Are One Piece character designs too similar to each other? Explored

While there aren’t many aspects of author and illustrator Eiichiro Oda’s original manga series which are considered widely controversial, One Piece character designs are a popular and ever present one. As the series’ scope and cast has ballooned in size over its 25-year run thus far, fans have noticed more and more similarities in the appearances of certain individuals.

More specifically, fans have noted that many of the women in the series often look extremely similar to each other with minimal differences in their features, if any at all. This area of One Piece character designs is easily the most volatile, if only for how clearly low-effort the differentiation in these female characters is at times.

Unfortunately, it’s not just a late-series issue, with the first example of this flaw in One Piece character designs appearing with the introduction of Vivi Nefertari in the Alabasta saga. However, fans have recently begun asking the question of whether or not these designs truly are too similar to each other, or if fans are simply overreacting.

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One Piece character designs continue to be a pervasive discussion with series’ fandom, anime fandom at large

Are the designs too similar? Explored

As mentioned above, the main issue taken with One Piece character designs stems from the female cast of the series. More specifically, there’s an argument to be made that several other female characters, both named and unnamed, are just Nami with different colored hair or slightly different features.

This issue first arises with the introduction of Vivi Nefertari, who does admittedly bear a striking resemblance to Nami. Fans have even gone as far as to remove the hair of both and put them side-by-side, showing them to be nearly indistinguishable from each other. That being said, there are minute differences, but these are generally unnoticeable in a blind comparison.

Flash forward to the Dressrosa arc, and the introduction of Princess Rebecca yet again brought the discussion of One Piece character designs being too similar to the forefront of online discussion. Like with Vivi and Nami, Rebecca also found herself subjected to these blind comparisons, further proving just how similar the trio are in their core design.

While there have yet to be any particularly egregious instances of named characters falling into this category since Rebecca’s introduction, some background characters also follow this same design archetype. Unfortunately, despite their role as background characters, this does lend some credibility to the argument.

However, some fans argue that Oda’s series is treated unfairly here, pointing to other series as proof that the One Piece character designs are no more similar than those of characters in other series. Some convincing arguments can definitely be made from the likes of Dragon Ball, Bleach, Jujutsu Kaisen, and more series with unique art styles like Oda’s.

While the character designs in One Piece are certainly extremely similar, there is realistically a very small number of instances of named characters sharing such stark similarities. Likewise, with these numbers being comparable to the similar character designs in other popular series, the argument seems to be blown a bit out of proportion here.

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