What is One Piece Paw Paw Devil Fruit? A Trip Into the Rabbit Hole

Last updated on November 18th, 2025 at 11:14 am

I wasn’t supposed to love a character who had bear paws for hands this much.

It began innocently: I was lying around on a weekend watching One Piece while my lazy ass did nothing with itself, until I made it to the Thriller Bark arc and witnessed some giant dude named Bartholomew Kuma swatting away hits like they were mosquitoes. Cool visual, I thought. And then he did something that caused me to stop the episode, rewind it three times.

He stuck his hand into someone’s body and removed a great red bubble of … pain?

Which is when I wanted to find out: what is Paw Paw Devil Fruit in One Piece and how the hell does that even go down?

The Moment That Hooked Me

So there’s a scene at the end of Thriller Bark. The crew’s tired, bruised up, pretty ragged out. Kuma volunteers to eradicate Luffy’s pain and fatigue so he could be well rested. Sounds nice, right?

Then you see it. He even removes this giant throbbing bubble of red power from Luffy’s body. It sits there, suspended in the air, it looks like all the concentrated pain made physical. And of course (because Zoro is Zoro) he just sucks the whole thing up so his captain has a dance partner.

I sat there like, wait, can you cut away pain? As if it’s a thing you can feel?

That got me into a research rabbit hole I didn’t expect to go down on a Sunday afternoon.

The Paw Paw Devil Fruit Found to be True

The fruit is a Paramecia type devil fruit called the Paw Paw Devil Fruit, or Nikyu Niky no Mi if you prefer. When you consume it, you develop these soft paw pads on the palms of your hands. Cute, sure. But here’s the twist those paws can repel whatever they touch.

And I mean anything.

I began doing some digging on the One Piece Wiki and realized that this power runs even deeper than I originally thought. It’s not all about dodging punches or blocking attacks. Kuma can repel:

• Physical objects, at silly speeds (bullets, people carrying whole attacks)
• Air, too (forming those teleportation bubbles)
• If we include abstract concepts like pain and fatigue, or even memories

It’s that last part that had me keeping the lights on to read fan theories until 2 a.m.

The Part That Blew My Mind

This is where finding out what is Paw Paw Devil Fruit in One Piece becomes more fascinating. The vast majority of Devil Fruits make sense now, right? Fire powers burn things. Ice powers freeze stuff. Rubber powers make you stretchy.

But repelling pain? How does that work?

I discovered this YouTube analysis that unpacked it. The idea is that pain signals are nothing more than nerve messages: Electrical impulses are sent by your body to your brain. The Paw Paw Fruit intercepts some of those signals and broadcasts them as physical energy.

Your brain says “ouch,” but before you actually feel that the fruit tears off with your signal and hurls it out of your body. Wild concept.

I began trying to work out what it might mean. If you can evacuate pain, what else can you draw off? Bad memories? Trauma? Fear? The power suddenly seemed less like a combat move and more like something with real ethical weight.

Testing My Understanding

After that momentous discovery, I went back and rewatched every Kuma scene I could find. And each time, I saw something new.

When he bubbles people to places hundreds of miles across the ocean with those paw-print bubbles? He’s moving the air around them so quickly that it pushes the rest of the air out of their way, creating a protective shield. They fly for days but land safely. It’s not just raw power that’s crazy precision, control and whip.

When he deflects attacks? It’s not random swatting. He’s doing all the math of angles, speed and force as it happens. Miss by a millimeter and chances are you would blow up whatever it is you’re trying to save.

And that moment he helps take away Luffy’s pain? It made me sit up and notice that he’s not simply yanking “damage” out. He is pulling out the physical sensation, the neural experience of being hurt, and compressing it into concentrated shape. That bubble Zoro suck up wasn’t just figurative it was physical pain that had collected.

Small wonder it almost destroyed him.

What Makes This Power Different

I’ve watched some anime, not to brag, and you can’t fool me with these overpowered abilities. But the Paw Paw Devil Fruit isn’t overpowered in the normal ‘I can destroy a mountain’ sense.

It’s overpowered because it violates basic rules. It applies to things that on the face of it should not be physical. It tweaks experiences, not just matter.

This is what makes to know what does paw paw devil fruit do in One Piece so intriguing for me, as I’m just a casual viewer. This isn’t about bigger explosions or flashier attacks. It’s a matter of redefining what is possible within the logic of that story.

Was there a way to unwill someone into not fighting? Their memories of a battle? Their sense of direction? And the canonical powers we’ve witnessed seem just like the surface.

Where This Left Me

By the end of my rabbit hole, I found myself with a deeper appreciation for Kuma as not only a man but a fictional and complex character. This is not a strong person with a funny power. Here is someone with a power that could be badly used, yet uses it in the service of others.

Taking someone’s pain away is not merely a medical procedure it is either a shifting of their suffering onto you, or a passing along of it to somebody willing to hold on to it. That’s heavy. That takes a certain kind of character that can bear that responsibility.

When you want to know something like what is Paw Paw Devil Fruit in One Piece after reading this, I’ll tell you it’s best to go the Thriller Bark arc. Watch how Kuma uses it. Notice the subtle things how he places his hands, calculates every precise movement, feels the full weight of his decisions.

Or just read the One Piece Wiki page and tumble down the same theory rabbit hole that I did. Fair warning, though: You may spend the whole night reading about nerve-signal manipulation and the physics of repulsion.

Worth it, honestly. This is a lot cooler than the paw pads I was thinking initially.

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