Six people have filled out the Strongest One Piece Characters list on Ranklist so far. Six is a small sample and I am not going to dress it up as anything else. But these are six complete ordered ballots rather than six upvotes, all six of them ranked Imu and Shanks, and the pattern inside them is more interesting than the finishing order suggests.
The short answer our rankers gave: Imu placed above Shanks on five of the six ballots. Imu took outright first on four of them. Shanks finished second overall without receiving a single first place vote from anybody.
What the ballots actually say
Imu averages a rank of 1.50 and never finished worse than third on any individual ballot. The spread is tight, with a standard deviation of 0.84 across the six ballots. That is the strongest agreement any character on this list gets.
Shanks averages 4.67. His six individual placements were 2, 2, 5, 6, 6 and 7. His standard deviation is 2.16, more than double Imu's. So our rankers are fairly united about Imu and genuinely unsure about Shanks.
The one ballot that put Shanks over Imu still ranked Imu third. Nobody ranked Shanks first, and nobody pushed Imu out of the top three. Even the voter most sympathetic to Shanks kept Imu in the elite tier.
Here is the current top of the list:
- Imu, average rank 1.50, on 6 of 6 ballots
- Shanks, average rank 4.67, on 6 of 6 ballots
- Rocks D. Xebec, average rank 5.17, on 6 of 6 ballots
- Gol D. Roger, average rank 6.17, on 6 of 6 ballots
- Joy Boy, average rank 2.25, on 4 of 6 ballots
Joy Boy is the honest asterisk. His average rank is the second best on the entire list, but only four of six rankers placed him at all, so the scoring pulls him down to fifth. That is the correct call with this little data, though it is worth knowing his raw average beats Shanks comfortably.
One more quirk worth flagging, because it cuts against the headline. Gol D. Roger beat Shanks head to head on four of the six ballots, yet Shanks finishes ahead of Roger overall. That is down to a single outlier: one ranker placed Roger fifteenth while every other ballot had him between third and eighth. Shanks wins that particular matchup by being less divisive, not by being more admired.
The case for Imu
The argument for Imu is an argument from position and scale rather than from combat.
Imu sits on the Empty Throne in Pangaea Castle, and the Five Elders, who the story spent hundreds of chapters presenting as the highest authority in the world, kneel. The World Government publicly maintains that the throne is empty. Whatever Imu is, the entire apparatus of the setting is organised around concealing it.
Then there is Lulusia. An entire kingdom was erased from the map, and Imu was shown giving the order moments before it happened. Nothing else in the series has demonstrated destruction on that scale in a single stroke. Rankers who put Imu first are largely pricing in that event.
There is also the structural argument. This is the final saga. The story has been building toward a confrontation with the World Government since Ohara, and the figure at the top of that structure is the last wall Luffy has to break. In a shonen manga, final antagonist usually does translate into final power level.
The case for Shanks
The argument for Shanks is the opposite kind of argument: it is made almost entirely of things the manga has actually shown.
He is one of the Four Emperors. His clash with Whitebeard split the sky, which is one of the clearest visual power benchmarks Oda has ever drawn. He walked into Marineford at the end of the war and the fighting stopped, with the Marines and the remaining pirates both standing down rather than test him. He later dismantled Eustass Kid and his crew, a Worst Generation captain who had survived Kaido, in what amounted to a single decisive strike.
Above all, Shanks is one of the small handful of characters established as having Conqueror's Haki and the ability to imbue it. The manga has been explicit that this coating is the marker separating the genuinely top tier from everyone else, and Shanks has had it longer and used it more efficiently than almost anyone.
There is a fair reading where Shanks is the strongest character we have concrete evidence for. That is a meaningfully different claim from being the strongest character, and the gap between those two claims is basically the whole debate.
What the manga has confirmed about Imu, and what it has not
This is where most power scaling arguments go wrong, so it is worth separating carefully.
What the story has established: Imu exists, occupies the Empty Throne, and outranks the Five Elders. Imu's existence is concealed from the world. Imu marked specific individuals for elimination. Lulusia Kingdom was destroyed, with Imu shown ordering it. The World Government's inner circle does not age the way ordinary people do. Imu has been shown to act directly and violently rather than only issuing commands.
What is fan inference rather than established fact: that the weapon used on Lulusia was Uranus. That Imu personally controls it as opposed to authorising its use. That the scale of that strike reflects Imu's own combat ability. That Imu would beat any specific character in a fight.
That last distinction is the crux. Erasing an island with a weapon of mass destruction is an authority feat. Beating Shanks would be a combat feat. The manga has given us a great deal of the former for Imu and almost none of the latter, and the two do not automatically convert into each other. Doflamingo could not have destroyed Lulusia, but that does not make the Lulusia weapon's operator a better fighter than Doflamingo by itself.
Why the debate stays unsettled
Because the two sides are not disagreeing about facts. They are disagreeing about what counts as evidence.
If you only credit demonstrated on-page combat, Shanks wins comfortably and Imu is not really rankable yet. If you credit narrative position, scale of demonstrated destruction, and where the story is clearly heading, Imu wins comfortably. Both methods are internally consistent. Neither can be falsified with the chapters currently published, which is exactly why this argument has run for years across Reddit threads and power scaling videos without resolving.
Oda is also withholding deliberately. Imu has never been shown in a sustained exchange with a named top tier fighter. Until that happens, any Imu placement is a forecast rather than a measurement, and our rankers' 0.84 standard deviation on Imu reflects confidence in the forecast, not confidence in a demonstrated result.
Frequently asked questions
Who is stronger, Imu or Shanks?
On Ranklist, our six rankers put Imu ahead of Shanks on five of six ballots, and Imu holds the number one spot with an average rank of 1.50 against Shanks at 4.67. In the manga itself the question is genuinely open: Shanks has far more demonstrated combat feats, while Imu has greater demonstrated scale of destruction and the higher narrative position. Oda has not shown the two interact.
Who is stronger, Imu or Gol D. Roger?
Our rankers were unanimous on this one. Imu placed above Gol D. Roger on all six ballots, with Imu averaging 1.50 to Roger's 6.17. Roger was also the most volatile of the top characters, ranked as high as third and as low as fifteenth depending on the ballot. Note that Roger is a past era character with no on-page fights against the current top tier, so this is a comparison across generations rather than a matchup the story has staged.
Who would win in a fight, Imu or Shanks?
Nobody can answer this from the manga yet, and anybody who tells you otherwise is extrapolating. Shanks has the clearer combat record, including advanced Conqueror's Haki and a decisive win over Eustass Kid. Imu has the greater demonstrated destructive scale but no shown sustained fight against a top tier opponent. Our rankers lean Imu by five ballots to one, which reflects how they weigh narrative position against proven feats.
Has Imu ever actually fought anyone in the manga?
Imu has been shown acting directly and violently, but not in a drawn out exchange against a named top tier character. That absence is the single biggest reason power scaling communities cannot settle Imu's placement, and it is why estimates of Imu's strength vary far more widely than estimates for characters like Shanks or Whitebeard.
Why is Shanks ranked second if he never got a first place vote?
Because the list scores consistency, not peaks. Shanks appeared on every ballot and never fell below seventh, so his aggregate holds up. Gol D. Roger beat him head to head on four of six ballots but took a fifteenth place from one ranker, which sank his average. Shanks finishes second by having no bad ballots rather than by having great ones.
Rank it yourself
Six ballots is not a consensus, it is a starting point. Every ranking above moves when someone new submits an ordering. The figures in this article are a snapshot of the six ballots on file, last checked against the live data on 26 August 2026, so the current standings may have moved since.
If you think Shanks deserves the crown, or that Imu is unrankable until Oda shows us more, the useful thing to do is add your ordering to the Strongest One Piece Characters list. That is what changes the numbers on this page.