Live-action One Piece is too good to let Sanji be a horndog
In a bold new direction for One Piece, the live-action adaptation from Netflix dared to make a major change: Showrunners have cut the resident pervert. Now, Sanji — the beloved cook of the Straw Hats and aficionado of women everywhere — is no longer outwardly a creep to women. He still seems to have a crush on Nami, but he no longer reacts with heart-shaped eyes and bursting bloody noses. Thank goodness.
A lot of the early adventures in the live-action One Piece follow Luffy as he starts to search for members for his new pirate crew. Among them is Sanji, a suave chef played by Taz Skylar. The live-action series changes a lot about Sanji from the source material. Fans of the anime and manga will notice immediately that he no longer rocks his character-defining swirled eyebrow and now has a sultry British accent, but from the jump his character is different. The first time Sanji meets Nami in the anime and manga, he is immediately “in love” and over-the-top horny for her, but here he’s merely charming. This is good; this is actually a relatively tame example of Sanji’s unquenchable thirst, as his obsession with seeing women’s bodies escalates. In later arcs, he fantasizes about eating a Devil Fruit to make him invisible so he can peep on women, and feels Nami’s body up during a body-swap episode.
Related
Sanji falls into what some would call the “chivalrous pervert character” trope because he doesn’t just chase women, he also cannot physically fight them… literally. “Sanji doesn’t have a ‘policy’ of not kicking women; the truth is that he actually CAN’T kick them,” creator Eiichiro Oda said in a column. Initially, this inherent ability of Sanji’s could be interpreted as a positive lesson for young boys, but these
Read more on polygon.com
