#I was all of 15 when I first saw Dr Kureha and even at that age I fell a little bit in love

[silencedrowns]

me: “I’m not like, the biggest one piece fan” (this is true though, I swear)

also me: started yelling and slamming the couch arm in excitement when I realized that s2 confirmed to include chopper which means 1) we will get…. HER…… and 2) THEY HAVE THE CHANCE TO DO THE MEME CASTING PLEASE

[creative-type]

Why Tony Tony Chopper is my Least Favorite Straw Hat

I feel conflicted when I see people list characters from greatest to least favorite. Cut and dry lists in general - whether featuring power levels, most attractive, saddest backstory, etc - tend to elicit this reaction, because they’re so subjective and I think if an author has done a good job then the audience shouldn’t be able to make the list at all.

Which wouldn’t stop people from trying, but still. 

Using One Piece as an example, there are certain characters that resonate with me personally, the chief of whom is Nico Robin. I’m a total sucker for the misunderstood badass bookworm - Raven from the original Teen Titans cartoon, Tris Chandler from Tamora Pierce’s works, Roald Dahl’s Matilda, and Thistle from Daughter of the Lilies are just a few examples of this in other media.

But apart from Best Girl Robin, my feelings about the cast of One Piece tends to vary depending on how you define “favorite”. I love Luffy as a main character, but would hate to meet him in real life. I appreciate Zoro’s place in the crew, but find him boring and long wistfully for the days when he was allowed to be a goofball. Nami, Usopp, and Vivi grew on me over time, and if I could graph my feelings on Sanji over the course of the series it would look like I have ventricular tachycardia 

And then there’s Chopper. 

Just as I’ve liked Robin since her first appearance, I have never liked Chopper. I know typing it is akin to blasphemy amongst the One Piece fandom, but I was left unmoved by his backstory, and he’s never grown on me in the hundreds of chapters since then. The first thing I thought when I first saw his unused concept art was “what a wasted opportunity”. 

 A lot of this is subjective. I work in health care, so the quack doctor Hiliruk rubs me the wrong way on a purely professional level, which in turn makes it really hard for me to care when he dies. I dislike Chopper’s “mascot” status and how it’s affected his character design. I wish he would do more onscreen doctoring. I find his naivete annoying. I think his post-timeskip transformations look dumb. And so on and so forth, ad nauseum.

At the same time, Nami is never shown drawing maps and I regularly have her in my top 3-4 Straw Hats. Usopp and Luffy are just as stupid, but their antics don’t bother me half as much as Chopper’s do. When I decided to sit down and write about Chopper, I had to figure out what made me less tolerant about him specifically when there are plenty of others who share his same flaws. This is what I came up with.

Want vs Need and Forgotten Development

In his book The Anatomy of Story, John Truby describes the difference between a character’s want versus their need. While written with writing screenplays in mind, many of Truby’s techniques can be used regardless of medium. It’s an excellent tool for would-be writers, and I highly recommend it.

When looking at Chopper through the lens of want and need, it’s pretty easy to see what Oda had in mind.

Chopper wants to become a doctor who can heal any illness, but he needs to reconcile his human and reindeer natures and see himself as a complete person. Ironically, in doing so he willingly becomes the “monster” he was so afraid of.

 Since this transformation is for the sake of and with the support of his friends, it’s coded as positive when before it was negative. Chopper is no longer isolated and lonely, but an accepted and important member of an infamous pirate crew. Compare the above to his fight on Fishman Island

So Chopper does have a complete character arc through the first half of the series, and it’s a good one - simultaneously unique to him while bolstering the themes of One Pieces as a whole. Good job, Oda.

At the same time, I think there’s a secondary need that’s overlooked by the narrative, and by this point I doubt will be relevant to the story, and that’s the fact that Chopper needs to grow the fuck up.

To be fair, Chopper is only 15 at the start of the series, had spent the first years of his life as a reindeer and the rest isolated from the world for his own safety. It is understandable that he’d be naive. Dr. Kureha points this out for herself when he first joins the Straw Hat Pirates

What sets Chopper’s immaturity apart from, say, Luffy’s is that it is presented as something that he needs to overcome. This is especially true during the Skyepiea arc.

Remember that early on in the arc Chopper is left alone to guard the Going Merry. Chopper fails, losing quite badly to the Priest with all the strings whose name I can’t remember. Even with Gan Fall’s intervention it was plot armor sheer luck that kept the both of them from being killed. 

This loss nicely sets up Chopper’s battle with Gedatsu, which ended with Chopper’s first solo victory of the series. 

Chopper screams to the heavens that he’s a “real” pirate, which in context refers to reliable, brave, and strong. Note that this ties into his main need of self-actualization as the chapter before Chopper calls himself a monster just before hitting Gedatsu with his finisher. 

In doing so, Oda is effectively saying that Chopper needs to mature before he can become a complete character. In this way Chopper is like Usopp, whose desire to become a brave warrior the sea necessitates that he face his problems head on instead of run from them.

Later during the Davy Fight Back, Chopper is temporarily lost to the Foxy Pirates. He is understandably upset, but he goes overboard with his hysterics, causing Zoro to call him out.

Zoro in essence tells Chopper to man up. Now, masculinity as defined by One Piece is a pretty broad topic, and this isn’t the only time Chopper is told how to act “manly” by other members of the Straw Hat crew, one of the best examples I can think of being Sanji telling Chopper that “a man doesn’t believe a woman’s lies” when Robin tries to leave the crew. In this instance, however, I think “being a man” is interchangeable with “acting like an adult”, specifically in the area of taking responsibility for one’s actions. 

So we have the problem of Chopper’s naivete brought up by Kureha, the first steps of maturity seen during Skypiea, and the exposure that Chopper still has a long way to go during the Davy Fight Back. There’s even a moment during Thriller Bark when he has to deal with the realization that one of his idols is an evil dirtbag of Spandam-like proportion - a loss of idealism that most go through as a normal part of growing up.

The development isn’t fast nor especially profound. It’s never the main focus of Chopper’s arc because it’s not his primary need, and in a gag-happy series like One Piece I think Chopper’s childishness would always be the brunt of some sort of joke. But there is a sense of steadily marching forward toward a goal, and if things had kept trending in that direction I think it would have been enough to elevate Chopper from his dubious position as my least favorite Straw Hat.

But immediately after the timeskip we have this abomination of a scene

Words cannot express how much I hate this scene. Every other Straw Hat gets an awesome reintroduction. Nami and Usopp, who along with Chopper make up the so-called “weak trio”, even get to beat the crap out of some of the Fake Hat Pirates. 

Chopper mistakes creepy cucumber lady for Robin and runs away crying, undoing hundreds of chapters of development in one fell swoop. It’s stupid on so many levels I can’t even articulate enough to type them all out. The gag falls flat and makes it impossible for me to take him seriously going forward. I will admit that I’ve not done a lot of rereading of recent chapters to double check, but where Usopp and Luffy get plenty of moments post-timeskip to display a new-found maturity while maintaining their fun-loving nature, Chopper does not. He’s the same old Chopper.

I don’t have any way to confirm this, but I think part of this stagnation of character is due to Chopper’s status of cute mascot. To disrupt this status quo is to lessen his marketability. There is a reason why Chopper’s so damn cute when Oda originally wanted him to be kind of ugly. I mean, say what you want about Oda’s use of realistic body proportions, but there was a time when Chopper’s head wasn’t bigger than his torso.

Whether I’m right or not, I don’t think that it can be disputed that Chopper has gone through what I call “forgotten character development”. He’s just as immature (and in some places more so) as he was early in the series, and personally I can’t stand that kind of character. 

And again this is a highly subjective thing, but I don’t even think he’s that cute anymore. It’s a serious problem when your mascot ceases to be adorable and has no development to fall back on.

In the larger picture of One Piece, the loss of Chopper’s secondary development is a small thing, but it’s enough for me to not care about him at all. Sanji, for all his polarizing actions, at least makes me feel something. These days Chopper is just...there. 

I will admit that I might have let my initial distaste cloud my objectivity, so let me know what you think about Chopper’s development, or if there’s any other character that everyone else seems to like but you can’t stand. I’ll commiserate with the burden of having an unpopular opinion.