One Piece's New Special Shows How Truly Terrifying It Is To Live In Its World

Warning: Contains spoilers for One Piece Fan Letter.One Piece Fan Letter is a brand-new One Piece special created to celebrate the anime’s 25th anniversary. The special loosely adapts the novel Straw Hat Stories, and just like the novel, it chronicles the lives of ordinary people in the world of One Piece whom the Straw Hats have touched, although it’s reworked to be more of a linear narrative as opposed to disconnected vignettes.

Fan Letter’s gimmick was unlike any other One Piece story, and the direction in which it took things was also wholly unique. One Piece’s world is filled with dark elements that are never fully highlighted unless it’s relevant to the main characters, but Toei Animation's One Piece Fan Letter used its gimmick of being from the perspective of ordinary people to show how terrifying the world of One Piece can be for ordinary people. The result was one of the most unique stories in the entire franchise, and it’s one that completely changes how people should look at One Piece.

One Piece Makes One Of Its Darkest Arcs Even Worse

One Piece Fan Letter strived to show how terrifying the world of One Piece is for ordinary people, and it started with its portrayal of the Paramount War arc. The Paramount War arc was already filled with intense and bloody violence and action, and while it wasn’t originally any worse than an average shonen anime arc, One Piece Fan Letter retold the Paramount War arc from the perspective of an ordinary Marine forced to struggle to survive being around the chaos of One Piece ’s strongest pirates and marines, which led to a far greater focus on how intense everything was.

That heightened realism for One Piece led to a variety of striking scenes like the ordinary Marine painfully prying himself out from under Oars Jr.’s leg and briefly considering leaving his brother to die to save himself, and it peaked when the Marine and his brother were caught up in Crocodile and Mihawk’s fight and the two didn’t even register that they were there. One Piece Fan Letter ’s interpretation of the Paramount War arc highlights how terrifying it was for anyone who wasn’t a major character, and sure enough, the Marine is still rattled by it two years later.

Overall, One Piece Fan Letter does a perfect job of showcasing what it must be like to be a nameless pirate or Marine in the world of One Piece. The ordinary Marine’s flashback was nothing but him constantly being terrified as he fought for his life against people who don’t even register his existence, and years later, he’s unable to move past what he lived through, even as other people have moved on. There’s never been such a dark and realistic take on One Piece’s story, and it adds an incredible amount of life to the franchise, as a whole.

One Piece Shows How Hard A Life The Average Person Lives

The main character of One Piece Fan Letter is a girl who admires Nami because she doesn’t go around destroying everything like other pirates, which perfectly highlights how destructive pirates are, and to make things worse, she’s repeatedly assaulted by a random Marine for no reason and also had to contend with the Marines plotting to pollute the surrounding ecosystem just to get the Straw Hats. One Piece Fan Letter emphasizes how easy it is for the average person to get caught up in the insanity of the larger story, and it always makes that fact as terrifying as possible.

It’s not as if One Piece has never tackled that sort of subject matter, of course; most story arcs have some focus on how the civilians of an island are being impacted by one of the villains, and 2022's One Piece Film: Red was heavily focused on how much the Great Age of Piracy had ruined people’s lives, as well. The main difference, however, is that One Piece Fan Letter is the first story to truly make the struggles of living in One Piece a focal point, and the realistic elements of its story are all the better for it.

The World Of One Piece Is Still Worth Living In, Despite The Chaos

How People Survive Living In One Piece

One Piece Fan Letter goes to great lengths to show how terrifying and chaotic the world of One Piece is, but it also shows why it’s a world worth living in. As chaotic as One Piece might get, people still get by thanks to having something to latch onto, whether it’s something small like hanging out with friends or something big like a familial relationship. In either case, One Piece Fan Letter shows that people can survive the world of One Piece thanks to their relationships with others, and that’s something very true of real life, as well.

Going off of that, a common theme with the special seems to be that, oddly enough, the Straw Hat Pirates help people survive the world of One Piece. Every major character is someone who was touched by one of the Straw Hats, and therefore, One Piece Fan Letter showcases how much the Straw Hat Pirates have become a symbol for the people of the world of One Piece, even if by accident. The Straw Hats are slowly doing something about how terrible the world of One Piece is, albeit unintentionally, and the focus on that is plenty great to see.

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

Writers Junki Takegami , Shoji Yonemura , Hirohiko Uesaka

Directors Kônosuke Uda , Junji Shimizu , Munehisa Sakai

Creator(s) Eiichiro Oda