One Piece: Why Luffy's Power Scaling Works

Monkey D. Luffy is a strong character, but his character is also strong. Eiichiro Oda proves his writing prowess when writing power.

Ahh, the age of the shounen protagonist. These strapping young men and women wake up every day to bust bricks over their heads and bust their villain’s chops. Though how strong each individual character may be can vary across genre, there’s no denying that most of them are up there in strength when it comes to bulldozing mountains and leveling tri-state areas. However, many of them didn’t start off swinging this strong; Naruto had to go through the Chunin Exams, Ichigo Kurosaki had Bankai training, and Monkey D. Luffy trained under Silvers Raleigh on the island Rusukaina for two years. Each of these examples has a varying context in the protagonist’s journey and each of them comes out with an addition of relative strength. In most cases, there’s hot debate as to who is the strongest of all time. As far as canon is concerned, the real question should be of not who, but how! Power scaling can be as dilapidated as the protagonists themselves, and the debate as to what universe makes the most sense has already been answered in terms of world-building – It’s Luffy’s power scaling in the One Piece universe.

Not to say that these other universes don’t make sense, but One Piece has more consistency for a few reasons: The story is longer, there are more grounding elements, and Luffy is always given an appropriate challenge in his setting. One Piece as a manga is at a technical unfair advantage, because of how long the story has been going on. One Piece (Made in 1997) had an initial estimated run of five years, only for Eiichiro Oda to continue releasing chapters well into the next decade. Patient fans have recognized this dedication, and the world of One Piece flourishes because of it. Oda even wrote in a character to explain why broken doors were suddenly fixed in the next panel, and integrated that into the canon lore. Oda used this amount of time to construct a strong world (Ba-dum-tsh). Now, all he needed were strong characters to re-enforce his ideas of reality.

Luffy himself is a strong character. Not just physically, but in the story as well. He is the driving force behind the plot, and guides the reader from island to island. In lieu, Luffy wasn’t always the powerhouse he is today. The story starts with him as a five-year-old, who would eventually undergo rigorous training before stepping one foot on his adventure. His education at the school of hard knocks didn’t stop there: At 17, he was fighting men twice his age and twice his height, but Oda always made Luffy’s challenge appropriate, to make it more believable for the reader. The order of enemies makes sense for Luffy to fight, ranging from bad pirate, to a worse marine, to third-party weirdos, to devil-fruit users once he crosses the Red Line. To show that Luffy wasn’t invincible, he nearly dies in his first encounter with another devil-fruit user (Buggy & Crocodile). The encounter with Smoker doesn’t count, because Luffy’s dad used the weather to bail him out. A lot of the power structuring wouldn’t make sense unless Luffy had friends to help him along the way.