One Piece: Why Luffy Never Uses Internal Dialogue to Express Himself

One Piece's protagonist, Monkey D Luffy, can be described as many things: a romantically dense ahodere, an archetypical shonen action star, a natural-born leader, and certainly an extrovert who's always open with his emotions and intentions. Luffy is an outgoing and expressive hero, and in One Piece's manga, that fact is even clearer with the dialogue.

Unlike anime, manga makes heavy use of internal dialogue, when a character thinks something to themselves. One Piece characters like the smart kuudere Nico Robin and the calculating Nami make good use of it, but Luffy has practically no internal dialogue at all, and that's no accident.

One Piece's protagonist, Monkey D Luffy, can be described as many things: a romantically dense ahodere, an archetypical shonen action star, a natural-born leader, and certainly an extrovert who's always open with his emotions and intentions. Luffy is an outgoing and expressive hero, and in One Piece's manga, that fact is even clearer with the dialogue.

Unlike anime, manga makes heavy use of internal dialogue, when a character thinks something to themselves. One Piece characters like the smart kuudere Nico Robin and the calculating Nami make good use of it, but Luffy has practically no internal dialogue at all, and that's no accident.

Interestingly, the world of manga has other protagonists who have relatively little internal dialogue, but for different reasons than One Piece's Luffy. In most written works such as manga and novels, it's usually the main character who has internal dialogue, as they dominate the point of view and can't know what other people are thinking. Potentially, a manga protagonist can have a lot of internal dialogue so they can communicate their worldview, emotions, intentions and personality to the viewer, all without the clunkiness of on-the-nose external dialogue. Still, certain manga protagonists have minimal internal dialogue like Monkey D Luffy -- just for different reasons.

Luffy minimizes his internal dialogue because he is impulsive and grounded, and he feels no need to plan for the future or calculate things. He is also very people-oriented and would much rather tell someone what he feels than just think about it. By contrast, some seinen heroes like Berserk's Guts and Vinland Saga's Thorfinn Karlsefni also have relatively sparse internal dialogue, but to a completely different effect. At different points in their stories, Guts and Thorfinn were both presented as bitter loners who hated the world, and they had little internal dialogue. This helped make Guts and Thorfinn more mysterious and sullen as standoffish antiheroes, treating the audience the same way they treat the people around them -- with cold, unreadable silence.

Guts is totally absorbed by his own problems and burdens, from seeking revenge on Griffith to fighting monsters day and night, and he's not too chatty about it with either the people around him or the audience. That almost makes Guts introverted on a meta level, and for a time, the same was true with Thorfinn. Like Luffy, Guts and Thorfinn expressed themselves with their actions and lived in the moment, so they had few inner musings to share via internal dialogue. However, unlike Luffy, Guts and Thorfinn did this because they were suffering and unwilling to open up to others. In this way, a basic literary technique can be used in wildly different ways, demonstrating the true storytelling potential of manga.