One Piece is an ongoing Japanese manga series by Eiichiro Oda. It’s one of the most popular manga in the world, and has been exported to many countries in many languages. New chapters are published on a weekly basis in Shonen Jump, a Japanese anthology magazine published by Shueisha.

Manga, if you are unfamiliar with the term, is a style of Japanese comic books and graphic novels, oftentimes in black and white with color only occasionally featured as spreads or chapter opening pages, containing themes that vary significantly from innocuous and very kid-friendly up to XXX-rated, trigger-inducing/including, very mature content. The majority of manga is in the middle of those extremes, and a lot of it is aimed at young adults or teenagers; but in general manga can be aimed at adults as well as children.

One Piece is a series set in a world experiencing the Great Age of Pirates. People from all over this fictional world are searching for One Piece: a treasure that the Pirate King Gold Roger said he hid before his public execution. It’s thought that whoever finds it will become the next Pirate King.

The world is divided into four seas, which are very livable for regular citizens, with one thin stretch of a fifth, very treacherous sea called the Grand Line, which circles the globe and can only be accessed from the outside in one place. This is a sea where the usual laws of physics and common sense get skewed, due to very powerful forces at play, and which forces seafarers to go in one direction so they must overcome all hurdles to keep moving forward.

At the end of the Grand Line is where Gold Roger is said to have left One Piece. Only the most determined, the most powerful, can even hope to make it there. Many die or fail along the way.

Since Luffy was a child, he’s dreamed of going to sea and becoming the next Pirate King. The series is about his adventures, the friends and crewmates he finds in his journey, and all the lives they change along the way.

In this age of pirates, the World Government and their military (the Marines) work to uphold justice and keep the pirates under control while protecting everyday citizens. There are other powers at play, including:

• the Tenryuubito (the Celestial Dragons, or world nobles) who are elite nobles under World Government protection, afforded the highest of honor and wealth
• the Shichibukai (Royal Seven Warlords of the Sea) who are former pirates turned privateers working under the World Government’s protection
• the Yonkou (Four Emperors) who are the four most powerful pirate captains in the world, ruling the Grand Line as neither enemies nor allies of each other. They are a wild card to the World Government, who strive to take them down.
• the Revolutionary Army, who seek to tear down the World Government and liberate the world’s people.

The question becomes: who is really good, and who is really evil? Where does true justice lie in a world of shades of grey, with great powers who try to operate in strictly black and white, and with pirates who represent death and destruction, and other pirates who stand for freedom and liberty?

This world also contains special powers that people can acquire; some of it is a type of power that is partially inherently born and partially built by hard work (haki), and some of it is the Akuma no Mi, the Devil Fruit, which gives the person who eats it extraordinary powers (different for each fruit) but which then brings with it a common weakness. Any Devil Fruit user becomes an anchor in the ocean, and loses their powers both as a person and a user. As powerful as they are on land, in water they will sink to the bottom of the ocean and die.

So this, too, is a balance of power. The strongest person alive who uses a Devil Fruit is the weakest in that which is most abundant in this world: simple seawater, and the seastone which replicates its energy.

You don’t have to, but I think you will come to like it as well if you read more about it. Even if you never end up reading the source material, or if you tried to get into One Piece and couldn’t, you may still like reading about its overall themes.

haha nope, not getting paid (but if someone wants to pay me to read and review One Piece, I do have a paypal account set up for donations ^_~) I care because One Piece is my favorite series ever in any medium, and has been since I first discovered it disturbingly close to 15 years ago. For over a decade, I have been religiously reading the new chapter every week when it’s released, and then calling my friend and talking at length about why it’s awesome or what we learned or why it’s important or what we think will happen next.

I have said it before and I will say it again: Oda is the best storyteller I’ve ever seen in any medium. I aspire to be even half as good of a storyteller as he is.

I often tell people that, but because One Piece is a pretty specific topic and probably seems odd as such a source of inspiration, most of the time people have no idea what I’m talking about — or they’ve heard of One Piece but never got into it so they think of it as just another generic shonen fighting manga. Which it isn’t, at all. It does have fighting in it, but it’s so much more than that.

Rather than trying to explain individually every time why I love it — and because I wished for a location where I could go more in depth on analysis of aspects of the series — I decided to make this so that in the future I can link people to a single place instead.

And I made its designation be so prominent on my author site because One Piece is one of those series where it really represents a lot of what I love, a lot of what I aspire to be or do, and a lot of its themes are in line with my own personal viewpoint. For some examples: the idea of believing in yourself and your friends; that hard work is important but it’s okay to fail as well; that the world isn’t black and white but filled with variations of grey; that people are not all good or all evil; that there is always hope for change.

Beginning of the series through the Arlong Arc

After Arlong Arc through Loguetown.

No spoilers in this. Basically nothing you wouldn’t learn from chapter 1.

No spoilers in this. Basically nothing you wouldn’t learn from chapter 1. Read more here.