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Warning: Contains spoilers for One Piece Fan Letter.Anime fandoms tend to be overrun with powerscaling debates, and unfortunately,One Pieceis no different. Oftentimes, fans will focus more on analyzing arbitrary power levels and pushing someone as either incredibly weak or incredibly powerful than they’ll focus on the story, itself, and unfortunately, they’ll often get so wrapped up in it that they’ll criticize anyone who disagrees with them to increasingly obnoxious degrees.
Powerscaling has been a controversial part of theOne Piecefandom for years now, and theOne Piece Fan Letterspecialcalled out fans who engage in it. The special was a series of vignettes about ordinary people in the world ofOne Piece, and in a very meta sequence,one segment ofOne Piece Fan Letterwas devoted to parodying the most common debates powerscaling fans tend to fall into. It was hardly the focus of the special, but for anyone familiar with the subject, and especially for anyone tired of it, it was plenty of fun to watch.
One Piece Officially Makes Powerscaling Canon
One Piece Has Never Been This Meta
In one of the stories ofOne Piece Fan Letter, several people get together at a bar to discuss the strongestOne Piececharactersin their opinions. Some opinions were based purely on personal bias, like Zoro and Akainu being brought up simply because someone liked them, and they even tried using bounties as an arbitrary measure of strength, most notably to shoot down the idea of Sanji being stronger than Zoro. Everything those people said mirrors the most common waysOne Piecefans engage in powerscaling, soOne Piece Fan Letteressentially makes powerscaling canon inOne Piece.
It’s one thing for powerscaling to be canon inOne Piece, but what makes things even better is howOne Piece Fan Lettertakes the time to make fun of it. In addition to how exaggerated the debating would get, most notably with one person randomly bringing up Akainu in a discussion about swordsmen, whenever everyone got too far in their biases,Zoro and Sanjiwould beat them up out of annoyance.One Piece Fan Letterwas clearly bringing up powerscaling for the sake of making fun of it, and because of that, the entire segment was great to watch.
One Piece Fan Letter Addresses One Of The Fandom’s Biggest Questions
One of the most infamous forms of powerscaling inOne Pieceinvolves the question of what does and doesn’t make someone a swordsman, as many characters aren’t explicitly treated as swordsmen, despite fighting with swords, especially some of the strongest characters in the setting. Most infamously,debates about who does and doesn’t count as a swordsman are used as excuses to powerscale Mihawk, as people will argue about whether Mihawk’s status as the world’s strongest swordsman makes him stronger than anyone who uses a sword like Shanks or Big Mom.
Not only did the same powerscaling people inOne Piece Fan Letterget into an equally over-the-top argument about who’s the strongest swordsman, but when someone suggested Whitebeard, they were shot down because Whitebeard uses anaginata, not a sword, despite his weapon being classified as a sword, in-universe. Add in how someone randomly tried to declare Akainu the strongest swordsman and how everyone was beaten up for their comments, andOne Piece Fan Letteris also calling out how ridiculous it is for people to argue about swordsmen, specifically, all of which was great to see.
Why Powerscaling Doesn’t Matter In One Piece
One Piece Fan Letterdid a great job of satirizing powerscaling debates inOne Piece, and that, of course, highlights why powerscaling doesn’t matter. While there are characters who are definitively among the strongest in the setting,One Pieceis very much a story that has battles play out by what fits the narrative more than arbitrary power levels, especially in its later years.Powerscaling inOne Piecealways misses the narrative weight behind the fights, and the way people inFan Lettergot obsessed with it to the point of being beaten up for it perfectly highlights that.
As fun as powerscaling might be, powerscaling often goes so far that it becomes the only thing people talk about when they should be talking about the actual story, andthe way the characters inOne Piece Fan Letterobsessed over powerscaling and nothing else perfectly highlighted how much it dominates discussions to the detriment of anything else, especially when another character would have preferred to talk about Luffy’s character than his power.One Piece Fan Letter’s approach to powerscaling was great to see, and that meta writing was another part of why the special was so great to watch.
One Piece
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The One Piece anime began in 1999 and follows the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy, a boy with rubber-like abilities, as he embarks on a journey to find the legendary treasure “One Piece.” Inspired by the pirate Shanks, Luffy aims to become the King of the Pirates, accompanied by a diverse crew.
