Anime to activism: Netflix’s One Piece Straw Hat flag becomes a global protest symbol

In August last year, Amnesty International Indonesia’s executive director Usman Hamid made a statement against the country’s military personnel, one that was published on Amnesty’s website as well. Mr Hamid wanted the authorities to stop targetting and harassing people for displaying a certain flag. This pirate’s flag featured the usual skull-and-bones pirate insignia against a black background, only the skull wore a straw hat as well. Across various incidents in August, the Indonesian army had confiscated these flags from houses, offices, protest meetings and even cars passing by, deeming these flags to be a threat to national security. The flag in question belongs to the universe of Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece, one of the best-selling manga series of all time with over 600 million copies in circulation worldwide. It is also the source material for the ongoing live-action Netflix show of the same name, which released its second season on March 10.

One Piece is a fantasy-adventure series set on “The Blue Planet” which includes human beings as well as fantasy creatures such as mer-folk, dwarves, giants and so on who wield magical objects (like “devil fruits” which bestow supernatural abilities upon the consumer). The Blue Planet is ruled by the authoritarian “World Government” and their omnipresent navy. The main characters of One Piece are a renegade group of pirates called “The Straw Hat Pirates” who do not submit to the World Government’s will and put up an organised resistance.

Throughout the series, the word ‘pirate’ is used to signal moral and emotional ambiguity — in some contexts, a pirate could be a thief, a petty criminal or even a murderer while in other contexts, a pirate could be a warrior, a saviour, somebody who stands up for the defenceless. The emphasis was on freedom — above all, pirates are free and answer to nobody but themselves. It is this devotion to individual liberty that has made One Piece such a potent symbol of anti-establishment protests in recent years. The straw hat pirate flag was seen in the Nepalese Gen Z protests in September 2025, and also in similar protests in the Philippines and Madagascar that same month. In May 2025, French authorities also confiscated these flags during widespread protests against the austerity measures proposed by Prime Minister Bayrou.

Netflix’s live-action One Piece series has proven to be a hit among fans and critics alike, with the recently released second season drawing rave reviews across the board for its characterisation, world-building, special effects and action sequences. And through the thoughtful performances of the lead players, we understand more about why the straw hat has struck a chord with pro-democracy protests around the world.

Take the protagonist Monkey D. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy), for instance. Monkey is a young man who dreams of becoming the king of the pirates. He is kind and charming and holds on to a childlike sense of wonder about the world. He is close to the platonic ideal of the ‘rebel’ archetype — and because he ate a Devil Fruit in his boyhood, he has gained the ability to stretch this limbs limitlessly. The literal flexibility of his limbs becomes a powerful metaphor for the flexible allegiances of the pirate, generally speaking. And yet, Monkey is also determined to buck the stereotype of the lying cheating backstabbing pirate-rogue. When he meets his future first mate Roronoa Zoro (Mackenyu) for the first time, he says with an impish grin, “I’m a different kind of pirate”.

Monkey is rebelling against the World Government, but also his own past because his estranged grandfather, Garp (Vincent Regan) is a Vice Admiral in the Navy and a kind of convergence of the family patriarch and the patriarchal head-of-state. So in Monkey’s quest to become king of the pirates and live free in perpetuity he is turning his back on several societal structures at once. In a similar vein, Roronoa Zoro, when we meet him for the first time in One Piece, is being aggressively courted by the Baroque Works, a shadowy group of assassins. But he turns them down every time, even killing one of their junior members sent there to parlay with him. Individual freedom is once again emphasised with a line Zoro repeats thrice in the first episode: “I’ve kinda got my own thing going on”.

Everywhere you look in One Piece, you find likeable, sympathetic characters who are trapped by larger societal forces outside of their control. And control is precisely what they want to wrest back. Nami, a resourceful young woman highly skilled in cartography (Emily Rudd), is tired of being told that being a pirate is a man’s game. She wants to map the known world — which for an authoritarian government is a major offence in itself because tyrants everywhere seek to control the flow of information. Sanji (Taz Skylar) is looking for the mythical “All Blue”, a convergence point in the oceans that may hold the key to freedom from the World Government.

The straw-hat flag has become shorthand for an infectious sense of youthful rebellion and irrepressible freedom. And when you see Netflix’s One Piece, you understand why it’s now considered one of the greatest live-action anime adaptations of all time.

The writer and journalist is working on his first book of non-fiction.