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In a hilarious clip from a Japanese news station, a reporter's phone airplaying to the broadcast accidentally revealed that she was viewing the latest One Piece meme craze.
The clip shows her YouTube app open to the scene, which has been trending as a meme across the internet and even beyond the confines of the anime community. One Piece fans have found the clip to be incredibly entertaining and enlightening on how internationally spread the meme is.
Like others who have seen the meme video, the reporter too laughed after the clip played on what appeared to be a live broadcast on a Japanese news channel.
Follow along as this article fully breaks down the clip, explains this latest One Piece meme, and more.
Japanese reporter playing 'the One Piece is real' meme on live news has fans celebrating the new trend
'The One Piece is real' meme started out on one of the series' Discord servers and subreddits, where fans take the clip and add explicit images afterwards.
However, the meme has since transcended its original format, thanks to a Cameo clip of Patrick Fabian repeating the iconic line. Fabian is better known as Better Call Saul’s Howard Hamlin.
This subsequently saw the meme making its way into the Better Call Saul fandom, which is much more mainstream than the fandom of the series created by author and illustrator Eiichiro Oda. From this point on, the general internet also began discovering the meme and ran with it.
The original clip comes from one of the most iconic and celebrated moments in the series, partially explaining why the meme was initially popular amongst fans. The original clip sees a dying Whitebeard use his final words to announce to the world that the series’ titular treasure is indeed real, which he knows from being friends with Gol D. Roger.
The clip is one of the most iconic moments both in the series and within its world, as it’s credited with reigniting the Golden Age of Piracy. Fans also remember it as one of the most climactic moments of the Marineford arc, which saw a massive battle end with the deaths of Whitebeard himself and Portgas D. Ace.
Since it broke out into the general internet, various versions of the meme have come about and become popular. One clip, for example, shows Tony Tony Chopper from the One Piece series sobbing at Whitebeard’s announcement rather than an explicit image being shown. The music also changes in this version, from Kanye West’s “Dark Fantasy” to one of the series’ earlier opening themes.
This specific Chopper version of the meme has also found its way into redraws for various other anime fandoms. One of the most significant of these is the Bleach fandom. This Bleach version sees Chopper redrawn and stylized as Toshiro Hitsugaya, one of the 13 Court Guard Squad Captains from Soul Society.
Several live-action series have seen fan-favorite characters inserted into this Chopper-version of the meme, with the Breaking Bad fandom stylizing him as Walter White.
Clearly, both One Piece fans and those who aren’t fans of the original series are reuniting and bonding over the meme, as evidenced by replies to the Japanese news footage.
Be sure to keep up with all One Piece anime, manga, film, and live-action news as the year of the series’ 25th anniversary progresses.
