- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
If it was an accident, I would have edited that post instead of double-posting.
Trafalgar D. Water Law is a bit of a fan favorite, which you might guess from the quantity of fanart. Or you can look at the data, ie the character popularity polls.
The lowest he's ever placed in one of those polls is 10th place, in One Piece's fourth poll, mere months after his debut. In that poll, the only characters who polled above him were Portgas D. Ace (Luffy's brother and another fan favorite), Red-Hair Shanks (Luffy's mentor and another fan favorite), and most (but not all!) of the Straw Hats.
In the fifth poll, he got second place, a spot which has otherwise only been claimed by Zoro. (Luffy is always #1, of course.) In the sixth and seventh polls, he got fourth and fifth place, above all the Straw Hats except Luffy, Zoro, Sanji, and (in the most recent poll) Nami.
Sure, he's introduced a third of the way through the story. But Trafalgar is the single most popular character who isn't a Straw Hat, and also more popular than most Straw Hats. And that's not surprising, because he was a major Straw Hat ally for most of the post-timeskip arcs, with the exceptions being Fishman Island, Whole Cake Island, and whatever this last saga is gonna be called. He's also directly tied to Doflamingo, arguably One Piece's most iconic (or at least recognizable) villain. And his Devil Fruit, while extremely vague (every time he opened his operating room in a fight I wondered why he didn't just grab the other guy's heart or something), is undeniably neat.
Trafalgar is a lot like Vegeta. He was introduced late in the series and only came into prominence after a major timeskip which signaled a major tone shift. He's a darker character than the protagonist, but he works with the heroes against a villain he used to work for and softens a bit. The only reason I hesitate to call him One Piece's Vegeta is that he sticks with his own crew and goes his own way after Wano Country.
If your concern is legibility to an audience who has not read One Piece (or only read up to Enies Lobby), then yeah, Traffy's a bad choice. But if you want to isekai someone other than the Straw Hats, Trafalgar's one of the best options.
