I don’t think people fully realise just how successful One Piece is as a book series.
To put it into perspective, Harry Potter is the bestselling book series of all time, having sold just over 600 million copies worldwide. One Piece is estimated to have sold somewhere between 500 and 570 million copies.
It often gets excluded from those “bestselling book series” conversations because it’s a manga, but if we were being honest about the numbers, it would comfortably sit alongside the biggest literary phenomena ever created.
What’s especially fascinating to me is not just how successful it is, but how repeatedly successful it is.
Every few years, a new wave of people discovers One Piece. Interest explodes again. Discussions reignite. The fandom renews itself. And when something remains this culturally dominant for this long, it’s worth asking why.
Especially as writers.
I think there are a lot of things fantasy and speculative fiction writers can learn from One Piece, and that’s what I want to talk about today.
The timing also feels particularly relevant right now because Netflix has been heavily promoting the second season of its live-action One Piece adaptation. As a result, a lot of people who would never normally pick up manga have suddenly found themselves reading it.
What’s been really interesting is seeing book reviewers and literary-focused creators engaging with the series from a completely different angle than the average anime fan. There’s been a lot of fresh analysis and genuine curiosity about why this thing works so well.
So here’s my take.
The first thing to acknowledge is the obvious one: One Piece is fundamentally a heroic myth. It’s a reskinned hero’s journey in the tradition of The Odyssey or Star Wars.
A young protagonist with unusual abilities sets out into the world, gathers allies, overcomes impossible odds, and changes the world around him.
It’s a structure humans clearly respond to. We’ve been telling variations of this story for thousands of years.
But underneath that familiar structure, there are several other things happening that make One Piece feel unusually powerful.
The first is that it’s a found family narrative.
This is one of my favourite tropes in all of storytelling, and many of my favourite books, films, and television series share it in common. Across the early arcs of One Piece, Monkey D. Luffy travels from place to place gathering companions who gradually become his crew and his family.
Now, there’s a bad version of this trope and a good version.
The bad version is when the cast are essentially interchangeable – the same personality wearing different costumes. What Eiichiro Oda does instead is give every crew member a specific emotional wound.
And crucially, those wounds never disappear after the introductory arc.
Each character joins the crew carrying some deep insecurity or unresolved pain, and their personal story continues long after their introduction.
For me, it looks something like this:
Luffy fears abandonment and losing the people he loves. Roronoa Zoro fears he may never be strong enough to achieve his dream. Nami fears powerlessness and the loss of freedom. Usopp carries shame about weakness and cowardice. Sanji seems convinced he must earn love through service because he doesn’t inherently deserve it.
What makes this structure so effective is that all of these individual emotional journeys interlock with one another. The crew doesn’t simply become stronger physically – they slowly help each other heal.
And beyond the thematic depth, there’s a much simpler reason this works so well.
Downtime.
When I think about my favourite moments in One Piece – or in other found family stories like Firefly – it’s rarely the action scenes or dramatic reveals that come to mind first.
It’s the campfire conversations. The dinners. The arguments. The jokes. The characters being idiots together.
Oda is brilliant at this.
Some of the best scenes in One Piece are simply the crew eating, laughing, fighting, or teasing one another on the ship. That’s the real magic of a strong ensemble cast. If readers genuinely enjoy spending time with your characters, you’ve unlocked something incredibly powerful.
Another technique Oda uses repeatedly is something I’d describe as a mirrored backstory.
Watch how he introduces major characters and villains. Often, the villain functions as a distorted reflection of the hero.
It’s as though Oda asks: what would this character become if all their flaws hardened into something ugly?
Take Usopp and Kuro. Both are liars, but one lies to exploit while the other lies to inspire and protect.
Or Nami and Arlong. Both are obsessed with maps and navigation, but for entirely different reasons. Nami sees mapping the world as freedom. Arlong sees it as domination.
Even Buggy feels like a distorted mirror of Luffy. Both are clownish and absurd, but where Luffy remains joyful and sincere, Buggy becomes cynical and selfish.
This is such a useful tool for fantasy writers in particular.
When building antagonists, ask yourself: what qualities make my protagonist heroic? Then ask what those same qualities would look like if twisted in the wrong direction.
The next major strength of One Piece is its setting structure.
At its core, it’s a frontier narrative.
It follows the same tradition as classic westerns: a wandering hero arrives in a troubled town, discovers a local injustice, and becomes involved in solving it.
Only in One Piece, every island is essentially its own miniature civilisation.
Each location has:
its own culture, its own aesthetic, its own political tensions, its own social wound.
And that idea of the “social wound” is incredibly important.
Take Skypiea. Beneath all the fantasy spectacle, the arc is fundamentally about generational conflict, stolen land, historical violence, and the rise of authoritarian religious power.
The villains, heroes, and ordinary people are all shaped by those underlying tensions.
That’s a fantastic exercise for worldbuilders.
When designing a city, kingdom, or civilisation, ask yourself: what is the unresolved wound at the centre of this place? What historical pressure has shaped the people who live there?
That question immediately makes fictional worlds feel more alive.
And finally, there’s the thing that I think truly makes One Piece magical:
its imagination.
Its absolute willingness to be strange.
This is difficult to teach because it comes from creative fearlessness more than technique. But when I think about writers and creators with overwhelming imaginative energy, I think of people like Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Stephen King, and Harlan Ellison.
Especially 1980s Stephen King.
Those books are packed with bizarre choices, surreal ideas, and concepts that feel completely unrestrained. And I think that’s because the writers weren’t afraid of seeming ridiculous.
Harlan Ellison once said:
“Never be afraid to go there.”
And I think Oda embodies that philosophy perfectly.
One Piece constantly pushes itself toward the weirdest possible version of an idea. Islands in the sky. Living skeleton musicians. Snail telephones. Cyborg shipwrights. Absurd powers. Emotional sincerity sitting right beside complete nonsense.
And somehow it works because Oda commits completely.
That’s a lesson worth remembering as writers.
When you’re building worlds or inventing stories, don’t immediately suppress the strange idea. Push it further first. See where it goes. Let your imagination become excessive before you start editing yourself down.
Because often, the memorable thing is the thing you were initially afraid was “too much”.
Those are just a few of the narrative techniques and storytelling instincts I think make One Piece so enduringly successful. There are plenty more.
So if you’re a fan, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think Oda does especially well.
And if you’ve never tried One Piece because you assumed it was just another long-running anime series, maybe this is the moment to give it a chance.