Forum - View topicThrough One Piece, the Golden Age of Piracy Lives On
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GunRabbit
Posts: 3 |
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I'm pleasantly surprised, I thought this article was going to talk about people pirating One Piece/distributing it on illegal sites.
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mewpudding101
Industry Insider
 Posts: 2206 Location: Tokyo, Japan |
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Same. |
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Guile
Posts: 595 |
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I'm genuinely shocked ANN published a historical revisionist article in the defense of pirates and implying they were misunderstood outcasts. I do not know if this is taught in American schools but growing up learning of people like Roche Braziliano and other historical pirates here who committed atrocities and seeing an article like this is really surprising.
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ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor
 Posts: 647 |
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You might be less shocked once you read the article and realize it’s not the straw man you’re making it out to be. It does a pretty good job of explaining the history of piracy and why the perceptions of them are what they are, and how that relates to One Piece. If the historical fact that oppression and racism leads to crime that hurts innocent people is upsetting to you then you should probably be in agreement with the article (and One Piece) that those forces should be dismantled. |
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Horsefellow
 Posts: 262 |
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Wanting to overthrow a corrupt Illuminati government is all well and good, but One Piece also does a good job showing us most pirates are, in fact, bad people. Someone like Arlong can cry hardship all he wants, but the fact Jinbe grew up under the same circumstances right alongside him yet turned out so much different just shows Arlong was always an evil person full of hatred. He just uses his upbringing as an excuse to justify his actions. I'm going to guess that pirates will still be a thing even after Im is taken down because evil will always lurk in people's hearts. |
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kgw
 Posts: 1063 Location: Spain, EU |
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Another History essay wrote from an English (American, too) point of view, who hardly were affected by pirate raids, but quite the opposite. I guess if New York have suffered like Panamá*, some people wouldn't be so eager to idolize pirates.
As for the relation with One Piece, yeah, it draws from the same sources (American movies and literature), plus a rather typical trope of "they make me this way". * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamá_Viejo Last edited by kgw on Sun May 09, 2021 7:04 am; edited 1 time in total |
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ANN_Lynzee
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 2945 Location: Email for assistance only |
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I believe your assumptions about the author are incorrect.
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ZeroReq011
Posts: 19 |
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Hi, I'm the writer of this article. I 100% agree with you that people shouldn't so easily idolize pirates. The pirates and pirate attacks both of you cited are terrible people and terrible things that occurred. Many pirates and pirate attacks were of a similar terrible nature. They're not honorable Robin Hoods or Robin Hood-esque moments. I'm not trying to make excuses for what's morally undefendable, and I don't think I explicitly state anywhere in the article that pirates should be absolved for whatever crimes they've committed. Perhaps I could have made that clearer at the beginning of the article, but I went into the writing of it thinking I didn't have to spell out the obvious. I do, however, talk about my concerns about pirate-whitewashing in the opening paragraph of the commentary I published just after this article on my personal blog. https://thereforeitis.wordpress.com/2021/05/07/anime-news-network-through-one-piece-the-golden-age-of-piracy-lives-on/ Do you read or watch One Piece? If you do perhaps you can agree or at least consider that not everyone who enjoys One Piece, a very popular story about pirates, are uncritical apologists or misguided fools. The One Piece story rejects "pirates" who behave in this stereotypically horrible pirate manner, while at the same time sympathizes with the freedom-loving and anti-authoritarian spirit of those "pirates" who are unambiguously good people. And it turns out that One Piece isn't completely making things up when it points fingers at its story's fictional government for excacerbating the golden age/larger chaos of piracy, because there's precedent for it in recorded history. That doesn't mean that I think pirates should be excused for their horrible crimes. However, I do think it helps explain the popularity of pirates in fiction in a way that isn't just reductively just fans prioritizing pirate's cool aesthetic factor & missing the point. |
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kgw
Posts: 1063 Location: Spain, EU |
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Hello and thanks for answering.
I am not saying that your article is white-washing piracy and I see your worries about romanticizing them. Still, the answer to the question "Why people love One Piece's pirates?" is short: "Because there is a long standing tradition of depicting pirates as lovable rogues, antiheroes"; unlike, as you cite, mobsters, mafiosi (or, I add, vikings*) My guess is that Eiichiro Oda didn't read a ton of books on how piracy was born or their multicultural crews before starting One Piece. He just simply looked at how pirates are treated in popular media (the one more accessible to him) and rolled with it. So, in the end it's more a Through One Piece, the Myths about Piracy Live On. * Yeah, there is Vindland Saga, which I think we all can say it is not exactly a fun, harmless adventure series like OP. I am quite sure we won't see a "One Drakkar" manga anytime soon.** ** I forgot Vicke the little Viking. Still, it was a Japanese-German co-production which I don't know if it reached English-speaking lands because vikings have still a rather negative image there. |
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