THE WAY ODA DRAWS WOMEN IN ONE PIECE GRIPPED ME FOR THREE HOURS
(originally published Dec 13, 2022 on Substack)
the way oda draws pretty women is so insane. every single woman you’re supposed to find attractive has melons for boobs, a waist thinner than the stem of a wine glass, hips that could birth a jeep, and legs that contain 83% of her height. the women in the main cast receive revealing designs and are objectified in all the shonen-typical ways you can imagine (except, curiously, upskirt shots, indicating that oda’s voyeuristic perversions do have a limit).
it’s fascinating how consistent it is, because they’re sexy in the same exact ways. all the sexist, problematic vectors end up neutralizing after a thousand episodes and/or chapters, incorporating themselves into the overall symbology and forming a simple shorthand: if you see a tall woman shaped like a sphere-tittied hourglass, she’s under 40 and can pull a man. get fluent enough in oda’s visual language and exhausted by how they’re outfit swaps of each other (with the occasional wrong-head-on-doll-body moment that’s probably meant to be comedic) and you can mentally redesign them to whatever you find sexy. use their paper-doll nature to your advantage and go crazy — imagining boa hancock looking like anna diop gets me hot, and that is the only justification i need within oda’s hedonistic framework.
i just can’t stop thinking about how absurdly consistent the man is. it’s shocking! one piece’s pared back storytelling mechanics completely kneecapped the women under 40 and eagerly crossed the bridge into camp. it’s in such bad taste. it’s so obviously shameless. the toony style oda draws in barely supports the sexiness he’s trying to communicate, so it often comes off grotesque. there’s no reason for it other than the fact he likes it. in the absence of shonen jump’s teenage boy audience, oda would still probably be drawing his deranged version of pretty women. his crazy lady bodies encompass over 20 years of dedication: he’s aware of the criticism, he’s directly addressed it, and he does not care because it’s his story and he genuinely thinks the two-circles-over-an-X template he’s created eats.
oda’s creative approach cannot ever be accused of nuance. one piece’s overall themes are compelling enough to hold people’s attention for 25 years, but the sheer amount of stuff oda needs to tie together necessitates oversimplifying everything else. an argument can be made that there is a version of one piece as indulgent as oda wants where the women are more nuanced and varied, but i just don’t think he’s put much effort over the years into learning how to write and design women more effectively. shonen authors are frequently guilty of creating more diverse male designs, and to oda’s credit, skinny women with pinched waists and overbearing chests aren’t the only women he creates. they’re often squat, fat, and frequently played for jokes, but at least that particular problematic archetype is applied semi-universally to represent how characters age and lose strength.
the most excellent woman-centered moments occur when their stories intertwine with the overall plot. for example, nami’s backstory is the starting point of an arc that ends with anime mermaid waifu martin luther king and the impact of a few hands holding complete power over the rest of the world — all the weak points of her character stem from typical misogynistic impulses to have women sit back while the men do the work, and one exceptional skill (navigation) attempts to bridge the gap. if it’s something you care about, you can use headcanon to beef up the characters. the vast, living world of the story and the mystery at its core encourages such thinking.
unfortunately, if you’re particularly media literacy poisoned, you will frequently heave a sigh every time Sexy Lady No. __ appears. at the end of the day, it’s your mileage that will vary. shonen-typical objectification means something different to everyone, and its existence as part of the canon men are expected to participate in could be analyzed in a whole other essay. i just got too high and was looking at a group picture of the girls and lost my mind a bit.
because it’s so egregious. how does he not get bored?