One Piece Creator Teases Long-Awaited Straw Hat Arc

As One Piece fans are all too aware of, especially with the Wano Country arc finally in full gear in both the manga and anime, Eiichiro Oda often plants seeds months or even years before they come to fruition in the series. In a recent interview with YouTube group Fischer’s (who also have a guest role in One Piece: Stampede), Eiichiro Oda teased that a Straw Hat plot mentioned at the end of the Dressrosa arc would be making an appearance in the series soon.

As noted by @sandman_AP on Twitter, who translated several of the interview’s best bits, Oda mentioned how the Straw Hat Grand Fleet incident would be making its way to the series “soon.”

Although it’s not clear what Oda means by “soon,” this is a very interesting nugget for fans to chew on. At the end of the Dressrosa arc, Luffy’s actions in the coliseum and in the fight against Doflamingo earned the respect of several major pirates in their own right. They then pledged their loyalty to Luffy, and promised to do their deeds in the name of the Straw Hats.

But the most interesting facet of this reveal came soon after as the narration for the series revealed that each of these big name pirates would go on to even bigger things in their own right and that they would be involved in a “great incident” that will go down in history. Considering that the series has been building itself toward some kind of climax, one Oda seems to have an eye on, its appearance “soon” could be a part of the series’ big finale. Regardless, it’s yet another piece of the puzzle to this grand series.

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.