Netflix's One Piece: Buggy's Devil Fruit Powers Explained
Contains spoilers for "One Piece" Season 1
Clowns are consistently the worst, and Netflix's live-action adaptation of "One Piece," Eiichiro Oda's ongoing and beloved manga series, continues that time-honored tradition with Buggy the Star Clown (Jeff Ward), the captain of the Buggy Pirates. He first appears in the Netflix series in Season 1, Episode 2 – "The Man in the Straw Hat", where he immediately makes himself an unwelcome entity, first through his lack of manners and second with his horrific ability to transform his body into a swirling vortex of detached ... pieces. It's the kind of nightmare fuel that you aren't likely to forget any time soon. Since explaining his power set is one of the few things Buggy doesn't seem interested in providing great detail about via a monologue, here's what you need to know.
All superhuman abilities in the world of "One Piece" stem from the consumption of Devil Fruit. No two fruits are the same, which means that no two superhumans are the same either. Buggy ate the Bara Bara no Mi, a Paramecia-Type — don't stress the lingo; it just means that Buggy ate something difficult to define — Devil Fruit that allows him to detach and telekinetically control his dismembered parts. This can be as simple as separating his hands so that they can fly behind an opponent and stab them in the back, or as complicated as that aforementioned limb tornado. No, he doesn't seem to lose any blood doing this because the bits, upon segmentation, uhm ... close up the cavities. He's like a living, fleshy Bionicle with a big red nose.
Dissecting (but not really) Buggy the Star Clown
By the nature of his Devil Fruit powers, Buggy is pretty much immune to blades and all other slashing and stabbing weapons. He's not impervious to harm, though; he's just annoyingly difficult to take down. The Straw Hat Pirates manage to do so by trapping his disjointed bits in cages and assorted containers until he's nothing but hands, feet, and a head. Oh, and for whatever reason, he can't telekinetically float his feet — those have to stay on the ground.
Netflix's "One Piece" also shows that Buggy doesn't necessarily need to reconfigure himself within any given time limit, as evidenced by the clown spending most of Season 1 as a disembodied head in search of his kidnapped frame. That must mean that breathing and eating aren't high up on his list of priorities because, well, can anyone really do either if they're divorced from their lungs and stomach? He does ask the Straw Hat Pirates, who are unlucky enough to carry his head around (it's a whole thing), for food a few times, but nothing seems to happen when they don't deliver.
Like all Devil Fruit eaters, Buggy is unable to swim. Ironically, the ocean is their kryptonite — it strips them of all energy and, where applicable, causes them to sink beneath the waves to an untimely death. There's no official justification for this, but citizens in the world of "One Piece" believe that the sea simply hates those who defy nature's normal laws. And if anything or anyone was an unnatural abomination, then it would be Buggy the Star Clown. He's not the most terrifying clown out there, but he's no Ronald McDonald, either.