I’ve written about One Piece before. That’s no surprise, I’ve been a fan for years, and there’s always another angle worth exploring.
When we talk about what makes the series special, we usually talk about world-building and characters. Oda built this universe with extraordinary patience. One island, one culture, one character at a time. But what makes it remarkable is how that care bleeds into the margins. Even characters who appear for a handful of pages feel like they belong.
Today, I want to look at a smaller, quieter detail of that world: the animals.
Most of them exist for just a scene or two. And yet, they linger.
Take Chouchou, a small dog in Orange Town, guarding a pet shop. The shop belonged to his owner, Hocker, who passed away. When Buggy’s crew attacked and leveled the town, the shop was destroyed in the chaos. Chouchou had nothing left. But he stood his ground in front of the smoking ruins anyway. It’s an early scene, but it proves Oda's point perfectly: even the smallest characters carry immense emotional weight.
That same weight echoes later at the entrance to the Grand Line.
Decades ago, a pirate crew left a young whale named Laboon behind. The journey ahead was too dangerous, but they promised they would return. Time moved on. Days became years. Laboon just waited. Eventually, that waiting curdled into something desperate. He started ramming his head against the Red Line (the massive wall separating the seas) trying to break through to the friends he lost. The thick scars on his head are a quiet record of that grief.
When Luffy's crew finally crosses his path, there's no epic monster fight. It's just a grieving animal crashing his own skull against a mountain, bleeding for a crew that is never coming back. We watch a creature who simply doesn't know how to stop waiting for ghosts. Even now, his loyalty remains one of the most quietly heartbreaking threads in the entire story.
As the journey continues, the animals we meet start shaping the cultures around them. In Alabasta, Karoo, a super spot-billed duck, stays by Princess Vivi’s side through a bitter civil war. He delivers messages across burning sands. He looks terrified half the time. He’s undeniably ridiculous. But his loyalty never wavers.
We also learn that Alabasta reveres Sea Cats as sacred. As a cat person, I always appreciated that passing detail. It grounds the kingdom in its own quiet beliefs and makes the desert feel genuinely lived-in.
Not every creature carries heavy emotional weight, though. Some are just gloriously absurd. The Kung-Fu Dugongs are martial-arts-obsessed sea mammals that challenge anyone who looks strong. When Luffy beats them, they instantly kneel and call him master. It’s a bizarre, funny quirk that captures the Grand Line's playful spirit. Then there’s Lassoo, a literal cannon that ate a Devil Fruit and became a dachshund. It sneezes cannonballs. That kind of wild, unapologetic creativity keeps the world feeling fresh.
Deeper into the sea, animals become the actual infrastructure of the world. In Water 7, Yagara Bulls pull boats through the canals like living gondolas. They make the city breathe. Eventually, the scale simply shatters. Surume, a giant kraken, navigates the crushing depths to Fish-Man Island. And then there is Zunesha. An ancient elephant so enormous that an entire civilization rests on its back. It has wandered the seas for a thousand years as punishment for a forgotten crime. Its legs pierce the clouds. Creatures like this remind us how ancient this world was long before we ever set sail.
In most stories, animals are just set dressing. In One Piece, they have stories. They have grief.
The tales of Chouchou and Laboon stick with me years later. They are simple stories about holding on to what's already gone. When I think back on those scenes, I don’t smile. I almost cry. There’s something deeply human about a dog guarding a ruin, or a whale waiting for ghosts.
They take up so few pages in a massive manga. But they are exactly why Oda's world feels so undeniably alive.
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