One Piece Fans Rank the Series’ Saddest Moments

One Piece‘s anime series is celebrating its 20th Anniversary this year, and fans have been using the celebration to look back on the series’ best moments. But many of the series’ best moments are also some of the most emotional as fans remember the heartbreak they have felt over the years. Sparked by Reddit user SaboTheWanderer, fans have been cataloguing their favorite sad moments from the series.

The moments here range in intensity from the “death” of the Going Merry, Whitebeard and Ace’s deaths, to early on in the series such as Nami cryingly asks for help from Luffy and the others.

SaboTheWanderer kicked this off with the death of the Going Merry as this scene did hit fans hard. The Merry was one of the key icons of the series up to that point, and seeing it go up in flames (especially following the emotional bout between Luffy and Usopp) definitely signaled the end of that era of the Straw Hats. Reddit user feelsgoodwan brings up a quieter moment after the Battle of Marineford where Garp went to Foosha Village to tell Dadan about Ace’s fate.

User ralphtropolis brought up the Arlong arc in which Nami was at wit’s end and tried to carve the Arlong tattoo off of her arm. That’s when Luffy stops her from harming herself further, and puts his Straw Hat on her as a way to comfort her much like Shanks did for him. That and the following scene of Zoro, Sanji, and Usopp walking with Luffy straight toward Arlong is one of the most impactful and memorable scenes in the entire series.

Another prominent moment is brought up by user rwright8292, when Brook performs Bink’s Sake as his former crew begins to die all around him. Brook was a tragic character all around, and this song made the impact of what he really went through hit hard. The other Straw Hats all had tragic moments of their own with Chopper’s and Sanji’s introductory stories going for a gut punch.

This is by no means every one of the saddest moments over the tenure of this long series as each character death is punctuated in fans’ memories alongside all of these other emotional or heartbreaking events. So the debate rages on. What do you think are the saddest moments in One Piece?

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.

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