 So, one piece. The gigantic anime and manga franchise that's been ongoing since 1997, which was before many of you were even born. It follows Monkey D. Luffy, a teenage boy who ate a magical fruit that turned his body into rubber. His lifelong dream is to become King of the Pirates, so he sets off on a journey to find the treasure of the previous Pirate King. Then he puts together a crew and most of the story follows them going from island to island, fighting various evil pirates along with the government. It's generally viewed as one of the all-time greats shown in manga, one of the biggest anime franchises of all time that's beloved by multiple generations. And it's easy to see why. The artwork is colorful and fun. The character cast is enormous and full of both endearing weirdos and savage villains. The action scenes are well choreographed and properly epic for a long-running adventure. The creativity there is insane. Unusual abilities with crazy applications, such as someone using their rubber body parts as a pump to make themselves more powerful, or someone fighting with three swords, or someone with a body made of light photons, are commonplace here. It makes every action sequence in the series more fun and less predictable, and that's no small feat for something this long. The story is way too long, but the pacing is helped by being divided into a lot of smaller arcs which are all largely self-contained. Even if Skypia doesn't bring Luffy and the Straw Hats any closer to finally reaching the end of the Grand Line and finding Goldrager's treasure, it's still a grand adventure in its own right, and it contains a few pieces of information which help the mysteries of this world come into focus. It's not filler, is what I'm saying, even though it could easily devolve into filler in the hands of a less skilled writer. The manga is still going strong, and there's even a live-action show coming to Netflix soon which looks… okay, actually. I'm not even joking. It looks like it's embracing the silliness of one piece while still toning it down in some places to make it look good in live-action. Except for Arlong. Live-action Arlong looks double-plus un-good. He's too short. Trailers are all lies, obviously, so we'll have to wait and see for sure. I am a little excited, though. But clearly none of that stuff I just said matters. Character, story, humor? That's all pointless nonsense. I'm here to remind everyone that the true yardstick used to determine the quality of speculative fiction is how the economy works and whether or not the magic system matches up perfectly with the local ecology. And one piece, as a goofy manga series, clearly couldn't have a setting that makes any sort of sense, right? Of course that's right. I said it. Everything I say is right. Spoilers ahead, obviously. But before that, I want to remind everyone that our plushie campaign is ongoing for just a few more days. August 25th is the cutoff date, so if you want to take the literally once in a lifetime chance to get one of these limited edition plushies, click the link in the pinned comment below to sign up. Now, back to one piece. Part one. What is biology? And how can I tell it to fuck off? So, let's start with the obvious. How can your whole body be made of rubber? Your nervous system operates using electricity. If all your neurons were rubber, they wouldn't conduct anything, meaning you would die. Instantly. I guess it's just magic. In fact, you could say the same for all the people who ate logia-type devil fruits. Logia fruits are widely regarded as the most powerful type since they turn whoever eats them into a specific element. Their bodies become made of light, or fire, or magma, and they become not only immune to most physical attacks, but they can also fire that element from their body as an attack. Not sure how anything in your body can function when it's all made of syrup, or whatever, but whatever, it's magic. I'll accept that. Geez, it's like Aetero Oda thinks that making the setting entertaining and creative is more important than having it be completely realistic. What a hack, am I right? Not everyone has the magic excuse, though. A lot of totally, quote, normal people in the world of One Piece have, let's say, strange anatomy. Some people are just eight feet tall, or 14 feet tall and wider than a house. Are they part giant? Nope, not that we're aware of. They're just regular people who grew that large somehow. Look at Blackbeard. No, really. Look at Blackbeard. Imagine him trying to find a seat on an airplane. Most of the buildings we see in One Piece are normal sized, yet people like him seem to have no trouble fitting through doorways or finding beds they can sleep in. You'd think that if humans had such massive variety in the size of their bodies, they would also have massive variety in the size of everything else. Furniture, houses, ships, everything. While the straw hats are walking through the many towns that they visit, they should see tons of giant houses for the numerous Blackbeard-sized people kicking around. Maybe the variety is there and we just can't see it. On top of that, it's apparently possible for women to have proportions like this. No idea how that works. Feel like she'd be permanently kissing the floor. Those things must weigh 30 pounds each. Then there's the fishmen. Good God, the fishmen. As their name suggests, they are a mash-up of humans and fish. There's a wide variety of fishmen, from Arlong, who's half human and half saw shark, to Gene Bay, who is half whale shark, to Chu, who is half smelt-witting. Fishmen all have unique abilities based on what type of fish they are, and they're also all 10 times stronger than humans for some reason. Not sure what fish have to do with super strength, to be honest. These aren't different subspecies of fishmen, though. When fishmen interbreed with other types of fishmen, their offspring could be the same type as either of their parents or a completely different one. Sounds like it would be really easy to cheat on your husband without getting caught here. This makes very little sense. It explains why the different fishmen types never mix, so that's why we never see one who's half human, one quarter blowfish, and one quarter great white shark. I just have no idea how that makes sense. I'm no geneticist, and if I was, it would be a moot point because none of this is based in real science, so I may as well just give up now and accept this as something that's odd and ultimately harmless. Fishmen can interbreed with mer people, humans, and giants. In fact, they can all interbreed with each other and produce young that, as far as we know, are still fertile. Meaning, by the biological definition, they're all the same species. That's not bad. It's just something I felt the need to bring up. Part 2. Geography. Fuck it. So here's a map of the world of One Piece. It's fan-made, so takes some liberties, but is mostly accurate to what we've seen in the series. You'll notice that it's almost entirely ocean with a single continent that runs from north to south around the whole planet and a line around the equator simply called the Grand Line. What sort of plate tectonics were going on to create a single ring of land that neatly divides the world in half? I don't know. I also don't know why the equator is sandwiched on both sides by the calm belts, which has very little inclement weather and is thus full of massive monsters called sea kings. How big is this planet? How wide is the Grand Line from north to south? Wide enough to go on adventures there for 26 years and counting, I suppose. You can't sail through the calm belt normally because of the sea monsters, so everyone has to enter through a place called Reverse Mountain. Reverse Mountain has four rivers that flow from each of the four oceans uphill to the peak, then a single river that flows downhill into the Grand Line. Okay. Setting aside the horrifying abuse of every law of physics, if the only way into the Grand Line is a one-way trip up this mountain, how do people get out? Recently, the Marines found a way to cross the calm belt by attaching sea stone to the bottom of their ships so the sea kings don't notice them. That's very recent, though, and only a few people have the resources to do it, so most people in the Grand Line are just trapped where they're born and have few opportunities to ever leave, meaning part of the reason that there are so many pirates is because it's the only way for many people to achieve a better standard of living. That's very interesting, and it ties in nicely to many of One Piece's ideas about how the world's ruling class keeps control not only by hoarding power for themselves, but by depriving others of the opportunity to gain any power or wealth independent of them. However, it makes me think of how trade routes would be non-existent and different islands should speak different languages due to lack of communication for generations at a time, therefore it is bad. Geez, it's like Aetero Oda thinks that making the setting large and varied is more important than having it be completely realistic. This weird geography creates a world of islands and archipelagos, each of which is completely different than the last, which means that as the story continues, the audience gets to see dozens of different exotic locales. Each has a fascinating ecology, climate, history, and culture. Throughout all four of the world's oceans and the Grand Line, there are countless different lands that each have their own story to tell, and sometimes that story is directly tied into the geography. Alabasta is a massive kingdom that's almost all desert, so when a pirate warlord named Crocodile wants to overthrow the government, he takes advantage of that. He diverts all the rain in the country to the capital region so that regular people begin starving from drought, then they stage an uprising. Crocodile doesn't even have to do the heavy lifting himself. The government almost collapses as soon as he touches it. Or how the town of Flevence gained immense prosperity from mining amber lead, and then all the citizens died from the ore poisoning them. Then the government pretended it was a contagious disease so they could kill everyone there under the guise of a quarantine and keep the word of them infecting the town from getting out. Or how Fishman Island is a spot where fishmen congregate because there's a giant magical tree that carries sunlight to a spot 10,000 meters below the water, allowing them to build a whole city for themselves instead of living on the surface or scattered through the ocean. This makes them stronger, but also makes them a target for those who would harm them. The weird geography of One Piece directly informs the world and story. It's not merely set dressing so that the writer can point and brag about how creative and intelligent he is. It's a way to make the storytelling feel natural while still taking advantage of the goofiness manga is capable of. But clearly that's all trash. Being cartoony is a cardinal sin because it means you're not being dark and edgy. Only dark and edgy media can ever be intelligent or carry any sort of commentary on society. Part three. How the fuck does this government work? The government of One Piece is simply called the world government. It's more of a federation or tightly controlled alliance than a single nation since there are a lot of islands that have their own monarchies with a slight degree of autonomy. There are some countries that aren't part of the world government but very few. The world government controls the marines who are the main military force of this world. If your town is being attacked by pirates you want to call the marines. Not really though since they're both incompetent and hopelessly corrupt. They also control a group of pirates called the, well in Japanese they're called the shichibukai which doesn't translate super well. A lot of people just call them the seven warlords of the sea. The point is the shichibukai are very powerful pirates that all run their own crews and go around doing pirate stuff. But they've made a deal with the government where they help them against other pirates sometimes and give them a portion of what they earn from pirating. In exchange they're given much more leeway when committing crimes. Wait so this government has serious shortcomings that it tries to cover by turning citizens against each other and giving some people special privileges? Huh. The world government is made up of a lot of smaller states and the central authority is exercised by a group called the world nobles or celestial dragons if you feel like being fancy. They're the descendants of the 20 kings who founded the world government who are completely above all laws. Literally. Laws do not apply to them. Most of them are inbred idiots who only want to goof off and buy slaves so the government is really led by the five elders who are seemingly the only world nobles with something resembling a brain between their ears. How are the five elders chosen? Are they elected by the other nobles? Are they self-appointed? No idea. At least the five elders run everything on paper. In reality they're the puppets of someone named Imu. So this Imu fella, he's kept a secret from the general public. Most people don't know he exists. Hell the audience didn't know he existed until many hundreds of chapters after the manga started. How does he maintain power like this? It's clearly not popular support so it must be from vast wealth that he accumulates from simply owning things like land and businesses without working them or through a supernatural ability to fight armies by himself because this is a fucking anime. This government is literally run by a secret evil force that keeps itself hidden from view to avoid being targeted by the ire of the populace and instead directs that ire at its underlings like the marines. And this force doesn't have any specific goals like mind control of the populace, wiping out other races, or uniting the whole world under a single government. Those are all simply tools for it to maintain the power it already has because power exists to preserve itself. Geez, it's like Aichiro Oda thinks that making the setting match up with the central themes of the story is more important than having it be completely realistic. What a hack, am I right? I haven't mentioned yet that the world government is a horrible regime to live under. It regularly commits genocide of entire islands to prevent inconvenient information from escaping. It executes ace because his father was the previous pirate king. It fails to protect people from the worst pirates in the world, oftentimes leaving them to fend for themselves or rely on the goodwill of other pirates, and it even kidnaps children for science experiments. Somehow a rebellion didn't form until 22 years before the story began. It's simply called the Revolutionary Army and it's been slowly gaining power and influence over the years. It explicitly desires to overthrow the world nobles and their government. A lot of times the Revolutionary Army refuses to fight directly and only provides regular people with the means to fight back themselves. The question is how? Surely in a world where people can get magical powers from eating fruit or lift weights until they can crush a mountain with their bare hands, it would be impossible for a small number of people to do any damage to such a large regime, and it's even more impossible for them to serve as a corps to build an army of angry citizens around. Please, just use common sense. The government has a secret police organization called Cypher Pole, and it's safe to assume they were used to stamp down any dissent before it could escalate to a full-scale rebellion. A government this centralized would have difficulty catching every bit of dissent though, so there should be a lot more of that. Pay no attention to the many, many pirates that explicitly go around being pirates as a way to escape the government's authority, or the four pirate emperors who together control a huge chunk of the world map. Those people are all rebelling against the world government, but they're uncoordinated and they didn't explicitly say they want to overthrow the current regime, so it doesn't count. Wait a second, have I been overthinking things? Have we been overthinking things? Is worldbuilding really just a way for writers to better understand cause and effect? Is the setting really just a backdrop for the events of the story which are far more important? Is the setting really just the end result of a thousand other stories that occurred before? Should problems in the setting only be treated as a big deal if they negatively impact parts of the story? Is this sort of pedantic analysis merely an intellectual exercise? Is it more important that a setting is consistent than realistic? Is it possible that a cartoon that begins with a character turning into rubber was admitting up front that it wasn't operating on real world logic? If that were true then this whole video would be pointless. It wouldn't be an epic takedown of an objectively awful piece of media, it would just be someone poking fun at something they love. Maybe I've understood that all along and even brought it up in my first worldbuilding analysis five years ago. Maybe I wish I'd been clearer about that in the past so I could avoid becoming part of the internet's pseudo-intellectual culture of, um, actually? Nah, that doesn't make any sense. Clearly one piece of worldbuilding is trash and I've done an amazing job of proving that. Feel free to send me hate in the comments, just remember that everyone who voices disagreement with me is butthurt. Everything I ever say is objectively true and there is no arguing against it. Why is it objective? Because I created the criteria for what objectivity is and it coincidentally happens to match up with everything I already thought. One piece is an objectively terrible manga. It's not a fun adventure filled with brilliant commentary on the world we live in, it's a cartoony mess that is objectively unrealistic and that means it's objectively bad. Objective. Subscribe and stuff. I wonder how many death threats I'm getting for this video. How many people are going to miss the sarcasm? Eh, whatever. Bleach was still the best of the big three, though. I broke no arguments here. Huge thanks to everybody who watched this far. Not totally sure why you would, but you know, I appreciate it. 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You're all fantastic. I love you. Goodbye.