The Pirate Show 'One Piece' & the Cyclical Nature of Oppression

Netflix, ep 6 "The Chef And The Chore Boy"

The live-action One Piece, based on the manga and anime of the same name, is about a pirate named Monkey D. Luffy and his crew as they search for the infamous treasure, The One Piece, hidden somewhere on the Grand Line. This world is one made of island chains (and one large, inaccessible continent), making shipbuilding and piracy a fact of life. Throw in some zany characters and an even campier aesthetic, and the viewer is undoubtedly guaranteed a treat.

There is always difficulty that comes when adapting between mediums. With its long-drawn-out fight scenes, Shounen anime is not well suited for the budget constraints of live-action TV. The Netflix adaptation had to be heavily slimmed down episodes-wise because of this. For example, the arc where Luffy defeats the pirate Buggy the Clown (see the Orange Town Arc) takes about five episodes to resolve in the anime and only two in the live-action show.

Therefore, for such adaptations, there is always a concern that some magic would get lost in this trimming. And while the show rearranged some things — character motivations are revealed way sooner, and some are axed entirely— mostly, I believe that the series captures the essence of the anime and manga quite well (see Trent Cannon's essay to see the significant differences between the show and the manga).

However, there is one key difference that deserves more analysis, and it's that of Arlong, the sharky Fish-man who wants to dominate humanity as an act of vengeance for his people's previous enslavement. Yet rather than tie into an old, problematic trope of the oppressed becoming just as bad as the oppressor, his violence is rooted in how those in power preserve the status quo — a refreshing take not seen as much in pop culture.

Fictional revolutionaries

The show, perhaps to tie into the zeitgeist, has retooled the motivations of Arlong. In the manga, he is merely dismissive of humans because he believes they are physically weaker — physiology that is more or less the same in the anime, the manga, and the live-action show. However, Arlong hates humanity in the latter because humans enslaved and later segregated fish-people. As he says to a marine: "…the leaders of the organization you so proudly represent saw fit to disparage and enslave my people…[and] your prejudice remains."

Let's not beat around the bush here. Metaphorically, we are meant to draw a line between the treatment of fish-people by humans in this land and Black people in the real world, who were also enslaved and discriminated against. This subtextual reading is made more explicit by casting a Black man (the talented McKinley Belcher III) in the role of Arlong, which wonderfully rebukes a tendency in media to have “metaphorical racism” narratives where white people play the oppressed group (see Star-Crossed, Zootopia, and many more).

And what does Arlong want to do in response to that mistreatment?

He wants to enslave and conquer humanity. "Fish-men are the rightful rulers of the seas," he monologues to his crew. "And the humans know it, too. They fear our power, so they bound us with chains. They loath our presence, so they banned us from their cities…But we broke those chains and built our own cities. Now the time has come to restore the natural order of this world…we will teach each and every human their rightful place."

Arlong was oppressed, and so he wants to replicate this dynamic with his oppressors. We see this tendency on a smaller micro scale when he enslaves the main character, Nami, as a child, chaining her up in a small room to take advantage of her cartography skills. He is contributing to a cycle of abuse.

As the saying goes, "hurt people hurt people." It's a trend we can see in the real world with abuse. While most survivors of abuse do not become abusive, it can correlate in some instances. One study found that "…adults who had records of abuse or neglect as children were twice as likely to have been reported to [Child Protective Services] because of child maltreatment" (note — there were limitations to these findings, and it's important not to walk away with the erroneous conclusion that an abused person will automatically go on to perpetuate abuse).

We can see this on the state level as well. At the risk of being controversial, the state of Israel was founded on the collective trauma of the European Genocide against the Jewish people, and that new state, in turn, used that hurt to ethnically cleanse hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their lands (see the Nakba). Israel has since arguably constructed an apartheid regime in the Gaza Strip. Trauma was weaponized to justify harm on a massive scale — and we have no reason to believe that the world Arlong wants to build will be any different.

There is a tendency to believe that this cycle of abuse is inescapable. This belief is especially prominent in pop culture where, except for maybe in Star Wars, oppressed groups who try to free themselves often become just as oppressive as the group they broke free from. Erik Killmonger from Black Panther; Marco Inaros from The Expanse; Daisy Fitzroy from Bioshock: Infinite; Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones; the hosts from Westworld— we could spend the rest of this article just listing examples of this happening in media.

And yet, just because it can (and does) happen doesn't mean that that regime is inevitable. When I look at Haiti, for example, the revolts that led to independence may have been violent for those enslaved people's oppressors (arguably rightfully so), but the country didn't create a regime that was just as oppressive as what came before, where white people were now in chains. Haiti forswore imperialism and reimagined race (on paper). Although many problems existed afterward — some perpetuated by imperialist powers, others by the newly emerging governments toward their own peasantry — there wasn't a role reversal where white Haitians were suddenly enslaved.

Our history is ripe with counter-examples of oppressed groups freeing themselves from oppressive regimes and then not becoming just as bad as what came before. Still, somehow, our media is bereft of these examples. I believe it is partly a defense mechanism from our institutions, which do not want to recognize the initial harm done by colonizers for fear that it will lead to even worse reprisals. As I argue in Westworld and the Limits of White Imagination:

“…the trope we have discussed above hints that, white society, by which I mean white supremacist, capitalist colonialist patriarchy, has never moved on from this fear that oppressed people will call for their pound of flesh when the time comes. It’s not a coincidence that most stories we see today of oppressed people violently rebelling against their oppressors devolve so quickly into an even worse status quo.”

For its part, One Piece has a more nuanced conversation about why this happens. Arlong was not lifted to power because his violence was inevitable but rather because his type of instability is what the World Government (that's what the centralized authority is called in the show) prefers. They brokered an agreement with dangerous pirates called the Warlords of the Sea to let the status quo remain, and Arlong has an ongoing "agreement" (bribe) with Marine Captain Nezumi for his operations in the East Blue to be ignored.

Tellingly, the World Government supports violent extremists rather than transformative revolutionaries like our main character, Luffy, because the prior is perceived as less of a threat to the status quo. As Vice Admiral Garp lectures to a subordinate: "…the world is no simple place. The same set of laws do not apply to everyone… but you have to decide if you can live with that…[because] the marines are all that are standing between order and anarchy." Garp doesn't care about changing the system, merely preserving his sense of order. He wants to keep everything the same, fearing that change will devolve into chaos. And if that means funneling revolutionary frustrations toward tyrants like Arlong and the even more powerful Warlords of the Sea, well, that's an acceptable risk to him.

That take is refreshing compared to such authoritarianism constantly being depicted in media as “inevitable” whenever oppressed people dare use violence against their oppressors. And in fact, this aligns more closely with our lived reality anyway. In the real world, many extremist groups are funded by imperialist superpowers. The US funded, sometimes indirectly, other times quite directly, the predecessors to Al-Qaeda, the Contras in Nicaragua, ISIS, Al-Qaeda again, and many more. Israel has backed the group Hamas. These countries often fund rogue insurgent groups to combat an immediate enemy, only for it to tragically blow up in their faces years or decades later.

Whether we are talking about the World Government of One Piece or the governments of the here and now, such violence is very much engineered (partly) by those in power.

A drowning conclusion

The richness of this commentary owes much to the source material. Eiichiro Oda's manga has constantly been called anti-imperialist, and you can see those influences bleed into the live-action show. The World Government was arguably more corrupt in the manga and anime, but I am glad that corruption is still a central component in the Netflix adaptation.

However, this doesn't mean that the manga was perfect. Eiichiro Oda's handling of race left much to be desired. The character Usopp's chief trait was that he always lied, and for a long time, he was the one Black lead on the show. In a years-old interview, while Oda could list where every other character's fictional counterpart would be from in the real world (Luffy would be from Brazil, Zoro from Japan, Nami from Sweden, etc.), Usopp was the only one he claimed, based on appearance, was from "Africa," contributing to the tired trope of flattening the continent to only one place. Usopp also had exaggerated facial features in the manga and anime that some fans considered problematic.

A lot has changed in the years since, and the live-action show (while keeping many things in place) has updated the material's sensibilities on race. Usopp's features were not exaggerated for the show, and many more Black and Brown characters were included to make a more well-rounded story.

We can also see this transformation in how Arlong was handled. He may be authoritarian, but because of the anti-imperialist themes of the story, we get a departure from the usual moral that radical revolutionaries are no different from the oppressors they fight against. Arlong is not a symbolic extension of what happens when the oppressed use violence in the name of freedom, but a rogue militia tacitly supported by the very government he is allegedly fighting.

Because while oppression may not be inevitable, it certainly can be enforced and funded by the status quo.