A sea of rubber pirates, sky islands and musical skeletons should collapse under its own absurdity, yet One Piece often feels more internally consistent than many sober science‑fiction settings. The trick is not realism but rule design: once a law is stated, the narrative almost never violates it, even when the result is inconvenient.
Devil Fruits operate like a fictional model of conservation of energy: every power comes with a clearly priced limitation, whether seawater weakness or loss of swimming ability. Haki behaves like a codified stress response system, closer to homeostasis than pure spectacle. These mechanics rarely receive retroactive continuity; instead, new details behave like incremental clarifications, not exceptions, which keeps narrative entropy low even as the cast and map expand.
Geopolitics and technology follow the same playbook. The World Government, Marines and pirates form a readable game‑theory landscape in which information asymmetry, deterrence and marginal cost shape conflict, rather than convenient plot exits. Technological anachronisms, from snails as communication devices to weaponized research, map back to a stable baseline of resources and control. The result is a universe that looks chaotic on the surface but runs, underneath, like a carefully balanced system that knows exactly what it will and will not allow.
