One Piece Shares the Secret Behind the SMILE Fruit

One Piece‘s Devil Fruits are already dangerous enough on their own (they are called “Devil” Fruits, after all), but the New World introduced fans to a more dangerous version of these called the “SMILE” fruits. This artificial fruit is such a dangerous entity, that it has fully wrecked Wano and has disturbed their world in greater ways than fans had expected. The chemical SAD in these fruits has, quite literally, taken the people of Wano’s ability to smile.

In Chapter 943 of the series, fans learn the secret behind the SMILE Fruits. Not only do they have their roots in Caesar’s work with SAD, but they were named “SMILE” as a cruel joke by Kaido, Doflamingo, and Caesar.

When Lord Orochi executes Yasuie, the people of Wano cannot do anything but laugh despite their words of mourning. Luffy and the others ask why everyone is laughing, but it’s soon explained that the starved people of Wano have no choice. A few years ago Kaido began trading weapons and importing the SMILE fruits, and though Luffy and the others destroyed the factory the damage was already done.

Kaido’s Beast Pirates did grow in strength as a result, but the odds of successfully getting a power from the SMILE fruits are 1 in 10. On top of this, the SAD chemical in them leaves those who eat it unable to do anything other than laugh if they are unlucky enough to be one of the other 9. Seeing this terrible downside, Kaido, Doflamingo, and Caesar deciding to make this a joke and named it the “SMILE” fruit.

But that’s not all as Orochi hated those people stuck in the “Leftovers” region of Wano as they cried over their starvation. So he snuck in some of the SMILE fruits in with the leftovers those people are forced to eat, and the people of Wano unsuspectingly shared the fruits with one another.

So despite wanting to cry, and despite knowing how dangerous the fruits were, the starving people had no choice but to eat them. This further proves just what kind of cruel world Wano is, and explains why some of them seem to have Devil Fruit abilities despite not having access to them. Now there’s more of a cause than ever to spark the big revolution Luffy and the others have been planning.

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.