rivals and/or enemies to Luffy… This is one of those many things that I chalk up to One Piece being an extremely male dominated series. In the canon history of One Piece, there have been approximately 112 named Pirate Captains. Of them, only 7 are women 

Big MomHancockLolaWhitey BayJewelry BonneyEmly Alvida

That’s only 6.25%. Only six percent of the Pirate Captains in OP are women. And for the entire cast, out of roughly 1090 total characters, 214 are women, meaning that women make up only 1/5th, or 20%, of the total cast. (FYI, those numbers include filler characters, but the manga is still has the same ratio of male to female characters.) We can also look at the Marine side of things. We have met a total of… about 59 named officers in the Marines. Of them, only 4 are women–Tashigi, Hina, Bellemere, and Tsuru. That is 6.8%. 

So. As a whole, women make up about a fifth of the total cast. But when we move onto more prominent roles like Pirate Captains and Marine officers, that number plummets down to about 6.5%. One Piece is just an extremely male dominated series in which boys are the friends, rivals, and enemies of other boys, and women mostly play supporting roles and exist as tokens in more prominent positions. 1 female Yonko, 1 female Shichibukai member, 1 female Supernova, and 1 female Vice Admiral. 

It sucks, but that’s the way it is. 

[calgaras]

I had an idea Cal, I thought you should hear it. If all of us disgruntled OP fans wrote to Oda about his gross misuse of his female characters, do you think it would help anything? At least draw some attention or something? I'm mad as hell! The males are so diverse and well represented, but I feel like lots of girls (me included) must feel sick over this. There are no bellies, no muscles, no small chests; it's hard to picture yourself in a world where you have no representation.

I’ve gotten a lot of asks like this over my time here, about writing to Oda to try to inform him of the things that a lot of fans are disappointed about. The idea that goes into them is the idea that Oda just doesn’t know. That it has never really even crossed his mind that he’s disappointing/frustrating lots of his fans with the way he overwhelmingly draws women with the same oversexualized body for the purpose of fanservice. However, that’s not the case. Oda already knows this. 

D: Nice to meet you. This is sudden, but… please teach us a tip or two on how to draw that hawt hourglass body all ONE PIECE female characters seem to have! Make sure you don’t forget to include them airbags ♡

P.N. If there’s no bread, let them eat roses~

O: Yes. Hello. It’s drawing time at the SBS segment. I would suggest that you think of a woman’s proportions as “three circles, one X”. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be leaving.

(I only draw this kind of body, so I get a lot of complaint postcards from my female audience. Let’s all stay strong and keep on living life.)

(All that was in the vol. 79 SBS) 

“I only draw this kind of body, so I get a lot of complaint postcards from my female audience. Let’s all stay strong and keep on living life.” 

Fans tend to assume, or prefer to think, that Oda just has no idea that women want more diversity and better representation, and that they don’t appreciate it that most of the women in the series who aren’t oversexualized fanservice bombshells are instead mocked for being old/fat/ugly. And another assumption that feeds into all this is the idea that Japan is completely devoid of feminism and that all the women and girls in Japan are silent about topics like these, about representation and how they are depicted and treated in media. 

However, I think it’s pretty clear that that’s not the case. Oda said it in his usual, endearing, being-silly-while-sounding-serious kind of way, but Oda pretty much directly stated that he knows that lots of girls/women have a problem with how he represents them, but that he doesn’t care and is just going to keep doing what he’s doing. Even if every follower I had on this blog wrote to Oda in perfect Japanese on this subject, I can’t really imagine that Oda would do anything about it because it’s nothing he hasn’t already heard before from who knows how many thousands of his readers. It’s disappointing, it sucks, but that’s the way it is. 

And as I’ve said before, I don’t write about subjects like this because I think that I can actually change what is in One Piece. However, I can help make fans conscious of these things and encourage the fandom to be more encouraging and receptive to the efforts that fans take to diversify the series on the fandom side of things. I love it when fans redesign characters and do things like depict Rebecca as being buff as fuck, and Nami as being covered in scars, and Perona as chubby, Vivi as actually being dark skinned like someone native to a desert country based on ancient Egypt would be, etc, etc. And some of the shittiest people in fandom are the people who get mad and attack other fans for redesigning characters to help make up for the diversity that the original series so sorely lacks. 

We can’t change what is in the series itself, but we can be aware and critical of its shortcomings and do what we can to improve things here on our end. 

[calgaras]

You know, going along with this topic of OP's females, it's hard to look back on early OP when Oda seemed to be tackling the serious issue of gender roles and inequality with characters like Kuina and pre-timeskip Tashigi. I remember as a kid really being interested in that aspect of their characters, excited to see how Tashigi would rise above it all in the future and prove the world wrong. Really makes me wonder if Oda practices what he preaches.

It seems in a lot of ways that Oda’s just totally thrown out the themes that he used to try to establish with Kuina and Tashigi’s characters. It’s more than preaching something and not practicing it–it’s deciding later to preach and practice pretty much the opposite. 

Oda keeps doing things like the fight between Franky and Senor Pink. He keeps doing things like having Sanji’s sexist beliefs about women being innocent and pure be true and even help save the day. He keeps writing characters who say things like 

Oh, and let’s not forget how Whitebeard, one of the most well respected and admirable characters in the whole series, refused to allow women to fight on his crew 

D: Odacchi! Question!! You know how there aren’t any females in the Whitebeard Pirates? It bothers me!        P.N. Apple

O: Hrmmm. So back when they made their first appearance (volume 25), there were female nurses on board. These lovely ladies were actually the Whitebeard Pirates’ official medical team. However, due to Whitebeard’s own set of morals, he never allowed a woman on board his ship as “fighters”. This is the reason why there wasn’t a single woman in his crew when they arrived in the “Summit War Arc”. He was prepared for “death” at this point. He had ripped off all of the medical tools that were helping him stabilize is condition despite his illness, left the women of his medical team, who desperately tried to stop him, in a safe place while tearing up, and went back out into sea for battle with just his boys!! (X)

Oda doesn’t include all these kind of things in the story because he thinks that they’re wrong, and that these things are unfairly sexist. Rather, Oda includes them because he think they’re good things. He thinks it’s admirable that Sanji refuses to fight women even if they’re evil. He thinks it’s good that Whitebeard didn’t allow women to fight on his crew. He made an entire theme about Rebecca staying pure and not hurting anyone because he thinks that’s what girls should be like. 

And even when it comes to characters like Kuina and Tashigi and how Oda treated them early on in the story, there’s was still sexism subtly encouraged within them. For example, Tashigi, the only character in the story who is actively and openly criticizing people and taking a stand against sexism, blatantly said herself back at Loguetown that women are weaker than men. That is to say, that even early on, when Oda seemed to be actively developing themes in One Piece meant to combat sexism, he was still advocating blatantly sexist ideas. So basically it’s kind of always been a mess. The treatment that Tashigi (and Kuina) have gotten in the series is something that I’ve written about in a lot of detail, and you can find those posts here, here, here, and here.