Warning: Contains spoilers for One Piece Fan Letter.Anime fandoms tend to be overrun with powerscaling debates, and unfortunately, One Piece is 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.
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Powerscaling has been a controversial part of the One Piece fandom for years now, and the One Piece Fan Letter special called out fans who engage in it. The special was a series of vignettes about ordinary people in the world of One Piece, and in a very meta sequence, one segment of One Piece Fan Letter was 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
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In one of the stories of One Piece Fan Letter, several people get together at a bar to discuss the strongest One Piece characters in 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 ways One Piece fans engage in powerscaling, so One Piece Fan Letter essentially makes powerscaling canon in One Piece.
It’s one thing for powerscaling to be canon in One Piece, but what makes things even better is how One Piece Fan Letter takes 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 Sanji would beat them up out of annoyance. One Piece Fan Letter was clearly bringing up powerscaling for the sake of making fun of it, and because of that, the entire segment was great to watch.
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One Piece Fan Letter Addresses One Of The Fandom's Biggest Questions
One of the most infamous forms of powerscaling in One Piece involves 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.
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Not only did the same powerscaling people in One Piece Fan Letter get 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 a naginata, 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, and One Piece Fan Letter is 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
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One Piece Fan Letter did a great job of satirizing powerscaling debates in One 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 Piece is 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 in One Piece always misses the narrative weight behind the fights, and the way people in Fan Letter got 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, and the way the characters in One Piece Fan Letter obsessed 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.
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18 9.2/10
One Piece
TV-14
Action
Adventure
Comedy
Drama
Fantasy
Super Power
One Piece chronicles the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy, an easy-going young pirate with the power to stretch like rubber, gained from eating a Devil Fruit. Luffy and his diverse crew sail across the Grand Line in search of the ultimate treasure, the One Piece, to become the Pirate King.
- Cast
- Mayumi Tanaka , Kazuya Nakai , Akemi Okamura , Kappei Yamaguchi , Hiroaki Hirata , Ikue Ôtani , Yuriko Yamaguchi , Kazuki Yao , Chō
- Release Date
- October 20, 1999
- Streaming Service(s)
- Crunchyroll
- Franchise(s)
- One Piece
- Writers
- Junki Takegami , Shoji Yonemura , Hirohiko Uesaka
- Directors
- Kônosuke Uda , Junji Shimizu , Munehisa Sakai
- Main Genre
- Action
- Creator(s)
- Eiichiro Oda