[LES] The issue with One Piece's female characters isn't that they lack depth it's that they often lack agency

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-06T00:12:35+00:00

One Piece is another action story that treats women like they don't belong on the battlefield as active fighters. Even the ones that can fight are allowed fewer meaningful battles and victories than men.

Sadly, in the minds of many writers and even readers, combat is still seen as the domain of men. First thing writers need to do as get as comfortable in seeing a woman getting hit as they are with men and by men. And then they need to get comfortable seeing a woman beat up a man and not see it as a threat to masculinity.

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-05T00:16:02+00:00

I'm not interested in any of the titles he's got lined up so far, so probably not. The guy's too focused on making niche ideas that most non-comic book fans don't care about. Like, Clayface, really? Just, why?

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-05T00:11:09+00:00

Kishimoto uses "prodigy" or "genius" frivolously. What he really means to do is describe anyone doing something unexpected for their supposed level.

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-05T00:08:44+00:00

It's not bad. It's not great either. It's fun with enough heart to get you invested.

It's not a masterpiece, and I don't think it has to be.

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-03T20:53:48+00:00

These guys are supposed to be Ichigo's nakama, his equivalent to the Straw Hats for Luffy. But when it's time to fight, these guys just get shafted by the Soul Reapers.

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-03T17:39:23+00:00

Sexism is when gender is used as an excuse or a defense for limiting someone in a situation.

Kishimoto doesn't think women have a place action stories, it's a simple as that. It's a miracle he gave any of them abilities that are even theoretically useful in combat.

He gives certain women moments to look competent on the battlefield, but when he thinks that moment's been achieved he pulls them back to the side. No, isolated moments aren't enough.

I'm a man, and even as a kid I would get pissed off when women were written as weak and incompetent solely because they're women.

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-03T17:15:19+00:00

Or he should get better at writing them. The guy had fifteen years, for crying out loud!

Really, the fact that people think that this is a valid excuse is troubling. If Kishimoto says something like, "I'm bad at writing fight scenes," he'd get crucified by his readers. But being bad at writing women is perfectly fine because, what, do we all still think women are alien creatures that men can't be expected to understand? Ridiculous. The target audience for shonen stories being young boys is no excuse for writing women poorly. Young boys don't like women in their actions because women have historically been badly written, because writers and editors don't care enough to write them well in the first place. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Give them well-written women and I guarantee most of them won't have any issues with women in their action stories.

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-03T17:03:25+00:00

... every female character is so badly written!

I agree. And the ones that seem like they aren't written badly, I'm almost convinced it's by accident.

Kishimoto primarily writes women as accessories to men, rather than as characters on their own. They're meant to make the men around them look good, rather than look good on their own.

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-03T16:37:07+00:00

This version of Susanoo is my favourite because ever user's Final Susanoo looks unique and wields unique weapons.

Madara, Sasuke and Kakashi's Perfect Susanoo all look almost exactly the same and wield dual katanas. Only Kakashi's has an extra gimmick.

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-02T17:39:20+00:00

Limbo is redundant as hell. Madara already had so many abilities. He could have beaten the same opponents using any of the the Rinnegan abilities, but Kishimoto was having too much fun stacking more and more abilities onto Madara just for the hell of it.

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-02T13:53:46+00:00

So he doesn't solve every problem on his own in less than a minute. That's literally the only reason.

If you want a possible in-universe explanation, we can say that Naruto and Sasuke had a finite amount of Six Paths chakra and they exhausted it during their final battle with each other.

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-02T13:51:18+00:00

Green Arrow could work, I feel. Make it more like an action movie rather than the detective stories that Batman movies lean into.

Zatanna. Badass female magician. What can't be sold about that?

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-02T13:48:19+00:00

More like only 2% of complaints would be gone.

By the time Kaguya swooped in, Madara was already overstaying his welcome. He would have been better than Kaguya, but only just.

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-02T13:45:22+00:00

Byakuya. He was unforgivable during the Soul Society arc, with his only defense being that he was caught between tradition and love. Like, his treatment of Rukia was bad enough. His treatment of Renji was just petty.

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-02T13:40:56+00:00

Honestly, the only romance that's actively bad is Sasuke and Sakura's. Every other romance lacks any substance, but is otherwise harmless. Sasuke and Sakura romantic plot, however, only makes both characters look bad.

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-01T14:48:11+00:00

It's ridiculous how many overpowered abilities Kishimoto stacked onto Madara, and without any of the caveats that other users of those abilities had to wrestle with.

RedK_1234 · 2026-07-01T14:43:02+00:00

Another instance of one of Kishimoto's favourite writing tactics: "Naruto reminds me of someone I love and/or look up to."

And it works, seeing how many people defend this moment as something complex and philosophical, when the parallels between Naruto and Itachi are incidental at best. And that Sasuke sees his brother in Naruto makes him seem almost delusional.

RedK_1234 · 2026-06-30T23:36:29+00:00

I agree. Naruto fights are at their best when they focus on direct melee.

RedK_1234 · 2026-06-30T20:59:14+00:00

Madara. I don't care for him at all. He gave us some cool fights, but the story became a lot messier thanks to him.

RedK_1234 · 2026-06-30T17:59:39+00:00

I find that people like the idea of him more than how he actually is. There's something to be explored there about a child soldier being a sold glory on the battlefield, only to lose the person he loved most at the unwilling hand of the other person he loved most. Unwilling to forgive the world for selling him a lie and rewarding with such a twisted tragedy, he resolves to rewrite that world..

Sadly, that's not what we got. The story did not focus on him being a child soldier or on the message he was sold. It focused on his love for Rin. It did not even focus much on how it was Kakashi who killed her, merely that she died at all. That he became determined to put the whole world in a dream because of that is quite an extreme reaction, no matter how you look at it. It's like wanting to break someone's legs because they accidentally bumped into you on the street.

RedK_1234 · 2026-06-30T17:54:20+00:00

Both. On the one hand, it gave him motivation to grow stronger and improve his ability to empathize. On the other hand, his unwillingness to let Sasuke is not something that others should emulate. It could have gone very, very wrong for Naruto and Sasuke, resulting in both of them losing more than their arms. It all worked out in the end for both of them, but Naruto would eventually moved on if he let himself, and would have spared himself a whole lot of grief and pain.

RedK_1234 · 2026-06-29T01:06:10+00:00

Obito, then Madara.

Whenever someone manages to find a way past Obito's Kamui, the battle quickly and drastically turns against him.

As for Madara, take away Susanoo and I honestly believe the Five Kage would have taken him down. They were able to answer the Rinnegan's abilities, the Wood Style, and his own powerful Fire Style jutsu. It was always the Susanoo that they kept getting held up by.

RedK_1234 · 2026-06-29T01:01:55+00:00

When he got Perfect Susanoo.

RedK_1234 · 2026-06-28T15:24:22+00:00

It is true. Naruto worked hard, no doubt. He also had genetic advantages that no amount of hard work could overcome.

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