From this thread over on /r/leftypiece where I've been arguing with vaushites who are currently trying to push people against this.
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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fishman island is about what if malcolm x assassinated mlk and falsely blamed white people for it to get more people to become reverse racist (which is a real thing in this scenario i guess)
Like, I really really like that the moral of the story is that "racism can arise just from the ambient culture, if inherent biases are left unchecked and unchallenged" but man was this the clumsiest metaphor to do that with, Oda really bit off more than he could chew here
yeah oda was absolutely not qualified to tell a story about race and so he defaults to using standard shonen manga style "ahh, the cycle of violence must be stopped," which is basically what he does in skypeia as well
in general, while oda is way ahead of most of his peers in most areas (trans rights included these days, but also he was so far below the curve there for a long while so i'm not going to give him any credit there) he's still a kinda lib guy making an incredibly mainstream piece of serialized art on strict deadlines and i think the number of people acting like it's the most radical piece of art in anime spaces only hurts it
i'm not opposed to allegory (i fucking love revolutionary girl utena, a show that has an insert song that ends with a choir singing "ALLEGORY! ALLEGORIER! ALLEGORIEST!") but when your allegory for political change ends with the rightful king restored almost every single time (including the rightful king of a settler colonial state, the indigenous people of which are leading guerilla warfare against!) i think that the allegory is broken
Yeah, that's a fair criticism of One Piece.
I think it's less that it's the most radical as much as it's the most accessible- enough people are familiar with shonen as a genre that they'll immediately "get" what One Piece is about, and having one of the Big Three Shonen Jump titles have even the slightest whiff of left-leaning politics in there gets it inordinately recommended as the "Baby Leftists First Anime" over, (sad to say) shows like Kaiji or Utena. Which is fine, I guess, if it's a pipeline to somewhere, but maybe the problem is 1) people aren't aware of other shows with more radical politics (and to be fair there's got to be only a handful, I'm struggling to name radical leftists movies off the top of my head, never mind cartoons) and 2) people aren't well-read enough on theory so they can't see One Piece's flaws in that regard
yeah i get why it happens, but it makes me like it a lot less than i otherwise would (though i still like it a lot!)
also if you want an openly leftist anime that has zero allegory, watch dallos. it was the first ova, it's directed by mamoru oshii (of ghost in the shell and patlabor fame) and it's just straight up doing the battle of algiers but in space. it rules, the ending is incredible
Cool, will give it a look. I need to go rewatch Patlabor 2 sometime soon anyway haha
Terry Pratchett did "the rightful king" trope the best. The rightful king is such a good and decent and wonderful person that he rejects kingship, hides all proof of there being a rightful heir and fights against people trying to make him a king, because kings are inherently bad
I read fisher tiger as the Malcolm X stand-in. the dude raising an army in fishman island is a rando warlord (in our sense of the term, not diagetic).
I haven't finished Fisher-man island yet, I'm still on the middle of the big fight just after the Kraken joined, but I don't think Hodi Jones is supposed to be a representation of Malcolm X, I think Fisher Tiger was. Tiger and the queen both wanted and fought against the racism and prejudice their people faced, one with violence and the other pacifically through the system. Tiger even died young, before being able to fully develop his ideology and his fight like Malcolm.
The two big criticism I have is that the sole existence of the royal family is never questioned, not even by the queen, even tho Oda clearly understands systemic oppression hinting towards it constantly, and having Hodi kill the queen is just lazy writing that undermines the true weight this arc would have had in my opinion. She should have been killed by a human contracted by either the world government or the celestial dragon they saved to show that true change won't come from the system, despite your best efforts and intentions.