One Piece’s Villain Designs May Be Changing

When One Piece: Film Red came out, it made a significant change to the One Piece film formula. Where the main antagonists of the last few movies had been veteran male characters like Douglas Bullet or Gild Tesoro, this movie’s antagonist was Uta, a cute girl around Luffy’s age. The design was so unusual that most people didn’t even realize she was the villain until the movie came out.

This change in villain design may have just been the start. The Egghead Arc has also seen a change in the series’ villain design philosophy that, until recently, skewed heavily toward older men. Going forward, there could be all sorts of characters who challenge what people expect to see when they think of primary antagonists.

What Kinds of Villains Have Shown Up?

Technically, this design change has only been made apparent for the movies so far. According to Oda, he deliberately designed Uta as a cute girl to contrast the older male villains of previous films. If he’s been thinking about doing something similar for the canon story, he hasn’t announced or mentioned it in an interview yet.

However, it would make sense with the antagonists that have been presented in the Egghead Arc. On the surface, there are well-established male characters like Rob Lucci, Kizaru, and St. Jaygarcia Saturn as the driving force of this arc’s central conflict. Just beneath them, however, are some atypical main antagonists, namely Vegapunk York and the Seraphim. It would make sense for Oda, in his efforts to broaden his villain design scope beyond older men, to include women and children.

It’s worth noting that these antagonists aren’t the kind of people anyone could have expected to see. If someone had said years ago that the Straw Hats would someday have to confront the likes of Kizaru and the Five Elders, that would have sounded like a natural direction for the story to go; characters like these have been built up as major antagonists for years if not decades. However, nobody could have been precise enough to predict something like a female Vegapunk clone or the childlike Seraphim model Pacifistas. The sprawling narrative of One Piece provides all sorts of opportunities for such antagonists to come out of the woodwork and play surprisingly major roles in the overarching story. It’s likely that going forward, Oda will use further open spaces within his narrative to add more of such characters who shake up the older man design formula.

Where Could More Female Villains Appear?

There might also be some opportunities to slip in some more female characters among the pre-established characters who are still shrouded in mystery. Crocodile, for example, has long been theorized to be a former woman. There are also a lot of fans who wonder if Imu is a woman; there are also theories suggesting the King of the World has some form of immortality, which could lead to them having youthful features. Having “women” like these who have been hiding in plain sight would be a sneaky way to mix up the formula ina way that comes off as natural and planned.

Whatever new antagonists show up in the future, they should be expected to come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Such is the nature of One Piece’s world and characters. If more characters who look less like the Five Elders or the Admirals begin to show up, the cast will be all the more colorful for it.