 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything One Piece, and today we are going to be taking a step back from the series itself in order to examine a bit more of the making of One Piece, specifically some controversies that have arisen over the course of its lifespan. And I do want to emphasise that for a series that has been running for about 23 years, One Piece is actually fairly clean in this area, however there have been some issues here and there that have resulted in the aforementioned controversy. Now to be clear, a controversy can be anything, literally anything, that results in a public disagreement, and by that definition we actually have a new controversy every week with the One Piece manga, often resulting in prolonged online squabbles. But what I'm looking at here is a bit different though, it has less to do with the series itself and more of the happenings in the outside world that are directly linked to One Piece. And we'll find out what I mean by that in a second, but first, the greatest controversy of all would obviously be you not being subscribed to the Grand Line Review, which if you were to do would result in regular One Piece content being uploaded straight into your YouTube V. An idea that I personally don't see as controversial, but a mighty like 53% of you do, so yeah. Let's get on that and please do say hi if you're a new member of the Grand Fleet, welcome. But with that out of the way, let's get truly controversial with our first topic being Ivankov's original voice actor. So very few One Piece fans either seem to know or remember this incident, but in 2010, Norio Yamamura was arrested for posting quote-unquote, indecent pictures of his lower body on his blog. And the most immediate result of this, as it relates to One Piece, was Yamamura being forced to step down from his role as Emporio Ivankov, which is actually a bit of a shame because Oda has stated in the SPS of 058 that Yamamura was the inspiration for Ivankov, as well as the Okama in general. And so when Yamamura auditioned for the role of Ivankov, he was the undisputed choice for the part. But it's not quite as simple as being arrested over, you know, dick pic. It is a bit more potentially innocuous than that because Yamamura was and I suppose still is a tattoo enthusiast who had been spending the last decade covering his body and wanted to celebrate its completion by showing the, uh, the full thing off. Which by the way, just as a side note, apparently all of these tattoos cost Yamamura somewhere between $45,000 to $56,000, United States dollars as well, to get done, so that's quite the investment. With that said, our real life Okama in Yamamura is a very controversial figure for Japanese society, as he has also posted various tied up classical Shibari style shots. And also the fact that these tattoos are also generally associated with the Akusa, despite the fact that Yamamura has never been shown to have a connection with them. But the combination of all of this has led to the subsequent separation of Yamamura from One Piece and all of his lines were re-recorded by Mitsue Iwata, who is the now iconic voice of Emporio Ivankov. With that said, apparently Yamamura is still on good terms with both Ichiro Oda and the voice of Luffy Mayumi Tanaka, as she and Yamamura used to work together in the theater. But moving on to a much more familiar controversy, we have the tale of Ace's tattoo. Or I guess one of his tattoos anyway, the one on his back, which we all remember as the glorious Jolly Roger of Whitebeard. However, this Jolly Roger originally looked a little something like this, which to the Western world pretty much immediately rings alarm bells due to its similarity with the swastika of Nazi Germany. And this symbol has a well-known history in the world across many different cultures, dating back roughly 15,000 years before its adoption in World War II, at which point it was flipped and slightly rotated. But in Japan, in particular, this is a Buddhist manji symbol, as well as the kanji itself that can be read as barn, which you know, if you're a bleach fan, you'll be quite familiar with, because this is how you would spell the word Bunkai. And in fact, the kanji itself also becomes the guard of Ichigo's blade. So while it is subtle to the point of indistinguishable for Westerners, the difference is still very much there, and quite obvious to Eastern cultures. But due to the foreign manga boom of the early 2000s, Japanese publishers began eliminating the symbol, so as not to cause issues with foreign marketplaces. And as a result of that, Whitebeard's Jolly Roger was reworked into this now iconic head on a cross, which interestingly enough is another thing that can cause problems in foreign markets, because it can often be seen as a direct reference to the prime symbol of Christianity, and English One Piece in particular has a rich history of editing out anything that even remotely resembles a cross. Although interestingly enough, this Jolly Roger was never touched, apart from the initial change, of course. And speaking of changes, oh, so many changes, this leads very nicely into our third controversy, and quite possibly the most famous of all being the 4Kids anime adaptation. Now let's start by being clear, One Piece was always going to have an uphill battle in the Western market as it was. It had goofy art that looked almost childish on a surface level, it was a show about pirates, which were very much not in fashion at the time, and it was a very, very slow bone story that required a big commitment to get into. But on top of all of that, in came in 4Kids who picked up the rights to dub One Piece as part of a package deal, and allegedly they had done no research on the series whatsoever. So the 4Kids directors and editors were given the unenviable task of bastardizing One Piece to fit the core 4Kids audience range of 7-10 year olds, which resulted in an infinity of examples of hilarious censorship, as well as confusing decisions, like deciding to remove the entire reverse mountain and little garden ox, as well as just plain changing the story, like when instead of being murdered, Belmau was thrown into a dungeon for the rest of her days. A nice room in a dungeon, according to Wallong, and I have to assume that according to the 4Kids' canon, she still remains in that dungeon to this very day, only nobody cares about her, which is very depressing. And naturally, the 4Kids' dub of One Piece has gone down in history as one of the worst dubs of all time, and it is empirically responsible for a major aspect of One Piece's struggle in the West. I've detailed this in another video, but you can track the effect of 4Kids financially through English manga sales. But you can also directly compare it to the dubs of other countries, which had extraordinarily successful runs of One Piece like, say, Germany, who has, as of January 2020, aired 731 episodes as well as dub 10 of the films. So this argument that One Piece was destined to fail in the Western world is ridiculous, but with a competent dub, it did do pretty damn phenomenally. Whereas in English-speaking countries, the damage was well and truly done. Funimation had to pick things up from the skypeer saga, and whilst One Piece has slowly, very slowly accrued an impressive level of popularity, the 4Kids' effect continues to live on. Now moving on to a controversy within the anime itself, a lot of people bring this up, and it is Robin's alleged whitewashing between pre- and post-timeskip. So here's the deal, there's a pretty big difference in complexion between pre- and post-timeskip Robin, which commonly leads to various bits of outrage over Robin being whitewashed, and the actual truth of the matter never seems to really disseminate too far. Primarily because at this point the community gets bogged down in all kinds of faux arguments to explain this change, one of which I see quite painfully often, is that Robin got tanned because the base of operations was in alabaster. I can't even say it with a straight face. Because it's absurd! Because she had the exact same complexion in the flashback on Ohara, so that's not a thing. But what's worse is that there is a horrible argument that she lost her tanned due to spending two years in a snowy environment, referring to Tequila Wolf, which she just didn't. She spent her two years with the Revolutionary Army potentially on Baltico, but definitely not on Tequila Wolf. So there is no in-world explanation for what happened with the anime. It's entirely to do with outside production. And it's important to note that if we look at Oda's colour spreads featuring Robin in the pre-times skip era, she always features that lighter complexion, and Oda did even state in an SBS that her real-life nationality would be Russian. But that begs the question, why would Toei decide to change it? And the sad answer is... We don't quite know. A popular theory is that Robin had not been given an official colour scheme by the time her anime appearance came about, which was in April 2001. However, that is not true because Robin's first colour spread would have been in Chapter 160, which was published in November 2000. So it really is a bit of a mystery as to why Toei decided to do this, but they were given the creative license to do so, which resulted in a mildly different, but equally as amazing in every way Robin. And then for equally as mysterious reasons, they changed her back to match the manga following the time skip. In addition to this, her eyes are also blue in the anime whilst they're clearly brown in the manga, but that was kept post-times skip. So I really don't get why Toei didn't just stick with their executive decision, because changing Robin's complexion doesn't ultimately do anything except raise the question as to why. And as a result, it has been, currently is, and probably always will be, an ongoing controversy within One Piece. Moving to something a bit more fun now, an intriguing event occurred on September 13th of 2019, whereby Toei Animation's official Twitter account retweeted a spoiler from the One Piece manga. Now at first, this doesn't seem so bad at face value, but it was quite controversial for two reasons. Reason number the first. The Toei anime adaptation of One Piece is roughly a year behind from where the manga is, so loyal Toei followers were not pleased with the spoilers presented to them. It is difficult enough for anime only watchers to avoid spoilers as it is, without the official company's Twitter account throwing them in your face. However, the second and frankly most entertaining reason for this being controversial is because the retweeted spoiler didn't even come from the official manga. In fact, the chapter this spoiler came from hadn't even come out yet. It was a screenshot of a pirated scanlation which prompted the following tweet from Steven Paul. The official English translator of One Piece. What effing dumbass is running the Toei Animation account retweeting scanlation screencaps? And basically what we have here is Toei Animation not only spoiling the anime only watchers, but also the manga readers by retweeting a pirated image from a chapter that had not been released. Which you know is not a great look for a company known to be very hawkish when it comes to copyright and piracy issues, so that was a pretty bad move made by an almost very certainly unfortunate and potentially now unemployed employee. Now as for another controversy warning this one is slightly heavier and much more complicated to talk about. So much so that I do have a whole video on this next one and I don't want to go too deeply into it, but this would be the infamous Etch Your Oda interview with Nobuhiro Watsuki. And the short version of the story is that Oda used to work as Watsuki's assistant on Rune Kenshin, brilliant series, but in November 2017 Watsuki was found in possession of child pornography at which point he was fined the equivalent of just under $2,000 and allowed to continue his career the very next year resuming his life as a mangaka. Which I do think is pretty damn incredible, considering that our first controversy on this list, Norio Imamura, lost his entire career over something significantly less and arguably not harmful at all. In any case, Watsuki's former assistant Oda faced some backlash over a plan to have him interview his former sensei at an exhibition celebrating the 25th anniversary of Rune Kenshin. And for posterity's sake I will point out that from what I've seen this backlash did primarily come from the Western world, who were not only surprised that Watsuki still had a career as a mangaka, but that he was also having a very well-publicized exhibition to celebrate that career. And it is a very difficult issue to explain with a lot of nuance and vast, vast cultural divides, but the most common argument I saw against any controversy was, well, why are people getting mad at Oda? It's just an interview. Would you get mad at a reporter for interviewing someone like Charles Manson? And I must say that these comments are a blatant false equivalency. The controversy at hand was less about Oda and more about the propagation of figures like Nobihiro Watsuki who had suffered no real punishment from the crime committed, and in fact, not only was there no real punishment, but he was being celebrated. So to put that into the Manson example, which I received a lot of, imagine that the reporter interviewing Manson was a former member of the Manson cult, and they were at an event celebrating the 25th year of the Manson murders. At that point, even you would probably question whether that hugely public interview and event is a good idea or not. Which isn't to say that Oda is in any way involved in what Watsuki was doing. There is no evidence, no allegations, no nothing, but Oda still faced backlash because he was seen as a part of that propagation. Because it is one thing to support your friend and mentor in private, Oda and Watsuki are friends, I would entirely expect that, but in a public celebratory manner is a very different situation, at least for us in the Western world. And once again, I will emphasize that this is largely Western-based. Japanese audiences and society have been far more forgiving of Watsuki, and once again, my summary here does not adequately explain the whole situation. There's a reason why I had to make a whole video on it before, but it is undeniably one of the biggest controversies within One Piece. But what do you guys think? Please do leave your thoughts in the comments below, or even join my Discord server. And if you'd like to see 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 Groundline Review, and I'll see you next time.