Nami: Monkey Queen?

Original post: August, 2018

Made by: swans-anime-ramblings

Art by patrickdeza/superpaddi

warlordgab:

Telescoping staff, Weather manipulation, creating duplicates of herself via Mirage Tempo, becoming invisible, and now flying cloud… all things related to Sun Wukong, who was also called the “Handsome Monkey King”

Should we call Nami the “Sexy Monkey Queen” then? (￣ω￣)

I’m so glad Warlordgab pointed this out, because I never would’ve put two and two together. But now that it’s been brought to my attention, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. 

I think this is kind of a big deal, because it shows me just how much Oda values Nami. 

As I’m sure most people are aware, Oda was obsessed with Dragon Ball, to the point that in early One Piece, Oda was trying to emulate early Toriyama style drawing and panel placements.

Obviously Oda’s style has drastically changed over the years, but back then, it was pretty close. 

Goku’s entire character and story was originally based on Journey to the West, which can be easy to forget since Goku has lost almost all of his Monkey King traits, and the Z portion overshadows everything that happened in Dragon Ball.

“Goku” is the literal Japanese translation to “Wukong”. Toriyama gave a clever little pun to Goku’s name too. His full name is “Son Goku”, based on “Sun Wukong”. The first chapter of Dragon Ball is titled, “Bloomers and the Monkey King.”

Goku rides on a magical flying cloud, the Kinto’un (or Flying Nimbus as it’s called in the dub)

has a staff that extends and retracts, the Nyoibou (called the Power Pole in the dub)

can disappear

and can make duplicates of himself. 

Luffy himself is a homage to Goku, his surname name being “Monkey” and his character is based upon Goku’s archetype. But it seems that Oda has given all of the Monkey King’s powers to Nami. And like everything in One Piece, this was planned for a long time.

huh. Something worth noodling over.