Dragon Ball Thread - RIP Akira Toriyama

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It was really satisfying to see Master Roshi and his Maafuba get so much love. Even Krilling got a moment to shine, though admittedly it was only a moment and didn't make much sense, like 17's power level rising to God-tier. How does he have "limitless energy" because he's an Android? That makes no fucking sense.

Meanwhile Tien got shit on and given a brief filler arc that would've fit better in Dragon Ball. Gohan got more action, but barely more than the Buu arc.
 
Super takes everything I hate about DB and puts it all into a single show.

The animation is pretty atrocious. Certain specific scenes are alright, but those are usually important fights. Everything else looks like dogshit.
I really hope you understand that I'm joking in the spoiler title. This is fucking stupid and such a joke of a scene.

The storyline is straw grasping. Since we're talking super, I'll go ahead and remove any arc that doesn't matter and say the only 2 important arcs are Goku Black and The Tournament of Power. I remove the two movies because they're movies, so they don't count fuck you. Anything other than these 2 arcs and the movies was forgettable garbage not worth watching. If you actually look at these two arcs, they're interesting in theory but massively failed in execution. Goku Black was retarded the moment Trunks was able to do anything at all because power scaling shouldn't work like that, not to mention Zamasu is a boring pathetic excuse for an antagonist. The tournament of power was literally entirely filler except for Goku and Vegeta vs Jiren and Toppo. Every single episode I watched I just wanted to die, the dialogue was always so stupid with "OH HE'LL GET GOKU THIS TIME" "NO I BELIEVE IN HIM" "HOW COULD HE POSSIBLY BEAT US?" with different wording, not to mention when I was watching it I watched the sub where all the characters sound like fucking children which made it even worse. They managed to turn Dragon Ball into a villain of the week anime. The character designs were exceptional, they looked like fucking morons, and sounded like morons too.

Now the worst part of it all is the power scaling. This has been an issue basically since the buu saga, but I thought that it wasn't as bad then as it is here. None of these fucking characters other than Goku and Vegeta should be able to even lay a scratch on anyone. They're fucking weak. Every one of those characters has been infinitely behind Goku and Vegeta since super saiyan motherfucking 3. Now there's 2 extra levels above, and the saiyans are gods. Goku fighting Beerus almost destroyed the fucking universe for gods sake, and he wasn't even full power then. Every single one of these characters is only there because they're part of "team dragon ball," team dragon ball my fucking ass the only purpose they serve is to be living sensu bean carriers for Goku and Vegeta.

I detest everything about Super, it's writing is shitty, the character designs even shittier. The only redeeming factor of Super at all is Ultra Instinct Goku, which was cool as fuck the first time, and then just turned into a power scaling nightmare when he ""mastered"" it. Someone should make an edit of the tournament of power that removes literally everything other than Jiren and Toppo fighting. Nothing else mattered in the tournament at all.
 
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Yeah yeah, it's ridiculous. We can go 100 pages picking everything apart because rules are ignored and Toriyama pulls shit and retcons out of his ass. Goku beats the master of the universe and his family, and then there's 12 other universes of people to beat up. There's more super forms above super forms, and if that's not enough you can bring back Kaioken to multiply the power by 20, or fusion to power-scale exponentionally.

It's all nonsense, but it's fun to watch just to see what they do next. All I care about at this point is seeing characters I like pulling off cool shit and the occasional brilliant film like Broly, which happens to retcon more stuff for better or worse. With Broly we got a new retcon for Bardock's story, bringing in elements of the Dragon Ball Minus manga and making Bardock more of a loving, tragic father figure. We also got a new qt² alien waifu with Cheelai. Frieza's still a joke, but frankly I'll take him than yet another monster-of-the-week bad guy. As for the power leveling, I want to see where they go with the whole "true Super Saiyan" angle with Broly, now that they made him canon. Ultra Instinct is the new hot shit, which is fine by me because the SSGSS is terminal weapons-grade autism. Meanwhile I'm just waiting for Toriyama to contrive some way to level the playing field enough to make the old Z Fighters relevant. He did it in small doses with Super to build it up to Roshi's last stand, but fuck it. Give Tien a redemption arc. Give Krillin's destructo-discs a power-level upgrade. Do something with Yamcha that isn't a meme reference, I dunno. Either that or just stop using them. Even characters like Launch would be refreshing to see again, seeing as he brought back and made Emperor Pilaf, Shu and Mai central characters again.

Toriyama's driven Dragon Ball to the ground by the end of the Buu saga. The best parts of the show became either new characters or old characters getting moments to shine, like Tien dumping Kikouhous on Cell or Super Vegeta blowing Cell apart with his Final Flash. Just one big fuck-off scene with a big payoff, which up until the Tournament of Power I honestly haven't gotten from Super (and the only one from Buu I remember is Vegeta exploding). They ripped off the Father-Son Kamehameha in the Goku Black arc for Vegeta and Trunks, but it just fell flat. The show's missing the intensity of the animation and directing from the old DBZ seasons, not to mention Bruce Faulconer's absolutely hype music. That being said, Super has at least one great theme.

My attitude toward more Dragon Ball is this: for as bad as it's gotten, it can still get a lot better. I don't feel like it's been irreparably fucked like Star Wars, but it can reach the point where it tires me out and I stop watching out of boredom or disinterest. You have to really try to make Dragon Ball boring or offensive to watch, but it can go either way at this point. Either go to shit or go next-level.
 
Dragon Ball can do no wrong if you view it with the perspective that it hasn't really changed.

It's always been inconsistent. It's low points have always been some awful shit. It's never made sense.

But you like the characters. The fights are fun. The people working on it clearly think it's fun to work on given all the wacky antics they still write. Dragon Ball suffers from not having a consistently good writer or director to guide the franchise. But given I always enjoyed it because of my attachment to these characters and how fun they still are, I'm able to look past traditionally bad elements because they clearly take a backseat to something a little more special.

I will never stop giving the Cell arc shit for taking itself too seriously. That's my hot take right there; I'm glad Buu exists simply because he and that Saga had a more goofy, imaginative premise and I value that more than "Freeza but worse" in Cell.
 
Cell gets points for trying to pass the ball from Goku to Gohan, among other things I mentioned already. Other than that, I didn't really care that much for the time travel or heart attack aspects.

I remember it feeling like such a weird place for the show to be after hitting the peak with Frieza. All of a sudden you have a Red Ribbon throwback creating (?) two Androids that are Super-Saiyan level right after Goku was the first in ages to become such a thing. Then there's Cell, who was made in the future with the express purpose of absorbing those two specifically, and whose creation depended on drone footage of the entire DBZ show up to that point. In hindsight it's incredible just how much of a shameless asspull that was, but I dunno. Toriyama really wanted to ramrod his Terminator fanfiction and absorption fetish into Dragon Ball.

If the Cell saga had instead just been about Trunks, Dr. Gero, and an army of androids fucking up the future, that alone could've made for a solid season ender after some down-time to process the Frieza arc and develop the characters after all that. But nah bitch, here comes King Cole, cyborg Frieza and a sword-wielding Super Saiyan right at the beginning to jack the stakes up. Considering Goku just killed "the most powerful being in the universe" (fucking LOL in hindsight), Toriyama had a power vacuum in at least a galaxy to work with. He could've made Frieza's family more of a relevant threat, along with possibly another rival army and/or any Saiyan stragglers who rally to the return of the legendary Super Saiyan, with Prince Vegeta and Earth being in the middle of it all. And after all this, you still could set up for the cosmic demonic threat of Buu in the next season, what with all the upheaval.

Anyways, this just reminded me how much I love the early DBZ movies: The Tree of Might, Dead Zone, and The World's Strongest. I could still watch those again. Lord Slug had some interesting aspects: a credible Namekian threat for a change and Goku's "false Super Saiyan" transformation. Broly as a monster-character was always appealing even though his movies were awful, and I could say the same for Cooler. I don't have much to say about Fusion Reborn's Janemba (never really liked fusion as a concept, but I guess it works) or Bojack Unbound (because I barely remember any of it). Wrath of the Dragon's baddie was just another Babidi metoo, but Tapion was pretty cool.
 
I do still appreciate Dragon Ball for what it is, the good, the bad and the ugly. It's just that I've long ago noticed that Akira Toriyama lacks the talent and creativity of most of his peers (such as Oda or Araki) and whenever he did something good, he basically pulled a Homer (making him more or less the anime George Lucas). Besides of Toriyama's creative sterility, which is reflected in the repetitive nature of the characters and especially the villains, he did himself absolutely no favours with the Akira baby shaped and sized cancerous tumor that are the Super Saiyan transformations.

Regarding the retcons, the most egregious example is the abomination that is Dragon Ball Minus. It retconned one of the key elements that accidentally (<- because I have yet to see proof that Toriyama is in terms of writing brilliant on purpose) made the Saiyan saga so great. Goku's backstory was inspired by Superman, but had an interesting and, dare I say, good twist once you learned what kind of people the Saiyans were. Minus undid all of that by having Goku's backstory be exactly the same as Superman's and thus having the epic boss fight against Vegeta (which was the best fight of the entire franchise) lose some of its impact. The only redeemable thing about Minus was that we finally learned who Goku's mother was, but I'm not sure if that was worth it.

As for Cell, the Cell saga is to Dragon Ball what Alien Resurrection was to the Alien franchise. On one hand it's shit and the weakest entry so far before the Buu saga/Alien vs Predator and especially Dragon Ball Minus/Prometheus, but on the other hand I can't be too mad at it since it had Emperor Wakamoto/Ron Perlman.
 
There have been a couple of good things to have come out of Super, but I'm not really happy that the revival happened. The super saiyan god shit is even more exceptional than Dragon Ball AF transformations.

If it were an inspired labor of love that would be a different story, but almost all DB content in the past decade has been a unrepentant cash grab. The Broly movie was a decent watch, and they did some interesting things there with the animation, but I can't forgive Toriyama's retcons. When canon has been established for 20 years you can't just go back and change the main character's origin story.
 
Super is Ok, I guess.

Episodes 1-27 are a big nothing burger since they're just retellings of BoG and Ressurection F but with terrible animation and some pointless filler. The U6 arc was alright. The Future Trunks arc was a nice change of pace since it made things darker compared to the previous episodes and it was cool to see Future Trunks and Vegito again, even though it doesn't change the fact that Zamasu was a trash tier villain. The ToP arc was pretty alright, with Yuya Takahashi's animation here and there being a big plus, though it sucks that it turned into the Universe 7 vs Everyone arc later on and that Jiren turned out to be just another cookie cutter character who got uber powerful with zero explanation

If anything, the best thing to come out of Super was the Broly movie. The animation was stellar and it was great that they fixed Broly's garbage "He cried a lot so I hate him" backstory plus it was nice to see him and Gogeta become canon.
 
It may be weird to admit this, but I watch the show for the slice of life stuff as much as I watch it for the battles. Just imagining two guys who are strong enough to demolish a planet with a sneeze trying (and often failing) to accomplish mundane everyday tasks without making a spectacle of themselves, gives me a chuckle. Hell, if the entire series from now on were nothing but a cooking show starring Vegeta, I'd watch the shit out of that.
 
Pokemonquistador2 said:
It may be weird to admit this, but I watch the show for the slice of life stuff as much as I watch it for the battles. Just imagining two guys who are strong enough to demolish a planet with a sneeze trying (and often failing) to accomplish mundane everyday tasks without making a spectacle of themselves, gives me a chuckle. Hell, if the entire series from now on were nothing but a cooking show starring Vegeta, I'd watch the shit out of that.
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Driver's license episode 4 life
 
Pokemonquistador2 said:
It may be weird to admit this, but I watch the show for the slice of life stuff as much as I watch it for the battles. Just imagining two guys who are strong enough to demolish a planet with a sneeze trying (and often failing) to accomplish mundane everyday tasks without making a spectacle of themselves, gives me a chuckle. Hell, if the entire series from now on were nothing but a cooking show starring Vegeta, I'd watch the shit out of that.
Click to expand...

This is the one aspect of Super I was totally okay with. It was amazing watching Vegeta trying to act like a father and husband, but his "I'M THE PRINCE OF ALL SAIYANS" attitude keeps flaring up, and he doesn't "get" Earth culture no matter how much Bulma beats it into him. But the progression of his character to show that he does care for his family (in his own little way) is something that feels natural--even if it's because there was already an end-goal and interquels tend to have limited space to expand.

I know fan fiction raises eyebrows, but there's this awesome one-shot called "President for a Day" that really and truly could've been an actual episode, and potentially a fan-favorite just because it stars Vegeta. If there were more episodes like that, Super or even GT would've been a bit more tolerable.
 
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https://twitter.com/KaiserNeko/status/1223495626228404225

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https://twitter.com/KaiserNeko/status/1223510897110536192
 
Guess Daddy Sabat's no longer able to protect them, or KaiserNeko is just throwing another fit again and TFS has decided they had enough of his bullshit.

Meh, honestly, this is for the best. Every year, it was clearly becoming more of a chore for them to do when it used to be a fun little project between friends. Yes, sucks that Japan can't seem to understand fair use and that an affectionate parody is helpful in bringing fans together as well as creating new interest in said-IP. If it's driving them insane to continuously fight Toei, and with YouTube fucking over content creators (even though they have their own website, but who even visits it?), ending the abridged series and just doing little shorts here and there is not a bad idea. TFS might also be wanting to focus on more original projects anyway, of which I wish them the best as long as Kaiser stops being a little bitch.

What remains of the fanbase is fucking exceptional, though, so least there'll be salt over it.
 
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