It has come to my attention that there are quite a number of people following One Piece now who didn’t start from the first chapter. It got me to wonder how accessible it is and how hard it can really be to understand the series if one starts reading from a later arc, like Wano for example.
Accessibility for those who don’t start at Chapter 1.
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I believe people can choose to jump into any form of media whenever they want, but that they'll be missing out on something they can never quite recreate or recapture.
Reading One Piece from Chapter 1 and reading all the way up to the current chapters is a different experience. Even if they decide to go back and read from the beginning later, they've lost that sense of experiencing events with full context for the first time.
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I believe people can choose to jump into any form of media whenever they want, but that they'll be missing out on something they can never quite recreate or recapture.
Reading One Piece from Chapter 1 and reading all the way up to the current chapters is a different experience. Even if they decide to go back and read from the beginning later, they've lost that sense of experiencing events with full context for the first time.
Understanding that, I don’t think people who start reading from the middle will necessarily make their experience any much less special, because if they still enjoy it, then that’s probably enough to conclude one had a special experience regardless. I’m glad that One Piece can be a series where you don’t have to read all of in order to enjoy the most recent chapter, even if some things still get lost on the reader. It has been suggested to me that the arcs are simple enough to get across in short summaries for anyone that only needs that much, which Oda seems to agree with, and I’m inclined to as well.
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Back pre-timeskip maybe the arcs were self-contained enough to understand for someone jumping straight into them, but if you tried that with Wano, I can only imagine how confusing and hard to keep track of everything would be. Hell, it's sometimes hard to follow even for people that read it week to week and therefore have more time to process everything.
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Obviously One Piece as an ongoing thing is constantly getting new readers, so that happens ALL THE TIME.
It also happens with Superman and Batman and Spiderman and the X-Men.
A lot of people's first issue ever with the characters will inevitably be the single worst story ever done with the characters, or a bad jumping on point in the middle of the story. Especially in OP's case where Jump is an anthology.
But raw pop culture osmosis makes them bigger and more exposed than any one given story. It's actually pretty rare a kid will buy a spiderman comic without already knowing who he is.
For any super long running narrative, especially decades old ones, there's rarely an ideal jumping on point, and everyone will have missed some of the story… unless you came in at very start or the start of a new arc. There's going to be a bunch who started picking up Jump just last year and their first real OP experience is in Wano during the raid which is a complete mess. And that... year 23 sample is really not a good isolated year to pick to show. It tells you about the series, but it in no way gives the breadth of it or what its best at.
But it happens all the time, it's part of how these things work. Thats why Oda started doing little power recaps when he brought back old characters like the Baroque Works crew.
Heck, basically the entirety of the western market started Dragonball with Z and missed out on the entire first 1/3 of the series, and most people's first episode they was probably wasn't actually Raditz, I know I started catching it around Namek. And you roll with the flow and you pick up on it as you go along, and if you're interested, you backtrack when possible and see the start if you can.
And this happens with tv shows ALL the time. Starting from the stat is actually pretty rare unless its super hyped event, most people will catch a random episode then get interested from there. I can list a boat ton of shows that I started with in the middle, watched through syndication, then got the first episode on the back end. Some shows actually benefit from missing the start, because the earlier episodes are much weaker than the later ones.
This is less the case than it used to be in the age of streaming, where if you're interested in something its much much easiesr to start at the start, but for decades its largely assumed that you're going to start in the middle and not see everything. Especially super long runner shows before dvds or hyper syndication... no one was expected to see every episode of MASH or Little House on the Prairie, let alone in sequence, so they weren't written with any assumption that you would..
With manga its a liiiiittle bit easier to deal with than american comics because its one author, with a definitive start point, and a single title with consistent numbering. It's feasible to start at the start. You just... can't do that with Spiderman. With his multiple stories and crossovers and decades of material with different writers that have all been collected in different ways... there's probably almost no one alive that has read literally every Spiderman book. (Compilation CDs help some) But OP its entirely doable.
So it's a mixed bag. There's nothing inherantly wrong with not knowing the entire story of a decades old property... yet with manga you can manage it if you really love the series.
(This is also incidentally one of the keys to the success of Demon Slayer... it's short. Easy to get the whole thing, it's finished, no major commitment.)
Though I wonder how much harder it is to do for something like Kochekame, which was also an insane long runner but not the same sales juggernaut so its not always going to be in stock... nor does the story demand you read it in sequence.
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My first experience with OP was watching some random episodes on tv, at age 10 maybe.
I remember seeing Sanji beating Kurobii and Luffy's neck being stretched by Nojiko and Gen(dubbed), so I got a couple of episodes from the middle of the action in Arlong Park, maybe also some from before the figths, and it was cool. It was easy to follow a bit of the plot and know who the good guys and bad guys were.But my strongest memory was watching a Little Garden episode, when Zoro, Nami, and Vivi are almost wax statues, and Luffy is sooo mad at Mr. 3 for interrupting the giant's duel. From that recap scene alone I could understand that this was a "magical" world, where giants existed and had great and important duels, and that the protagonist, Luffy, and a good sense of honor while the villain, Mr. 3, was despicable because he was interfering with something important just to make a quick buck. Then I saw all those crazy powers and wanted to see the rest of the series.
I also got to see a couple of Arabasta episodes after that but I only started the series for real a couple or two of years later, when I was around 13/14 and my friends were getting into anime and one of them told me about OP and I saw it was that cool show I had once seen on tv.So yeah, I think OP works even if you start watching it randomly.
Oda is very good at showing the good guys, the bad guys, and having a couple of simple plot points that people can follow at any time if people pick up the series at random.A bit of context: For some reason the broadcaster choose to use OP as filler/placeholder show to close the broadcast.
Back then the public tv channels still had dead hours or infomercials from 4 am to 7 am, and OP was used along side with Lum (Urusei Yatsura) to air right before those infomercials hours. I suppose they ended up finding Urusei Yatsura to raunchy to air during the weekend mornings cartoons, since it was subbed, but OP still got a bunch of episodes dubbed and I have no ideia why they didn't fit it into the kids programs timeslot. I think it was around the same time Yu-Gi-Oh and other series were premiering, Pokemon was still huge, and Power Rangers was always a hit, so maybe those big series full of merchandise felt like safer choices against this weird pirate story. -
Something we should take into account as long time readers is that you don't know what you don't know. It might seem really confusing for us with the knowledge of the complexity of, say, wano and all that's lead to this if someone were to jump in halfway into the saga. But the reality is that they can engage with what is happening right then and there, and the simplified ways in which the build up manifests at the current time.
Take for a bad example the tendency by some concerned parents to fuss over things such as dominatrix gear in media. To them the getup carries significance, and they see it as overtly sexual, and therefore harmful to their kid. Meanwhile the contextless kid sees a badass in a cool leather suit. Or maybe they think it looks goofy and edgy. It will not however take away from the personality and interpersonal drama of the character, even if to fully understand them, it might require…deeper reading?
What I'm trying to say is that One Piece is a very emotionally driven series. It has plots and long term goals and character arcs that will have pay off that won't hit the same if you've not been on for the ride, but it won't be hard to follow what people are doing and why. It will just come off really different to us. Same as the difference between volume and weekly readers, to an extent.
I do wonder about the current raid, though, considering we're in complete chaos territory and characters tend to get a couple chapters worth of moments at a time at best, so it can be really hard to connect to anyone. Then again you have all the goofines and fighting, which might well be the reader's thing. We all read OP for different reasons and it sure can be frustrating when passionate people have come to view different parts of the whole as essential or what it's about.
Hey hi nice to meet you all, looks like my years of lurking has come to an end of sorts
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That's why streaming services are great for backlogs.
I pay $2 monthly and got access to thousands of chapters via the Shonen Jump application.
Buying the volumes for new user is insane, that's like a thousands dollar lol
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@Ghost:
Something we should take into account as long time readers is that you don't know what you don't know. It might seem really confusing for us with the knowledge of the complexity of, say, wano and all that's lead to this if someone were to jump in halfway into the saga. But the reality is that they can engage with what is happening right then and there, and the simplified ways in which the build up manifests at the current time.
Take for a bad example the tendency by some concerned parents to fuss over things such as dominatrix gear in media. To them the getup carries significance, and they see it as overtly sexual, and therefore harmful to their kid. Meanwhile the contextless kid sees a badass in a cool leather suit. Or maybe they think it looks goofy and edgy. It will not however take away from the personality and interpersonal drama of the character, even if to fully understand them, it might require…deeper reading?
What I'm trying to say is that One Piece is a very emotionally driven series. It has plots and long term goals and character arcs that will have pay off that won't hit the same if you've not been on for the ride, but it won't be hard to follow what people are doing and why. It will just come off really different to us. Same as the difference between volume and weekly readers, to an extent.
I do wonder about the current raid, though, considering we're in complete chaos territory and characters tend to get a couple chapters worth of moments at a time at best, so it can be really hard to connect to anyone. Then again you have all the goofines and fighting, which might well be the reader's thing. We all read OP for different reasons and it sure can be frustrating when passionate people have come to view different parts of the whole as essential or what it's about.
Hey hi nice to meet you all, looks like my years of lurking has come to an end of sorts
Good points, and your comparison reminded me of this Space Jam scene, where Bugs Bunny gets stiff after Lola's interaction.
As a kid it was clear that Bugs had just fallen for her, but it looked more like a visual gag, he was so enamoured that he froze in place. When rewatching the movie with friends when we where 20 years old, it was like "Wait what? Is this a boner joke? From Bugs Bunny? "(things we also noticed then, Space Jam has a Pulp Fiction reference, that's pretty dope)
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The first chapters I read were in a random issue of Jump I picked up in early/mid 2003, in the Buggy arc. I used to sit in Barnes & Noble and read Jump magazines. I didn't actually read volume 1 of One Piece until around Nov / Dec 2003. I don't really remember those chapters making as much of as an impact for me as the first issue I actually purchased, probably because I was unfamiliar with the characters and where they started from. I really picked up Jump magazine because of the anime I was already familiar with from Toonami / WB - Dragon Ball Z, Yu-Gi-Oh!, YuYu Hakusho, and Rurouni Kenshin. The magazine also contained One Piece, Naruto, Shaman king, and Sand Land, but I wasn't familiar with those series and so I read through them, but didn't really form an attachment. The first issue I purchased was the December 2003 issue (so released in November), which I kept reading and re-reading and so those are the first chapters that made a lasting impression on me and made me really invested in One Piece, Naruto, and Shaman King.
That probably doesn't really qualify - since I'd hardly classify the Buggy arc as basically the beginning. There wasn't a ton of established lore at that point in the story, so picking up from that point wasn't confusing at all and really, I only had to go back and read 1 volume worth of chapters.
But perhaps more in line with what you're talking about, Oda certainly is considering those readers as he writes One Piece now. In the chapters following the Luffy, Ace, and Sabo flashback, once the size of the cast had increased pretty dramatically, Oda started 're-introducing' characters with nametags / intro boxes after they were absent from the story for a while and he has continued that trend ever since. There's a very common page layout now where, a character who has been absent for a while, even within a given story arc, re-appears accompanied by a big, romanized name, to remind readers who this character is, or, for new readers, to provide a name. In the Reverie chapters, Oda also included little single-panel vignettes of past arcs for the benefit of new and forgetful readers (probably moreso the former).
I actually think that's partially why you're seeing a bigger surge in sales for series like Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen these days. On top of the high quality animation, theyr'e more accessible for Jump's primary demographic. I don't know if data suggests the readerbase for WSJ is aging or remaining constant, but from the perspective of new / young readers in Japan, picking up Jump, it's a lot easier for them to pick up a new series than invest time (and money, particularly money) involved in reading One Piece from the start.
Of course, One Piece is still wildly successful, so it's not hurting for sales and plenty of young people / new readers are still getting into the series. There's no cause for concern or anything, One Piece will continue to do extraordinarily well as long as Oda continues the series (and probably long after).
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What ideas have non-researchers who start from a later chapter come to presume anyway? One case I think I recall is that there are people who come to think that Shanks was the one who started the Straw Hat Pirates, and him passing down his hat to Luffy could give the impression that he passed down title of Captain to him like a future inheritance. They might even think that characters like Zoro and Nami used to work alongside Shanks, even though they have still yet to meet, and would never know that unless it was told to them or saw an in-depth flashback about it.
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Honestly it's more rare to find someone who actually started this series with chapter 1. Most people started with the anime and if they transitioned to the manga they often start where they left off in the anime, or the beginning of an arc, or at whatever plot point interests them(a certain flashback, a fight, whatever). I myself started with 4kids on TV during the Arlong arc, switched to the sub and started with Jaya as a starting point, then went back to EB/BW after G8, went back to Davy Back Fight and switched to manga which was at Robin rescue stuff and read the earlier manga later as I started buying volumes. It's fun to zigzag.
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Understanding that, I don’t think people who start reading from the middle will necessarily make their experience any much less special, because if they still enjoy it, then that’s probably enough to conclude one had a special experience regardless. I’m glad that One Piece can be a series where you don’t have to read all of in order to enjoy the most recent chapter, even if some things still get lost on the reader. It has been suggested to me that the arcs are simple enough to get across in short summaries for anyone that only needs that much, which Oda seems to agree with, and I’m inclined to as well.
https://i.ibb.co/xszv1Rs/C6811-D42-8616-42-D4-B0-BC-29-C13-A0-D5-BEE.png
It's not that it would be less special for them (people connect and resonate with different things), but from a fandom POV, I personally can't have a genuine, engaging conversation about One Piece with someone who skips arcs and reads summaries. One Piece is a visual medium. A summary is never going to contain those little nuances and complexities that reading the manga or watching the anime can bring.
Enjoying something that you "got the gist of" and fully understanding the context are completely different.
I'm not a gatekeeper and I whole-heartedly welcome anyone to partake One Piece how they choose. But that disconnect and lack of commitment (yes, OP is a big commitment, no matter how much we sugarcoat it) would automatically make me tune out from any conversation with someone like that. -
I really cant imagine jumping in to One Piece with w/e recently published chapter and never going back to the beginning to read the entire story.
But I may jist be a complete-ist cuz I eventually went back and read all Amazing Spider-Man issues, the X-Men books, Avengers, and a few other long running Marvel books. It's just the way I am.