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Thoughts On Dragonball Z and How People Spend Their Time

So, I’m not going to pretend that I’m a Dragonball Expert, but I’ve followed and enjoyed the series for a significant portion of my life. I’ve also, like I’m sure many people who used to be teenage boys did, spent a lot of time thinking about that world and the people in it.

There is an opinion I’ve seen voiced in many ways and in many places that says something along the lines of “It’s just a show/game/movie/whatever, just consume it and have fun, why are you thinking about it so much.” To that, I’ve taken an idea from Lindsay Ellis to heart. It goes something along the lines of “These properties make ungodly amounts of money, and influence the thinking of countless people. To pretend that they aren’t worth thinking about seriously because they’re silly/made for children is shortsighted, and ignores what we can learn from those things”. She was talking about the Michael Bay Transformers movies at the time, but that kind of thinking can be applied to most things.

This is a long-winded way to say that I have Thoughts about Dragonball, and the way both the narrative and the characters within it discuss things like hard work, training, and the decision of how to spend your time.

I’ve always liked the human characters in Dragonball more than the others. Don’t get me wrong, I like Goku as much as the next guy, and I, like many others, went through a phase where I realized that Vegeta is both Incredibly Cool, and also A Pretty Good Dad. But it was always the human characters(Krillin, Yamcha, and to a lesser extent the half-human Gohan I suppose) that I really identified with. I guess it’s because I am a human? But I think even then, I identified with the feeling of other people outpacing me, getting better at things while I’m just trying to catch up.

Krillin and Yamcha are frequent fandom punching bags. Yamcha more than Krillin, and for good reason. Yamcha is kind of a dirtbag, so he deserves most of what he gets. But a lot of what I see when I see people talking about the human characters of Dragonball, is that they aren’t worthy of fandom because they’re weaker than the Saiyans, and that’s why they’re lame. I don’t agree with that line of thinking.

Sure, the human characters in Dragonball are probably always going to be weaker than the Saiyans, because Saiyans Cheat At Kung Fu Magic. They, as a species, are basically designed to always win in dramatic ways, and it’s hard to impossible for a human to catch up with that. They’re also the Designated Protagonists, so they always have to be the strongest. But the reasons I like the human characters aren’t because they’re good fighters, but because they’re more interesting characters, and their existence says interesting things about the setting.

Okay, before we keep going, I feel like it’ll be helpful to state what my sort of thesis is. Dragonball is a setting where hard work and determination can allow a person to transcend their normal limits, and become a being on the level of gods. But in order to attain that level of power, a person has to let everything else in their life fall away, and devote themselves solely to Getting Better At Punchwizarding. Saiyans have a natural disposition towards this singleminded focus, but Goku in particular, because he’s A Moron(and, like, brain damaged, I guess? Yikes), will always be best at this. The fact that other characters in the show, from Vegeta to Gohan down to Krillin and Yamcha, don’t reach that level isn’t an indictment of their skill or dedication, but a sign that they value other things in their lives. This makes me like those characters more, but that contrast wouldn’t exist without Goku doing what he does.

So, lets talk about Yamcha. Yamcha is a dingus. He dumped Bulma because he’s an idiot, and then effed off to use his Punchwizardry to become a famous baseball player. And while he’s an unenviable person(in a lot of ways, he has manufactured his own misery), he is a good example of what I’m talking about.

During Original Dragonball, Yamcha was a respectable martial artist. He wasn’t as good as the Designated Protagonist, but he could hold his own, and was likely one of the strongest humans on the planet by the end of that series.

Then, Dragonball Z happened. Raditz was a sign that things were climbing to a new level of power, and Yamcha managed to hang for a little while. He trained with the other Z Fighters for a while, preparing for the fight with Vegeta and Nappa. He also got immediately smoked my the Saibamen, getting brutally killed.

It’s around this point that I feel like Yamcha begins seeing the writing on the wall. He trains with King Kai alongside the others, and by the end of the Frieza saga he’s respectable, but not exemplary. Once the Android saga starts, and he challenges Android 20, he also immediately gets smoked, this time literally, with a massive hole blown in his chest. 

After this point, he is basically not a factor in any of the major battles of the series. He sits out most, if not all, major battles in the rest of the series, and during the timeskip between Cell and Buu, has completely stopped his training. He coasts by on his residual physical skill to make money. And while there’s something to be said for him abandoning the fight to protect Earth, to some extent, I get it? Like, he saw what was coming. Goku is doing sit-ups in 1000x Earth’s gravity or some nonsense, and lives for nothing but the fight. That was never Yamcha’s goal, so he got out while the getting was good. While he regrets this decision by the time Dragonball Super is going on, I understand the motivation.

So, lets take a quick detour to talk about Krillin. He’s probably my favorite character in the series. He looks like a weird gremlin and literally doesn’t have a nose. He’s great and perfect. A lot of his story is similar to Yamcha’s so we won’t have to talk about him long.

Krillin managed to avoid most of the pitfalls that Yamcha blunders into, but based on the person he is, he was always going to. Yamcha was a bandit who stumbled into World Shaking Nonsense, so his lack of dedication to back-breaking training is expected. Krillin was a monk who devoted himself to training when he was in Original Dragonball, and he stuck with that training for much longer. Accordingly, he stays relevant for much longer. By the time of the fight with the Saiyans, he survives when most of the others don’t, and he manages to hang during the fighting on Namek. Hell, his chops are still decent by the time of the Android saga, and he holds his own when he needs to. 

But he still makes the cardinal sin when it comes to Keeping Up With Goku: he cares about things besides training. He gets married, has a kid, settles down. Lets his hair grow back. Becomes a good dad and has a wife who loves him. He still does some training to keep himself in fighting trim, but by the time of the Buu saga, he’s basically no one of consequence. And that bites him in the ass when he gets taken out basically immediately.

I find this arc incredibly relatable. Who among us hasn’t devoted their lives to protecting Earth, but then fallen in love with an incredibly cool android woman and had a precocious kid, and then decided to skip leg day once or twice? Krillin manages to avoid falling as far as Yamcha did because Android 18 is another Z Fighter, and I’m sure they keep each other in shape. But they’re retired by the time of the Buu saga.

However, in Super, you can see how far a human can go when sufficiently motivated. Krillin makes it all the way to the Tournament of Power, while Yamcha is looking like a scruffy piece of trash, sad that all of his friends are going off and fighting without him. Like, of course they are, Yamcha. You haven’t lifted a weight in longer than Goten has been alive. Damn, even Master Roshi hit the gym when the chips were down, and he busts out some OG Dragonball moves. You see him in Resurrection of F, and the Tournament? Damn.

Y’know, I think I might’ve been wrong before. I said Krillin was my favorite character, but really, I think it has to be Gohan. He’s just the best.

So, a lot of the impetus of writing this piece has been because I’ve been vicariously reliving Dragonball Z through the All Systems Goku podcast. Seeing the series through fresh eyes has been neat, and it’s made me think about a lot of this for the first time in a long time. 

There’s a part at the beginning of the Buu saga where Vegeta drags Gohan for his decline in power level, and while I understand that frustration from Angry Saiyan Dad, like, I get it. Even by the time of Dragonball Super, Gohan has not, and likely will not, develop into the fighter he Could Have Been. But like, that’s fine. Vegeta didn’t, either.

So, to wrap this up and not write another thousand words, lets talk about the Saiyans as a group.

Goku is a Committed Idiot, who will always be the best at fighting because it’s all he cares about. Because of this, he is a negligent father and husband, and also not a very good person or friend.

Vegeta can hang on Goku’s level because he’s a Saiyan and has a very understanding wife that will build him weird gravity chambers, but he also takes an active role in parenting his children, and actually wants to be present at the birth of his daughter instead of going to train with an angel. Like, for real. Goku tries to convince Vegeta to miss the birth of his daughter to go train, because Goku missed the birth of Goten because he was dead, so it’s fine. Whis ends up making it a non-issue by using Angel Magic to just poof the baby out of Bulma, which is kind of horrifying, but Bulma was pretty alright with missing those arduous hours and having the work just done for her.

Vegeta compromises his training by being a person with a life, and watching Goku keep pulling ahead of him was the impetus for the Majin Vegeta stuff. He had his mid life crisis, but realized what he was doing, and I guess eventually got over it. He knows he’s not as strong as Goku, but he takes his son to Disneyland sometimes and he’s mostly cool with it.

Gohan could have been the greatest martial artist the Earth has ever produced. When he beat Cell, he was far and away the most powerful being that had ever set foot on the planet. But between then and the Buu saga, he just started to care about other things. He was a teenager, and went to school, made friends, fell in love. Between then and Super he got married, had a kid. People talk like they’re disappointed that Gohan has “gotten lame”, especially after the glimpse of him we get in Future Trunk’s Bad Future. But they don’t get it. 

Gohan won. That’s his happy ending. He can still hang with his dad and Vegeta; he’s probably the third strongest person on the planet. Piccolo might have him beat some days, but probably not. And he also has a wife and daughter and a life outside of lifting weights and screaming. That’s what Future Trunks would’ve wanted for him. 

At the end of the day, the Earth needs someone like Goku, who is willing to forsake everything else and keep doing push-ups until he can punch out God. It’s a good thing that he relishes the opportunity, because a more self-aware person would probably be pissed that the weight of the world/galaxy/universe/Creation keeps getting put on his shoulders. 

But to say that other characters are less interesting, or somehow “bad” because they don’t have that single-minded devotion to Punchwizardry is foolish, because that dichotomy and contrast between Goku and everyone else in his life is what gives texture and weight to the choices the characters make. Krillin sees Goku punching out deities and probably feels bad that he can’t help. But his family makes him happy, and that’s worthwhile, too. It’s what makes the fighting worth doing.

Okay, so that’s it. Feels good to get these thoughts out of my head. Been percolating them for a while. Not gonna do any more passes on this for editing because I’ve already been writing this for like an hour and I wanna be done. Happy to hear thoughts or comments. Be excellent to each other.

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A Refocusing

So I’ve had this tumblr for Literal Years and have never used it for much of anything besides a reblog depository, and to like things friends post. And even that was years ago, I haven’t done anything here in Eons. But I also always spend a bunch of time thinking about things that I want to ramble towards people about, but then I never actually develop those ideas into anything. And when I do, it’s always Talking At A Thousand Miles Per Hour, Confusing And Concerning Bystanders With My Word Vomit.

I want to spend more time writing, and was wondering how to accomplish that, when I remembered that I already have a place for that.

So, I’ve revamped this account. I’ve pruned my following/followers list to get rid of some chaff, and I’m gonna use this as A Place To Put My Garbage. I’m still likely going to reblog garbage from this account, but probably not as much as I used to when I was actually using Tumblr. I’m going to use this as an outlet to let words out of my brain so I don’t have to think about them as much. I feel pretty confident saying that it’s mostly going to be pop culture/fandom thoughts, but I also keep having thoughts for tabletop campaign settings that I want to get out of my head, so those will probably go here too. Not gonna spend much time editing any of it, because that will just delay the process.

So, if that sounds like something cool, then keep an eye here I guess. If it doesn’t, then no hard feelings. I’m also incredibly bad at using Tumblr and don’t know how most of the site’s features work so I would imagine things will be formatted poorly. But, eh. 

That’s about it for this post. Now I have some Thoughts about the Dragonball franchise and it’s use of Effort, Hard Work, and Obsession that have been burning a hole in my head for months that I’m going to try to get out.

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Pugilist Class by coolgamertagbro

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Tabletop Gaming has a White Male Terrorism Problem

I am a gamer. I followed the call of Cthulhu and ran in the shadows with hackers and shamans. I traversed the ancient lands of Greyhawk, Faerun, and Eberron with companions new and old. I swung from an airship and buckled swash over London for the Kerberos Club. I threw dice and flipped cards and ground men into dust playing table-top wargames.

I don’t do that anymore.

Since July of 2015 fans of the game Malifaux have been attempting to overwhelm me with death and rape threats for no other reason than I am a woman who has opinions on the game. Wyrd Miniatures is silent on this matter and hangs up whenever anyone attempts to discuss the harassment. Given that a large number of threats identify the senders by name as Wyrd staff members, I do not find this surprising.

But that’s not what this article is about.

Keep reading

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This is the kind of thing that motivates me to get out of bed in the morning.

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This is the Great Pyramid of King Khufu.  Everybody knows the Great Pyramid of King Khufu, but you probably don’t know about the Shit Pyramids of his father, King Sneferu.  This is a shame, because they are amazing.

When King Sneferu came to the throne of Egypt, the cool thing that all the pharaohs had was a Step Pyramid, like the original one built by King Djoser and designed by Imhotep (not the mummy).  King Sneferu could easily have had one one because his predecessor King Huni had died before his could be finished. All Sneferu had to do was step in and put the last few blocks on.

But King Sneferu had a vision.  He didn’t want any old Step Pyramid.  He was going to build Egypt’s first smooth-sided pyramid, and make King Huni’s pyramid way taller in the bargain.  It didn’t work.  The core of Huni’s pyramid couldn’t handle the modifications and nowadays the Step Pyramid at Meidum looks like this:

It’s not on a hill - that’s the outer layers of the pyramid that have fallen down all around it.  The name of the structure in Arabic is Heram el-Kaddaab, which means something like The Sort-Of Pyramid.

Anyway, King Sneferu was understandably disappointed and made his pyramid-builders start over from scratch at a different site.  Apparently having learned nothing about the Big Fat Nowhere that hubristic pyramid ambition was going to get him, this pyramid was designed to be even taller and pointier than the last effort!  Too tall and pointy, in fact - the bedrock proved to be less stable than he might have hoped, and by the time the pyramid was half-finished stuff was already moving and cracking inside of it.  There are ceilings in this pyramid that are to this day partially held up by wooden beams.

The builders seem to have panicked and decided that the only way to finish the pyramid without another disaster was to make the top half lighter than the bottom half.  They did this by changing the angle of the slope, ending up with a pyramid that looks like this:

Egyptologists call this one the Bent Pyramid for fairly obvious reasons.  Uniquely among Egyptian Pyramids, it has most of its smooth outer blocks intact, rather than having them all stolen to build other stuff (most of medieval Cairo is built from the skin of the Giza pyramids).  I’m guessing this is because nobody dared touch the thing for fear the whole structure would come down like a giant limestone game of Jenga.

I’m sure the pyramid-builders were very proud of this solution.  Sneferu appears to have been less so.  He had them move over about half a mile and start over.  Again.  Why only half a mile when he had them move 34 miles between the Sort-of Pyramid and the Bent Pyramid is a mystery.  I think he wanted to keep them in sight of the Bent Pyramid so they could look at it and feel ashamed every once in a while.

And there they built Sneferu’s third pyramid, which is called the Red Pyramid.  As pyramids go, it’s a very cautious one - it’s got the shallowest slope rise of any Egyptian pyramid, and while it’s the same height as the Bent Pyramid it spreads its weight over a much greater base area, making it far more stable.  Sneferu seems to have been happy with this one, because he was buried in it.  Either that, or after a forty-eight-year reign he just finally died and that was the pyramid they used because it was the nicest of the three.

These three pyramids together actually contain substantially more stone than the Great Pyramid of Sneferu’s son Khufu.  By the time Sneferu died, his workforce had honed themselves into a lean, mean pyramid-building machine.  They had already made every possible pyramid mistake.  So when Khufu announced that he didn’t just want a great pyramid, but The Great Pyramid, these guys built him a pyramid so fucking great that we now think aliens must have done it.

It was as true in Ancient Egypt as it is now.

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At the age of 19 Padme Amidala was the queen of a planet and had already saved her people from total crisis

At the age of 19 Anakin Skywalker was married and a general in a galaxy wide war and was considered to be one of the most powerful Jedi in history 

At the age of 19 Leia Organa was a senator in the imperial senate as well as a leader and spy for the Rebellion

At the age of 19 Luke was making vroom vroom noises with his toy planes 

I love him so much

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Our party of almost all half-elves are in a stolen rowboat, trying to sneak our way onto a pirate ship. We’ve been incredibly stealthy so far, when our fighter rolls a nat 1 on Stealth and thus sneezes incredibly loudly.

The goblins running the ship immediately take notice.

Goblins: Alarm! Get your swords! We’re being attacked by elves!

The Party: [yelling back] We’re HALF-elves!

[beat]

Goblins: We’re being attacked by shitty elves!

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When a villain in an Anime is finally getting beat, but then they get a random power boost out if nowhere.

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I am ready to die

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Barbie Vlog #9

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On our newest Round Trip, Ryan wants you to try the role-playing game Space Station 13. Check it out!

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sneeze on your knuckles before a fight in order to inflict poison damage