YMMV / One Piece – Fish-Man Island Arc

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• Anti-Climax Boss: Hody Jones and his Fishman crew ended up not being all that much of a threat to the Straw Hats. The reason being that Oda had to show off the results of the Straw Hats' two years of training against someone, which Hody and his gang being the first true adversary against the Straw Hats after said training had to be used as the punching bag for Luffy and company to show off their new skills. Hody's efforts in particular were incredibly lackluster as he suffered a one-shot to Zoro midway through the arc, and only managed to get a single bite in on Luffy throughout the arc's Final Battle. The anime tried to rectify this by extending Hody's fights against Zoro and Luffy, which Hody manages to get several more shots in. However, this resulted in a different problem.
• Arc Fatigue:
  • The Fisher Tiger / Queen Otohime flashback goes on for 6 chapters, which can be a bit fatiguing if you're not all that invested in the background history of the Fishmen.
  • Only in the anime. This was where Toei started to pare down each episode to either cover only one chapter or two halves of adjoining chapters to avoid surpassing the source material, which caused the pace of big story arcs to grind along at a painfully slow rate. Fish-Man Island happened to be the first significant arc of the second half of One Piece, but it took a little over a year for the anime to power through it all.
• Broken Base: The anime extended a few fights for the sake of increasing the suspense and drama, but some people got vocal over the fact that it made some of the Straw Hats (particularly Zoro vs. Hody and Luffy vs. Hody) appear weaker because the battles were over much quicker in the manga without nearly as much struggle. Others had a beef with Hody being much less of a threat than he was built up to be for having to rely on a constant supply of steroids just to hold his own against his opponents.
• Complete Monster: Hody Jones is a Fish-man with all of Arlong's hatred of humans but none of his care for his fellow people. Disgusted by the benevolent Queen Otohime's petition that intended to improve relations between humans and Fish-men, Hody Jones hired a human to burn the signature box. Hody then assassinated Otohime and framed the human for it, proudly bragging about his crimes when they're discovered. When he takes over Fish-Man Island, he declares that all of the Fish-men who had signed Queen Otohime's petition will be executed. When his ally Vander Decken uses his Devil Fruit power to send the giant ship Noah after Princess Shirahoshi, Hody severely wounds Vander Decken to cause the latter's powers to deactivate in an attempt to have Noah crash down on Fish-Man Island.
• Strawman Has a Point: Hody is the only person to chastise Shirahoshi for not telling the truth about her mother's assassin, while everyone else praises her for following her mother's dying wish to not hold a grudge toward the culprit. However, this necessarily equates revenge to punishing an unrepentant Fish-man supremacist like Hody for his crimes, which would only build up until an attempted hostile takeover of Fish-Man Island only foiled by the convenient arrival of the Straw Hats.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some consider Hody's extended fights against Zoro and Luffy in the anime to be this due to the belief that it made the latter two look weak compared to how the fights were portrayed in the manga.

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