- Joined
- Mar 21, 2019
This seems like a pretty decent take. Plus, Chichi grew up as rich pseudo-royalty and only had to start living in abject poverty after marrying Goku (or, at best, after he blew up her mountain). Combine the fact that she's not accustomed to poverty with the staggering cost of feeding Saiyans and any repair costs that come from Goku being careless, and it's no wonder she's hyper focused on money and on making sure that Gohan grows up to succeed.
That said, I would go further and say that Chichi's behavior is pretty reasonable even if we discount that she's so out of her element. Chichi is the one voice of reason in her family: "No, you cannot get in a space ship for a full half a year so you can adventure on an unknown alien planet who-knows-where to make a wish to bring back a man that tried to kill your father and kidnapped you for a year. Your father is in a full-body cast, you just came home after being kidnapped and forced to be a living weapon to fight alien invaders, and you are five years old."
The anime really blows her 'you need to be a college graduate right now!' stuff out of proportion, but if you consider she's a woman who keeps having her husband die or be maimed, and has had her child kidnapped or yanked into traumatic and deadly battles from when he was literally a toddler onward (going to Namek despite her protests got his neck broken and also got him savagely beaten multiple times. At five years old). The fact that she was really active with training Goten until he went super (and ran off to get eaten and later murdered by an ancient evil at 7) supports that, in my opinion. Her meltdown in Super where she's desperate for Pan to stay out of battle once her dream of a calm life post-buu is shattered by Beerus showing up is just the crowning moment of that. She's a woman slowly driven mad by trying to cling to sanity in an insane world.
Super is good in concept. It provides new content to a long beloved series and sets out to correct many of the tropes that have been criticized about DBZ for years - excessive transformations, leaving behind everyone who isn't Goku and Vegeta (and eventually even leaving Vegeta behind), Vegeta smack-talking and one-sided feuding with Goku only to be humiliated, and power scaling that caused people who could literally overthrow an intergalactic emperor without trying to be considered useless wastes of space.Goku giving Cell a Senzu isn't the biggest WTF moment of the franchise, but learning that there are people who unironically like Super.
Battle of Gods refreshed the franchise better than any other concepts that popped up over the years in fandom and RoF wasn't terrible. The Zamasu arc was good, but better in the manga as a set up for Xenoverse and Heroes, the primary issue was that on a fairly short runtime it shoved in two large multiverse tournament arcs with nothing really at stake beyond the outcome of the tournament. Universe 6 + 7 tournament's stakes were "if we win, we get to use the super dragonballs, but none of us have any pre-existing wishes to make that worthwhile" and "if we lose, Earth gets translated into a different universe where there was never a Frieza and the Saiyans are a flourishing race of peacekeepers". Because 99% of all pre-Super content is earth-based, Beerus can universe hop at will, and nothing says there isn't still a Namek in 7, nothing would have been lost in switching universes and arguably it would only improve he story. All that the show would lose out on are the familar Supreme Kais, King Kai, and King Yemma. The Tournament of Power arc was obnoxiously long, and by contrast had stakes so high they were no longer believable. Universe 7 was always going to win, short of some crazy last second Universe 6 upset, and everyone expected that the erased universes would be brought back somehow due to the fact that it was way too wasteful to wipe out a dozen universes worth of content on one arc.
Any sequel/return will be better than Super simply because they've hopefully gotten the tournament arcs out of their system. From what I understand, the manga has better arcs that the anime never yet reached to.
I know Dragonball and Z always had tournament arcs, but they were either spacer arcs or had something else compelling in them that were interesting: the first tournament was a spacer between the dragonball hunt and red ribbon arcs, the last tournament arc was a warm up arc that eased into the Buu saga. The Tien and Piccolo tournaments were driven by the 'villain' of the tournament stomping on everyone and pushing Goku to his limit until he beat them. Cell Games were technically a tournament, but it basically pretended to be one for .5 seconds before Cell dropped the act and it became very obviously just the final battle arc for the Android/Cell saga. The Universe 6 arc holds itself up as its own thing, and the Tournament of Power's only "villain" was Jiren, who was about as interesting when he sat there meditating and not existing as when he actually did anything. Both in engagement in the tournament and in personality, Jiren can't compete with introduction-era Tien, Piccolo, or Cell.
