{"id":598169,"date":"2026-08-28T01:52:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T01:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/598169\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T01:52:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T01:52:10","slug":"more-shonen-anime-should-have-their-own-one-piece-heroines-style-spin-offs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/598169\/","title":{"rendered":"More Shonen Anime Should Have Their Own ‘One Piece Heroines’ Style Spin-Offs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Watching shonen anime is similar to viewing the world through a magnifying glass. The moment you peer beyond the rim, the world outside of its confines becomes harder to perceive. Only here, the confines tend to be male-centric stories where women in the hero\u2019s ensemble play only a supporting role in the grander story. That\u2019s not to say there are no strong female characters dominating the genre. Even in anime as sacrosanct as the \u201cBig Three,\u201d a woman\u2019s big hero moments tend to come with a \u201cfinally\u201d as they rise up to the feats of their comrades\u2014though never shoulder-to-shoulder as to steal their limelight. It\u2019s happened to Sakura Haruno in Naruto; it\u2019s happened to Orihime Inoue in the latest episode of Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War<\/a>, and it\u2019s happened even more often to the ladies in One Piece.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, One Piece Heroines is a TV special that rectifies the sausage-party phenomenon of shonen epics by giving the Straw Hat ladies a much-needed night out as the heroes in their own spin-off story, and more shonen would do well to follow suit.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve said it once but it bears repeating: whether you\u2019re watching the OG anime<\/a> and reading the manga<\/a>\u2018s 1,000+ episodes and chapters, watching Netflix\u2019s live-action series<\/a>, or waiting for WIT Studio\u2019s leaner remake<\/a>, now is a really good time to get into One Piece<\/a>. If Toei Animation\u2019s previous special for Eiichiro Oda\u2019s long-running series<\/a>,\u00a0One Piece Fan Letter<\/a>, was the fandom\u2019s version of the heartwarming anime film\u00a0Look Back<\/a>, One Piece Heroines\u00a0is as close as the series has gotten to The Devil Wears Prada and The Phantom Thread. Based on Jun Esaka and Sayaka Suwa\u2019s light-novel spin-off, the special sees Nami and Nico Robin<\/a> join forces for a heist at a fashion show.<\/p>\n

On the surface, their tale sounds as pedantic as woman-led stories can be. But the inciting incident to their rare team-up is a pretty clever, almost shower-thought-provoking one. Light spoilers for that. Turns out Nami bought some shoes from a bougie fashion brand that specializes in making footwear that meets every woman\u2019s needs. Said brand is very popular with\u00a0 women who take to the high seas because their fancy footwear is also fashion they can fight in. When Nami hurts her toe while wearing what\u2019s essentially a fast-fashion version of the esteemed brand, she meets a female cobbler who works as an assistant to the brand\u2019s owner, who wants Nami to model his brand on a runway.<\/p>\n

Turns out the dude is behind a string of pirate jewel robberies, whose recent caper was the Straw Hats\u2019 own ship and Nami\u2019s own stash.\u00a0Nami, being the Sapphic charmer that she is, convinces her crewmate Nico Robin to join her on an Ocean\u2019s Eleven-style heist while also lifting her newfound friend, in whom she engendered self-confidence, to not only craft her new footwear to fight in, but to fly under her own flag, as it were.<\/p>\n

The whole special, which clocks in at a lean 23 minutes, is an utter delight to watch. One huge part of why I was charmed by the special on a story-level was that it went the extra mile to underscore that this is an anime ladies\u2019 night, going so far as to obscure Luffy, Sanji, and Zoro when they showed up ever-so-briefly in the special, and had its ladies take center stage. Another reason I loved the special is that it felt like a callback to the halcyon days when filler anime episodes were king<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, filler episodes\u2014which One Piece had a lion\u2019s share of\u2014have gone by the wayside. While that\u2019s mostly seen as a plus, with the worst filler episodes prolonging into entire arcs and seasons so as to allow mangaka to come up with new material in their stories for studios to animate, filler episodes also allowed for creative storytelling where viewers got to spend more time getting to know their favorite heroes whenever they weren\u2019t on the back foot facing a world-ending foe. After all, if it weren\u2019t for filler episodes, we wouldn\u2019t have the absolute pinnacle of the anime filler<\/a>: Goku and Piccolo taking a driver\u2019s ed test in Dragon Ball Z.<\/p>\n

The special is also a facet of One Piece that\u2019s made it a hard selling point for window-browsing anime fans: the whole Jessica Rabbit of why they\u2019re drawn like that<\/a>. The slander Oda\u2014and especially Toei Animation<\/a>\u2014get clowned on online for<\/a> the overtly cartoonish proportions of its characters is par for the course for the series\u2019 visual identity, but their oversexualized designs<\/a> are a hard selling point for would-be anime fans. And the leering the camera does at One Piece\u2018s women is, let\u2019s be honest, a little gross. Which is a shame because the series has some of the best fashion in a shonen<\/a>\u2014other than Yu Yu Hakusho<\/a> and JoJo\u2019s Bizarre Adventure<\/a>, of course.<\/p>\n

A lot of this can simply be chalked up to them being designed by men. End of conversation. Which is why Heroines, being a thoughtful and moving story written and originally drawn by women, carries over to the art style of the special, making it a breath of fresh air. Roll that into how the very plot of the special takes fashion to heart as a signifier of the characters\u2019 own kick-ass, endearing qualities as heroines, and you\u2019re cooking with gas as far as anime spin-offs go.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\"One<\/a> \t\t\t \t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\u00a9 Eiichiro Oda\/ Jun Esaka\/ Sayaka Suwa\/Shueisha\/ \t\t\t\t \t\t\t \t\t\t\t\"One<\/a> \t\t\t \t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\u00a9 Eiichiro Oda\/ Jun Esaka\/ Sayaka Suwa\/Shueisha\/ \t\t\t\t \t\t <\/p>\n

In an age where we have fans clamoring for more women-led anime without immediately getting astroturfed by clapbacks pointing to series decades old as proof there\u2019s no need for more representation, One Piece Heroines is a delightful artifact leading by example to show its contemporaries that carving out a fun story where its shafted female characters bask in the limelight is a worthwhile venture. My only hope is that Toei will wise up to that and adapt the other tales in Esaka and Suwa\u2019s light novel where Boa Hancock and Vivi Nefertari<\/a> get to join in on the fun.<\/p>\n

One Piece Heroines is streaming on Crunchyroll<\/a> and Netflix<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel<\/a>, Star Wars<\/a>, and Star Trek<\/a> releases, what\u2019s next for the DC Universe on film and TV<\/a>, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Watching shonen anime is similar to viewing the world through a magnifying glass. The moment you peer beyond…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":598170,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[13913,146,85,46,59454,411],"class_list":["post-598169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-anime","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-one-piece","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/598170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}