Shōnen: One of the four demographic categories of manga, targeting boys 9-18.
I did it. I’m all caught up on the One Piece manga.
One Piece isn’t just a shōnen manga. It is the shōnen manga. There are many who came before, and many that came after, but this behemoth of a series created by Eiichiro Oda is the granddaddy of them all. It has been published in Shueisha’s Weekly Shōnen Jump since July of 1997 and has as of the time of writing this, 1108 chapters collected in 108 volumes.
To me it is the most perfectly crafted piece of entertainment, nevermind manga for young boys ages 9+. If I would have found this when it started in 1997 I would have been obsessed with it. As an adult I’m still blown away by it, but it took me about a hundred chapters to even start getting invested, and around 300 to start realizing how good the series really was, whereas younger me would have been completely in from the first chapter.
It’s about a young boy named Luffy who wants to become King of the Pirates by finding the the dead Gol D. Roger’s mythical treasure called the ‘One Piece’, in a wild, fantastical, and pirate-centric world. He has the powers of a rubber man because he ate a “Devil Fruit”, and he quickly assembles a crew just as bizarre and crazy as he is: Roronoa Zoro -a swordsman and pirate hunter, Nami -a woman obsessed with treasure and skilled navigator, Usopp – a skilled sniper and utterly compulsive liar, and Sanji -a cook who is both incredibly chivalrous and a crazy flirt. Together they sail the ever more dangerous seas on a grand adventure, seeking to grow stronger to survive, and become powerful enough to achieve their dreams.
And if that doesn’t appeal to you, that’s kind of the point. I say it is the ultimate shōnen series, because it is laser focused on a single demographic: young boys. Even as it grows in length and popularity, as the world expanded and the stories got deeper and more complex, it is still at its heart, written for that core age group. This is a look into the mind and imagination of young boys. If you were to ask ‘what do you want to be?’ chances are it would be something like “I wanna be a pirate!” or a ninja, or a superhero, or whatever exciting thing has grabbed their fancy. But the more you ask what they imagine it to be, the less grounded in reality their answers. Young boys don’t want to be pirates to murder and enslave others, to deal with scurvy, backstabbing, and the whole host of other things actual historical pirates dealt with, no they want to go out and find treasure, explore and see crazy things nobody else has seen before, get into fights, and have fun.
And the story of One Piece is, pretty much, the exact story that a boy that age would come up with when they respond to why they want to be a pirate, what his crew would be like, and what kind of adventures they would have -but told by someone who’s capable of taking that whimsy and crafting it all to make sense, in the characters, the story, and especially the worldbuilding.
And it’s at this point I think the true genius of Eiichiro Oda lies. While the series is made for young boys, and is wildly fantastical, it is not stupid. He treats his readers as intelligent human beings, capable of following long, long standing plot threads, and world building that is surprisingly complex and coherent. For all the islands floating in the sky, cities below the ocean, and islands literally made of cake, the world, the powers, characters, and the rules it has are remarkably, almost staggeringly consistent for as crazy as it gets. So as young boys age into men, they still enjoy and love it, not just because it’s old and familiar, but because why they enjoy it can change for different reasons. After 27 years, sailing from Island to Island with simple adventures would easily be something one could grow out of. But when it’s built towards one goal, and when the further one gets into these adventures and the overarching story, the more things there are for ‘more mature’ adults to get into and enjoy. You have all these pieces and mysteries slowly being introduced as the series goes on: Government and their Navy, the Revolution that is trying to overthrow them, the Navy controlled Pirate Warlords, the Four Pirate Emperors, the Fish Men, the Celestial Dragons. The Void Century. And then there’s events that happen that dramatically alter how each of these different pieces interact with each other as time passes.
This is a series filled with fun and adventure, but it also introduces deep tragedy, sadness, and loss. Luffy doesn’t always win, and he has (literally) the scars to prove it. But you get to see him grow from it, and ultimately become more powerful as a result of his experiences.
I do truly believe that this One Piece is the pinnacle of its genre. And if what Eiichiro Oda has said over the years about it coming to an end in 2024-2025, if it ends on anything better than a bad note, it will go down in contention for greatest manga of all time.
It is a modern epic. Though I also believe that if you’re not the kind of person who enjoys media aimed squarely at its core demographic, you’ll bounce off of it hard. And that’s ok. We can’t all be boys wanting to be the King of the Pirates.
(The anime is ROUGH to get into, and I’ve not been able to get past the first 50 episodes, because of how incredibly dated it is, with so much filler, cheap animation, and glacial pacing. The Live Action is really good and gets the general gist of the content it covers)
