One Piece's Gender-Flipped Straw Hats Are Even Stranger Than Fans Expect
The large cast of One Piece's bizarre characters is constantly expanding, with more than 1,000 chapters of the incredibly popular manga currently published. One of the latest addition is Yamato, the son of Kaido and possibly the next addition to the Straw Hat crew, whose exact gender is still a matter of discussion among fans. However, not every One Piece reader knows that the manga's creator Eiichiro Oda has also gender-swapped many of his main characters.
The «experiment» started in the SBS (Oda's Q&A section) for One Piece volume 56. As the storyline at that moment heavily featured Ivankov, a genderfluid character, one reader asked Oda to draw genderswapped versions of the Straw Hat Pirates. The result was funny and unexpectedly accurate, to the point that many readers asked for a follow-up drawing, this time detailing all the pirates of the «Worst Generation», aka the Eleven Supernovas, and Oda obliged in volume 72. In volume 76 it was the turn of the Shichibukai, the Seven Warlords of the Sea, and finally, in volume 87, the mangaka accepted the request of yet another reader, this time to draw the original four Admirals of the Marine. While Oda-sensei jokingly expressed regret in the SBS, calling the drawings «creepy» and «weird», it's clear he had a lot of fun designing these characters, and also put some effort into it, judging from the results, that are still pretty weird in some cases.
Related: One Piece Theory: Luffy's Father Is the Key to Zoro's True Origin
Reddit user Competitive_Reading9 assembled all of the gender-swap artwork into one image and some of the results are quite strange. For example, Nico Robin's male version is very muscular and burly, while the regular character is always calm and elegant.
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