By: Kelvin Akinyemi
Love and Its Impact on Emotional Development in One Piece
Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece, an animated series known for its action-packed storytelling and humorous moments, follows Monkey D. Luffy, a young pirate, who sets out on a journey to find the One Piece and become the next Pirate King. Although pirates are generally considered a force of evil, Luffy’s crew, the Straw Hat Pirates, highlight the complexity within the One Piece world through their countless good deeds and commitment to friendship. Whole Cake Island, one of the most recent arcs, further emphasizes One Piece’s complexity through its introduction of Big Mom, one of the four Emperors of the Sea, and the Big Mom Pirates. Big Mom behaves in typical pirate fashion, ravaging islands and manipulating people with her power & authority as an Emperor, and her pirate crew consists of a few subordinates and her eighty-five children, forty-six sons and thirty-nine daughters from forty-three ex-husbands. While Big Mom’s children have a clear bond with each other and with her, she commands respect from her crew and her subordinates with equal parts love and fear. Whole Cake Island centers around Big Mom commanding and arranging the marriage of Pudding, Big Mom’s 35th daughter, and Sanji, a member of the Straw Hat Pirates. As the wedding approaches, Eiichiro Oda establishes certain fairy tale elements for a variety of reasons. Whole Cake Island’s landscape mostly consists of sweets and confections made by the exploitation of stolen resources from different islands and parallels the witch’s food house from Hansel and Gretel. The landscape also shifts & changes frequently, particularly in the Seducing Woods, due to the “homies,” objects imbued with Big Mom’s soul. As the plot of Whole Cake Island progresses, Oda slowly reveals the backstories of Big Mom, Pudding, and Sanji, each full of themes of abuse & neglect (familial or otherwise) reminiscent of stories like Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, and Cinderella & Little Red Riding Hood, respectively. From a psychoanalytical perspective, Eiichiro Oda utilizes fairy tale elements primarily within the backstories of Big Mom, Pudding, and Sanji and throughout Whole Cake Island to underscore how true love and a lack of it impacts personal development.
Central to Whole Cake Island’s plot, Big Mom acts as an agent of chaos within this interesting arc. Unlike her title suggests, Big Mom acts quite childish from the moment she’s introduced to the audience, singing about her brutal exploits of other islands with her “homies” and ravaging Whole Cake Island after she goes on one of her “Hunger Pang” tantrums. While having one of her Hunger Pangs, Big Mom becomes incredibly violent and unreasonable until she eats what she is craving at that moment, often destroying homes and even people in the process. The destruction of homes on any other island would be a much more significant issue, but on Whole Cake Island, the damage is minimal as nearly everything within Big Mom’s territory is made completely out of food.
Maria Tatar’s Classical Fairy Tales examines the relationship between food and fairy tales. “Fairy tales with child protagonists often take us squarely into the household, where everyone seems to be anxious, not only about what’s for dinner but more important about who’s for dinner” (Tatar 230). Oda takes the general family structure in regard to food in fairy tales and inverts it to offer an explanation for Big Mom’s present behavior. In her backstory, due to her voracious appetite, Linlin (Big Mom) is orphaned on an island where she meets her new adoptive family and her adoptive mother, a nun with special soul powers. (cite here). Linlin has another Hunger Pang attack after observing the island’s fasting ritual, nearly destroying the island in the process, and while she is given permission to stop fasting, she is never reprimanded primarily out of fear of her strength. At this moment it is clear that she is “given permission” to outrage whenever she wants. At the end of her backstory, after resolving their issues, Linlin’s family throws her a birthday party with a delicious cake and in her excitement, Linlin realizes that everyone has gone missing, but after exhibiting soul powers herself, it is implied that Big Mom eats her adoptive family. As an adult, Big Mom’s continued appetite & hunger pang tantrums, unnaturally large family without a stable father figure, and mistreatment of other people serve as indications that Big Mom, despite all of her strength and power, has not emotionally developed that much since she was a child and still yearns for stability and love. Due to her childish mindset, Big Mom pushes the responsibilities of a parent, i.e. watching & protecting her children, to her oldest son Katakuri, and behaves like a child, putting down her children rather than uplifting them, as evidenced by Pudding.
Another major storyline within Whole Cake Island is Pudding and Sanji’s wedding as ordered by Big Mom. Part of why Big Mom has such a large number of children with so many different ex-husbands is because she uses the familial tie to establish connections and expand her territory and influence. Pudding, a descendant of the Third-Eye tribe, also has a third eye, and always covers it due to her childhood. Maria Tatar’s Classical Fairy Tales considers how both love and physical appearance intersect. “Beauty and the Beast may be a love story about the transformative power of compassion, but it also has an emotional ferocity that encodes messages about how we manage anxieties about monstrosity and alterity” (Tatar 30).
Oda uses the core principle behind the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale type to flesh out Pudding’s character, despite Pudding not having an anthropomorphic transformation. Pudding was bullied as a child, constantly told that she was a monster by the children around her, including her mother. In fact, Big Mom is the one who tells Pudding that her third eye is ugly and that she should cover it. Studies show that a lack of positive affirmation from parental figures often has a significant impact on the mental well-being of children. “The importance of parents early in the life span is paramount as they can facilitate or hinder the development of emotional abilities and overall adaptive functioning in offspring” (Skinner 2016). Due to constantly getting bullied and not receiving support from her parental figure, Pudding eventually snaps and decides to become the monster that everyone believes her to be. She attacks those who bullied her with a knife without reservation and becomes cruel and mean-spirited up to the present.
Oda completes Pudding’s Beauty and the Beast tale within the arc during the wedding. Big Mom uses the wedding as a front to deceive and kill Sanji and steal his family’s impressive technology. At the crux of the Big Mom’s plan is Pudding, who has the ability to alter memories, whose third eye is supposed to shock Sanji for long enough to shoot him. Though once her eye gets revealed, Sanji remarks on its beauty, something Pudding has never experienced, and the plan falls to pieces. Throughout Whole Cake Island, Sanji shows nothing but love and affection towards Pudding, who believes it to be a deception based on her childhood experiences with bullies and her mother. Fortunately, whatever grasp Big Mom has on Pudding slips away as Sanji’s kindness offers the support that Pudding desperately yearns for her entire life.
Despite the affection that Sanji shows Pudding throughout Whole Cake Island, he truly wishes to return to the Thousand Sunny with his chosen family, the Straw Hats. The final major storyline within Whole Cake Island is Sanji’s rescue from Big Mom by the Straw Hats. Maria Tatar’s Classic Fairy Tales highlights the tense family situations that Cinderella stories typically contain and the struggle to succeed in spite of these often-abusive relationships. “The plots of “Cinderella” stories are driven by the anxious jealousy of biological mothers and stepmothers who subject the heroine to one ordeal of domestic drudgery after another…the tales capture the hard facts of everyday life, staging domestic arrangements that led to the physical abuse of girls, with cruel parents and stepparents who exploit rather than protect the young” (Tatar 141). Interestingly, Oda combines elements from both Cinderella and Skylappjenta, a Little Red Riding Hood-derived story, to accentuate his kindness in spite of the abuse he has endured from his family. Sanji’s brothers, genetically altered by their father to have superpowers and be cold-hearted, strike and injure Sanji throughout their childhood for not being like them and having an interest in cooking, something “unbecoming” of royalty. Eventually, he escapes from his family with the help of his sister Reiju, and crosses the sea where he eventually meets Owner Zeff, his adoptive father, who teaches Sanji truly how to cook and pursue his passions.
Despite Sanji’s escape, his past will not leave him as his father offers Sanji to Big Mom effectively as a sacrifice claiming ownership over Sanji in much the same way as the grandmother claims ownership of her granddaughter in Skylappjenta. “You belong to us” (Iram Haq 2012, 5:31). As Sanji’s crewmates come to save him, they find themselves lost within the Seducing Woods facing countless enemies, and only after a decisive struggle does Luffy escape the woods, mortally wounded. Oda juxtaposes Sanji’s family relationship dynamic with Sanji’s relationship dynamic with the Straw Hats through Luffy’s sheer determination to bring Sanji back to the crew, his real family. Despite this, initially, Sanji is unable to return with Luffy because he is being held hostage as his adoptive father’s life is on the life depending on Sanji’s cooperation. Beyond all else, Luffy’s determination has been one of the strongest elements of One Piece because it is this exact determination that has driven him to challenge even an Emperor of the Sea in pursuit of becoming the King of the Pirates. So when Luffy cries out, “I can’t become the King of the Pirates without you,” (Oda Chapter 843 pg.14) it emphasizes that Luffy holds his chosen family, the Straw Hats, in front of his ambition and is willing to sacrifice everything for his family. Eventually, Sanji, donning a red cape, must return to Luffy and heal him using his food after crossing through the woods effectively completing the Little Red Riding Hood aspect of Whole Cake Island, and when the Straw Hats end up saving Sanji from Big Mom and the Big Mom Pirates, they complete the Cinderella story Sanji’s rags to riches story, completing his Cinderella story as well.
Throughout Whole Cake Island, Eiichiro Oda tells a story of familial abuse and manipulation and implements multiple fairy tale elements to varying effects. Big Mom, a major driving force for the story, due to her voracious appetite and overwhelming strength, a character aspect taken from Hansel and Gretel, never develops emotionally. Big Mom’s lack of emotional development led to poor emotional development in her children like Pudding who develops a poor self-image and personality, aspects familiar to stories like Beauty and the Beast. Sanji’s familial abuse and victory in spite of this abuse mirrors the victory of characters like Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood from Skylappjenta, and in all of these stories, the fairy tale elements implemented within them effectively and succinctly demonstrate that proper love and development of relationships at an early age leads to proper development as an adult.
