I try to keep my rambling about my favorite manga to a minimum around here. It could very easily be my exclusive focus if I let it and there are so many other topics I want to write about so a certain restraint is called for. Three essays on the topic in one outing is certainly more than I had planned on and two of them on a single series is certainly excessive. Yet there is something in One Piece that I have been contemplating for a while that bears examination.

Eucatastrophe is a literary term coined by JRR Tolkien to describe the moment in a story where things go suddenly and inexplicably right for the protagonist. In short, it is the opposite of a catastrophe. It was Tolkien’s stance that eucatastrophe was the highest form of fairy story just a tragedy was the highest form of drama. They exist to remind the audience of the power of providence. They serve to reward moral behavior. And, let’s face it, when done well they serve to put a smile on our face that will not soon go away. The problem comes about when they are not done well.

The eucatastrophe is a literary device that is often employed by Eiichiro Oda, the author of One Piece. However it is also one of his most controversial tropes. That’s not surprising to anyone familiar with the Internet’s fascination with both trope talk and pessimism but it does bear examination. However conducting that examination is going to require an examination of several events scattered across several thousand pages of illustrated story. I don’t have time to recap all of it so if you’re not already familiar with One Piece you may feel a little lost. My apologies but it can’t be helped in this case. And, of course:

SPOILER WARNING

Oda has a terrible habit of not killing his characters. By this i don’t mean that he doesn’t put his characters in situations that would kill them. The problem is more that he puts them in situations that should kill them, then they just don’t die for no clear reason.

The most obvious example of this is the character Pell, who takes an explosive device that will supposedly level most of a city, and flies it away so no one is harmed. He is still holding it when it detonates. Yet Pell survives and returns home about a week later with nothing more than a bandage wrapped around his head.

A similar case is the butler Merry, who is stabbed through the chest five times, left on the ground overnight, and is up and walking again just days later. The butlers of One Piece are made of impressive stuff, it would seem.

It has been argued that all people in Oda’s world are of superhuman toughness as practically everyone in his story seems stronger, tougher and cooler than a normal person. However that’s not particularly satisfying either. We do see people die in One Piece. The obvious example is Nami’s adoptive mother Belle-Mere, who is executed by the pirate Arlong, but there are plenty of others. Typically they are the friends and family if main characters. This provides us insight into the nature of our cast and an emotional moment to connect them to. Oda is quite good art creating these moments.

However, after writing his story for nearly thirty years, Oda’s patterns are quite clear to anyone who goes looking for them. Deaths in One Piece exist to create emotional moments. The often cruel and arbitrary nature of death in the real world is absent from the world Oda creates. Instead deaths are clearly and deliberately calculated to evoke the strong emotional response Oda desires from his audience. In theory there is nothing wrong with that. I’ve often stated that I believe one of the goals of an author is to create an emotional response in their readership and, over time, I’ve refined that notion to include a corollary, that the best emotion to create in the audience is one in harmony with the characters in the story.

By creating moments where his characters and the audience are both moved to mourn a death Oda pursues this goal. The problem is when he reveals a death he implied took place did not actually take place it fractures this emotional resonance. The characters in the story feel relief, the weight of grief suddenly vanishing from them. The audience realizes their emotions were being manipulated. This shatters the harmony between audience and character and frequently undoes the investment the audience had in the previous emotional moment. In some cases that investment turns into actual hostility towards the creator or the story.

This brings me to the curious case of Jaguar D. Saul and many of the events surrounding him. Saul was a vital character in the history of Nico Robin, one of the main cast of One Piece. We last saw Saul frozen solid on a burning island. Before he was frozen he gave Robin a goal: to live out her life and find friends who would care for her in the place of the family she lost.

Saul was Robin’s last tie to her childhood hopes and dreams. When the audience learned of his death it contextualized one of One Piece’s most complex main characters, who started as a cold and distant antagonist and had slowly been pulled into the fold to become a beloved member of the crew. The Water Seven Saga, where we learned about Robin’s childhood and her brief but impactful relationship with Saul, is widely considered one of the best stories in One Piece. So when it was revealed that Saul was still alive the audience was disappointed, to say the least. To make matters worse, the reveal that Saul was still alive came coupled with not one but two other characters who appeared to die but, in point of fact, did not. These three case studies in “fake out” deaths are illuminating. You see, the audience had no real issue with two of them but a third has really irritated a lot of people. Most interesting is the fact that the fake death of Saul, which had the biggest emotional impact of these three false deaths, is the one the audience has accepted the most readily.

While Saul’s case is the one which prompted this essay I’m going to briefly discuss all three fake out deaths to make my point. But before that, there is one element present in all three cases that most people have cited but I’m going to dismiss by examining Saul’s case on its own. That is the issue of “justifying” the character’s survival.

Saul was presumed dead because he was “frozen solid” by a character with the power to create ice. This is not the first time we’ve seen this power in use nor is it the first time we’ve seen people survive being frozen solid in this way. In fact, Robin herself survives one such attack. When added to the fact that Saul was on the shores of a burning island it’s not unreasonable for him to thaw out in the heat then take refuge in the ocean and thus survive both freezing and burning. At least, not by the logic of One Piece. Given that Saul was also a wanted man, the fact that he never revealed his survival to the outside world but rather retreated to an isolated island where he could lay low also makes sense.

None of this is discussed when people analyze the impact of Saul’s apparent death and survival. That isn’t because the logic of his survival is flawed but rather because the logic is irrelevant. What people are really trying to grapple with is, as I have already stated, their emotional investment in the story and whether it was misplaced. I believe this is also true in the case of Bartholomew Kuma and Dr. Vegapunk, the other two characters who “died” and survived alongside Saul.

Kuma, like Robin, was introduced as an antagonist. Unlike Robin, Kuma was much harder to pin down as friend or foe (and I’m not saying Robin was easy to work out.) Over time we came to understand that Kuma, who was uniquely strong and robust, even in the One Pieceworld, was being used as part of an experimental program to create cyborgs. The project was headed by Dr. Vegapunk. Kuma submitted to the experiments in exchange for medical treatment for his daughter, Bonney, which Vegapunk also oversaw.

However, Kuma was also a wanted man and Vegapunk worked for the government. This created a certain conflict of interests.

In order to overcome that conflict the government demanded that Kuma surrender his free will and allow his consciousness to be completely eradicated, replaced with machine programming. Kuma agreed to this happily out of his love for Bonney. The scene where Kuma and Vegapunk reflect on Kuma’s life before throwing the switch that transforms him into an unfeeling machine is one of the most tragic scenes in One Piece, a series known for making it’s audience weepy. Less than a year later the audience learned that Vegapunk would probably be able to undo the modifications and restore Kuma’s thinking mind.

Of course he was willing to do this because Vegapunk had made discoveries that put him at odds with the World Government and they had ordered his execution. Eventually that execution was carried out and Vegapunk was dead. Except the most brilliant man in the world had made provisions for that, creating a clone and backing up his memories using technology the audience knew he already had.

On a spectrum of audience reactions, Vegapunk surviving his execution is the most disliked by far. Yes, it was in keeping with his character as a forward planner and an inventor but it wasn’t particularly satisfying. While Vegapunk has only been making appearances “on screen” in the story for two years or so he had quickly won the audience over. He was a sympathetic figure to Kuma and his daughter Bonney and he had a certain kind of integrity to him. His death caused a lot of consternation among the cast and the readership. The offhanded reveal that he had a cloned body ready to go just didn’t sit right, even though all the pieces were in place for it. In fact, most people saw those pieces in place and fumed about the inevitable reversing of Vegapunk’s death long before it was made official.

This is a clear case of a moment intended to create harmony between audience and character emotions instead creating dissonance. Oda has been writing One Piece for nearly thirty years and the audience knows his tricks. When we see them coming it prevents our investing in his story even when the emotional moments are fairly good in and of themselves.

On the other hand, the revivals of Kuma and especially Saul were taken very gracefully by the fanbase. The euchatastrophe that Oda offers lands much better in these two cases and I think it’s vital for anyone who wishes to include such an element to at least try to understand why.

The first factor, in my humble opinion, is time. Robin lived for twenty two years from the moment she sailed away from Saul and the burning island of Ohara to the moment she reunited with him on Elbaf. It was a long and trying time for her, full of danger and sorrow. It also gave her the opportunity to meet her closest friends and allies and revive her passion for her childhood dreams. For the audience who read One Piece, the publication history from Ohara to Elbaf spans a period of nineteen years. Nineteen years.

I read One Piece in real time over that entire nineteen year span. I occasionally wondered if, given everything we knew about how Saul supposedly died, we would ever see him again. I watched Robin and the Straw Hats struggle and suffer through all the many cares of Oda’s world. When I heard of Saul’s survival I was a bit surprised, but not terribly. Then I watched as Robin changed her hairstyle to reflect how she looked as a child and got ready to meet Saul again. And eventually, when they met again, for the first time in decades, I was struck by a sudden and surprising sense of relief, as if something I didn’t even know I had been waiting for had inexplicably come to pass.

The moment had been building so gradually I didn’t even realize I had wanted it until it was already past.

The second factor is connection. Saul was a character with a big impact in spite of very little narrative presence. However Bartholomew Kuma has been a mover and a shaker in One Piece for a very long time, appearing in the story for the first time almost twenty three years ago in mid-2002, and having numerous contacts with the Straw Hats over the course of the story. His daughter Bonney appeared six years later, although we wouldn’t know they were related for another decade. We’ve seen Kuma with free will and without it and he has been an antagonist and surprising ally to the Straw Hats over the years.

While Kuma’s actions were often mysterious and his transformation into a machine with no human will was only fully explained in 2023, more than two decades after his introduction, we already knew all we needed to about him through the way other characters acted towards him. The villains of the tale were never fully comfortable with Kuma, even after replacing his mind with a machine, and the love and devotion of Kuma’s friends and daughter spoke volumes about him. That these factors would eventually merge to overcome mere mechanical forces and restore his humanity just makes sense. We’ve seen the tragedy Kuma’s family and friends suffered when they though he was lost. We also get several small moments where Bonney sits quietly with her father, trusting that the man she loves is still in there somewhere, no matter how machine like he behaves at the moment. These moments of connection to Kuma made it much easier to draw him back into the story. They build the emotional harmony between the characters and the audience and make it clear that what we felt when we saw Kuma “die” is not being undone. Rather, that emotional payoff is now the investment in another, even greater moment of resolution.

The third factor is providence. Eucatastrophe is inherently providential, a reaffirmation of what is good and worthwhile in the human condition as stronger than mere fate or circumstance. That Saul fought an ice man on a burning island and was frozen solid in the one place where circumstance would allow him to survive was providential. That the lonely child Kuma would meet and form a family willing to follow him into the worst places on earth and love him even when all his warmth and kindness were gone is nothing short of providential. That added element, the feeling that you can’t quite earn these moments of grace, is ultimately what makes them work. Sometimes the world is just arbitrary and capricious enough that you lose what you love most. Sometimes its providential enough that you get it all back.

Ultimately, I think it’s these three factors that make the difference between “fake” deaths like Saul and Kuma and “fake out” deaths like Vegapunk’s. Vegapunk had no providence in his revival, just his own scientific prowess, he had little connection to other characters outside his role as the most brilliant man in the world (except Kizaru, a subject way outside of the scope for today’s essay) and he hadn’t been around in the story long enough for the sudden reversals in his fate to feel organic.

However there is one other thing to keep in mind if you set out to write a eucatastrophy. The trope is, in and of itself, an idea that revolves around the concept that the universe is created and maintained by a loving and graceful God that desires to know and be known. It assumes that the universe we live in wants us to feel and reciprocate God’s love. Thus, if you seek to write eucatastrophy you are writing a story that mimics that part of the universe in your story – and that notion about the universe has never been widely accepted. It’s very clear, from his persistence in writing One Piece in the way he does, that Oda has simply made his peace with the way the audience reacts to his eucatastrophies. He wants to write them, so he has poured more time and skill into making them the best they can be. If you or I wish to write euchatastrophy, I suggest we make the same peace with whatever response we may get.