 You know, the red line has been a consistently confusing factor of the One Piece world for many fans, a constant that like circumnavigates the globe. What? And I'm not about to make things any better because in reality, it is also one gigantic subscribe button specifically for the Grand Line Review, allowing everyone who reaches it to receive regular One Piece content uploaded straight into their YouTube feed. And you, my dear viewer, after your long journey of life have reached it. Enjoy. Hello and welcome to One Piece 101, the series that breaks down everyone and everything in the One Piece world and today that statement is being taken on a rather grand scale because we are going to be tackling the massive, massive task of breaking down the literal world of One Piece. And this is far from an easy thing to delve into because one of the greatest features of One Piece is its overwhelming mystery and the kind of endlessly expanding landscape before our eyes. However, after two decades of the series, we do have a very functioning idea of how this world is structured. And first and foremost, I will begin with the fact that One Piece is indeed set on a planet, a planet that is overwhelmingly dominated by water, much more so than our home of earth. Or at least I'm assuming that's where most people are watching this video from. If not, feel free to let me know. Otherwise, for the sake of ease of explanation, we are now going to invoke flat earth theory and smush this planet in order to begin building it. So the overwhelming majority of the series takes place within one particular stretch of water known as the Grand Line, which circumnavigates the globe. So I suppose just imagine a planet wearing a belt or something. This area of the world is extraordinarily volatile, dangerous and highly unpredictable in terms of weather. Thus providing a fantastic location for an exciting pirate-based manga. And at the same time, the Grand Line is populated with potentially hundreds of islands of varying shapes and sizes, some of which could be the area of a small deserted island, whilst others can be the scale of gigantic countries. But in keeping with the fickle weather of the Grand Line, the climate of these islands can vary rapidly, even for relatively neighboring islands. And these climates can be broadly classified into four types, being summer, autumn, winter, and spring. With some of your classic examples, including alabaster as a summer nation, drum island as a winter wonderland and dress-rosa as your spring paradise. However, autumn islands tend to be exceedingly rare in this series, so much so that we haven't actually labelled anything as an official autumn island as of yet, although it is fairly widely speculated that Wano would be an autumn island, given that its heartland is permanently draped in falling Sakura leaves. Wano does bring up the first of many tricky exceptions to the climate classification though, because it happens to be an island that boasts multiple extreme climates. And if you were to take one giant step out of the capital and venture into Seiringo, then you would find yourself in the depths of a winter island. And then there are also places like Punk Hazard, which have had their climates artificially created via a serious battle between Lugia double-foot users, as well as currently unexplained aberrations like Rygen Island, which is being perpetually struck by lightning. So there is no really solid classification system at play in this world, and each island will still present its own unique challenges. However, the Grand Line obviously does not exist in isolation, and in order for this stretch of water to be differentiated from the rest of the world, it is deliciously sandwiched on both sides by two thinner stretches of water known as the calm belts. And obviously these lengths of water also circumnavigate the globe, but as opposed to the Grand Line, the weather in this section is as the name would imply, perfectly calm. Beyond calm actually, I'd say nonexistent really, because somehow in these sectors of the world, there are no winds or sea currents, and everything is pretty perfectly still, making it of course incredibly difficult to sail across and actually access the Grand Line, or leave the Grand Line should one so desire. That's far from the most major difficulty of the calm belt though, because it is also the designated breeding area for sea kings, which are the absurdly massive creatures that can be found all over the planet. However, they are highly concentrated in the calm belt, meaning that should you sail into it, your chances of being destroyed or eaten by one are extraordinarily high. That is of course, unless you are an absolute boss of which the series does have a fair few, one of which I'd like to point out being Silver's Rayleigh, the first mate of the former pirate king, who is able to casually swim across the calm belt without any fear of sea kings whatsoever. Also in more modern times, the Marines have developed a method by which to cross the calm belt, which involves lining the bottom of their vessels with sea stone, which I suppose apparently repels the sea kings as if they were zubats in a rock tunnel. In actuality though, the sea stone just masks the appearance of the ships and renders them for all intents and purposes, invisible to the senses of sea kings. Now we have one more pretty big piece to place here, because while the world of one piece is predominantly composed of islands, it does have one crown incontinent, which goes smack bang here known as the red line. And it is a particularly long continent by anyone's standards. And just as with the ground line and the calm belt, it also circumnavigates the globe, just along a different axis. And I suppose you could say that the red line functions as something of a gigantic wall, because it extends 10,000 meters below sea level right down to the sea floor. And while its exact height is still unknown, it is certainly tall enough to be considered impossible, which isn't to say it's impossible to do so because the German kingdom, for example, have developed a technologically savvy way of climbing the red line with their ships. And we've also had at least one example of an individual who has painstakingly climbed up the red line being Fisher Tiger. And he did so in order to get to the one known settlement on this tall continent being the Holy Land of Marijua, which is where the world nobles reside and rule over the rift raft masses from afar. But the existence of the red line also has the effect of creating four more distinct bodies of water in the world, which are known as the four blues, having been divided into north, south, east and west blue respectively. And these probably represent what we would consider average chunks of water that operate very much akin to our real world. There is nothing particularly special or volatile about them, except I suppose you may encounter a sea king on the odd occasion, but otherwise these blues are all quite peaceful and reasonable areas of the planet. The one that we are by far the most familiar with in the series being East Blue, which is where we commenced our journey with one Monkey D. Luffy in the Goa Kingdom specifically. And it is also the home of iconic locations such as Shelstown where we found Zoro, Syrup Village where we recruited us up, the floating restaurant of Baratie, where we found our chef guy, Nami's home of Kokuyashi Village, as well as Log Town where Goldie Roger was executed and many, many more. As for the other blues, we know very little about them at this late stage, other than some scattered kingdoms and random fun facts about who was originally from where. Like for example, Nolan and the Lovnil Kingdom were located in North Blue, whilst Port Gastease was born in South Blue and O'Hara, Robin's home island, was located in West Blue, prior to it being completely and utterly destroyed that is. So they certainly contain great importance to the world and the series at large. However, what tends to happen is that prominent figures migrate from these blues and make names for themselves within the grand line. That's problematic though, because with the map as it is now, there is no way to access the grand line or any of the other four blues actually. For example, if I was to migrate from East Blue, I would either be met with the calm belt or the red line on all fronts, making any form of progress impossible. Before we get to how to overcome this problem though, it's actually very important to completely reshape this map for a second. Now previously I stated that the red line also circumnavigates the globe, which is accurate and wonderful. However, it makes the map that we are viewing incredibly inaccurate. To account for the fact that the one piece world is a globe, this is a bit trippy, but the fight and map ends up looking a little, something like this, which just to avoid any potential confusion because I know it will come up, this does not mean that there are two red lines. It is still one continent and when scrunched up into a ball, this map will become a flawlessly connected globe. Great, with that out of the way, it's now time to point out that the grand line is not in fact a singular stretch of water and due to the red line, it is separated into two distinct areas, one of which is referred to as paradise, whilst the other is labeled as the new world. And the reasoning for these names is that, despite how incredibly deadly and unpredictable the grand line is in general, the first segment is absolutely nothing compared to that of the second. Hence it being known as paradise by all those who have experienced the truly apocalyptic conditions of the new world. And the new world is also very notably the only area of this planet that is not currently under the direct rule of the world government. Instead it acts as more or less a lawless territory, primarily under the command of the four emperors, who are known as the most influential pirates in this world. But back to how we actually access any of these locations, this is where we introduce the concept of reverse mountain, which is a super tall point of the red line in which all four blues meet, and from which they may enter the grand line through the various scattered paths shown here. However, once entering the mountain, you have but one choice, which is to be ejected into the paradise section of the grand line. At which point we encounter another problem because even if you make your way around to the end point of paradise, you encounter the red line again, blocking your path into the new world. And unfortunately getting into the new world is nowhere near as easy as reverse mountain, which actually wasn't very easy to begin with, but you basically have two options. You either need to somehow get over the red line, or you need to go under it. Because there is a segment of passage available, a sort of tunnel through the continent, if you will, which will take one past Fishman Island. But this is important actually, because now we need to discuss the one piece world through a different lens, which is height and depth. Up until now we've mostly been considering things from sea level, which in this case is referred to as the blue sea. But the world of one piece extends far below and far above this concept. Firstly, making our way down, once we reach 7,000 meters below sea level, we hit an area known as the underworld of the sea, which is a position so deep that no light from the surface can penetrate it. So it's very spooky, dark, and full of all sorts of terrifying sea life. But then we can go even further down and at 10,000 meters we hit the sea floor, which is actually known to possess quite an array of civilized life, including the aforementioned Fishman Island, and in an incredible natural phenomenon, light does indeed reach this area of the world via the roots of the sunlight tree Eve, which allows everyone and everything to prosper. But then we can also go in the opposite direction as well and make our way up, and once we've reached 7,000 meters above sea level, we hit the white sea, which is heavily populated by island clouds, which are allegedly created by a particular element, the composer Seastone called Pyroblown, which is a fictional element, ejected into the air by volcanic eruptions, and then it binds with water vapor to create clouds of various levels of solidity. Some of them could be sturdy enough to walk on, for example, whilst others could mimic the properties of water and allow vessels to sail upon them. However, most of the more solid clouds are found once we reach the height of 10,000 meters, which is known as the White White Sea, which is another layer of sea clouds that includes prominent sky islands like Scypia, for example, as well as half of Jaya Island, which was sent up there by the knockup stream, which speaking of the knockup stream is thus far the only way that we have been shown capable of reaching the White Sea levels, which is an absurdly dangerous practice and not at all recommended, because apparently there are other much safer ways of traveling to this area, although none of them have been revealed to us at the time of this recording. But with that, we have the very basics of the One Piece world, and I would like to emphasize that this is not an exhaustive examination. Every new arc in the series tends to present us with new and conflicting information regarding the composition of this realm. And even with everything we do know, there is still an incredible amount of remaining mysteries, the most prominent of which being where is the Hidden Island Velaf Tale, the discovery of which theoretically leads someone to the One Piece and putting them on the path of becoming the next pirate king. And then there's also the entire realm of outer space, which I have decided not to touch on in this video. The rest of short life definitely exists out there as well. So there is an awful lot left to unpack, but I hope that this has provided you with some sort of solid grounding. But what do you guys think? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below or even join my Discord server. And if you're keen for some more videos like this, then please do go and check out some of my other content or even subscribe to the channel for more glorious One Piece business uploaded straight into your YouTube feeds. But for now, this has been the Grand Line Review and I'll see you next time.