What Is Two Pieces & How Is It Connected to One Piece?

Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, once said: “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” And while you might be wondering how this quote relates to the world of anime, One Piece in particular, we actually have a very good explanation. Have you ever heard of Two Pieces? We’re not talking about the hyphotetical sequel to One Piece, but rather a very obscure parody manga that the Internet knows about but… not really. In this article, we are going to tell you how Two Pieces is connected to the original One Piece manga.
Two Pieces is a three-volume parody manga of One Piece written and illustrated by Shiranami Tsuchigumo, an author the Internet knows nothing about. Not much is known about this parody manga save for the fact that the characters look like badly drawn versions of Oda’s characters and that a foreign language copy is available for ordering online. It is not known how many copies there are in circulation or whether anyone’s actually read it.
The rest of this article is going to tell you everything that is known about the Two Pieces parody manga and that is – almost nothing. We’re going to talk about how it is connected to the original One Piece manga and why this manga is such a cult title in the otaku community, but we have to warn you that we haven’t actually read it and the information we have on it is very scarce.
What is Two Pieces?
When yours truly was initially assigned this article, he was quite irritated because he thought it was just another fanfic demand and I really detest writing those because they aren’t based on any canon material or theory, which makes them more or less useless for such a serious website. Namely, Two Pieces (or Two Piece) has been the title of a hypothetical One Piece sequel story for years now and I honestly thought this one was going to be about that – but I was wrong.
Namely, upon further research, I discovered that Two Pieces is both the title of a hypothetical sequel to One Piece and an actual manga published, as far as we know, in 2010 in three volumes. The series was written by a guy called Shiranami Tsuchigumo, whom the Internet knows absolutely nothing about; this means that it could be a pseudonym by some more popular author, which wouldn’t be strange for the world of anime and manga. Be that as it may, the Shiranami Something-guy published a total of three volumes of the series and you can see what they look like:
It is not known how many copies there are in circulation, nor how to get one’s hand on these books (Amazon sells volumes 1 and 2, but they are quite expensive and not in English), but they actually do exist. And they are an officially-recognized parody of Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece manga, which is visible if you simply observe the covers with a parody of Luffy (called Huffy or Fuffy, depending on which source you take), Nami, Zoro, Usopp, and Chopper on them (interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a parody of Sanji in these books).
The story is supposedly set after One Piece, i.e., after the One Piece treasure has been found, although not by Luffy. The crew members are scattered and are united by Fuffy or Huffy, who hears about the existence of another valuable treasure, the Two Pieces, so he goes on an adventure to obtain it. The characters really look like badly drawn versions of the originals so we don’t really know what to think of it. People who’ve read it say that it isn’t as bad as it looks, but we really don’t know what to think of it. Be that as it may, Two Pieces does exist and it is a parody of One Piece, although we don’t really know what Eiichiro Oda said about it and why there are only three volumes of the story present but this is what we know about the title.
How is Two Pieces connected to One Piece?
How is Two Pieces connected to One Piece? Well, the latter serves as a narrative and artistic basis for the former but that’s about it. Really, it’s connected to the original material as any other parody is, so we don’t have anything specific to add. What we did want to tell you is the plot of One Piece, in short, since we don’t know anything about the plot of Two Pieces, we thought that knowing the plot of the original might help you understand how the parody was actually created.
The story of One Piece is set in a fictional world dominated by oceans, where some pirates yearn for an era of freedom and adventure known as the “Golden Age of Piracy”. This era was ushered in following the last words spoken by the Pirate King, Gol D. Roger, nicknamed Gold Roger before his execution. Roger announces to the world that its inhabitants were free to seek all the riches he had accumulated during his entire life, the “One Piece.”
Twenty-two years after Roger’s execution, interest in One Piece is waning. Many have given up on it, some even wonder if it really exists. Although pirates are still a threat to the locals, the Navy has become more effective in countering their attacks on all four seas: East Blue, North Blue, West Blue, and South Blue. However, this change did not deter Monkey D. Luffy, a young boy, from wanting to become the successor to the legendary Roger.
He will thus set off on an adventure, giving himself the first objective of creating a crew in order to reach the sea of Grand Line, where the fever of the “great wave of piracy” continues to rage, and where many big names in the piracy are in pursuit of the One Piece, supposed to be on the last island of this great sea, Laugh Tale (spelling intended by Oda).
Luffy goes on an adventure after meeting Redhaired Shanks, the captain of a pirate ship who spent a year in his village and saved him from a sea monster by sacrificing his left arm. Since then, Luffy wears his straw hat which he gave to him to mark his promise to become a great pirate. This hat will therefore become the symbol of his crew. It was during this time that he ate a devil fruit held by Shanks: the Gomu Gomu no Mi, which made his body elastic.
Devil fruits once eaten give special abilities to their holder, who at the same time loses all his strength when immersed in sea water, it is a curse. Luffy and his crew will meet many people who will strengthen their friendship and expand their crew. But they will have to confront the pirate crews advocating violence and powers, as well as the Navy and its soldiers, guarantors of justice.