One Piece and it's monstrous worldbuilding!

 SPOILERS FOR ONE PIECE IF YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED 

First paragraph should be fine if you're avoiding spoilers... I think?

    
    One Piece and it’s amazing worldbuilding. What is One Piece, it is a shonen manga series created by Eiichiro Oda. Shonen means young boy, or teenage male. Shonen is a genre of story for manga or anime where the story is designed to appeal to that type of audience, these days we don’t think of it like “It’s a show for guys” more so we think of it like “Ripped dudes fighting each other while yelling!”. Now that’s the genre, but One Piece isn’t just that, and neither is the most famous Shonen arguably Dragon Ball. One Piece follows a Monkey D. Luffy after eating the Gum Gum fruit a Devil fruit that makes him into a rubber man. He sails the seas to find crewmates so that he can become the Pirate King. Some popular shonen series set the characters up with a big goal or dream that they are deadest on usually from a young age. Son Goku’s is to be the strongest martial artist, Naruto is to be the leader of his village the Hokage, those are a couple examples. But the world that Oda has created and is still creating is one that is so vast that you will get lost in its pages. The story starts in the East Blue, where Luffy and the first few core members of the Straw Hats come from. This part of the ocean is calm, much like what we would see if we went to our oceans. 

After a few arcs they sail off to the Grand Line, where things start getting crazy, they find out islands have their own magnetic fields, which makes the oceans tides unpredictable and hectic. This also causes islands to have their own seasons. At the entrance of the Grand Line the Straw Hats run into a person who is watching over this very huge whale. This whale has scars on its head because it’s been slamming itself into the mountain that separates the Grand Line and the East Blue. The man watching over the whale and says its name is Laboon.

    

     Laboon has been waiting at Reverse Mountain ever since it was just a little whale. It’s been waiting for a pirate crew that had fun with Laboon and they promised to come back but never did come back. Luffy in his very interesting way fights with the whale and then makes friends with him drawing his Jolly Roger on Laboon’s head as a sign of their friendship.

    Moving onto the New World is where they run into even bigger problems with tougher foes and more of the world. Back in the Grand Line the Straw Hats which at this point consists of Luffy, Zoro a three sword style swordsmen, Nami their navigator, Sanji their cook, Usopp their sniper, Chopper a cute deer who ate the human-human fruit which lets him speak and turn into a humanoid deer (he can turn into different forms, his main form is a small cute deer standing on his two legs) he’s their doctor, and finally my personal favorite Nico Robin their archeologist.

    Robin’s goal is to find the Rio Poneglyph, it’s a tablet with a specific language only certain individuals can translate. This tablet holds the history of the world, specifically the Void Century that no one knows anything about because the World Government has covered it up. All these Straw Hats, with more to come have their own specific dreams which gives them even more importance which doesn’t let them become side characters. After Robin joins the crew, they find their way to an island called Jaya Island. Except part of this island is missing. This island used to look like a huge skull, now its reduced to something much smaller. The Straw Hats fall upon this strange phenomenon happening as they were sailing, a stream of water shooting up from under them into the sky. This is called the Knock Up Stream. This shot them so high up they landed in the clouds, which brings them to their next adventure into the island of Skypiea. 

The story of the Island of Jaya connects with the story of Skypiea. You can see the many ways that Oda has built up his world. In the Punk Hazard arc at this point in the story another individual has joined the crew, he is a Ship Wright, one who fixes up ships. He is a cyborg essentially, always wearing speedos because he does.

 In the beginning of this arc, they run into a ghost ship with a talking singing Skeleton. His name is Brook, he’s kind of a pervert, but is a nice guy. Luffy just asks him to join the crew just because he’s a talking skeleton and Luffy thinks he's cool and funny.

 Later on we get his backstory finding out that he was part of the crew who met Laboon all those years ago. Now we see why they couldn’t keep their promise, because the main antagonist of this arc was keeping them captive with his Devil Fruit abilities. How is a skeleton talking and cracking jokes? Because he ate the Revive-Revive fruit, which does what the name says, except as a Skeleton. We first saw Brook in chapter 442, we first see Laboon in chapter 102. One small story of a whale comes full circle. We still have yet to see Brook come back and see Laboon since he has joined the Straw Hats and are crossing the whole world. Hopefully on their way back around the world Brook can finally reunite with Laboon as he says he will keep his promise. This is just a taste of what One Piece has to offer, there's so much in here, from political issues with different races, and the World Government having some good people and some bad people in it's ranks makes what they stand for very complex. Other issues like racism against humans from Fishmen and vice versa, to very emotional beats that will make anyone cry. One Piece debuted on July 1997 with its first chapter, and is still running with 1031 chapters. It currently holds the Guinness world record of the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author. It's a scary read, took a long time, but it is very worth it!