One Piece Fan-Art Gives Zoro Slick Genderbent Spin

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece is one of the longest running, and most popular action anime and manga franchises gracing the pages of Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump and one of the many reasons why is the fact that Oda often depicts his characters in many different designs and fashions. Characters often change for entire arcs of the series, but despite that malleability its rare for the characters to change at the foundation.

Genderbending characters through fan-art is one of the oldest practices among anime fans, and due to One Piece’s ever-changing nature fans often wonder what gender swapped versions of the Straw Hats would look like. One fan gave a strong take at genderbending Roronoa Zoro, and you can check out the impressive work below!

Artist Agent-65 shared this take of a genderswapped Zoro to Reddit, and it’s been an instant hit with fans. Reddit user dozvan even joked that this would result in a strange new struggle for Sanji, “Sanji is confused, he injured himself.” And other fans compare this new look to Vivi from Alabasta. But regardless, fans agree that Zoro would probably be the same character no matter the gender. Zoro would still be bad with directions, and would definitely still be fighting to be the world’s greatest swordsman.

Did you know that series creator Eiichiro Oda once created genderbent versions of the Straw Hats? Sharing them during one of the columns in which he responded to fans in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump, Oda shared quick sketches of what the Straw Hats would all look like in a genderswapped universe. Brook hilariously would look the same according to Oda, however.

Fans are hoping Zoro gets more of a focus in the manga as the current Wano arc seems to be setting something up for the character. Making his grand return to the series following the Whole Cake Island and Reverie arcs, there seems to be something brewing for Zoro in this samurai influenced world.

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. The series still ranked number one in manga sales in 2018, which surprised fans of major new entries.