Watching shonen anime is similar to viewing the world through a magnifying glass. The moment you peer beyond the rim, the world outside of its confines becomes harder to perceive. Only here, the confines tend to be male-centric stories where women in the hero’s ensemble play only a supporting role in the grander story. That’s not to say there are no strong female characters dominating the genre. Even in anime as sacrosanct as the “Big Three,” a woman’s big hero moments tend to come with a “finally” as they rise up to the feats of their comrades—though never shoulder-to-shoulder as to steal their limelight. It’s happened to Sakura Haruno in Naruto; it’s happened to Orihime Inoue in the latest episode of Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, and it’s happened even more often to the ladies in One Piece.
Thankfully, One Piece Heroines is a TV special that rectifies the sausage-party phenomenon of shonen epics by giving the Straw Hat ladies a much-needed night out as the heroes in their own spin-off story, and more shonen would do well to follow suit.
We’ve said it once but it bears repeating: whether you’re watching the OG anime and reading the manga‘s 1,000+ episodes and chapters, watching Netflix’s live-action series, or waiting for WIT Studio’s leaner remake, now is a really good time to get into One Piece. If Toei Animation’s previous special for Eiichiro Oda’s long-running series, One Piece Fan Letter, was the fandom’s version of the heartwarming anime film Look Back, One Piece Heroines is as close as the series has gotten to The Devil Wears Prada and The Phantom Thread. Based on Jun Esaka and Sayaka Suwa’s light-novel spin-off, the special sees Nami and Nico Robin join forces for a heist at a fashion show.
On the surface, their tale sounds as pedantic as woman-led stories can be. But the inciting incident to their rare team-up is a pretty clever, almost shower-thought-provoking one. Light spoilers for that. Turns out Nami bought some shoes from a bougie fashion brand that specializes in making footwear that meets every woman’s needs. Said brand is very popular with women who take to the high seas because their fancy footwear is also fashion they can fight in. When Nami hurts her toe while wearing what’s essentially a fast-fashion version of the esteemed brand, she meets a female cobbler who works as an assistant to the brand’s owner, who wants Nami to model his brand on a runway.
Turns out the dude is behind a string of pirate jewel robberies, whose recent caper was the Straw Hats’ own ship and Nami’s own stash. Nami, being the Sapphic charmer that she is, convinces her crewmate Nico Robin to join her on an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist while also lifting her newfound friend, in whom she engendered self-confidence, to not only craft her new footwear to fight in, but to fly under her own flag, as it were.
The whole special, which clocks in at a lean 23 minutes, is an utter delight to watch. One huge part of why I was charmed by the special on a story-level was that it went the extra mile to underscore that this is an anime ladies’ night, going so far as to obscure Luffy, Sanji, and Zoro when they showed up ever-so-briefly in the special, and had its ladies take center stage. Another reason I loved the special is that it felt like a callback to the halcyon days when filler anime episodes were king.
Nowadays, filler episodes—which One Piece had a lion’s share of—have gone by the wayside. While that’s mostly seen as a plus, with the worst filler episodes prolonging into entire arcs and seasons so as to allow mangaka to come up with new material in their stories for studios to animate, filler episodes also allowed for creative storytelling where viewers got to spend more time getting to know their favorite heroes whenever they weren’t on the back foot facing a world-ending foe. After all, if it weren’t for filler episodes, we wouldn’t have the absolute pinnacle of the anime filler: Goku and Piccolo taking a driver’s ed test in Dragon Ball Z.
The special is also a facet of One Piece that’s made it a hard selling point for window-browsing anime fans: the whole Jessica Rabbit of why they’re drawn like that. The slander Oda—and especially Toei Animation—get clowned on online for the overtly cartoonish proportions of its characters is par for the course for the series’ visual identity, but their oversexualized designs are a hard selling point for would-be anime fans. And the leering the camera does at One Piece‘s women is, let’s be honest, a little gross. Which is a shame because the series has some of the best fashion in a shonen—other than Yu Yu Hakusho and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, of course.
A lot of this can simply be chalked up to them being designed by men. End of conversation. Which is why Heroines, being a thoughtful and moving story written and originally drawn by women, carries over to the art style of the special, making it a breath of fresh air. Roll that into how the very plot of the special takes fashion to heart as a signifier of the characters’ own kick-ass, endearing qualities as heroines, and you’re cooking with gas as far as anime spin-offs go.
In an age where we have fans clamoring for more women-led anime without immediately getting astroturfed by clapbacks pointing to series decades old as proof there’s no need for more representation, One Piece Heroines is a delightful artifact leading by example to show its contemporaries that carving out a fun story where its shafted female characters bask in the limelight is a worthwhile venture. My only hope is that Toei will wise up to that and adapt the other tales in Esaka and Suwa’s light novel where Boa Hancock and Vivi Nefertari get to join in on the fun.
One Piece Heroines is streaming on Crunchyroll and Netflix.
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