Alean, sun-bronzed boy with unruly hair that never quite obeys gravity, round eyes that can flip from innocent to razor-sharp in an instant, and a wide, childlike grin that surfaces even when he is half-dead. In his late teens, his body is made of rubber after accidentally eating a “devil fruit” named the Gum-Gum Fruit. He wears a red, unbuttoned vest, tattered blue shorts, sandals and his trademark straw hat—old, battered and treasured more than gold. Cheerful, impulsive and perpetually hungry, he appears foolish at first glance. But beneath the goofiness lies deep compassion. He hates oppression, and whenever he sees someone crushed by power, he stretches himself—literally and figuratively—into the fight.
He is Monkey D. Luffy, protagonist of the Japanese anime One Piece, by the legendary Eiichiro Oda. A wanderer and seafarer, Luffy harbours an absurdly ambitious dream: to find the legendary treasure known as One Piece and become King of the Pirates. His idea of kingship, however, has little do with rule or territory; it is based on something far more radical—the pursuit of absolute freedom, not just for himself, but for anyone who chooses to sail with him.
Standing against this vision is the World Government, a global power structure dominated by an elite class known as the Celestial Dragons. The Government suppresses all knowledge of the “Void Century”, a lost period whose buried truths could threaten its legitimacy. The clash between Luffy’s anarchic pursuit of freedom and the World Government’s obsession with control forms one of the central tensions of One Piece.
Over the past few months, this carefree “straw hat pirate”—and his Jolly Roger, a skull wearing a straw hat—has spilled out of fiction into the real world. Luffy has become a Gen Z symbol that can unite, provoke, and in some cases destabilise governments across continents. A teenage hero created for a different era, he has become a vessel through which Gen Z around the world is asserting its claim to shape the political and social futures of their countries.
Sarcastic defiance
ON JULY 25 last year, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto unveiled the logo and theme for the country’s 80th Independence Day, urging citizens to fly the national red-and-white flag throughout August as a gesture of patriotism. For many young Indonesians, the call rang hollow. What followed was a counter-wave of defiance. Beginning with a few TikTok posts, the response rapidly spread across the archipelago. From Jakarta’s crowded streets to remote villages, a different banner appeared—black, emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, topped with the familiar straw hat. Some even raised this pirate flag on public flagpoles alongside the national flag.
The movement drew energy from simmering frustrations with a government blamed for rising youth unemployment, soaring living costs, controversial policy decisions, power centralisation, and the expanding role of the military in civilian governance. Indonesia had already witnessed youth-driven unrest in early 2025 through the #IndonesiaGelap (“Dark Indonesia”) and #KaburAjaDulu (“Just Flee First”) movements, both fuelled by anxiety over the country’s political trajectory.
By late July, as the Jolly Roger morphed into a symbol of dissent, the government went into war with the cartoon flag. Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal and Security Affairs Budi Gunawan warned that the flag posed a “potential threat” that could “compromise the dignity of the nation”. Sufmi Dasco Ahmad, deputy speaker of the house of representatives and senior leader of the ruling Gerindra Party, escalated the rhetoric, calling the trend a “systematic movement” and a “coordinated attempt to divide the nation”. Firman Soebagyo of the house of representatives went further, branding it “treason” and urging police to interrogate anyone who raised the flag.
Saner voices urged restraint, arguing that what was unfolding was public criticism—an essential feature of any democracy. Farhan Rizqullah, a young political analyst who was introduced to One Piece through Netflix’s live-action adaptation in 2023, described the government’s “schizophrenic response, vacillating between accusations of treason and acknowledgments of democratic expression”, as deeply revealing. The protests featuring a globally beloved pop-culture icon created a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dilemma. A hardline crackdown on a cartoon pirate flag risked making the government appear both tyrannical and absurdly out of touch.
The protests eventually turned violent and were suppressed, though not before the government conceded to some demands. Indonesia soon became a template as Gen Z took to the streets in countries such as the Philippines, Nepal and Madagascar.
The artists’ arc
IN 2020, Hungarian political scientist Ákos Kopper of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest published what now reads like a prophetic study on why scholars—especially in international relations—should pay attention to One Piece. Kopper argued that the series offers “highly important political reflections on crucial dilemmas” and invites audiences to interrogate the global order and question “taken-for-granted truths” about how power is organised and legitimised.
That such a work emerged from manga is no accident. Japanese comics emerged as a major cultural export in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was during this phase that Eiichiro Oda, then just 17 and hailing from Kumamoto, entered the scene by winning the prestigious Tezuka Manga Award in 1992 for his one-shot cowboy manga Wanted!.
Oda went on to work as an assistant to some of the industry’s biggest names, including Nobuhiro Watsuki of the samurai epic Rurouni Kenshin, at publishing giant Shueisha. Much like his future protagonist Luffy, Oda was unusually blunt in his youth, frequently arguing with senior mangaka (manga creators) and editors. His mentors, however, disciplined and shaped him.
During this period, Oda developed several original drafts, nearly all of which were rejected. Finally, as a last attempt to break through, he reworked a pirate story he had been sketching since high school—Romance Dawn. This became the prototype for One Piece, which was approved for serialisation in May 1997. The weekly series has been running ever since, spanning over a thousand chapters and episodes, with multiple arcs and an expansive world of characters, each with their own subplots.
From the beginning, One Piece appeared calibrated for a global audience—its many characters are named after European pirates. “The pirates I admired so much in my youth hardly ever wrote records of their history,” Oda wrote in 1997. “I guess they were just too busy having fun with their adventures and forgot to leave their stories for future generations. That’s the trouble with those damned pirates.”
Symbolic significance
KOPPER ARGUES THAT pirates have long functioned not merely as criminals but also as popular icons of resistance—figures who challenged colonial states and entrenched power hierarchies. The pirate violates the law often because the law itself is perceived as unjust. Under the guise of neutral policing, colonial powers had legitimised violence against “native pirates”.
In One Piece, the World Government is shown doing precisely this. The series strongly suggests that whoever reaches the One Piece gains knowledge of how the existing world order was constructed—how the Celestial Dragons established their dominance and how the World Government came to rule the world. It is this suppressed history that holds the potential to overturn the existing order.
“The Celestial Dragons [who hold power as their hereditary right] strongly resembled the ‘nepo baby’ phenomenon in Nepal,” said Bibek Dhoj Thapa, programme coordinator and research associate at the Nepal Institute for International Cooperation and Engagement. An ardent One Piece fan as well as a participant in the Gen Z protests in Nepal that toppled the K.P. Sharma Oli government last year, Thapa said the protesters immediately connected with the imagery: inherited privilege, unaccountable power, and contempt for ordinary people. No single individual, he adds, can be credited for bringing the Jolly Roger flag to Nepal, but its influence clearly travelled from Southeast Asia—particularly Indonesia and the Philippines.
Bikhyat Khatri, youth leader and president of the NGO Youth in Federal Discourse, said that beyond the anime’s popularity, the flag filled a symbolic vacuum. “We had seen Indonesia use the flag, and it felt right,” he said. “Honestly, we didn’t overthink it. It felt symbolic and fitting.”
But Khatri admits that he felt uneasy as the momentum of the Gen Z protests toppled the government in Nepal. “I met people from 40–50 countries in recent months. Everyone was curious about Nepal’s protest. But honestly, I didn’t always feel good about that, because protest should only happen when democratic processes fail,” he said.
Similar movements have erupted elsewhere, with the pirate flag becoming a bandwagon. Khatri said two issues remain common to every place where protests erupted: kleptocracy and nepotism.
Jasmine Ojha, a former leader of the student wing of Oli’s party who quit to join the Gen Z protests, said the meaningful change they were hoping for never came. “Corruption was everywhere, and young people saw no space for themselves in political parties. Within parties, questioning senior leaders was impossible—silence was expected,” she said. “For us, staying silent felt like participating in wrongdoing. The anger wasn’t just political; it was generational.”
One Piece shows how entrenched elites pass power down through generations while generations of ordinary people remain oppressed. Thapa points out that many One Piece story arcs culminate in the destruction of symbols of power—Enies Lobby, Impel Down, Marineford. “Luffy liberates people, and oppressive structures collapse,” he said. “In Nepal, protesters similarly targeted buildings seen as symbols of power.”
This impulse, however, carries grave risks. “My friend was shot dead,” Khatri said. What unsettled him most was watching supposed leaders vanish once protests reached prohibited zones. “When leadership vanished, the crowd turned chaotic. That’s when casualties happened,” he said.
Anime imagines leadership differently. Rather than fleeing, Luffy steps forward and takes risks to shield his friends and crew. But he is no ideologue—he does not fight the World Government because it is “evil”, but because it harms people he cares about.
As Kopper explains, Luffy’s appeal is that he is an imaginary hero with “no problematic historical legacies, no contradictions to reconcile—just pure idealism”.
Planting their flag
INTERESTINGLY, One Piece offers no governing footprint after the overthrow of an oppressive regime. “Luffy’s crew liberates and leaves—they don’t govern; they believe people should simply rule themselves,” Thapa said. “But that doesn’t translate neatly into real politics. One Piece is fantasy. If it were that simple, we would all be living in a utopia by now.”
Yet the Jolly Roger protests have produced tangible—if uneven—shifts in power. More importantly, they have forced a reckoning. Across societies, older generations are beginning to recognise Gen Z not as a fringe presence, but as a consequential political force.
In Madagascar, this was vividly captured by comic artist and urban sketcher Eric Andriantsialonina, known as DWA. Last year, when the protests over water and electricity shortages snowballed into a broader movement against President Andry Rajoelina, DWA began documenting the unrest in watercolours. One striking image shows a man in a red-and-white jacket and blue jeans hurling a stone. A faint Jolly Roger is emblazoned on his jacket. The original protester wore no such symbol. “I added the logo deliberately,” DWA said. “Gen Z was the force pushing back, standing on the front line. It mattered to mark that.”
Thapa notes that outcomes of the protests have diverged. In Madagascar, unlike in Nepal, the military seized power. “So, although these movements began with comparable grievances,” Thapa said, “their outcomes differed because of culture, society and domestic power dynamics.”
In Nepal, Khatri said, the Gen Z protesters were not driven by heroic impulses alone. “In the civic space, we were not acting like Luffy,” he said. “We were reading history, writing analysis, proposing frameworks like a Nepali Magna Carta. The focus was on a safe landing and a stable transition.”
Yet, Luffy hovers above these movements—not as a governance guide, but as a rallying symbol of hope, defiance and the refusal to abandon generational dreams.