Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, you’ve likely heard about Toei Animation’s One Piece (1999) anime, which was based on the manga of the same name by Eiichiro Oda. Following the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy, One Piece sees Luffy — a boy whose body mimics the properties of rubber — and his band of misfits, known as the Straw Hat Pirates, searching the seven seas for a coveted treasure called the One Piece, which Luffy hopes to obtain to become the next Pirate King. After airing over 100 episodes and enjoying universal success for the last two decades, One Piece has — unsurprisingly — become a meme.
All over Twitter, One Piece video edits featuring the character Whitebeard with some NSFW modifications have been surfacing. In these videos, a montage of images transition to the beat of “Dark Fantasy,” a song by Kanye West (henceforth known as simply Ye), and particularly focuses on the lyrics “can we get much higher.” Usually, the videos start out with a clip from One Piece that sees Whitebeard shout the catchphrase, “The One Piece is real!”
These videos, although varying in levels of technical skill, depict the same scene. However, some videos should be marked NSFW, since the trend — which has amassed hundreds of participators — is associated with One Piece genital edits, which are additional memes wherein the users digitally integrate different sized penises onto the anime’s various characters. Obviously, we won’t include the more vulgar edits in this post, but any interested parties can’t scroll too far on Twitter right now without coming across one. You have been warned.
So, where did the One Piece meme originate from? Well, on Jan. 30th, 2011, One Piece aired Episode 485: “Settling the Score – Whitebeard vs. The Blackbeard Pirates,” in which Whitebead sings his swan song, though not without loudly proclaiming that the long sought-after treasure, the One Piece, actually exists. Until then, many pirates had considered the existence of the jewel to be nothing more than a rumor or a myth. On March 15, 2021, YouTube uploaded the clip from the English dub, which garnered over 23,000 views in a year — and can be viewed below.
On Aug. 3, 2020, Twitter artist dhlinez uploaded a NSFW image of Whitebeard with a penis that was proportional to his giant stature. From there, Twitter user @BestBuyMilk was one of the earliest-known participants in the trend after posting the catchphrase over the top of dhlinez’s artwork. That exact audio and visage become a viral trend in July 2022, where versions of the edits featuring other characters with proportionate penises started to circulate. After that, it became customary for editors to use Ye’s song “Dark Fantasy” as a soundtrack, which later become integral to the meme. All of this madness culminated when TikTok user eijaks posted a mash-up video of the Whitebeard clip (to Ye’s “Can we get much higher” verse in “Dark Fantasy”) along with a clip from Cameo where Patrick Fabian, better known as Howard Hamlin from Netflix’s Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul, uttered the iconic catchphrase. That TikTok upload hit 25,000 likes in a single day. The rest is history.
Everyone is equal parts confused and fascinated, but One Piece has single-handedly proven — once again — that the internet is a dark, dark place.