One Piece and (In)Sensitivity in Hollywood

Some people may not like it, but the fact of the matter is that we live in a society that values political correctness, and to be honest, I’m entirely in favour of it. If you want to come and complain to me that a character isn’t white or straight or whatever, go ahead, but unless there’s something in the character’s story that inherently aligns them with one identity or another, I’ll never be convinced that diversity is a negative. Fortunately for me, then, political correctness is what sells these days and Hollywood knows it, so the creators of the live-action One Piece show made sure to have a diverse cast. But it’s this same trend towards sensitivity and inclusion that left me shocked when I saw the live-action One Piece’s fish-men.

There’s an inherent risk to reading race in a non-human character, and I’m not familiar with the source material, but from what I read online, I’m not the only person who picked up on the uncomfortable characterisation of the fish-men. It seems that in the original manga, the fish-men gave some slightly weird vibes to American readers, but given the fact that it’s Japanese, it doesn’t necessarily come across as being racist against black people. After all, the fish-men just represent the general experience of a people that have been enslaved and discriminated against, something which isn’t unique to black Americans, so it’s easy to move past.

So why, then, did the live-action remake go to such great lengths to make the fishmen black-coded?

Maybe I’m just reading into things, but when you take themes of past slavery and “fish-men power”, have the character use words typically associated with African American Vernacular English like “ain’t” and play hip-hop music every time they’re on screen, the association with black Americans becomes impossible to ignore. Being an allegory for the black American experience isn’t a problem - the problem is that the fish-men are all super-humanly strong thugs and gangsters with no redeeming qualities besides a vague traumatic history. Their characterisation plays into so many negative stereotypes about black people, and in the end, they’re shown to be complete villains without any of the main characters expressing any sympathy or desire to help right their past injustices.

I really don’t know what the creators were thinking when they were deciding how to portray the fish-men, especially given that one of them, Matt Owens, is a black man himself. The leader of the fish-men, Arlong, is played by McKinley Belcher III, also a black man. He gives a wonderful performance and brings the character to life, so I want to make it clear that I’m not criticising him or questioning whether he was the best choice for the role. But I can’t help but wonder, when he was cast, were the creators trying to play further into their stilted metaphor? Or were they hoping that casting a black actor would make the fish-men’s depiction hard to critique without coming off as racist? I assume it’s the former, as I want to believe that the creators were just trying to tell a diverse story that didn’t land quite right, but I don’t think the latter is impossible either.

I think that the fish-men in the live-action One Piece are really just a symptom of a greater problem in Hollywood. For all that Hollywood wants to be “woke”, they do it purely performatively and end up really missing the mark sometimes. Maybe the fish-men’s depiction isn’t as bad as I feel it is - I’m not going to pretend I speak for black Americans. At the same time, though, if there were a similar situation with a queer or female villain playing into negative stereotypes with no sympathy or redemption, it would definitely leave me feeling ill at ease. Hollywood now is so desperate to add progressive views to its works that it ends up enforcing negative stereotypes about the same groups they’re trying to champion. There’s nothing wrong with telling diverse stories, the problem is when they’re told without any sensitivity or awareness for the cultural context in which they’re being told.

One Piece isn’t the only work to suffer from this issue either. Recently I saw a joke online about how Dinsey will handle its live-action remake of Tarzan. Since Disney’s current trend is to cast people of colour in lead roles, they run into a bit of a sticky problem: should they have a black actor play the primitive, monkey-like Tarzan? Just like the fish-men, that reinforces negative stereotypes and things will get really ugly, really fast. But then again, casting a white person isn’t “woke” enough, so what’s to be done? There are solutions to this, of course: have Tarzan be Asian, or maybe have Jane change race instead. Regardless of how the problem might be solved, though, it’s clear that audiences have already picked out the root issue of completely ignoring race when casting : not all stories are neutral. Not only because some stories are deeply linked to a cultural identity, as in the case of a film like Mulan, but also because some stories reflect the discourse around a cultural identity like that of fish-men. When this happens, then, the showrunners have to put more thought into the story if they want it to live up to its full potential and not come off as clumsy and unaware.

I’m not saying that these stories need to be censored, nor do their creators deserve to be cancelled. Outside of the characterisation of the fish-men, I found One Piece to be an entertaining show with a sweet message. What is needed, though, is for film and television to go beyond perfunctory efforts to promote diversity in casting. Creators need to make an effort to trulyunderstand the complexities of different identities. When they do that, they might finally learn how to tell stories about those identities in ways that are both thoughtful and empowering. It’s possible, of course, that the live-action One Piece is working up to a more nuanced story about the fish-men - well have to wait until the second season comes out to know for sure, though. Until then, the fish-men will remain just another sad symptom of Hollywood’s lazy-"woke" problem.