**SPOILERS UP AHEAD**

I want to start off by saying a blog post is simply not a good enough medium to express my feelings about this series. There is honestly no good way to express my feelings about this series. But I must try.

Continuing off my last post, my desire to binge more anime content only greatened after finishing Bleach. I wanted MORE character arcs, MORE unique abilities, MORE heartwarming interactions, MORE banter (love the banter), and MORE power scaling.

So, naturally, I decided to finish off the Big 3. The only one remaining, the beast, coming in at more than the length of the other 2/3 of the Big 3 combined (this is starting to sound like WWE RAW sorry), Eichiro Oda’s One Piece.

I started watching this show just to fill time in between classes so didn’t think too much of it, I kind of just dove in.

It started out as I expected, a fairly low-stakes, fun adventure-type story centered around my best boy, the humble, Monkey D. Luffy. The plot seemed pretty straightforward, as Luffy stated it right in the first episode:. He wants to be King of the Pirates.

Most “real fans” say it was interesting from the jump, but I mostly disagree with that stance. The beginning of the show was slow in my opinion. There was not a lot known about Luffy, no characters really introduced, and the plot was not very clear other than Luffy wanted to get to the Grand Line.

Took a little bit for me, but episode 28 is where my interest really piqued, and episode 37 was where I was a lock to finish the series out (Canon event for me).

After watching a couple shows, I noticed the shonen trend, as I assume most people do. Protagonists tend to have these over-wordly dreams that they work towards in the background while they go through a series of adventures. (Hokage, Wizard King, etc.)

However, becoming the Pirate King was different. Luffy is different.

It took me a while to put my finger on it because frankly, on the surface, Luffy is a pretty bland character. Not a ton of depth, his actions were fairly predictable, and he was always the one to beat the big bad, just like a protagonist should.

It actually wasn’t until I had watched about, 10 different shonen anime that I realized he was different. So different that I am going to dedicate an entirely new post to why Luffy is different, so I will get off this tangent for now.

Watching the show was an adventure in and of itself. You laugh with the crew, cry with the crew, cheer with the crew, learn with the crew, and most importantly of all, and you grow with the crew.

I don’t know if Oda intended for this, or if it was some beautiful byproduct, but the sheer length of time required to watch or read all of One Piece, whether through binge or the weekly tune-in, makes it so that the enjoyer literally has to grow up with the series to see it through. People who were 16, 17, who started reading or watching around the start are now well into their 30’s.

Even people who catch up to experience the Final Saga with the rest of us should probably expect to wait a few years before seeing it through to the end.

This is something I came to really appreciate about the series, as it always provides a constant even though life and everything else about it is absolutely not.

That being said, I finished watching One Piece in about 10 months from start to around the middle of Whole Cake Island. I had been watching it weekly until about the start of Wano. Then, like most people, I got very impatient and starting reading the manga.

I’ve been reading and watching the series on a weekly basis ever since. Every week I basically froth at the mouth for a new chapter, get excited to see the Toei bring the manga chapters to life (especially as of late, I mean Garp vs. Aokiji?) insane.

There’s so much more to write about this series, but I realize it’s too much at once. Even as I am typing this all out, I am discovering so many small thoughts and ideas related to One Piece that I want to expand upon, and that makes me really excited to continue writing posts. Here’s to the next!

Thanks for reading. Welcome to 20 Pages & 20 Minutes.