There are two things you can always count on Monkey D. Luffy to do: eat more than it’s possible by any human, and declare his dream of becoming King of the Pirates every five minutes while saying his own name. It is easy to read Eiichiro Oda’s manga or watch the anime and think that Luffy isn’t capable of much else, that his only two functional brain cells are devoted to his next meal and achieving his dream. After all, Luffy comes from the Son Goku school of shonen protagonists, whose alumni are funny and earnest, but also gullible and thick as a castle wall, like Naruto and Denji from Chainsaw Man. That’s what it seems on the surface when it comes to Luffy. But our favorite stretchy rubber guy can be quite smart when it matters, and Netflix’s live action adaptation of One Piece proves it.
One of the biggest changes in Season 2 is a small one that many fans might not even notice. It comes in episode 2, when Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) convinces the whale Laboon to open his mouth and free the rest of the Straw Hat Pirates from his stomach. In the original manga and anime, Luffy decides to beat the hell out of the whale to accomplish this. His thinking being that he would become Laboon’s rival, inspiring the whale to hope for a rematch fight in the future and move him beyond waiting for the pirates that left him years ago. Yes, violence does tend to solve almost everything in One Piece so this was a decent idea, but the live-action saw a different path.
In Netflix’s adaptation, Luffy recognizes the deep emotional connection Laboon has to the Rumbar Pirates and the song “Bink’s Brew,” similarly to his own connection to the song he associates with Shanks and his pirate crew. So, Luffy sings the song to Laboon, connecting to the whale emotionally and explaining that sometimes people leave your life, and that’s okay. What matters is being open to new relationships, and new people who do stay in your life. It’s a rather emotionally mature moment for Luffy, who then spends the next episode eating his way through a town, oblivious that they’re plotting to murder him and his friends. He sees himself in Laboon and chooses empathy, connecting with him through song and their relationship to pirate crews who left. It is also just a more useful way to win an argument than just punching a whale.
The change shows the kind of leader that Luffy is, the kind of anime protagonist he is, and why he's smarter than he gets credit for.
It is a bit of a running gag amongst fans that Luffy doesn’t care about flashbacks and backstories — stemming from him sleeping through the Fish-Man Island flashback. In truth, Luffy simply doesn’t need to spend two hours listening to someone’s backstory to understand who that person is and what they need. Instead, Luffy just gets it, and leaps into action. On multiple occasions, Luffy has shown a keen ability to observe how people truly feel, and what they need to hear. Luffy is the only person who treats Momonosuke as a future Shogun rather than a defenseless kid in the anime and manga, and builds up his confidence. Likewise, when Robin leaves the group to protect them in Water 7, Luffy refuses to actually save her until she explicitly says she wants to be saved. He recognizes the tragic lack of agency Robin’s had for years, and makes sure she actively chooses to live her life rather than have someone else, even if it’s him, decide for her.
Netflix’s live-action One Piece does a lot of things right, and Season 2 improves on virtually every aspect of the first season. The show brings to life the goofiness of the source material and is overall quite faithful to Oda’s story and world. And yet, it is in the differences where the show truly shines. It adapts the story chronologically, bringing in reveals from much later in the manga because they actually take place around this time. There are also some original plotlines and scene changes that actually improve on the source material (blasphemous, I know!) by adding new layers to it. The season gives Miss All Sunday (Lera Abova) and Smoker (Callum Kerr) ongoing storylines that make them more essential to the story at this point than in the original, and build up the larger world of One Piece.
