Character · One Piece
Monkey D. Luffy
A rubber teenager with a straw hat, a borrowed promise, and no plan beyond forward.
In Otakana the clue reads: Straw-hat captain made of rubber
- Type
- Character
- Series
- One Piece
- Letters
- 5 · Easy
Monkey D. Luffy ate the Gum-Gum Fruit as a child, which stretched his body and took away his ability to swim. For someone who intends to spend his life at sea, that is a poor trade. He made it anyway and has been sailing towards the title of King of the Pirates ever since, collecting a crew of people who each want something equally unreasonable.
The hat is not his. Shanks, a red-haired pirate who lost an arm pulling him out of the water, left it on Luffy's head and asked for it back once he had grown into someone worth the loan. Most of what Luffy does traces back to that debt. He is not clever, he does not pretend to be, and he decides far too quickly, but he almost never revises.
Eiichiro Oda started One Piece in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997 and has not stopped since. It is the best-selling manga series ever printed, past 500 million copies in circulation, and the anime has run well beyond a thousand episodes. Luffy carries it by being funny first and frightening second, usually in that order and usually in the same scene.
Spelling LUFFY
LUFFY is five letters with a double F, and the second F is where guesses die. The Japanese is ルフィ, closer to Rufi, so the English spelling is a localization decision rather than a transliteration. If you have only ever heard the name out loud, LUFY and LUFI both feel correct. Neither fills the row.