Hello everyone, in this lesson let's talk about one of the most popular animes worldwide which is One Piece. This is a shounen anime which is one of the most popular anime genres. Shounen is the Japanese word for boy and is normally a male-targeted anime. A story where the protagonist is a boy or teenager and is usually an action story that includes battles between good and evil.
So talking about One Piece, what is this story about? This story is set in a world of different lands, where marines and pirates have a lot of power and conflicts. Here just before the most famous pirate was killed by the marines he said that whoever finds all his called One Piece would be the new King of the Pirates. So after his death, a lot of pirates set out to try to find this treasure. One of these is our protagonist Luffy who swore to find the One Piece and become the King of Pirates, and in doing so he will look for members for his crew and live many adventures in order to find the treasure.
Ok, so as I mentioned before, this is an action type of story that also has a lot of fantasy, adventure, and a bit of drama and comedy as well. It is actually a very simple story to understand even though it does get more complex as the story progresses. Our protagonist and his crew start their adventure going to a lot of different lands and in each one of them, they find troubles to solve and confrontations with the people residing there or the marines. So every time they go to a new place new characters are presented to us so we have a lot of characters especially since the story is long. But here I will comment on some of the protagonist characters in this story.
So first of all we have our protagonist Monkey D. Luffy which is a person with a simple mind that does not thinks much before acting just trusts his intuition and his strength because yeah, Luffy is a superstring and that is because… remember I said this story had a lot of fantasy? Well in this world there some special fruits that give a special ability to anyone who eats it, the only thing is that they become a hammer in the sea, I mean they drown. So, when Luffy was a kid he ate a fruit that gave him the ability to become elastic like rubber, so he is literally a rubber man.
And of course, even though Luffy started his adventures alone as the story goes on he makes friends that become part of his crew and the first member of the crew and his right hand is Roronoa Zoro, a swordsman that wants to become the best swordsman in the world. He is really serious but like Luffy, he does not think that much before acting.
The third member crew I am gonna mention is Nami, a girl who was basically a thief and loves money and is super intelligent and bossy, she becomes the navigator of the ship and dreams of doing a map of the hold world. And so on we keep adding more members to this crew like a chef, a snipper, a doctor, and many more characters, and what makes this crew so special is the fact that more than members following a boss their friends carrying their own independent dreams and are in this journey to make those dreams happen to believe of course in their childish but reliable captain Luffy.
Also, another important character that is not part of the crew is Shanks, the captain of the red hair pirates who saved Luffy when he was a kid and it was after that that Luffy decided to become the King of Pirates and promise to meet Shanks in the ute again.
All of these characters and everyone who appears later carries a dream and a past related to that dream as well. Some stories are way more tragic and emotional than others and are this background gives the characters a lot of character development so you can find a character to identify yourself with pretty easily. Another thing that gives this story a little more complexity is the fact that not only the character but every land they arrived at has its own background and problems so we get a lot of military and political kind of troubles as well. And also in the world in general there are things going on with the government, the marines, and the pirates involving historical secrets, weapons, power, deals, and more.
Now One Piece is one of the longest manga and anime there are. The manga was created by Eiichiro Oda and the anime production was and is still being made by Toei Animation since 1999. The story has not ended yet but it's approaching its end. The anime has already over 1,000 chapters (don't worry not all animes are this long) but is still great. On the other hand, the drawing style and design of the characters have really evolved a lot during the years just as the animation as well which is a pretty cool aspect to watch. Also the music of the anime is great, the opening and endings all of them are really good special the opening goes tend to be really energetic and full of happiness just as the group of pirates of our story. Of course, the most emblematic song being the first opening We Are! by Hiroshi Kitadani.
In general, One Piece is a really bright story full of comedy and action but also full of emotional moments as well. So this is it for Lesson 2, I hope that you enjoyed it and look forward to Lesson 3.
