One Piece Introduces Otama to Anime Fans

One Piece's Wano Country arc has been an exciting debut in the anime for a number of reasons including its brand new look, staff shake-ups, returning Straw Hat characters, and most of all, the anticipation of brand new characters coming to the series. The most recent episode of the series introduced fans to the first big addition for the Wano's anime run, Otama, who will be accompanying Luffy throughout his adventures in the new region.

In Episode 893 of the series, Luffy meets the strange young girl, Otama, as she seems to have some kind of plan of her own. Because when fans first see her, she's already caught some heat from Kaido's forces.

Otama, voiced by Megumi Han for the anime series, is first seen being carried inside of a bag. She's screaming out for Kaido's men to let her go and insists she didn't say "that." A flashback reveals that she yelled out that the Kozuki Clan will teach Kaido's forces a lesson when they "come back." She's thus been labeled as a traitor and just might be sold into a brothel or slavery. But she seems like she won't go down without a fight.

When Kaido's forces come across Luffy and are defeated, Otama approaches him slowly and says now that she'll have her chance. There's no clear clue as to what she's got planned just yet, but Otama seems a lot more feisty and clever than her appearance seems to suggest.

She reveals that she's got an ability to pull off a piece of her cheek and get animals to come to her side, and that's probably how she came to befriend the large lion dog Komachiyo, which had a fight that Luffy had to put an end to. But now with Otama in the picture calling Luffy her "Big Bro," and with the hint that she has ties to Ace as well, fans will be seeing more of what she's capable of soon enough as she provides a suitable guide through the Wano Country.

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.