‘One Piece’ Just Broke a Big Shonen Trope

One of the biggest tropes in Shonen action anime is the main character’s ability to power up under duress. Usually this means that the main character, who had been losing up until then, is able to turn the tables and win the battle. One Piece and Luffy are no different. Well, until now.

The latest episode bucked this Shonen trend and actually interrupted Luffy before he was able to activate his Gear Fourth, and Katakuri managed to seemingly defeat him by the end of the episode.

Like many episodes before, Luffy was struggling to deal with Katakuri’s power. He has been able to dodge Katakuri’s attacks successfully, but that doesn’t mean he has escaped unscathed either. Katakuri, feeling frustrated activates his awakened Devil Fruit power and nearly drowns Luffy in mochi.

Luffy struggles and tries to activate his power but Katakuri, who foresaw the Gear Fourth form, interrupts him. Katakuri says he’s not about to let Luffy transform (as he’s not underestimating him in the slightest), and pelts Luffy with even more mochi. Katakuri then takes the fight one step further and moves the walls of the Mirro-World and buries Luffy in a mountain of mochi.

Luffy’s seemingly out of breath and Katakuri walks away easily, and this bucks the trend of Shonen action shows. Much like in the past, if Luffy would have been able to activate his Gear Fourth form successfully, it could have potentially turned the tides of the battle by freeing himself from Katakuri’s mochi grasp. But it seems the battle is going in a completely different direction.

This makes sense given that Katakuri is Luffy’s strongest opponent yet, and there’s no clear indication that Luffy will win just yet. Hopefully Luffy will be able to capitalize on this trope as the battle continues.

Eiichiro Oda‘s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold.

Oda revealed some news about One Piece‘s future in a recent interview as well. Stating that he was about 80 percent done with the manga at this point with the Wano arc, fans are worried that the series may be coming to an end sooner than they thought. But it wouldn’t be wrong to infer that the ending will most likely still be years away given how much of the world there is to explore and just how well it’s selling week to week.