Netflix's One Piece Receives a Mixed Grade for Pirate Accuracy From Historian
In a clip from episode five of Netflix's live-action One Piece, pirate historian Rebecca Simon gives the show a mixed review for accuracy. The show, which is an adaptation of an Eiichiro Oda manga, centers on Monkey D. Luffy and the Straw Hat Pirates as they search for the show's eponymous treasure.
Through their exploits, they come up against the Marines and a number of formidable pirates. Regarding how true the Netflix adaptation of One Piece is in comparison to actual piracy, Simon provided a mixed review in an interview with Insider for their YouTube series "How Real Is It?"
The historian demonstrated how the usage of Wanted posters in the show differs from true life, but that Marines collaborating with pirates is really rather realistic, while demonstrating this with a clip from episode 5 at 16:30.
Simon said, "So what's interesting here is that we're seeing a Wanted poster about a specific pirate. Now, manhunts for pirates weren't very common, and this is because it was pretty rare for the government to throw so many resources into capturing one specific pirate. There's really only two cases during the Golden Age of piracy that we see manhunts. One for the pirate Henry Avery and one for the pirate Captain Kidd. They both operated in the Indian Ocean in the 1690s."
"Captain Henry Avery initiated a mutinty on his ship and then became a pirate, and they were fighting against major Indian Mughal ships. The Mughal Empire, which had a trading relationship with the British East India Company, was very threatened, and they threatened to cut off all trade unless the British could capture Henry Avery. Unfortunately, Henry Avery disappears in history, so the British were never able to capture him.So this scene, we see that Marine Admiral [Garp] who has hired a pirate [Dracule Mihawk] to basically work for him."
"This was common, and these pirates were called privateers. A privateer, in a way, was a pirate for hire. They would work for a specific government, and in Cayman they were allowed to keep about 80% of all the goods they could steal. As long as the ships they captured were the ones they were supposed to, they could go anywhere they wanted."
"So, yes, it was pretty common for a lot of pirates to either start their career working as a privateer, or decide to finish their pirate career by becoming a pirvateer.In terms of realism, I would give this about 6 out of 10."
The show itself contains a lot of fantasy elements to counterbalance parts of its reality, even though it presents piracy in a way that is a mixed mirror of actual life. After consuming Devil Fruits, some characters in the anime have unique abilities.
Luffy, in example, has the ability to stretch his body into any shape. Throughout the series, there are also a lot of strange animals, such the terrifying Sea Kings that hide in the ocean's depths.