One Piece fans attack voice actor after she addresses Yamato as a "He"

With Crunchyroll having added One Piece anime's English dub episodes on its streaming platform, fans can finally watch the anime up till its 14th season. The episodes that are set to come out after that will be added to Crunchyroll's library time-to-time when the dub team will finish their work on the same.

With the release of the new English-dubbed episodes, several characters made their English debut. One of them was Yamato, who appeared in the anime's 972nd episode. With this, Crunchyroll hired voice actor Michelle Rojas for the role. However, when she tweeted about her excitement for the same, she was met with some criticism.

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One Piece VA gets scrutinized for addressing Yamato as "He"

On July 4, a day before the release of One Piece's English dub episodes on Crunchyroll, Michelle Rojas, the English voice actress of Yamato decided to post a tweet. She expressed her excitement over fans getting to finally witness her work as Yamato in One Piece.

However, in her tweet, she referred to the character as a "he," which happened to enrage fans. Yamato was earlier addressed as "he" in the series as the character was born as Kaidou's daughter. However, as the character happened to admire Kozuki Oden, she decided to impersonate him after his death, and chose to be referred to as "he."

This made it pretty evident that Yamato was born female but identified as a man. But soon after, mangaka Eiichiro Oda released a color page, featuring the One Piece girls, which also included Yamato. With this, Oda debunked that Yamato was, in fact, a female. This is what exactly caused fans to be enraged at Michelle Rojas.

One Piece fans flooded Michelle Rojas's Tweet with criticisms stating how the voice actor had no clue about the story and yet was working on the anime. With that, they displayed evidence of how the mangaka Eiichiro Oda confirmed that Yamato was a girl. While they knew that she was once referred to as "he," they were confused why the character's official voice actor would address her incorrectly.

That said, several fans did come to the voice actor's defense stating that during the timespan of the episodes that Michelle had recorded for, Yamato was addressed as "he." Hence, it made sense why the voice actor would address the character as a "he" even when she was confirmed to be a female in the manga.

Meanwhile, many One Piece fans did not like the fact that other fans criticized Michelle Rojas's choice of pronouns for addressing Yamato. Considering that every character in the anime referred to Yamato as "he," fans did not like that people referred to the character as "she" just because of an illustration that was released as a fanservice.

Hence, they were vexed why people would refuse from referring to Yamato as "she." The character was yet to be canonically seen referring to themselves as a woman. Thus, it made sense to them that Yamato's gender was female, but they identified themselves as "he." Nevertheless, fans, who believed that Yamato was a girl refused to address the character as "he" because as per them, that would mean disrespecting the author.