[LES] The issue with One Piece's female characters isn't that they lack depth it's that they often lack agency

Or also "One Piece women aren't badly written, they're badly implemented".

I don't think this is a new or revolutionary take, but, as the upteenth discussion about female writing in One Piece came up and the usual factions took their place, it struck how both sides seemed to talk past each other. I think that mostly stems from a failure in terminology.

When people complain about female characters in One Piece being badly/poorly written, the usual answer is that that's actually not true. And that is a fair point. One Piece has great female characters, especially for a shonen of its time and for what it is.

The issue is that those characters often are deprived of agency they supposedly should have. Another issue is that... well plain and simple, Oda was better at writing around this fact when he was younger imo. Look at Vivi in Alabasta for example. Sure, she can't take on any of the big bads on her own basically, but she's not agencyless, which makes her inability to fight not matter.

Compare that to someone like Rebecca who is stated to be a great defensive Colosseum fighter and yet once the actual fighting starts she does basically nothing and comes off as not even out of her depths, but completely incompetent. She wins her round in the Colosseum by sheer luck and then outside she gets used as hostage bait not once but twice. The first time is particularly egregious as she's basically forced to stand there and be protected by Robin for her inability to defend herself, which is, again, supposedly the one thing she excels at as a fighter.

All of this is not to say that Rebecca is a bad character on paper, her concept is quite strong and you could even excuse her absolute dogshit design by chalking it up to her being forced to wear it by Doffy's people as a humiliation ritual, considering how hated she is.

The issue is that she's presented as someone capable of, if not fighting, at least taking care of herself and then the story undermines that concept at every opportunity to a frankly ludicrous degree (she gets two "HELP ME ..." scenes against two different opponents in like 10 or so chapters IIRC, it's insane)

And while Rebecca is an extreme example, this has been a more pressing issue in One Piece.

I think part of why it has become so apparent is just that One Piece has failed to evolve alongside the rest of the shonen genre and so is still very much written like an early 2000's work.

But it also suffers from Oda's age and his ever-increasing focus on moving the plot forward to the detriment of other aspects like character interactions, dialogue, etc. which makes it feel like he's regressing in many aspects One Piece was once praised for. I get it, he wants to get it over with, but it's severely hurting his story