Netflix's One Piece Got Its Female Characters Right
The live action adaptation changed its female characters for the better
This guest post comes courtesy of
, who writes “Do You Know What I Love the Most?” newsletter about his relationship with the stories he loves. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy.When it was first announced that Netflix was creating a live action adaptation of One Piece — one of the most popular manga/anime of all time — I was perplexed. Hell, I was a straight-up hater about it. One Piece is my favorite manga, so part of that was just me being protective of a property I adore, and another part came from my frustration with live action adaptations in general.
The biggest issue, though, was that One Piece seemed uniquely unsuited for live action — a series as strange, over-the-top, and full of unlimited possibilities as One Piece is tailor made for animation, and I couldn’t see how live action could ever hope to do it justice. Yet, in late 2023 live action One Piecepremiered to surprising, unexpected success, finally breaking the live action anime curse.
Despite my concerns, the limitations of live action actually ended up benefiting the series — those limitations forced the writers to approach the material from new angles, to prioritize dialogue and character over action, to develop a willingness and ability to change the story while still showing a clear respect and love for the source material. It actually gives Live Action One Piece a reason to exist — something most live action adaptations do not have — but it also allows the series to sometimes improve upon its source material!
And let’s be clear, as much as I love One Piece, it’s not without its flaws. One of the most common complaints about the manga and anime is the way they treat their female characters, and those complaints are not without merit. Live Action One Piece, much to my surprise, finds ways to address many of these complaints and improve upon how the story handles nearly all of its important female characters. It’s an impressive feat, one I intend to explore throughout the rest of this piece by discussing, one by one, four of Live Action One Piece’s most significant female characters and how it’s expanded and improved upon the source material’s treatment of them.
But before we do that, because I am nothing if not a thorough nerd, I want to give you a bit of context.
SHŌNEN AND WOMEN
One Piece, as a manga and anime, belongs to a genre of story known in Japan as “shōnen,” which translates to “young boy.” Shōnen stories are fast-paced, action-centric, and aimed at a demographic of adolescent boys — despite that, though, it has gone on to become perhaps the most popular and best known genre of anime, with dedicated and passionate readers of all ages and genders.
The most important thing to know about shōnen is that these stories don’t just have a lot of action — they revolve around fight scenes. In the same way musicals utilize song and dance, shōnen stories use their fight sequences to explore theme, character, and emotion — everything significant that happens in a shōnen story happens during a fight, and how important or popular a character is is usually determined by how often they fight. Remember that — it’s important.
Despite its universal appeal, shōnen has quite stubbornly clung to its original demographic of adolescent boys, and this is most apparent when it comes to its female characters. Due to the perceived non-interest of young boys, throughout much of shōnen’s history women have largely been non-entities. In the 80s and 90s, the women of stalwarts like Dragonball or Yuyu Hakusho were relegated to minor supporting roles, a small roster of wives, mothers, sisters, and assistants with virtually no bearing on the story, just there to cheer on their love interests, pump out babies, be kidnapped, or used as fanservice for (straight) male viewers to leer at.
Around the turn of the century, some series started incorporating more female characters as secondary protagonists (such as One Piece’s most notable contemporary, Naruto, with Sakura), but these characters were very much treated as “the girl,” usually only allowed to fight other girls and with their motivations and storylines almost always tethered to a romance with one of the male protagonists. The possibilities for female characters seem to have expanded over the last few years, but even then, they lag behind what we’re used to in America/the West (not that we don’t have plenty of room for improvement ourselves!)
ONE PIECE AND WOMEN
The early chapters of One Piece were about on par with their late-90s contemporaries when it came to their female characters — there weren’t many, and they didn’t fight. However, even then it differentiated itself via its primary female protagonist, Nami, who was an adventurer in her own right, not defined by romance, and given her own complex personality and motivations that drove the first 100 or so chapters of the story more than any other primary character’s bar the main protagonist Luffy.
As One Piece continued, its number of female characters would balloon and a good number would take on important combat roles in the story, but it’s always been this aspect of One Piece’s storytelling that has set its female characters apart from other shōnen: every single one of them has an interior life, has their own unique personalities, motivations, wants, and needs that drive the story, and none of them exist solely to be love interests or mothers. Maybe that’s a low bar, but it’s one the majority of shōnen have historically failed to clear, and I think that deserves recognition; it’s certainly led to One Piecehaving an unusually high number of popular, beloved female characters among fans of all genders.
On the flip side, the greatest criticism of One Piece’s female characters is how similar they look to each other, and hand-in-hand with that, how sexualized they are. One Piece author Eiichiro Oda loves to draw sexy women, and the majority of the series’ “beautiful” female characters share the same ridiculous hourglass proportions and standard pretty faces, with only their hair and clothes differentiating their designs.
These characters are subjected to frequent revealing fanservice shots and sexual jokes — nothing too outside of typical shōnen tropes, but moments that can still be uncomfortable for Western audiences, especially those without a familiarity to the genre. By contrast, most female characters who aren’t supposed to be beautiful are drawn with ridiculous designs and proportions and made the butt of jokes about their size, age, and appearance, though these have lessened as the series has gone on.
So as you can see, though One Piece is often a step above its shōnen brethren in terms of its female characters, it also has much room for improvement, and specifically, indulges in tropes that would likely be off-putting to a good chunk of the Western viewers the live action adaptation no doubt hoped to court.
Just the jump to live action alone solves one of these issues — the similarities in appearance among Oda’s female characters — but beyond that, what changes did the Live Action One Piece make to address this?
ALVIDA
Despite being the first opponent Luffy ever defeats — and despite popping up sporadically throughout the rest of the series — Alvida is a rather inconsequential, one-note character. She’s taken down in all of one chapter, and she’s really more of an opponent for Koby, a meek boy with dreams of being a Marine who’s being held captive by Alvida, than Luffy himself; Alvida is truly defeated when Koby finally stands up to her, and Luffy knocking her out is just a reward for Koby’s bravery.
Alvida works well in this regard, but unfortunately, the one note Oda gives Alvida to play in terms of her personality just plain sucks: Alvida is “fat” and “ugly,” but thinksshe’s beautiful. Alvida is constantly asking her terrified subordinates who the most beautiful pirate throughout all the seas is, and they know that answering anything other than “Lady Alvida” means certain death. Oda twice plays this as a “gag.” First, he introduces Alvida from off-screen, with her asking her subordinates this question and being praised as the fairest on the seas, only for the reader to turn the page and see this:
And later, when Koby finally proves himself by standing up to Alvida, he does so by finally answering her question truthfully:
It’s an important and cathartic moment for Koby, but it truly is unfortunate that Alvida’s entire character is tied so intrinsically to a fat joke. This is especially unfortunate when you consider how often “jokes” about weight and appearances are brandished against women — whether fictional or otherwise — in general.
Gender also comes into play when you factor in Alvida’s return to One Piece nearly 100 chapters later:
The “joke” is kept intact — a few panels later Alvida claims that the Devil Fruit didn't enhance her beauty, asserting that all it did was get rid of her freckles — but it’s notable that, when deciding to give Alvida a slightly larger role in the series moving forward, Oda also updated her design to make her look more like the standard beautiful, hourglass-figure women he likes to draw. I wouldn’t have wanted Alvida brought back with her original design just to be the butt of more jokes, but at the same time, making her generically sexy feels like a lazy fix.
So how did the live action One Piece handle Alvida? They actually changed very little about the character and her conflict with Luffy and Koby except that now, Alvida asks her subordinates who the most “powerful” pirate on all the seas is, instead of the most beautiful. This actually keeps the core of the character mostly intact — she’s still a character with zero self-awareness, who thinks far more of herself than she should — only this time, her delusions are based around her strength, not her physical appearance, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s a major improvement.
Live action One Piece hasn’t yet adapted Alvida’s second confrontation with Luffy — that will most likely be in the second season premiere — but she does reappear briefly in a dialogue-free cameo near the end of the season one finale that seems to be setting that plot up, and it’s notable that her appearance hasn’t changed at all, which gives me hope that they’re going to ignore her redesign as well.
It’s entirely possible that this change is due more to logistical issues than any ethical stance, but still, I think it’s the right call to make, and will benefit the character in the end — especially because I really like the actress playing Alvida, and re-casting her or altering her appearance to make her slimmer or more “sexy” would feel tone-deaf at best. Live action One Piece handled Alvida right.
SHAM
The change made to Sham is hard to miss: in the original manga and anime, Sham is a man, while in the live action adaptation she’s a woman.
In the original version of the story, Sham and his brother Buchi — known as the Meowban Brothers — are members of the villainous Captain Kuro’s crew, and their sole role in the story is to fight Zoro (they are literally summoned about halfway through the final battle with no build-up or foreshadowing). Buchi is the brawn of the duo while Sham is fast and agile, and both use cunning and trickery (and razor-sharp claws) to attack their opponents, but beyond that they have little in terms of personality. In fact, their battle against Zoro is infamous for its Early Installment Weirdness in regards to how it handles Zoro’s fighting style, setting limitations to the style that, within 50 chapters or so, the story would begin regularly ignoring for the rest of its run, rendering this fight quite bewildering in retrospect.
What I’m saying is that there was vast room for improvement when it came to Sham and Buchi, and Live Action One Piece took full advantage of this. It adapted Kuro’s right-hand man Jango out of the story entirely, allowing the Meowbans to fill his place and giving them far more opportunity to interact with Kuro and the Straw Hat Pirates and a real purpose in the narrative beyond just keeping Zoro busy for a couple of chapters. They were also given some real quirks, spending all their time on screen bickering with each other and griping about their years working undercover as “the help.” When they do finally battle Zoro it’s a far more interesting fight, with some of the season’s best swordfighting choreography. All-in-all, I’d say the Live Action One Piece has the better take on Sham and Buchi.
Of course, none of those improvements really have anything to do with Live Action One Piece’s decision to swap Sham’s gender. Moreover, gender (or race) swapping characters in adaptations is a controversial, contentious subject in general. Lukewarm as this take is, my feelings about it vary depending on the situation, and when it comes to Sham, I’m 100% positive about the change. Sham’s gender wasn’t an important part of the manga or anime, and swapping it doesn’t change anything essential about the character, but it does add one more significant female character to a portion of the story that’s somewhat short of them, and that’s a win in my book.
KAYA
Kaya is a unique case because, unlike the rest of the characters we’re discussing today, I don’t have any complaints about the way she’s handled in the source material.
As a supporting character in the “Syrup Village” storyline, she’s integral in moving the plot forward and fleshing out the character of her best friend Usopp, the spotlight character of the arc, yet she also undergoes an arc of her own and has her own unique personality, goals, and motivations. Moreover, Kaya isn’t sexualized at all, nor does she fall into any of Oda’s typical female character design traps, feeling rather unique as a result. Yet, Live Action One Piece still finds a way to improve upon the character, and it all comes down to her relationships with the rest of the cast.
In the manga and anime, Kaya has relationships with two characters: Captain Kuro — the pirate who has been manipulating Kaya and her family behind the scenes for years with the goal of legitimately inheriting their wealth — and Usopp — the village troublemaker who has been cheering the sickly Kaya up with his tall tales, and who attempts to save her when he discovers Kuro’s scheme. Throughout their adventure Kaya does interact with Luffy and his crew, a group of Usopp’s underlings, and another of her servants, Merry, but it’s nothing meaningful; the story is defined by her relationships with Kuro and Usopp, and that’s really all you need to not only sell the story, but to make Kaya work as a character.
Live Action One Piece, likely for budget reasons, moves much of this storyline indoors, primarily Kaya’s mansion. While this most notably affects its action sequences, the series also takes advantage of the close quarters to build further upon the cast’s relationships; specifically, it gives us a long and truly sweet conversation between Kaya and Nami that cements them as close friends throughout the rest of the storyline.
I’m so enamored with this scene; Nami, a thief who grew up with nothing, is jealous and resentful of Kaya’s fortune and is attempting to steal as much from her as possible, while Kaya is more than happy to give Nami anything she wants from the mansion and truly just wants a friend to open up to.
Both characters learn more about themselves, each other, and the world around them as a result, growing as people in the process. Moreover, neither character has any other significant women in their lives at this point, and while Nami and Kaya’s relationship isn’t defined by them both being women, it certainly does influence their easy camaraderie and sisterly bond nonetheless.
Making Kaya and Nami friends was a smart move on the part of the writers in order to bring out new sides of the characters and to make the female presence in this storyline more prominent (this scene helps Live Action One Piece pass the Bechdel Test three to four episodes earlier than it otherwise would have). It’s just a pairing of characters I was never expecting that works like gangbusters, and I’m not only impressed at the writers for coming up with it, but I’m grateful that they put in the effort to explore Kaya further in general. She may not have necessarily needed the extra attention, but she certainly benefitted from it nonetheless.
NAMI
Nami can’t be summed up quite as easily as the other characters we’ve discussed thus far. As One Piece’s most prominent female character, Nami has played a major role in the manga for over 1100 chapters now, growing in complexity and facing her own highs and lows as a character in the process. As much as I like Emily Rudd’s performance as Nami in the live action adaptation, this take on the character is simply too new to meaningfully compare to its manga/anime counterpart.
More on theme with this essay, many of my issues with how One Piece specifically treats Nami due to her gender pop up later in the story, well after the chapters the first season of the live action adaptation are covering. Still, there is one way the early chapters of the manga treat Nami differently due to her gender that the live action adaptation improves upon significantly: at this point in the manga, Nami can’t fight.
Now, fighting isn’t the be-all-end-all, but as I mentioned earlier, in shōnen it’s pretty damn close. Fight sequences are how characters in shōnen grow and learn, and they’re a reliable sign of which characters are most important to the story. Thankfully, Nami being unable to fight does not condemn her to the same fate as female non-combatants in series like Dragonball or Yuyu Hakusho; she’s not someone who stands on the sideline or simply reacts to the boys.
Nami’s desires and backstory drive the story, her thieving skills consistently aid the crew, and her almost-supernatural navigation abilities make her pretty much the most important member of Luffy’s crew when on sea besides Luffy himself. Oda and his narrative put effort into making it clear that she’s a vital member of the cast and to be respected, and yet, the fact that Nami, the lone woman in Luffy’s crew at this point, is unable to fight while the four men areothers her, setting Nami apart as different, as weaker or more fragile than the men, as needing protection, as not getting the same kinds of narrative spotlight as her male peers. Even Oda eventually comes to this realization, giving Nami a new, unique weapon called the Clima-Tact that enables her to fight strong enemies one-on-one somewhere around Chapter 190.
Live Action One Piece addresses this simply by allowing Nami to be a fighter from the very beginning. The first episode ends with a grand battle that finds Luffy, Zoro, and Nami taking on Axe-Hand Morgan and his entire division of Marines, and Nami is an active participant in that battle, kicking ten kinds of ass with the same simple collapsable bo-staff she originally carried in the manga — here she’s just stronger and better at using it. However, this solution is more elegant than it may sound.
While Nami being able to fight is great, if she becomes too powerful — say powerful enough to defeat Arlong, the Pirate who enslaved her and her entire village — it ruins her character arc of learning to lean on others and accept help, and derails the narrative trajectory of the entire first season. Again, Live Action One Piece handles this perfectly; the battle against Morgan and his flunkies eventually finds Luffy and Zoro defeating Morgan together while Nami finishes taking down the soldiers, establishing Nami as a skilled and capable fighter, but not amongst the highest echelon the crew has to offer. Hell, since Live Action One Piece sticks to Nami’s basic bo-staff, they’re also preserving the reveal of her Clima-Tact later on down the line, along with the important character revelation that leads up to it.
That kind of clever course correction is all over Live Action One Piece; the series and its writers have an uncanny knack for identifying issues with or weaknesses in the source material and addressing them in simple, smart ways that don’t cause more problems down the line. Nor do they call much attention to it; there were no Press Releases or big write ups about no longer fat-shaming Alvida or gender-swapping Sham or letting Nami fight with the boys, the series simply let these changes and the way they affected plot and characterization for the better speak for themselves.
As a writer and editor, I envy the ability to shuffle plot points around this elegantly; as a human being who just wants to see the world be a better place, I applaud their willingness to update the source material to make the world of One Piece even just a little more friendly towards its female viewers.
So now that we finally have a good live action anime adaptation, will more series be able to replicate the success of Netflix’s One Piece? It depends on what lessons they take away from it. Though its lavish practical sets, pitch-perfect casting, and attention from its original creator all helped the series thrive and find a new audience amongst the mainstream, that isn’t what stood out the most to me.
No, what makes One Piece such a good adaptation is that it captures the essence, the heart, of its source material, but is not slavishly devoted to it, and isn’t afraid to addresses weaknesses in the original story even when it leads to controversial changes. As far as I’m concerned, those are the qualities future live action anime adaptations need to emulate more than anything else.
But what do you think?Have you seen the live action One Piece? Do you believe the female characters are improved, compared to the manga or anime? Do you think it’s a good step forward when it comes to live action manga/anime adaptations? Please,
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Love this piece, Spencer. My relationship to One Piece is that I have been stuck in the Syrup Village arc for about a decade. Each year, I get maybe one or two episodes deeper, and then give up again (I think I'm currently on episode 17). One of the main reasons for me is that I found, in the manga, the character motivations to be somewhat inscrutable (especially compared to contemporary characters like Naruto). Luffy just seemed like a sociopath more than anything. But transforming the characters into live action people, I could actually understand their emotions meaningfully and it has given me renewed excitement to return to, if not the the show, then the manga.
I also have, for years, sought out feminist analyses or accounts of anime - and it wasn't until maybe 2017 that I found anime feminist (https://www.animefeminist.com/about/). They had an article about My Hero Academia (a 2010s shonen) and how it still fails women, but, specifically, the female characters are given more agency - and a chance to fight! I really don't love 'fanservice' and it has also been a barrier to getting father in One Piece, but at least I know the Live Action has been doing a great job. Thanks for exploring women in One Piece!
I did enjoy One Piece even though I haven't watched the original animated series.