One Piece and the modern pirate media revolution
“Who says pirates have to be scary?”
It’s a question protagonist Monkey D. Luffy asks in Netflix’s live-action adaptation of the immensely popular manga One Piece, and it’s at the heart of recent reconceptions of pirates in popular culture.
Set in a fictional, sea-centric world where pirates regularly face off against the government’s authoritarian marine force, Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece has captured the imagination of adventure readers around the globe — first as a manga, then as an anime. With more than 500 million copies sold, the ongoing manga is the bestselling comic of all time. And it’s all about pirates, one of Western pop culture’s most enduring yet least diversified character types. For existing One Piece fans, the new Netflix series will most likely be judged in the context of its beloved source material. But, for those unfamiliar with the manga and anime, One Piece will most likely be judged in the context of the pirate adventure stories that have come before.
In our culture, most depictions of pirates — fictional, historical, or both — have been directly inspired by a specific subset of pirates: white, European male captains living during the Golden Age of Piracy, between the 1650s and the 1730s. (Think Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, and Calico Jack.) Most of this narrow depiction of pirates can be traced back to one book: A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates. Published by Captain Charles Johnson (believed to be a pen name for Robinson Crusoe novelist Daniel Defoe) in England in 1724, the book contained (perhaps exaggerated) biographies of famous pirates. It introduced concepts including the Jolly Roger, pirates with peg legs, and buried treasure, and was a major influence
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