One Piece Diaries #52: Boss Luffy Filler

One Piece is one of the most beloved anime in history, but at over 1,000 episodes, it’s tough for those who haven’t been watching from the start to jump on board. One Piece Diaries tracks one writer’s experience with this daunting rite of passage. With hype for the highs and critique for the lows, this column will help you decide whether to take your own One Piece journey – or let you relive the one you’re already on. It will update biweekly every other Thursday.

Episodes Watched: 406 – 407 – Boss Luffy Filler

Well, once again we’ve come to another set of Boss Luffy filler episodes. This time around, Luffy and his friends are trying to enter a portable shrine race, but their work gets sabotaged by the Thriller Bark Company, who want their own Oars-shaped shrine to win. The prize is a mythical wish-granting item, plus some serious cash.

I can’t say I was all that enthusiastic about watching these. In fact, I had to restrain myself from scrolling mindlessly through my phone while watching, and I kept pausing to see how many minutes I had left before I was free. The one thing I really liked was getting to see some of the characters who weren’t in the previous Boss Luffy fillers. Brook playing Bink’s Sake on the flute was an especially nice touch.

There’s not that much to say about the stories themselves, so I’ll just make two quick points. The first is that for some reason, I was convinced that Otae was going to be secretly evil. Maybe it’s just that she sounded so cloyingly sweet that it was hard to believe that she was who she said she was. I was a little disappointed when she turned out to be window-dressing, but whatever.

The other thing I’d like to note is that I figured something out regarding my thoughts on pervy jokes. The joke was that the treasure turned out to be a pair of golden panties. At first, I thought it was a swimsuit at first and thought it was going to be a joke about Franky and his clothing style. I laughed about this, but I stopped laughing once Brook started asking Otae to wear the panties.

One Piece has lots of jokes about sex or sex-adjacent things, but when the target of the joke is a dude, it’s usually about his behavior and choices. Meanwhile, if the target is a woman, it’s about other people violating her boundaries. No matter what, it’s nearly always the guy who has agency.

I’m glad to get that figured out in my head. I was confused about why I could laugh when I thought they were going to make a dick joke about Franky but the instant they made it about the women I was uncomfortable. I knew it wasn’t that I was comfortable with men being objectified or having their boundaries violated – I’m not. It’s because the jokes aren’t the same, even if they look like they are on the surface.

Anyway, it’s not that these episodes were bad, it’s just that there wasn’t really anything new on offer, so it was hard to get engaged. I was really into the Sabaody Archipelago arc, so getting derailed like this was a bit of a downer. Unless you’re a completionist or a huge Boss Luffy fan, I recommend skipping this arc and heading straight to Amazon Lily. Given what I’ve heard the arc is about and what I talked about above, I’m kind of scared of how the Amazon Lily arc is going to go, but as always I will remain cautiously optimistic.

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