Character · One Piece
Arlong
The fishman who taxed a village by the head, and kept a cartographer chained to a desk for eight years.
In Otakana the clue reads: Saw-nosed fishman who taxes a village
- Type
- Character
- Series
- One Piece
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Arlong runs a stretch of the East Blue out of a fortress shaped like a theme park, charging every village a fee per adult and per child, payable monthly in cash. Miss a payment and the village stops existing. He believes fishmen are simply better than humans, and he has the strength and the regrowing teeth to win most arguments about it.
The reason he matters is Nami. He killed the woman who raised her, then offered a deal: draw sea charts for his crew and buy the village back for a hundred million berries. She spent eight years stealing towards that number and he was never going to honour it. When the crew finally arrives, the fight is less about a pirate than about the interest on a debt.
Arlong Park is the arc where One Piece stops being a comedy about a stretchy boy. It ends with Luffy stamping on a building until the building gives up, and it plants the history between humans and fishmen that the series returns to properly hundreds of chapters later, at an island on the seabed where Arlong's own past turns out to be more complicated than his behaviour.
Spelling ARLONG
Six letters, and both the R and the L are doing work. Japanese writes him as something closer to Aaron, with a long opening vowel that English throws away completely. ARLONG is a localisation choice rather than a transliteration, so hearing the name spoken in Japanese will not help you spell it. The RL pair in the middle is the cluster that guesses skip.