#honestly I'll answer all questions about Law or Zoro or Mihawk or Saga

[gildedmuse]

Imma ask a stupid ass question. Is Law black or POC? I know because of his past their skin was experiencing pigment loss due to the minerals and such of their island, but now that he’s older his melanin is there but I’m really bad at telling race in shows. So I was wondering what is his RACE? Not nationality or ethnicity. Also sorry for the dumb question

Hey, it's not a stupid question. I mean, "race" in One Piece is weird.

[In theory, these characters are said to represent someone of African decent, one who is Scandinavian, one of East Asian heritage, and one who more than likely would be considered mixed-race with European, African and Amerindian ancestry. And, yes, that is a game you would never ever play in real life.]

I would say this may be a strange blog to bring it up on. After all, there are a breadth of sites out there that discuss race as a concept, race and gender in One Piece, the importance AND problematic elements of group identity in fiction, and out of all those you've chosen the one whose main concern is really pointing at characters like, "you there, yes, you. You have a sword."

"I'm gonna write about you making out with *so many* people.... But mostly Zoro."

[I have my priorities. Pictured: My priorities.]

Which some may say is a strange tactic but to be fair... Law does have a sword, and I do enjoy making him lust after Zoro. So, sure, I will totally attempt to answer this.

Let's start with the obvious: there is no real or right answer to this question.

It's incredibly difficult to define our concept of race to begin with, because it various so widely through location, culture, usage and time, but even if you just consider it's common usage in the west, we're still talking about a concept that relies partially on physical similarities, but also relies on ancestry/geography.

[Oda has said that Franky's nationality would be American. Point to America on this map. Go on. I'll wait.]

In this sense, Law's ethnicity would be "Northerner" because while the show never really discusses the topic in an overt manner, I think it's safe to assume that the Four Blues function in much the same way our continents do, with individual islands functioning as everything from countries to single villages. And the broadest definitions of races tend to be divided roughly along continental lines. And I think if the world of One Piece did have a definition of race outside of "human", "fishman/merfolk", "giant", "mink", etc it would likely tie into both physical attributes but also, your Blue of origins.

I do understand, though, that the real question here is, "would Law be considered white/non-white by the standards of our reality".

And yet, the answer is still pretty fuzzy. Especially in the anime, which has a terrible habit of skin whitening.

[Actual Serious Caption Time: I got really, honestly upset seeing how much whiter these characters were post-time skip. Either @chromatic-lamina or my brother - who are both endless sources of canonical knowledge - informed me this change was very much endemic to the anime, and that in Oda's art the two characters have always been portrayed as with lighter skin. Like most facts, rather than help to clarify things, this only makes them more complex. On the one hand, the original source material didn't erase the only two main characters you would describe as "non-white", which the anime was under no obligation to do. After all, the shade of their skin has no major story factor, and the anime is already happy to diverge from the Canon source in other ways. Why was this issue the one they felt they absolutely had to fix? Then again, while it's horrible that they ended up whitening these characters, Oda just didn't bother with more than one skin tone for 90% of the human characters. Which, aside from everything else, considering the scope of the One Piece planet, just seems like lazy world building.]

This isn't helped by Oda assigning characters real nationalities (I wouldn't consider that Canon, of course, since it was done based on an ask, but also.... Don't assign people ethnicities based almost solely on stereotype your own characters and not expect people to comment) that either seem to have little impact on their appearance, or inform it in the worst possible way.... (Thank goodness Ussop is actually one of the best characters in the show. Seriously, would watch him and Nami forced to fight outside their weight class all day, any day.)

I have heard it repeated, though I don't think it's in anyway verified, that Law's "non-fictional" nationality is German, though, personally, the name of his home town, Flevance always makes me think "Florence", and I've got to say I feel that is backed up by his olive complexion.

[I was originally hoping for a screenshot of him standing close to someone so that you could compare, but, you know, it's Law. The last person he was close to bleed out in the snow leaving Law to face this cruel world alone so....]

There is a lot of study and debate about whether Italians, especially Southern Italians and Sicilians, have historically be considered "white", but they have definitely been considered a different racial group. Keep in mind at this time, there were a lot more racial groups than what we would think of today, and almost all of them were deeply flawed and incredibly insulting. A lot of that was based, yes, on traits such as skin color and facial features, but also on language groups and cultural differences.

Which, again, sort of don't exist in an obvious way in the world of One Piece outside of a handful of Grand Line islands (which is utterly ridiculous; like of course the four Blues have distinct cultures, likely with deeply held stereotypes and biases against the other Blues. We see hints of this, like how the East is widely considered the "weakest" of the Blues, or how the West seems to have wide spread criminal syndicates while the North apparently has a higher number of marine than other seas).

I would say that, if you simply showed a picture of Law to someone with no other context, a fair amount of people would guess white, maybe mixed-race or asian. However, if you showed him beside another One Piece character, I think more people would assume him to be of some none north european background.

[Oh, look, I did find a picture of Law standing close to someone.... So he could mock them.]

For what little it is worth, I tend to imagine Law as having either an olive complexion, as mentioned above, or else being from what I imagine is the equivalent of an indigenous artic/northern people such as the many peoples of Siberia or Canada or Greenland. There are a lot of artist who tend to draw him with a darker complexion, and I have a preference for that art. On the other hand, I have friends who think of him as very pale (though pale is not a quality that at all correlates to race, so I couldn't comment on their opinion on that), and some who think of him as being very North European precisely because, well, he's from the North and he's named Trafalgar. None of those opinions are any more right or wrong than the others, just as fan artists may choose to depict Ussop (who, according to Oda, is from the "country of Africa.....) As black while others draw him closer to the colors used in the show. I think you could argue for both depictions, and since they're neither real people nor does the story take place in the real world, it's difficult to identify characters by racial groups that are constructed based on our own history as a species.

So if you want to depict Law as a person of color, you know, go for it. If you don't see him that way, that's also fine and valid. It's a fantasy cartoon that pays little attention to race unless it's being embarrassingly bad about it, so I'm actually happier if they leave characters ambiguous.

Except Zoro. Zoro should be tan, like a golden sacrifice to the God Of Sun, Sand and Steel. This is not up for debate.