I’ve noticed another part of my pattern this week. After having completed another comic, I’ve been feeling more burned out by work than usual. It makes sense. I get a taste of what my life could be like, and I feel how out of line my job is for me. Like, I don’t mind having a mindless task that I don’t have to be invested in, but having to spend so much of my life doing something I don’t care about is exhausting. When I get in the zone, everything in my life is a distraction from what I should be doing. When a project is over, I’m just left with a big distraction, and one that I now have to get promoted for so I don’t have to feel insecure about my living situation. Capitalism, huh? All I want is to make art for a living, or at least work a simple, entry-level job and make a reasonable amount of money to live on, like my grandparents could do. It’s what they promised. But alas.
Anyway, this week, I’ve not been doing a lot of big, intellectual, thought provoking stuff, by my own standards. Instead, I’ve been reading Dragon Ball Super again, because I love it so much. I’ve been a fan of the series since I was a child. It’s an integral part of my understanding of the world and storytelling. I probably wouldn’t have become a black belt in kenpo if I hadn’t been a Dragon Ball fan. And admittedly, for all its strengths, there are a number of weaknesses in the series. I’m not going to sit here and say it’s the highest quality book ever made. What it does, it does really well, and all pioneers end up looking like has-beens in retrospect. But I have a special love for the Super era in particular, given the kind of fan I am and what the most vocal segments of the fandom are obsessed with. So let’s talk about that for a bit.
I’ve mentioned here before (I assume, not checking) that I think the introduction of Super Saiyan ultimately hurt the series more than it helped. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love transformations, too. They’re cool and a lot of fun. But ultimately, it moved the focus of the series away from how good a martial artist Goku was and towards raw power, as developed by higher and higher transformations; this ultimately leads to a sense of racial hierarchy, where Saiyans stand supreme. I recognize that Goku never rested on his laurels and kept training, but at the same time, he stopped working to get more skilled. Instead of all the stuff about the way of the martial artist being for everyone, it became a distinctly Saiyan quality. It would be one thing if Goku had a unique ability that he pursued as the hero of the story. But no, other Saiyans joined him, and soon they’re the only ones who can be useful in a fight. The human characters, the ones who were Goku’s earliest and still some of his best rivals, basically gave up their ambitions. Like, literally, the only reason Krillin, Tien, and Yamcha couldn’t keep up with Goku after the Frieza Saga was because they never learned Kaio-ken. They kept training and got stronger than Goku on Namek; they could handle higher than x20, and Tien said he wanted to make an improved Kaio-ken. Krillin would have had to learn it from someone on Earth, but the other two? They trained with King Kai! There’s no reason they shouldn’t have come home knowing Kaio-ken, and if they had, then they would have been competitive. Piccolo, too, and it would have explained how he had the raw power of Goku’s Super Saiyan before fusing with Kami. And while I get that this is Goku’s story, and it’s all about him, wouldn’t it be great if he had more than one person able to keep up, and only then because they share a racially specific ability? It’s a glaring omission from the series that sidelined several great characters who deserve better. That’s just the ones we’ve followed longest, too; Videl had every reason to become a top tier Z Fighter, and then she drops off because of sexist tropes about marriage and love.
I can grapple with that on my own, and that sort of lost possibility is the stuff of great fanfiction. The thing that really gets me mad is that the loudest contingent of the fandom eats all that up like it’s a gourmet steak. I regularly hide suggested Facebook posts about Dragon Ball because it’s just transformation porn. People only want to see Saiyans doing more forms, to the point of forgetting what the story is about. Like, the thing I love about Super is that, over the past decade-ish, it’s weaved a tale about how relying on power is bad and they have to develop their techniques as martial artists. All the fan art I see is about how cool Goku and Vegeta’s new “transformations” are, and not about how cool it is that Roshi is on the verge of Ultra Instinct, as well. Or how, further, there’s nothing stopping Tien, Piccolo, Yamcha, and Krillin from making a comeback with a compatible Ultra technique. I wasn’t seeing anything about Piccolo until Super Hero and people could fawn over his transformation; while it’s cool he’s getting his due, and I like that he’ll be more relevant in the series again, I also liked that he didn’t need to transform to be amazing.
Like, let’s talk Yamcha for a second. It’s a long-running joke in the fandom that Yamcha is useless and weak because he’s always getting beaten by villains first. And that’s really a dumb takeaway, because the reason he’s always getting beaten first is as a show-of-force. If the main villain can beat Yamcha easily, that means they’re serious business. Android 19 saw Yamcha’s resting battle power and gave it a 90-something percent chance he was Goku; that means that at that time, without being serious for a fight, he was strong enough to look like someone who was stronger than Frieza and then continued training intensely for three years. He’s no pushover, he’s just not able to jump to a higher weight class with hair dye. Remember how cool he is? He’s a great fighter with great style, he’s a real pal who’s always ready to help his friends, and he developed the Spirit Ball, at the time the most advanced and refined chi attack in the series. The loud, highly visible online fandom has really been sleeping on Yamcha, because all they want is more muss-kulls and spiky hair.
Broly is the biggest offender in that regard. The only thing he had going for him for most of his history was that he was also a Saiyan and could do the cool transformation. He didn’t have a personality or character arc, no grand goal. He was just a pile of muscle, and his latter two movies had him become a punching bag for children. Like, objectively, the group that beat his Zenkai form in Second Coming was weaker than the group from the first movie, and Gohan wasn’t even there in Bio-Broly. Yet he somehow became one of the most popular characters of the series because “ooh aah Super Saiyan.” Like, it’s good he has an actual story in the Super movie, but also that movie is a flashy waste of time, narratively. It doesn’t add anything to the story, because we already saw Kale as the Legendary Saiyan. And there comes the sexist part, because I’ve also seen people talk about how Kale is worse than Broly because she’s too weak to handle the power. Like, Broly couldn’t, either? He was lucky Goku and Vegeta saved his life by beating him, and Kale had the mental and emotional control not to transform for decades, no control ring required. The next time we see Universe 6, all the Saiyans there will be going SS3, if they haven’t figured out God, and Kale will have learned to control her Legendary power. That’s how the story works. Let’s not start putting down women because you like your big muscle man better.
That’s what I mostly see from fan pages, and it’s really annoying. It’s like they didn’t read the manga. And in terms of Super, maybe they didn’t; the anime version of Super focuses way more on power and transformations than the manga does, even contradicting established canon and inventing nonsense like “Hit just gets stronger if he feels like it” to show off. And the movies of late have all been like that. Battle of Gods introduced a number of important concepts, besides a new transformation, but that’s followed by Resurrection ‘F’, and what does that movie do? Revive Frieza for no reason so we can see transformations that are developed off screen, because we know it’s a given and not narratively inventive? Broly was just showing off another big fight and feeding red meat to the Broly fanbase. Super Hero is remarkably similar to Resurrection ‘F’ in that it brought back a mindless, stronger version of Cell just to give Gohan and Piccolo a transformation that contradicts the thematic purpose of Potential Unleashed (I mean, I have since figured out a mechanical reason the forms could work, but still, themes). It’s all pretty frustrating. We should at least get new villains and a new story with a movie, and not literally a villain and story we’ve seen before. Past movie villains were among the best of the series, with Garlic Jr., Wheelo, Turles, Slug, Cooler, and Bojack. What does Cell Max add?
All this is to say, I’m of two minds as we enter this next phase of the manga. The opening of this story arc was fresh and fun, going back to the action-comedy roots of the series for a fun Trunks and Goten story. I was really into it, and it felt like a better fit for Hedo as a character, as compared to him joining up with obvious villains as an excuse for Cell Max to get made. This last chapter, with its sudden and direct turn to the plot of Super Hero, left me concerned. I wouldn’t want this to be a rehash of the movie that goes over the same, largely pointless path. That said, I also am very excited, because I genuinely don’t think that’s where this is going. Toyotaro skipped both Resurrection ‘F’ and Broly to save time and focus on the actually important story he was telling, so I don’t think he’s interested in that kind of big, flashy fight for its own sake. He’s also been steering the story down a very different path than the anime and movies, as I described before and have talked more about in an earlier post. So really, there’s a ton of possibility for this next story coming up. Will we see Piccolo Orange and Gohan Beast? If so, will they have the same origin, or a different one that is somehow more connected to their training rather than relying on pure power granted by magic? If not, what will they do to win the day? Will we see Trunks and Goten do something of more continued relevance, instead of fusing just to lose because they’re “useless on their own” and also together? I don’t know what to expect, exactly, but I do think it’ll be a different story than we’ve seen in the film. Toyotaro has been getting increasing control on the story over time, and he took a few months off to prepare for this; he doesn’t need months to storyboard a preexisting movie narrative, even with the original opening portion, based on how he’s been able to continuously work on an original narrative in the manga for years.
So yeah, Dragon Ball! I really love this stuff, as I’m sure doesn’t really need to be explained when I have a fanfiction posted on this site (I’m working on ‘Gamma’ now, so check it out). I think a lot of the best parts of the series are getting a revival these days, and that’s good to see. I have faith that the future of Dragon Ball is in good hands with Toyotaro, and hope that he’ll be able to continue the series after Akira Toriyama passes. No matter what, though, I’ll always hold onto the spirit of the story, that hard work and dedication can turn anyone into the greatest of all time.
Life in the Gutters 