The world has spoken and the best pirates were chosen.

Last January Shueisha, publisher of the manga behemoth One Piece, kicked off the World Top 100 poll asking everyone from all over the world to select their favorite character from the very long-running series and determine the best of the best.

On 5 May, the tallied votes were announced in a special YouTube announcement ceremony honoring the winners of this massive popularity contest.

▼ The ceremony was hosted by Japanese comedy duo Kamaitachi and a panel of fans from around the world

Since there’s no easy way to say this, let’s just get the bad news out of the way first: Despite my tireless efforts in voting, it’s with a heavy heart I inform you all that Camel the super penguin did not come in first. Instead, this was the top five:

▼ 5 – Trafalgar Law

▼ 4 – Sanji

▼ 3 – Nami

▼ 2 – Zoro

▼ 1 – Luffy

It’s probably not the most surprising outcome with the series’ main cast gracing the top five, but we can see how the competition between Zoro, Luffy, and Nami was actually surprisingly close when we break it down by region.

▼ Top 10 rankings by region

Despite her big wins in Oceania, Europe, and Latin America, Nami’s ranking turned out to be a bit of a surprise. As of the midterm results, the cartographer was trailing in seventh place but managed to rally enough latter half support to land in the top three. Conversely, Portgas D. Ace, who was enjoying fifth place as of the midterms, got knocked way back to ninth. He was also surpassed by the WT100’s biggest dark horse: the half-human-half-rabbit warrior Carrot, who shot up the rankings from a mid-term 17th to a final eighth and within hopping distance of seventh place.

▼ The full global top 100

The grassroots push for Carrot even caught the attention of Eiichiro Oda himself, who issued the following letter regarding the final results of the WT100.

WORLD TOP 100!

Usually, this character ranking poll is only done in Japan but by opening it up to the world through the internet, I was able to see in real time a glimpse of which characters are popular in different regions of the world and some characters went up in the rankings since the midterm results, so it was truly entertaining.

I heard that there seemed to be some movements online organized by fans to come together to cast votes for unexpected characters. That didn’t get past the production team (laugh). It’s amazing how different the preferences towards these characters are all over the world and it was so fun seeing how it went down for Robin and Carrot.

As I promised, I’ll be creating a cool piece with the characters who ranked in the top 50 plus some others so please look forward to it.

Thank you so much to all the ONE PIECE fans all over the world for casting so many votes!

If you missed out on the ceremony, it can still be viewed on YouTube and everyone behind the manga and series is far from finished celebrating, so be sure to keep and eye on their YouTube channel and other social media accounts.

▼  Part 1: 100 to 21

▼  Part 2: 20 to 1

It looks like this One Piece ranking was a rousing success aside from the unforgivable omission of Camel. I guess we’ll just have to wait until the 2,000th chapter is published before we can take another crack at it.

Source: One Piece WT100
Images: © Eiichiro Oda/Shueisha
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