I gotta recommend One Piece, my all time favorite. It’s about goofy ‘pirates’ who sail from island to island liberating them from fascists or stopping attempted coups, or fighting the CIA. The biggest problem in the one piece world is that everything was built to support a ruling class of disgusting inbred billionaires who do things like take slaves. There is a literal revolutionary army named “the revolutionaries” lead by a guy based on Che (he looks like che, his boat was named after che’s boat) who’s main goal is to destroy that billionaire ruling class.
The beginning of the show (like first 4 arcs) are more about introducing characters, but every arc after is about the above. The tone is like if Tom & Jerry had a plot. Despite how it might appear it’s not like a typical power scaling battle shonen, the fights are not the main point, though later on they do end up emphasizing fights a lot (in the anime, the manga is better at keeping fights secondary).
The show isn’t without issue though. It portrays trans, gender fluid, and queer people in a very mean way. They’re all still part of the ‘good guys’ but a lot will be drawn as like hairy men wearing dresses. There are better portrayals like one inspired by tim curry or one inspired by Jim carry (with the best voice actor ever if you watch it subbed). This issue gets a lot better later on though. This story has been going for 25 years, in the last 5 years or so it’s gotten much much better.
Another issue is it’s portrayal of women. Almost every prominent woman looks the same. They have the same-ish face and exact same body. They’re frequently scantily clad. No matter how important they are to the story, no matter how well fleshed out their characters are or how heartbreaking their story is, the author will still find a way to make them dress in underwear or something. I realize a lot of this was because of his editors. It doesn’t become a problem till later on when he gets editor after editor pushing him to draw them as scantily clad as possible. The author has warned other authors that the publisher is full of perverts. The anime makes things more gratuitous than the manga.
I do recommend reading it over watching it due to pacing and artwork though. They are remaking the anime right now even though the anime is still ongoing. The remake is supposed to address the pacing and art.
