Over the weekend, Netflix and Wit Studio shared concept art for their upcoming remake of the long-running anime juggernaut, The One Piece. While a majority of the Straw Hat pirate’s East Blue-era designs were a quintessential nostalgia affair for fans, its continued whitewashing trend of crew member Usopp left a lot to be desired. Usopp’s new concept art, while a huge departure from either creator Eiichiro Oda or Toei Animation’s designs upon first blush, depicts the pirate sniper with noticeably fairer skin than he had in his debut.
While whitewashing isn’t a new phenomenon for anime fans with characters like Casca from Berserk losing her melanin as the series progressed, it's especially endemic to One Piece as a series. This has led to a bunch of fans highlighting how Usopp continuously appears to have fairer skin the longer One Piece continues on social media. Here are a few reactions to Usopp’s design in The One Piece: The fact that Usopp’s melanin is just GONE is insane.
https://t.co/4pTZANSqyr pic.twitter.
com/gWNCcNHb6i — Otaku Big Boy D.J. (@OhHeyDJ) August 11, 2024 its really not that hard https://t.
co/2JYAfUglSq pic.twitter.com/yAJGJPydTV — AK0 (@AK0UTLIAR) August 11, 2024 They still going with those f**kin’ lips, huh? If Shaman King can fix it for its remake anime—One Piece can easily.
https://t.co/kleILf1dCX pic.twitter.
com/PrRvR2ggWG — Veerender Singh Jubbal (@Veeren_Jubbal) August 11, 2024 Aside from Usopp, fellow crewmember Nico Robin also got a new design post-time skip. While Nico’s whitewashing is in contention among fans, who believe her time in Alabasta’s desert led to her having an olive skin tone (despite her having the same skin tone in Impel Down flashbacks as a child), Usopp’s whitewashing is more problematic when you consider his given nationality. In One Piece’s 56th Shitsumon wo Boshu Suru (SBS) —a Q&A column that would accompany a new manga chapter— creator Eiichiro Oda revealed the nationalities of the Straw Hat crew, with Luffy being Brazilian, Zoro being Japanese, and Usopp being of African descent.
While this bit of lore hasn’t been made explicitly official in One Piece’s lore, it has been reflected in the casting of its live action series . Clearly, a lot of effort is being put into WIT studio's mix of industry veterans and upstarts who grew up reading One Piece. Chief among them is the team’s implementation of a video game-esque 3D map of its towns to breathe a sense of identity into the setting and overarching themes.
More specifically, One Piece's predominant themes or racial and sociopolitical struggles, which director Masashi Koizuka holds in high regard as what makes the long-running series special. "Themes in the original manga is deep. Like war or stepping in topics of race.
It allows all ages of readers to ponder about it, and be entertained at the same time,” director Masashi Koizuka said in the video. "This is the most intriguing part of the manga in my opinion." While these efforts are commenable, fans feel like WIT let them down when it came to righting what's long been felt as a wrong the fandom has overlooked with Usopp's design.
Although the team is devoted to not altering too much from the original work despite Oda’s encouragement not to copy and paste his panels while expressing themselves, fans feel like WIT already let them down when it came to righting the wrong of Usopp's design. Isaiah Colbert is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow them on Twitter @ShinEyeZehUhh.
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