One Piece is something I had heard good things about for a very long time and after becoming more open-minded towards shounen series I knew I had to get to it eventually. I knew it probably wasn't going to me, but I can still appreciate things that aren't. Regardless of if I liked it or hated it I told myself I'd watch up to the time skip then take a break. I did actually enjoy certain characters such as Nami and Robin or arcs like Water7, and the series has a wonderful sense of whimsy and adventure that reminds me of OG Dragonball. This is a series that at its best makes you feel like a child with eyes full of wonder.
However, the more I watched of it the more I kept noticing how skin-deep everything was. Every single criticism or false-belief I have of battle shounen is at its absolute most extreme here. Everything from Luffy's generic and aimless characterization to having an ensemble cast that it repeatedly fails to balance to just blatant sexism or completely nonsensical power-scaling - it's all here. By the time of the time skip there were still members of the Straw Hats who weren't developed in the slightest (Zoro, Sanji, Franky, Brook) and ended up mostly relegated to comic relief. Meanwhile the few that were developed (ie Nami, Robin, Hopper, and Usopp) mostly fell to the way side as soon as their relevant arcs were completed.
Luffy himself is his own can of worms, being plagued by inconsistent stupidity (there's times where he seems to have meaningful awareness of situations, different from academic intelligence, but that completely gets undermined whenever being dumb is funnier) and retroactive characterization. He's shown to struggle through flashbacks (except for pivotal moments to set up a goal in an arc/saga) and the series will show his pain through a magic bubble far before giving him any kind of thoughts on what he's gone through.
All of this is to say nothing of how things like Amazon Lily or Kamabakka Kingdom make me feel, letting me peer into the grossest parts of Oda's mind and seeing how he views others through these gags. Not to mention Usopp's entire existence is uncomfortable, and that Oda has (offhandedly, granted) said Usopp would be from "Africa" in real life paints a rather grim picture. Usopp is a character with cartoonishly large nose and lips, is constantly played for the fool, and often tries to pretend to be more grandiose than he is only for his aforementioned foolishness to come out. This is a minstrel show archetype known as "speedcoon". I absolutely wanted to vomit when I realized what I was being shown, even more so for how many black or LGBT One Piece fans I personally know.
One Piece for all its charm is just completely awful both in terms of writing quality and on a moral level, something that I usually find easy to ignore when going through media. This series is so bad that the fact I was no optimistic towards it starting out actually made me decide to rewatch some of our old punching bags, starting with Sword Art Online, and 3 episodes into that I'm already confident it is a better story and experience overall than One Piece and it's not even close.
I gotta be meaner to One Piece, we gotta be meaner to One Piece.
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