One Piece is a manga created by Eiichiro Oda that has been featured in a weekly shonen magazine since 1997. Over more than 25 years of the series’ history, it has captured the hearts and attention of fans worldwide. Earlier this year, Netflix announced they were releasing a live-action adaptation of the manga and fans went wild.
Despite the hype for the show, some remained sceptical. Netflix’s previous attempts at live-action anime adaptations like Cowboy Bebop and Death Note haven’t always been received well, but still, the excitement from fans for this series was palpable. On the release of One Piece to Netflix it hit the first spot on Netflix’s Top 10 TV charts in 84 different countries, a new record besting out Wednesday and Stranger Things, which ranked top in 83 countries during their release week.
The popularity of the show follows on from the massive love fans around the world share for the manga, which has sold over 500 million copies worldwide: making it the best-selling manga series in history and the largest comic series per volume. It also set the record in 2022 for the most copies published in one series by a single author.
Utilising the power of our data tracking and some analysis, we’ve taken a look at the mentions for One Piece and other related terms in global Twitch chats across the past few months. Let’s take a look and when and how much people are talking about One Piece as the hype for the live-action show was building up, and even what they’re talking about.
Chat Mentions Dynamics of One Piece
In our data, we tracked the chat mentions for one piece, its characters, and its author Oda Eiichiro. Across the entire data set, Usopp was the least mentioned term in the data and protagonist Luffy was the most popular character to be mentioned. Deuteragonist Zoro was the second fan-favourite of the data, receiving 4.9K mentions in total alone.
Oda Eiichiro and his character Nami were very similar in terms of mentions, but the author managed to best his creation by less than a hundred mentions across the dataset. There are three distinct spikes in the dynamics, and these correlate to news and happenings in the One Piece community.
Firstly, mentions spiked to 12.8K in one day on the 22nd of July. This date coincides with Netflix’s release of the official trailer for the live-action adaptation. A teaser trailer was released prior to this but the 22nd of July marked the first proper look at the show for eager fans. Currently, the trailer has garnered 11M views on the official Netflix YouTube channel, and fans were raving about this trailer on Twitch.
The following month on the 6th of August mentions spiked once more: this time reaching 19.5K. This spike likely doesn’t have much to do with the Netflix series, although this is hard to prove. It likely was caused by the release of episode 1071 of the anime. Episode 1071 is when Luffy first awakened his Gear 5 ability, which was revealed a year and a half prior in the manga. Fans of the manga have been hyping up this moment in the story for over a year and anime fans could not wait any longer.
Finally, mentions spiked to 21.3K, the highest peak we recorded, on the 31st of August: the release date for the Netflix series. Reception to the series has been positive from both critics and fans alike, and Twitch chats were absolutely buzzing to talk about the new series. Not only was the 31st of August a new peak for the mentions, but the following day also recorded 19.8K mentions, the second-highest amount of mentions in our dataset.
The hype didn’t immediately die down, with Twitch chats still aflutter days after the release of the anime and mentions are still overall high. One Piece’s Netflix adaptation is one of the largest cultural events for anime fans of the year, and this hype and excitement bled over into the live-streaming sphere as well. Stay up to date with all the latest trends in live streaming, viewership, and even Twitch chats with Streams Charts.