If you look at how much traction JJK gained in a time period , they surpass One piece easily.
One piece has old readers who are following it since decades and bored now.
I don’t know a single person irl who has watched Bleach lol. No offense, but Bleach has always been the Sakura / (insert borderline irrelevant female member of the main character trio) of the Big 3
The 4Kids dub played a huge part. I was nine years old when I first watched it, and even I knew it was ass. Also Oda's artstyle isn't exactly the most appealing to look at, I mean Naruto, DBZ, Bleach are just cooler to watch. Also most in the west seem to prefer their shonen to be more actiony and serious than whacky/goofy like One Piece is.
Yah know people give the 4kids dub a hard time and when compared to the original series yeah its pretty bad but when I was growing up 4kids one piece was the only one piece I knew I didn't know about funimation until I was around 11
4kids is what got me into one piece in the first place and don't get me started on that 4kids rap epic
I don’t know a single person irl who has watched Bleach lol. No offense, but Bleach has always been the Sakura / (insert borderline irrelevant female member of the main character trio) of the Big 3
I don't blame the 4kids dub, 100% but it definitely didn't help. It made One Piece feel alot more childish compared to Naruto and Bleach. Another big factor and I think the more important factor. Is the first couple arcs of One Piece were not very strong. Arguably until the Bartie arc and Mihawk vs Zoro and Arlong Park, One Piece is like a 3 or 4 out of 10. And for anime watchers back then who got one episode a week that 20-30 episodes. I think alot of people in North America dropped it before then.
I don't blame the 4kids dub, 100% but it definitely didn't help. It made One Piece feel alot more childish compared to Naruto and Bleach. Another big factor and I think the more important factor. Is the first couple arcs of One Piece were not very strong. Arguably until the Bartie arc and Mihawk vs Zoro and Arlong Park, One Piece is like a 3 or 4 out of 10. And for anime watchers back then who got one episode a week that 20-30 episodes. I think alot of people in North America dropped it before then.
The biggest issue with One Piece is that it's too childish for adults but too adult for children. Oda claims he writes the story for 15 year olds but I think the content is closer to middle school territory. If Oda removed all the cringe stuff like Sanji's noosebleeds, Brook asking to see panties and the constant crying and the dumb "open mouth" facial expressions then the story would be much more popular. It's hard for normal people to recommend this story to other people without feeling dirty or childish.
Oda said:
I think middle-schoolers are the core readers that could enjoy it the most. Of course when I was in elementary school I read comics but I realized later that I didn’t really understand any of it. So there are probably a lot of points that don’t get across to elementary schoolers. But, on the surface, you’ve got Luffy whose body can stretch and similar strange elements and they enjoy the images they see. As they reach middle school, they can slowly grasp the story and when they get even older they can start to see the themes. Every age group has a different way of reading the story but personally I’ve set the target age at fifteen. Every week I determine whether or not my fifteen-year-old-self would enjoy it. If not then it doesn’t qualify to be called a boys’ comic. Lately [One Piece] has a lot of adult readers but if I tried to adjust the story just because of that, it would lose the value of its existence. How about for music?
The other major issue is the bad character design. If Oda would draw the series with normal looking characters, such as these 2, then that would also increase the popularity. Likewise with female character design.
Masterpiece. Bleach. Same sentence. No!
Bleach is a bad version of Saint Seiya x Yu Yu Hakusho.
I think Saint Seiya is closer to the "masterpiece" tier. As a whole it's worse than Naruto but it was a foundational Shonen, 1 of the first real battle shonnens along with Hokuto no Ken, and it has some aspects that are lost in most of its derivatives like Naruto or One Piece.
I skipped all the filler and I'm at the poseidon arc. This arc isn't great but it is acceptable i.e. bleach tier. I hear it gets better at hades arc.
Check our Fuma no Fojiro. It's proto saint seiya with swords. I love Musashi/Ikki.
Stories that blue ball their readers, i.e. lots of mystery with no payoffs, tend to be the most popular like Lost (2004) and Game of Thrones. If anything this is the number 1 reason why One Piece is soo popular.
4kids dub played a huge roll.
Another thing is Naruto starts of crazy strong and then goes to shit. One Piece starts of meh-ok and slowly gets better but requires you to care about the characters and the world which isn't gonna happen if you aren't watching every episode(which was much harder when the series started appearing in the west). Something DBZ had going for it. You can skip 5 episodes and it wouldn't matter, you get to see cool character screaming and blowing shit up and it's just fun.
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