The Japanese masses offer a ranking of their favourite One Piece characters (or at least those who count themselves members of Luffy’s crew), for once providing a ranking not determined by breast size.
The ranking, with votes in parentheses:
1. Tony Tony Chopper (11,675)
2. Zoro (9,340)
3. Luffy (5,458)
4. A non-companion of Luffy (4,318)
5. Sanji (3,938)
6. I don’t even watch One Piece! (2,646)
7. Nami (1,310)
8. Robin (1,131)
9. Brook (592)
10. Usopp (536)
The rather small proportion of respondents who report not watching One Piece is telling in itself…
OMGGGGGGG NO HANDCOCK! I lub her though!! And wtf, chopper is in first?
Tony Tony Chopper’s always been my personal favorite. Looks like I’m not alone.
The characters are all hideous.
I have a love/hate thing going on with One Piece and Bleach. Both series have moments and arcs of pure incredibleness, and then they can end up lagging for nearly 100 issues. One Piece is actually worse than Bleach for dragging on arcs for too damn long. Also, both series neglect character development and simply enjoying all the incredible characters they already have established. They focus too much on forcing in new characters. The same can be said of Naruto, but Naruto fell to absolute unwatchable trash deep in the first few arcs, at basically the time when ninjutsu became the equivalent of being a sorcerer/wizard/mage/Marvel mutant/etc.
I am not surprised with the rankings, but I don’t agree with them. I despise Sanji, and I like chopper, but not in my top 3. I actually like many of the side characters more than the main crew. If Sanji, Usopp, and Franky all died, I would totally be down with that. I kind wish Nami had taken a level in badass in her time away rather than becoming a super skank, but whatever. And Ace… spoiler block… was a bummer.
Oda can drag out things, but he makes it up with lots of comedy and fun. Bleach is just dragged out repetitive battles after battles. Character development is a big factor for the main characters in OP imo, all the SH’s were vastly different before joining Luffy. All the characters in Bleach are the same from day one.
herpderp Luffy has character development? Since when? And when does Nami have character development? Beyond the major character development arcs that happened in the past, they’ve also stagnated and stayed the exact same throughout. The only character who has, in recent memory, developed humanly and realistically has been Usopp.
Apart from Usopp, Bleach’s character development is a tad much more noticeable than OP’s. Don’t know where you get ‘vastly different’ from, either. Aside from a few who’s character arcs were interesting and collided with Luffy, there hasn’t -been- much character development.
Luffy hasn’t grown more mature, Nami hasn’t stopped being a greedy bitch, Zoro and Usopp grew from being -very- anti-pirate, and a liar and a coward, to what they are now, which is fairly realistic. The rest, however, haven’t grown much if at all.
Chopper is really awesome, I wish I had a pet Chopper!