Tony Tony Chopper’s Bounty at 50 Berries

Fifty berries. It is the lowest bounty the World Government has ever issued, and the right way to read it is as what it is: a gag, placed there by Oda and played straight.

The mechanism is simple. On the poster Chopper appears in his smallest form, a ball of fur about the size of a dog, and the Marines took him for the crew's pet. He is not even the only case: Bepo, the polar bear navigator of Trafalgar Law's crew, got the same treatment at five hundred berries.

On the facts he is worth what the others are worth. At Enies Lobby it was Chopper who beat Kumadori of CP9, alone, after swallowing a third Rumble Ball — the one that costs him his mind, and that he had promised Kureha never to touch again. He then tore the front off the Tower of Justice and threw the agent into the crowd of Marines and World Government officials massed below, who watched a top CP9 operative land in front of them in a bloody heap. Not one of them connected the monster that came out of the tower with the small reindeer in the photograph.

He took the figure badly, too. When the posters arrived, two weeks after the battle, he was convinced he had fought like a man — he had — and found himself priced at fifty berries.

For scale: a serving of Hatchan's takoyaki sells for five hundred berries. His bounty is worth a tenth of one. That is what keeps the joke warm rather than cruel: the reader knows exactly what the Marines do not, and the reindeer himself knows he is worth more than that.