Arlong: The stigma returned as tyranny

Arlong, the saw-shark fish-man who reigns over a subjugated human village in One Piece, is easy to read as a simple racist tyrant: he enslaves peoples, extorts impossible tributes and despises humans as if they were cattle. But behind that contempt lies a story that the theory of culture conflict helps to name without whitewashing. Arlong does not grow up in a vacuum: he comes from a species, that of the fish-men, whom humans enslaved for centuries, feared, and pushed to live beneath the sea, far from the surface. His hatred is not a whim: it is the response —monstrous, yet understandable in its origin— of someone who grew up in the losing code of a clash of cultures and decided that, if the world was going to divide into superiors and inferiors, this time the superiors would be his own.

// The theoryWhen two codes collide in the same sea

The criminologist Thorsten Sellin, in Culture Conflict and Crime (1938), argued that much of crime is born not from individuals without norms, but from the clash between the codes of conduct of different groups sharing the same space. Every culture has its rules about what is right and what is wrong; the problem arises when those rules do not coincide with those of the dominant code, that of the culture that controls the law. Sellin distinguished primary conflict —between two complete cultures, like the immigrant facing the host country or the colonized facing the colonizer— from secondary conflict, which fractures a single society into subcultures. Arlong's case is primary conflict in its purest state: two species, humans and fish-men, with opposing codes, histories of crossed domination and an entire sea to fight over. Sellin's key point is uncomfortable: whoever controls power turns their norms into law and automatically defines the conduct of the other group as criminal. For centuries, that power belonged to humans, and being a fish-man was enough to be treated as a threat or merchandise. You can read the full theory of culture conflict to see how that clash of codes manufactures what we call crime.

// The subjectThe despised one who became the executioner

Arlong is dangerous precisely because his grievance is real. The fish-men of One Piece do not imagine their oppression: they have been enslaved, put on display, feared for their strength and despised for their difference. That substrate gives Arlong's discourse a true core wrapped in a monstrous conclusion —«they hated us, therefore they deserve to be hated»—. Against him, the series places the opposite figure: fish-men who suffered the same and chose reconciliation instead of revenge, proving that grievance does not dictate the outcome. Arlong, by contrast, embodies the subject who turns his wound into a license: he uses the injustice he suffered as a moral certificate to commit his own. He boasts of biological superiority —the physical strength of the fish-man over the human— and from it deduces a right to dominate, tracing the very reasoning that once placed him under the yoke. His kingdom in Nami's village is not a fish-man utopia: it is a faithful copy of the order that humiliated him, with the roles swapped. The conflict of codes, in his hands, does not seek justice: it seeks revenge in the shape of a system.

// The crackThe grievance explains; it does not absolve

Here lies the delicate edge of applying the theory of culture conflict to Arlong. The theory runs the risk of sliding into a relativism that forgives everything —«it's his culture», «the world made him that way»— and ending up functioning as an alibi. Sellin did not say that, and with Arlong less than ever. Understanding that his hatred sinks its roots into centuries of real discrimination explains its origin, it does not legitimize its tyranny. The oppression suffered by the fish-men is one fact; the slavery Arlong imposes on innocent humans is another, and the first does not cancel the second. The victim of an injustice does not acquire a blank check to commit their own: that is exactly the trap the series dismantles by confronting Arlong with other fish-men who, carrying the same pain, did not choose cruelty. Explaining the code does not exonerate the harm.

The opposite crack is equally dangerous: using Arlong's case to conclude that «the oppressed end up being worse» and, with that, justifying keeping them subjugated «as a precaution». That is reading Sellin in a xenophobic key, seeing in every difference a latent criminality. The theory serves the opposite purpose: to understand that the conflict of codes is defused with recognition and integration, not with more chains. Arlong does not prove that equality is impossible; he proves what happens when a society, instead of repairing the grievance, lets it rot until someone turns it into a doctrine of hatred. The honest reading holds both things: Arlong is fully responsible for every village he subjugated, and his story is also that of a clash of cultures that no one wanted to translate in time.