One Piece has a legendary reputation, and rightly so. With over 1000 episodes under the show's belt, Eiichiro Oda's epic pirate adventure about a young boy named Luffy who dreams of finding a legendary treasure and becoming king of the pirates features some truly stunning character writing and arguably some of the best worldbuilding in all of fiction. That being said, there has long been a disconnect between One Piece readers and watchers. The former swear on this being one of the all-time great mangas, while the latter tend to play a bit coy about recommending the anime to newcomers.
The biggest reason for this is the pacing. Like many '90s and early '00s shonen anime, One Piece has a lot of filler episodes – which sometimes extend to whole arcs. Because the show releases on a weekly schedule rather than a seasonal one, the filler impacts individual "canon" episodes, too. These see extra scenes added and scenes stretched out in order to extend the episodes' runtime and slow down the anime's pacing to keep it behind the manga. Important fight scenes will pause at seemingly random times while showdowns will evolve into staring contests for minutes on end with nothing happening.
