#also he had a kid who looks like evil goten. that is all

[pussyfootmaneuver]

Giving my ask to you:

What’s your opinion on Turles?

due to me involving him in my oc lore i had to make him like an actual guy with a backstory and i think. well. he's cool. i like his devil horns and feel like his weird slimy conniving character yet also his laidback and cool demeanor is fun and interesting. the fact that he's regarded by other saiyans in xenoverse as a subversive troublemaker who is decidedly not part of their ingroup... he's an evil guy who doesnt care about doing things the right way when there's a shortcut that will kill billions of people.

a lot of my turles feelings are secondhand thru my oc alfa, who is also a rogue low class saiyan whose bent on destroying frieza so she falls in with the crusher corps. they come from similar backgrounds and exist in this state of having an all consuming goal that drives their actions, not to mention (DESPITE the fact other saiyans treated them like dirt) an unwavering devotion to the principles of saiyan pride. they were kind of just hooked up for convenience/serving their own ends but they saw themselves in each other and felt like they were the only ones who could understand each other which was annoying when they pissed each other off......i feel like there's an interesting story to how he got his hands on this supposedly divine fruit and id be interested to see where he mighta taken things had it not been for some plucky young saiyan raised on earth....

[dballzposting]

hey do you know that post that is like "evil infodumping where you just tell lies" "older brother"? well that reminded me of an idea i had the other day

but since the Son family lives in the middle of el campo yknow i got thinking that they might believe on this one folklore leyend "la luz mala" (the evil light) that tbh just spawns in the forest and honestly older people use it to make little kids not go into the forest alone so i think Chichi would have told that to both Gohan and Goten

And whereas Gohan found out it was fake the second Piccolo threw him in the middle of fucking nowhere? I feel like Goten still believes it simply because he never got the explanation of why la luz mala happens and he hasn't gone to the forest alone because he listens to his mom you know, Gohan has tried to explain it to him once or twice but he doesn't think their mom would be too happy with that so he doesn't outright tell him;

Like he tries to give hints into the thought process that it's not real but Goten doesn't catch them and Gohan doesn't try anymore because at least his brother isn't going into the forest at night alone idk.. In the end it's not like he lives like that all his life he eventually finds out it's just a legend but he does live most of his childhood or teenage years believing that there is fucking spirits in the forest until idk Trunks gives him the scientific explanation on why lights spawn in the forest to make himself look smarter and then he goes to Gohan and Gohan is like "He's right and i've been trying to tell you most of my life" and Goten is like that picture at the end of the comic of the guy that wakes up from the dental surgery anesthesia and tries to fit his own fist in his mouth as fast as possible and then looks so distressed when they stop him

But i mentioned the evil infodumping older brother thing because the second Trunks finds out he's going to try to make Bulla believe it, not for any noble reasons he's just messing with her, and i feel like that would be hard to do but he could pull it off if he was feeling mischievous enough at the time, like going to "DAD HOW DO I MAKE AN ARTIFICIAL MOON" extremes, but it only works if he's a kid i don't think teenage Trunks has the energy to do that, if he was a teenager he would tell her "It's real, i've seen it, Goten too, ask him" and exudes the confidence he does that could make you believe that a jellyfish is 90% piss if he told you that (real thing i did to my internet friends btw i dont think any of them fact checked it until i told them it was fake a year later)

also about Gohan again: future Gohan would tell future Trunks about it so he doesn't go into the forests alone to train or something at night because he can't watch him or defend him in case anything happens to him just like Chichi told him so he wouldn't get hurt when he was a kid, so future Trunks believes in la luz mala until he gets older and maybe when he goes to the past he talks to present Gohan about it and Gohan tells him how "Yeah it's not real but my mom didn't want me going into the forest alone in case i got hurt" and it actually sinks in and he realizes that's also one of the many ways Gohan tried to protect him back when he was alive, and that worked even beyond that because Trunks didn't go into forests at night again did he?? (he goes in the day time and maybe he pets some animals like a disney princess but not at night, maybe he grows out of the habit once his timeline is at peace and he looks at the stars because they're pretty and who doesn't like stars)

and maybe he doesn't cry about it once he knows and remembers the man who practically raised him alongside his mother and that he's admired for most of his life but maybe he just does a little sad slightly shocked face and thinks about it while looking down at the ground because he looks like does that a lot for some reason

its 3 am i should go to bed uhh thats a @yu7i moment, saludos desde argentina

I do not know that infodump post but I can extrapolate details + the joke so we're all good

THIS . IS SO . REAL!!!!

I don't know the anesthesia post either but again it all makes sense anyway

Maybe all of my lovely followers know those posts in question so maybe they love this post as well

Goten is like NO SPIRITS? like the megamind NO BITCHES? meme.. IT'S A LONELY WORLD OUT THERE when there are NO SPIRITS TO WATCH YOU HURRY OUT OF THE WOODS AT DUSK ..!!

Astute comparison between kid Trunks and teen Trunks .. I never would have cared to think it ... as a kid he has fun going sooo far for a prank but as a teen he has the ability to just sound so completely legitimate in one sentence that he doesn't need a whole set-up, and he would rather not have to put the time in anyway ....

So true about Future Trunks . . . . that is a bittersweet and profound experience unique to him . The other dragon ball guys don't get that . And when Trunks was young, he thought that Gohan was old, because that's how kids think. But now that he's 17 he realizes that Gohan was not that old, but he still did so much for Trunks .. and he had the tact to get Trunks to not go into the dangerous woods at night by using the same trick his mother had used on him .. if Trunks had a child that he had to be responsible for in his life then he would use the same trick now. And thats sort of completely beautoufl . Beuaotufl. Sorry. Beuaotuifl. Beautiful

Thank you for sharing as always

[dragon-ball-meta]

Yes, a Reddit post. I’m sure so many of you are shocked that our colossally bad take came from there, (and probably from Toyotaro’s burner account lol), but nevertheless, here it is. How to even begin to unpack this... Okay, here we go: 1. Goku’s was hardly the only one who didn’t want to stop Gero. Vegeta literally threatened to KILL anyone who DID try to stop them. Tien wanted to fight them to test his limits. Goku’s desire was to fight them, yes, hello, this is Goku, But he also refused to just find and straight-up kill Gero when he TECHNICALLY hadn’t done anything to warrant it yet. And, as we actually came to see, that’s not an entirely unwarranted stance; things changed between these two timelines even without direct intervention. Unlikely as it was, it was possible that Gero may not have gone through with it. There have been entire books and films on this topic.. 2. This stupid claim just refuses to die. At what point in any part of the fight with Goku and Cell was it even IMPLIED that Goku could have won? Goku stated he’d been going all-out in his fight with Cell, when the Cell Jrs arrived and started attacking, Goku was getting bodied even though they were only about as strong as Vegeta or Trunks, who were both far below him when at full power. Goku could not have beaten Cell. ONLY Gohan could. The boy even said that he’d thought Goku and Cell were both not fighting seriously because they looked to be moving slowly to him. Gohan was already stronger than Goku, before he ever turned SSJ2. Period. And for the love of GOD, STOP with this “severe emotional trauma” nonsense! Gohan had been watching people die, his friends no less, since he was FIVE. In fact, seeing that at FIVE is FAR more likely to have given him any severe and lasting emotional trauma. PICCOLO is more likely to have caused this than Goku. Yes, the Piccolo the OP even then tries to claim is the paragon of fatherhood. Gohan was already afraid of his own anger, he always had a dislike of fighting and hurting people. The thing that shook the boy the most was watching his dad die and knowing it was partly his fault. Even then, he grew up into a healthy, well-adjusted man with his dream job and a family. Just STOP pushing your headcanons onto him for two seconds! 3. THINKS he could have killed Buu. Opted to try to teach those still alive a technique that would enable THEM to kill Buu and keep protecting the Earth even after he was gone. Could have killed Vegeta, yes, and sent him to hell and left Bulma and Trunks broken-hearted. Instead opted to try to reason with him first and allow him to think he’d finally caught up to him so he’d stop obsessing over their power gap to the point of SELLING HIS SOUL TO AN EVIL WIZARD TO GET THE EDGE.. And now, for the completely asinine reasons Goku is eeeeevil: 1. You’re acting as if this isn’t just Goku. That is LITERALLY Goku. Always HAS been Goku. He treats EVERYNE as a peer and potential friend and ADORES the idea of trying to fight strong people. Note that he also ASKED for a spar, didn’t just “attack” or something. This also has nothing to do with a thirst for “power”, it has to do with Goku trying to test himself and push himself to be the greatest warrior it’s possible for him to be. This is the same mentality that had Goku excited for the Tenkaichi Budokai, that had him excited to face Vegeta, that had him spare Piccolo and Vegeta for the sake of  rematch against such a great opponent someday. This is not some sort of development that happened post-Namek, and it’s by no means Evil. Also, how tf did VEGETA supposedly warn him when Vegeta was back on Earth and nowhere to be found?  2. Again... this is just Goku. This is how he is. That doesn’t mean he didn’t care about the plight of others though; Goku doesn’t just sit back and ignore suffering he’s been made aware of, and he helps his friends. But yes, the idea of facing HIMSELF was exciting to him; possibly his ONLY chance to compare his progress to another “version” of himself.  And... I’m sorry, but Goku erupting into a fit of rage over his family’s murder is invalidated because he was mad it used HIS body? Really? NO KIDDING I’d be extra pissed if some psychopath took over my body and murdered my wife and little boy! Who WOULDN’T be pissed about that? The last thing his wife saw was her husband’s face grinning as he cut through her and their son. The last thing Goten saw was his daddy GLEEFULLY murdering him. The fact that he flew into the biggest rage he’d ever had since he first fought FREEZA over this shows how much that hurt him. The fact that you think it was entirely about the use of his body and not their deaths shows a piss-poor ability to analyze what you see on screen, ESPECIALLY as he was upset but mostly indifferent hearing how Zamasu stole his body UNTIL he told Goku he murdered his family too. THEN he flew into a rage. This is also going to invalidate an upcoming point, so pin this.

3. Aaaand... we’re right back to the Tournament of Power itself. The Tournament that literally no one foresaw as having those results. The one that as stated to actually buy one universe that was gonna be wiped anyways a fighting chance to survive, and later turned out to be a massive morality test to allow ALL of said universes to survive. Nevermind that though, this OP here asserts that Goku KNEW it would result in that, was TOLD it would even (he literally was not I am so sick of that claim), and didn’t even KNOW they COULD undo it and STILL wanted it! This is easily the most hardcore anti-Goku stance I have ever seen on this topic This isn’t just chiding him for being ignorant or not listening to warnings (again, not applicable), it’s accusing him of KNOWING Genocide would happen and actually WATING that in the name of a few fights.  This being his stance is further illustrated by his assertion that Goku is indisputably a sociopath. Let’s look at the definition of a sociopath, shall we? “A person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience.” This is not Goku. OBJECTIVELY not Goku. Goku is far from anti-social, and very much has a strong sense of right and wrong, hence his desire to intervene when he comes across people suffering. Hence why he sought justice for the murder of Upa’s father. Hence why he felt IMMEDIATE REGRET after hearing what the consequences would be for the losers of the ToP, and WHY HE FLEW INTO A RAGE OVER THE MURDER OF HIS WIFE AND SON. Goku is capable of sympathy, empathy, and grasps the concepts of right and wrong. A sociopath he is not. And, of course, the stupid assertion that Goku is a bad father and Piccolo and Vegeta are the REAL examples of fatherhood... which is also erasure of Gohan and Krillin, neither of whom assaulted their daughters, tossed them into the wilderness to fend for themselves, forced them to be fighters and face homicidal aliens at age 5,or nearly let them and their mothers fall to their deaths because they were too absorbed with finding and killing an enemy to prove their superiority. To cap it off, Vegeta and Piccolo have somehow inexplicably become the “symbols of hope” in the series, trying to stop an evil, unhinged Goku from annihilating them all, and he asserts that Vegeta became the REAL hero during... the Cell Saga? The arc where Vegeta literally helped Cell become perfect? And was the hero in the arc where he sold his soul to Babidi, helped resurrect Buu, AND murdered hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people JUST to make Goku mad enough to fight him because he refused to? You know, the thing you actually used as a point of criticism for... GOKU, and are clearly abdicating Vegeta of any and all responsibility for?  Folks, I’ve seen some bad takes in my day, but it’s very, VERY rare to find one this unhinged and frankly inept in one place. This is nuclear levels of Bad Takes here. Just... wow. 

[animatedminds]

What If: Every Character In Dragonball FighterZ Had a Dramatic Finish? (Pt. 3)

And here we are at the third leg of this little brainstorming session. Since yesterday, UI Goku has come out - people are enjoying the apparently pretty insane defensive options he’s got, and the new Kefla Dramatic Finish, but that doesn’t mean our work here is done just yet. If you haven’t seen the first two installments of these, this week in honor of the Ultra Instinct Goku DLC for Dragon Ball FighterZ I’ve been doing a little hypothetical thinking about Dramatic Finishes - those awesome re-animations of classic Dragonball moments that Arcys lovingly put into the game. Specifically, we’ve been approaching the question of “what if there were even more Dramatic Finishes” - since only a select portion of the cast has one. Over the last couple of days, we’ve been going through each of the characters without a Dramatic Finish and trying to find the best choice, the most cinematic moment, coolest and hopefully most epic shots of each character’s history that could work as a Dramatic Finish for them. This is more of a hypothetical: as I said in the previous installments, I’m not seriously saying that every character in the game should have a Dramatic Finish: Arcsys puts a hell of a lot of work into each of them, and the majority of the roster getting such time consuming devotion is just not happening. This is more of a thought experiment - and an excuse to rewatch a ton of clips from all over Dragonball history, of course. And as before, I’m looking for good scenes that would make appearances in Dramatic Finishes, not necessarily wins - so some of the characters on this list are going to lose.

If you want to the whole thing in one shot, you can always just listen to it on Soundcloud: we have a whole cast for it right here. But if not, then buckle up: cause here we got into Part 3. When last we met, we went through the Cell Saga (and Videl), so the next character up without a Dramatic Finish should be...

Majin Buu

Buu has been in the game since the beginning, but never did seem to get much attention - the main villain of his own arc, albeit one in which is many additional forms and personas took center stage after himself, Buu’s got quite a bit of interesting moments under his belt, with his own brand of destruction that’s as terrifying as it is silly.

I do want to preface this by pointing out that in the last video I went over an option for Super Saiyan Vegeta, which involved compositing the Final Explosion moment from his stint as Majin Vegeta into his regular Super Saiyan form and using that as a Finish, and before we go into more options for Buu I’ll say that at the end of the day I still think that’s the best option both for Vegeta and for Buu himself, but too give something extra for this segment...

The tricky thing about Buu is that he does a lot of fighting but not a lot of finishing - in this form, at least, he mostly wreaks havoc on innocent bystanders while the heroes can’t stop him. There are some scenes, like him killing Dabura by turning him into a cookie, that would work - but which would involve characters that aren’t currently in the game.

So I ultimately came up with two options (technically three, but I’ll save that third one for the next section).

The first is a less serious suggestion, since the steps required to make this scene smaller for a Dramatic Finish probably aren’t worth it, but its is a version of this anime-only scene where Gotenks attempts to fight Buu and - predictably - is defeated. This scene works in a general sense due to the good framing: Gotenks is knocked into a wall so hard he gets embedded into it, and then Buu destroys everything around them while he is helpless to stop it, and in transferring the action to the City stage you could make that simple idea work pretty well.

The thing is, what would really make this scene work as a Dramatic Finish is something that would be kind of extra for this game: the army shows up, and they kill massacred while Gotenks fails to get them to run. That would really put the drama in this Dramatic Finish - the hero fails to save the innocent bystanders and all, and without it the scene is just kind of bland, but there’s no way Arcsys is modelling all that just for a reach of a Dramatic Finish, so in the end there are better options for both characters.

So for the other, better option? Give him one of his scenes where he goes up against his later forms. Majin Buu ultimately turns good and fights against his later, eviller transformations, which makes for some good moments. The first of which would simply be a Dramatic Opening which adapts the scene where Kid Buu spits out Majin Buu who (later) gets up to attack him. It’s a two separate scenes, but they’re both quick, and easily condensed condensed into one: just have Kid Buu spit out Majin Buu, who immediately steps up to fight.

But for finally a Dramatic Finish suggestion, we have another one that requires some finagling: take the scene in which Majin Buu attempts (and fails) to turns Evil Buu into chocolate, and give it to Kid Buu instead.

This would be a win for Kid Buu (again, replacing Evil Buu with him in this case), and it would work pretty easily, given that a lot of Dramatic Finishes so far use a formula like this: Kid Buu knocks Majin Buu back, who gets mad and tries to strike back with the Chocolate Beam. Kid Buu blows it back and Majin Buu gets hit instead. A piece of chocolate hits the ground, Kid Buu picks it up and eats it - then end with a shot of Kid Buu laughing maniacally, or perhaps shift one of Evil Buu’s poses over to Kid Buu.

It wouldn’t be the first time something from one of the earlier forms was given to Kid Buu in this game, and it works out fairy well - though I will say again that the Final Explosion moment is still the best option for Majin Buu in my opinion.

Next on the list...

Gotenks

Gotenks is, if anything, even trickier than Buu. The entire concept of Gotenks is a warrior who is extremely powerful and versatile, but also a complete fool and a blowhard. He’s many times more powerful than either Goten or Trunks could ever be alone, but in terms of character and wisdom he’s less than the sum of his parts - and so, he can never win.

This presents an interesting problem for this list: Gotenks has no follow through. Not only does he never really finish off an opponent, he also has a tendency to screw up and get himself taken out in inglorious ways that wouldn’t make great Dramatic Finishes either. The option I gave in the preceding section, losing against Buu, is a good example: it just has too many problems even given that it’s an above average choice in comparison to a lot of his other moments.

But there are a couple options I can think of, still. The first is a good choice for a Dramatic Opening - in fact, the very first thing I thought of for this section: that anime only fight that I brought up with Majin Buu begins in an interesting way: Gotenks blindsides Buu with a cheap shot. Then we get a surprisingly cool entrance for a scene meant mostly to fill time, in which Gotenks - wreathed in shadow against a vibrant blue background - makes a dramatic speech about how he’s going to kill Buu for good.

Really, the visual effect of this is so good that even given that they would have to transpose it to a different stage (the City, again) I wouldn’t mind seeing it as a Dramatic Opening. It’s at least an option for this section, though... let’s face it, it’s not quite there yet. We can at least think of a Finish for here as well, can’t we? Well, the one I figured on is - unfortunately for Gotenks - a loss, and it’s more of a funny moment than a Dramatic moment, but I’d say either of the versions of Beerus’ defeat of him during the Battle of Gods arc (either in the movie, or in Super):

For reference, he’s the Battle of Gods version as well.

The perfection of this scene is that while it may not be a titanic moment that shook the heavens like most of the Dramatic Finishes, it gives us a chance to show off another side of Dragonball that’s always been a strong factor: the humor. The Super version, especially, gives Koichi Yamadera and Jason Douglas a chance to let loose their chops and give us a complete rant that’s as all over the place as it is fun to watch, and ultimately even if it’s not epic, it’s definitely entertaining. To imagine a Dramatic Finish that’s just Beerus stopping the action, taking over the camera and shouting about pudding in as over-dramatic a way as possible for half a minute sounds oddly good to me - kind of meta, and a heck of a non-sequitiur.

Yes, at Gotenks’ expense, but these two options really run the gamut of Gotenks’ scene: either he’s crowing dramatically about how awesome he is, or he’s getting humiliated in a fight. I love the kid, but he could use some character development (Super gave Goten and Trunks a little, but they were out of focus so much you’d never notice).

Either way, we move on to...

Vegeta (Super Saiyan Blue)

When it comes to characters for who felt a bit left out, it was somewhat surprising that neither Super Saiyan Blue Goku nor Vegeta got Dramatic Finishes when the game came out: this was Super was current, and it was assumed the game would try have a bit of synergy with its moments - but then again, it also makes sense. Animation lead time takes forever, and game lead time takes forever, and since it takes over a year to make either of those things waiting to make a moment in retrospect sometimes is just more worthwhile than rushing to do something in the moment.

You can see how doing adapting quickly might not end with the best result in Ranger 17′s FighterZ moveset, which has to fill blanks with Cell saga moves and a couple things adapted from other video games, unable to use a lot of the things that made Ranger 17 so fun to watch because the character was already in production when those happened.

But let’s not get distracted. Vegeta Blue is in an interesting spot, because no matter how powerful he is Vegeta’s role is still the same: do well against the less powerful opponent, then get wrecked by the main antagonists. This ultimately means that a lot of Vegeta’s best moments in Blue are against characters not in the game. A favorite moment, and the one I would absolutely want as a Dramatic Finish, involves a character I’ve personally wanted in the game since launch - but who is almost certainly never going to make the cut (Auta Magetta), a titanic Final Flash + Punch that ended up becoming his LVL 3 in the game itself. Other good options include his hilarious and cathartic defeat of Frost in the Universe 6 vs Universe 7 tournament, and his defeat of Toppo in the Tournament of Power, all of which involve character that are unlikely to be in the game even as DLC (though they’re at least more likely than Spopovich).

But if we only look at characters who are in the game, we’ve mostly got fleeting moments of victory that quickly turn around to defeat. But, if we’re looking that those there is one that stands out as particularly cinematic: the end of his fight with Freeza in Revival F (or Super).

In this clip, Vegeta defeats Freeza, who has a cheap shot attempts to blow up the entire planet. Think the Freeza vs Goku Finishes or the Gohan vs Cell Finishes, except in this case the hero fails. The cheap shot works, and Freeza destroys everything... until time gets rewound and Goku stops this from happening by taking out Freeza before he can.

The irony here is pretty funny. You either get a Dramatic Finish where Blue Vegeta loses, or one where he wins but Blue Goku still steals his thunder. EIther way, though, it’s still one of the most cinematic options. Especially if you add in a little of the Super version of Freeza blowing up the Earth, with bits and pieces of all the characters as they have only a moment to react to their sudden doom. You could even do something akin to how Arcsys did Dizzy’s instant kill in Guilty Gear Xrd, and have your different teammates all react differently depending on who is on your team, though that might be a step too far.

Either way, all you’d need is to win against Blue Vegeta while Blue Goku is on your team. Freeza throws a fit, Vegeta attempts to execute him but is stopped by Freeza blowing up the planet... then rewind. The scene replays, but this time Goku leaps forward and finishes Freeza off. End with a shot of Vegeta yelling at Goku or something for stealing his moment.

It’s a pretty great option, even if it’s not Vegeta’s most glamorous moment - but then, that’s pretty standard for Vegeta. Either way, we can move on. Next up...

Hit

When I was first putting this list together, last week or so, it was before Blue Goku was revealed to be the version of Goku with the Kefla Dramatic Finish. Everyone assumed it was UI Goku, so I had a Goku option lined up - but him now having one (and thus being out of this list) works out fairly well, because originally the choice I made for Blue Goku and the choice I made for Hit ended up as the same thing anyway.

Hit and Blue Goku’s fights feature some of the best scenes either character (which is to say, Hit and that version of Goku) have in Super, and it’s a no brainer that the finish for this section would come from that fight... but, since the first version of that fight ended inconclusively, I would actually suggest compositing scenes from their first fight with the conclusion of their second, anime-only rematch: which ends with a titanic moment - though yes, another Kamehameha - where Goku literally breaks through and shatters Hit’s time stalling technique.

Meanwhile, while the second fight provides the climactic conclusion, the first fight provides the build up and the best visuals: featuring epic scenes where the two rush each other in sprays of blue, red and purple that could really show what Super was capable of when the animation really got going.

So the key here is to make a new Dramatic Finish that combines elements of that first fight and the conclusion of the second: much like the Super Broly Finish, have the first part be moments from the first fight adapted together, to create the flow of a single stretch of combat. A win for Blue Goku, of course, this would start out as a blistering clash between the two.

Then, end it with the conclusion of the second fight, with Goku completely overcoming Hit’s time skip and blowing him away, through collapsing in exhaustion afterwards. Given the differing locations of their two fights, this could either take place in FighterZ’s original stage - Galactic Arena - which is loosely inspired by the Universal Tournament area, or the Archipelago.

Then much like the Jiren Finish, the last part of the scene would be them palling around - or as much as a guy like Hit can pal around - after the fight, promising to come at each other with even more power next time they meet, just like the ending of their rematch. It’s a strong Dramatic Finish that shows off the best of both.

It seems like Blue Goku has been the theme for the last two sections... but we might as well not break the trend now. We move on to the last section of the day, and the last character introduced in Super to not have a Dramatic Finish...

Goku Black

Yes, Zamasu’s insidious disguise himself. While Zamasu got several Dramatic Finishes to his name, Goku Black has since launch had to make due with the semi-special finish you get if you kill him with Beerus’ LVL 3.

As the primary Zamasu faced during his eponymous arc, Black does most of the legwork throughout that saga, but a downside to the way that saga is built is that there isn’t much in the way of “final” moments throughout it all: it’s basically a running fight in which the fighters take break for Round 2, Round 3, etc - most big moments on one side are instantly undone by big moments from the other side, with neither really gaining ground enough that you could build a Dramatic Finish out of it.

There is, however, one pretty decent moment that would make a great moment - featuring a cinematic comeback for Blue Goku followed by a brutal shutdown by Black. We’re talking here about Goku’s fury, the moment where he finds out what Black did to Chi-Chi and Goten in his timeline (note: not pleasant), followed by his enraged - but short lived - revenge.

The flashback is just too long to really work in a Dramatic Finish, unless you did it in snippets like Bardock’s flashback in his, which I would suggest, but given the whole fight scene afterwards might end up a step too far. Either way, it’s a win for Goku Black, in the City stage: he has Goku literally up against a wall, torturing him alongside Zamasu... only for Goku to break free and completely lose it. Following would be another fight scene within a Dramatic Finish, in which Goku goes to town on Black and Zamasu, seemingly winning... until Black turns it around by powering up himself, finishing Goku off with the God Slicer (or Divine Lasso, depending on your preference).

Final shot is easy: a shot of Goku’s broken body on the ground, as in the source, added with a shot of Black standing smugly over him smugly. It’s one of Black’s more epic moments - at least that isn’t inflicted on innocent bystanders - and works very well as one of those few moments where the villain gets one over on the hero.

And that’s it for today! We’re coming up on the end: to be concluded, tomorrow!

As always, if you don’t want to wait just check out the whole thing on Soundcloud, and in the meantime let me know what you think of the choices for each character and whether you have any other ideas! But either way if you’re a FighterZ player I hope you’re enjoying the DLC, and if you’re a Dragonball fan I hope you’re keeping up that endless search for more power. Stay sparking!

[hotstreak2k3]

Things we want for the upcoming Dragon Ball Super movie (2020) and future episodes!

While we are airing some English Dub version on a Adult Swim, there is a fatal announcement that another DBS movie is on development. Even Gohan’s dub actor Kyle Herbert wasn’t happy to know that his character isn’t in that film this time around.

Many fans have been wondering where do we go next since the Galactic PatrolPrisoner Manga Arc is unexpected goes beyond the series. Even though CBR had given some possible storylines in the upcoming movie, I am not certain we can bring back the Red Ribbon Army anytime or any other weird scenario from their list.

So here are the list of possible storylines and changes we fans should expect to see in either the next Dragon Ball movie or saved for the future episodes and manga arcs afterwards:

20.) The return of blood, gore and better animation quality from Dragon Ball Super: Broly.

19.) Gohan and Krillin enjoy their slice of life with their wives and kids in future Episodes... and train for the next threat as well.

18.) Filling up a fan theory of one the Angels sinister plot against Grand Zeno’s... and it could possibly be the Grand Minister.

17.) Bringing back Vic Mignogna as the voice of Broly

16.) Another Future Trunks Saga where we can see our favorite hero and future Mai settle down at since their Original Timeline was obliterated by Zeno

15.) One time story mini arc of Universe 6’s Saiyans (Cabba, Kale and Caulifla) adventures. In addition, explore more on their threesome relationship and the Saiyan society.

14.) Broly and Cheelai’s relationship blossoms (At least that what most fans would see a anime reference of Tarzan and Jane)

13.) Son Goku meet his parents, Bardock and Gine, for the first time!

12.) Piccolo merge with an namekian god to gain the power that rivals Super Saiyan Blue.

13.) Cooler is hint to be canon just like Tarble. But fairly some of us want our favorite badass villain to side with his brother Frieza, not as an anti-hero

12.) for the Dragon Ball Fighterz adaptation, Android 21 is now a beloved character thanks to Akira Toriyama himself. But not everyone wants the revived villains from the game. Plus her good half and the her human link partner would be a great addition to the Z Fighters. Wheras bringing back Android 16 would be a lot of fun. It’ll be cool to see a human fighting soul, his Majin Bio waifu and Goku to take on the Evil Android 21.

11.) Warriors from the Tournament of Power teamed with Son Goku and the Z Fighters to save the Multiverse from a much greater threat... like Frieza or Hearts [A villain from the Super Dragon Ball Heroes mini series]

10.) The return of Tien Shinhan and a long forgotten character Good/Bad Launch.

9.) King Kai teaches Tien, Yamcha and Chiaotzu the Kaioken technique!

8.) The development on Goten and Trunks; Goku trains Broly on Planet Vampa to control his inner power!

7.) Don’t add anymore Super Saiyan forms! Give the Z Fighters time to get caught up with their own strength, and the classic aspect from the original Dragon Ball series needs to come back!

6.) When Jiren was shown up in the Tournament of Power arc, he has poven to be the strongest warrior in the Multiverse. His potential story would be interesting to explore more of his tragic past while Goku’s for another round for this broken hero of Universe 11.

5.) Universe 7’s Saiyans (Goku, Gohan, Vegeta and Broly) visit Planet Sadala Of Universe 6. Also had a friendly spar with Cabba, Kale and Caulifla.

4.) In the Universal Survival arc, Gohan made a promise to Frieza that he will finish him up himself if Earth is threaten. Hell yeah! I wanna see our boy beat that galactic tyrant in his own hands. Sorry Goku!

3.) Make the Z Fighters become more prominent characters then being on the sideline. I mean for real Toriyama! Why is Super so focus on Son Goku and Vegeta? They already had their moments. So now it’s their turn take on the baddies much or similarly like DBZ.

-Krillin has decided to go back as a martial artist so that’ll be something for fans of the Dragon Ball.

-Tien’s new take as a role ofSensai would interesting enough to see how he teaches his pupils while taming Yurin and had another rematch with Mercenary Tao.

- Android 17 is surprisingly strong in the Tournament of Power. So would it be easy enough to had him aid Goku and friends in future battles? You damn right!

-Master Roshi is has been heavenly underestimated by his opponents, and he has overcome his pervert behavior in the TOP. Plus he can use Mafūba more then once despite how dangerous the sealing technique is. This Turtle hermit need some more comeback after a long absent.

-Videl is being treated like a housewife for her daughter Pan in Super. But many fans had forgotten that this gal is martial arts fighter in her own right in the Majin Buu Saga. When she hold on her own against Spopovich in a bloody fight, I was amazed how determined and inner strength the daughter of Satan has proven. Dont care what people are saying, she deserves more. So why can’t her husband Gohan teach her the Kamahamaha wave? Why haven’t he reason her training? This problem needs to be fixed!

2.) While Japanese fans were all looked up to Son Goku as their favorites, many westerners like me like Gohan more. He may not into fighting, but he’s willing to do it in order to keep his friends and family safe. Plus he did state that he is searching for a power beyond his Mystic form. So I hope Toriyama can hear this own out.... MAKE GOHAN GREAT AGAIN!!!

1.) Had Goku mastered his Ultra Instinct!

So here is my list I hope Toriyama and @toei-animation-official should consider take some advices. For the most part, I am not only speaking for myself, but to many Dragon Ball fans who grew up with the show since childhood. So don’t let all of us down! 🙂👍

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[tigerlover16-analysis]

Dragon Ball Super: Episode 1 Review

A first episode is often going to be the most important of any series. This is the episode that's intended to sell the majority of a show's intended viewers on whether or not it's something worth getting invested in.

For a series like Dragon ball Super though, a continuation of a beloved nostalgic series that millions of people love and has been a massive influence on their lives, the first episode has to make it clear to those people that the show will not only be enjoyable to watch, but that it will respect the series it's following on from. That's a lot of pressure, and while subsequent episodes can always drop the ball (And unfortunately, that did kinda happen in a few episodes), the first impression is the most crucial.

Dragon Ball Super is a long running show that had many ups, and it had it's downs. But did it succeed at that oh so important first impression? Well my friends, today that is what we’re here to discuss.

The series opens with a recap of the ending of the Buu Saga of Dragon Ball Z, and then cuts ahead an unspecified number of months afterwards. The story proper begins with series protagonist Son Goku having largely settled down to becoming a farmer after returning to life at the end of the previous series. A job that he's not exactly enthusiastic about, as he'd rather be training to get stronger in the event that the earth should be threatened by a new evil force in the near future, but he keeps at it for the time being in an effort to provide for his family like a responsible family man.

The focus of the episode shifts between the various members of the Son family, as well as new in-law Mr Satan, and while it does set up the direction the arc will be taking, outside of one scene early on and the ending it's pretty self-contained. It's difficult to talk about this particular episode without just recapping most of it's scenes as a result, so while I'll go into more detail in some future reviews I'll keep this one brief and focus on the important aspects.

The episode is well paced and for the most part, each segment flows neatly into each other. Everyone who appears is in-character and the episode does a good job of re-familiarising old fans with the characters and what they've been up to since last we saw them, while also giving potential newcomers tuning in a good enough first impression of who these people are and whether they might like them (Though newcomers might in turn be surprised at how small a role Goten and Trunks end up playing for the rest of the series, considering their subplot gets the most focus)

The tone of the episode is mostly light hearted, and has a nice slice of life feel throughout much of it with a focus on comedy and character writing, though also introducing us to the villain of the first arc, the mysterious cat-like being called Lord Beerus, and letting us know that things will eventually get serious.

It's a pretty pleasant experience overall. Almost all of the jokes land, in particular the scene with Goten and Trunks casually floating around the jewellery store and unknowingly freaking people out while looking for a wedding gift for Videl always manages to get a good chuckle out of me no matter how many times I watch the episode, and when the episode isn't being funny it's still full of cute moments. I don't think there's a single moment that doesn't offer up either a good joke or something to make viewers smile.

What helps with this greatly is the animation. I'm not an expert on talking about art styles and I can understand the overall look of Super not appealing to certain fans of the previous series, but the animation of the episode is pretty well crafted, and the nice colouring helps to enhance the pleasant feeling of a lot of scenes. In particular the scene near the end of the episode with Goku and Goten looking out into the sunset before Mr Satan stops by to offer Goku money for his heroic actions in the Buu saga features some very beautiful backdrops, with the orange and purple skies especially being a real treat for the eyes.

For a franchise well known and regarded for it's action scenes though, the episode only features a short minute long fight scene, and one that's pretty small scale since it just features Goten and Trunks being attacked by a giant snake (Which sounds like it would be dramatic in any other series, but considering Goten and Trunks can both destroy the entire planet by firing a lazer into the ground, it's really more of a minor inconvenience since the snake almost breaks a jar they needed to gather water). And while it's nothing too fancy, it's still pretty fun to watch and well animated.

Makes it a bit sad that the show's production would experience some major pitfalls a few episodes later, and we'll cover that later on, but needless to say the animators and director for this episode at least deserve credit for making the first episode very visually appealing.

While I don't have any major criticisms of the episode, I do have to comment that the scene introducing Beerus does end up feeling almost out of place. It's a good moment don't get me wrong, it gives a good first impression of the character and establishes him as someone who seems incredibly dangerous, but it has no bearing on anything else that happens in the episode other than the last few seconds before the credits, which just has the supreme kai and Old Kai looking out into space and noting that something bad is going on.

I get setting up the plot, and it does leave some intrigue to encourage viewers to keep watching. But with the scene taking place so early in the episode and then nothing coming of it, it feels almost like an afterthought. Needless to say the next two episodes would do a much better job both in establishing the characters personality and presence, and what his actual deal is.

Again, not a bad scene, but it feels weird in how quickly it's brushed aside.

Probably my favourite part of the episode though is the aforementioned scene with Mr Satan offering Goku the reward money for saving the earth. For one thing it's just such a delightful demonstration of how much Mr Satan has grown as a person as a result of his development in the Buu Saga. His character arc was always one of my favourite parts of Dragon Ball Z as a kid, and it's really nice to see the fruits of it here. He's still a somewhat arrogant showboat, but outside of showboating for the public Mr Satan here is a much more humble and considerate man than who he was back in the Cell saga, and seeing him being so insistent on offering Goku such a large sum of money that he could have easily just kept for himself as the person officially labeled as earth's saviour really makes me proud of the guy.

But apart from that, I really just love Goku's response to the whole thing. Outside of his over the top shock at the whole offer being amusing, I just love how humble Goku is shown to be here, only finally accepting the offer because it would go a long way to provide for Chichi and Goten, and give him the chance to train harder so he can be strong enough to protect everyone and not have a repeat of Raditz. It really says a lot about what kind of a person Goku is, and why he's the hero of this story.

So, yeah, all in all this was a pretty great first episode. It does a good job re-introducing us to Goku and his family, with the next few episodes gradually re-introducing the rest of the supporting cast, and it succeeds at being an entertaining, fluffy experience. If you were hoping for the show to hit the ground running with it's plot and for there to be more of a sense of looming dread, like how Z started out, then you'll probably be a bit taken aback by how nonchalant and wholesome the episode is. But personally I loved the approach the writers took with this episode, and early Super in general. It feels like a natural follow up to the events of the Buu Saga, while also being it's own thing, and I think the episode should give you a good idea about whether you're going to enjoy the first arc of the show.

All in all, I think I'll give the episode an A-

Not entirely perfect, but it's a charming, very enjoyable first outing for the series, and something I for one always enjoy coming back to.

Next episode, Vegeta enters the scene as he, Trunks and Bulma take a family vacation, and we get a better look at who our villains are going to be. Should be a lot of fun to talk about, hopefully I'll have a bit more to say, I feel like I kind of phoned this review in since I didn't know how to write out my thoughts in more detail.

[breezytealy]

You can tell all you need to know about a person with 17, 23, 24 and 25.

DB Ask meme!

Ho ho ho!  Hi Nonnie! 

17. Which anime ending is your favorite?23. What is your favorite technique?24. If you could write your own episode, what would it be about?25. What would you wish for with the dragon balls?answers under the cut!

17. Which anime ending is your favorite?

As I grew up with the dub I’m meh on “I’ll Give You Romance” lol. So, from Kai, “Dear Zarathustra”! 

From Super I will not skip “Hello Hello Hello”, “Forever Dreaming”, and “An Evil Angel and Righteous Devil”

I think “Forever Dreaming” fits my general music taste the best so that one! 

Bonus, if I had control of a Next Gen show, I’d pick “Forever” by Ykiki Beat :)

23. What is your favorite technique?

HMMM Good question. Since I seem obsessed with making a “unifying theory of ki” I guess all of them? Ho ho ho! 

Naaah, fusion for every single headcanon I’ve built up about it has to be a treasured face, multiform technique again for the same mind-fucky-ness. Like, why is that considered a low-level technique rather than something to unlock? I LIKE the idea of tingle back Super Saiyan as a quick way to unlock it, though I do think the 50x is overpowered. The fact Kaioken has drawbacks is awesome, I wish more people were brave enough to use it/learnt it.

The simplicity of the Kienzan/Destructo Disk though, I think, makes it my academic favourite. It’s taking the same principle as the ki balls and making that cutting edge, and from that principle comes the pseudo-weapons like Vegito’s blade/Zamasu’s scythe and Trunks’ sword use. 

(I’m starting to think I live in this alternate world which is just my DB headcanons haha)

24. If you could write your own episode, what would it be about?

I’d write a whole Next Gen series set more Earth based, more character-driven and less pure shounen lol. But if I only had one standalone... that’s tricky. Of course I want to see GTM on 17′s island, but I feel other people could do a good job on that if we all banded together. So I’d pick the episode when, officially (whether implied or explicit) the handover from the old guard to the new happens. If I stick with my own timeline it would probably have happened slowly, way before this moment, but I’d write the day it would have hit the Kids - when Goku and Vegeta leave for their final fight and subsequent death in 801. 

I have a few things I’d like to put in that episode if I was given a lot of creative control on everything in the build up (i.e. it’s where Goten/Marron’s son’s named Goku for those following my writing adventures) but if I had to pick one thing, it would be Goten turning to Trunks and saying “long live the King” and everything that means between them. 

25. What would you wish for with the dragon balls?

Thought about giving a silly answer here. Usually when those DB memes come round I reblog wanting my ideas on ki in DB to spread as that’s achievable myself, so it’s like motivation fuel to keep working. 

But honestly? Wew lad. Strap yourself in, and this also explains my slow-down in pace on content. 

Last year my sis got married in June and everyone was there, but in a space of a few months after both my Grandmothers passed away, and end of November my Mum collapsed at work with a brain aneurysm. They managed to get her to hospital on life support, but she was unconscious at work within 10 seconds basically (just enough time for her to clock what was happening as her Dad had a stroke around the same age) and it was pretty clear cut she wasn’t waking up. We were able to do organ donation and help 4 people, but that meant a delay in turning off her life support and it meant she officially died on my Dad’s birthday. She was 51.

You know those nightmares you have of seeing a parent’s phone number pop up and you answer expecting to hear them, but it’s actually a doctor using their phone saying they’re trying to find the next of kin and they need to get to a hospital 3 hours drive away ASAP? YEAH. HI. That actually happened to me. The last call in my phone from my Mum is actually from an ITU doctor. It’s fucking tragic -whilst she would have done anything to have her own Mum back she was set to inherit a lot of money from her Mum, and was planning on quitting her job to have a break and to find somewhere closer to home, and get the new kitchen she’s wanted for like 20 years. They’d just paid off the mortgage, too.

As sudden as it was you can’t wish people back from a natural death. If I could I would so she could enjoy the break she so heartily deserved. But since I can’t, it would be to encourage the 4 people who received her organs to write to the organ donation team to tell us how they’re doing, whether they did anything for Christmas holidays with their family and stuff. My partner is currently looking at whether he should go on the lung transplant waiting list or not because of his cystic fibrosis, it’s why we knew Mum would have approved of donating her organs, so we understand what it means for these people. Receiving the letter that told us the age and gender of the recipients was really helpful for my Dad - I just want the people to write to us and tell us how they’re doing so we can celebrate them rather than feeling sad.

There you go, an actual proper answer. 

[garlic8reath]

1: Maybe one of your Inktobers can have something to do with the HCs you mentioned having (i think) concerning Namekian biology? I lov the green friends. 2:... got any ships?

1. Good idea! Time for me to break out the fantasy biology diagrams, or at least do some demonstrations of what I think their body language is like (at least the ears and antennae positions!)

2. I have a lot of ships, there are a lot of fun relationship dynamics that could be explored with all these goofs... this is gonna be long:

First of all, the Canon stuff I enjoy:

Vegebul (they suit each other so well, other people have worded this better than me though, so I may reblog the reasons why... They remind me a bit of the Monarchs also...)

-18/Krillin (They seem playful with eachother, and Krillin’s not like, a total goody-two-shoes either; mostly I just want to see more of their dynamic, but that’s also how I feel about most of the interpersonal relationships on this show???)

Gohan/Videl(Kinda, the Saiyacouple bit was real cute, though I don't like thewriters pretending that Videl would become a quiet hypereffeminatehousewife... Let her stay spunky, let her be the hardass kickboxing instructor on the campus Gohan works for, let her pick up her husband!! Also she is genderfluid, Gohan is also some variety of nb, but I’m not set on what identity yet.)

Noncanon or kinda-canon/baited:

Gohan/Dende(they're very sweet on eachother!! If nothing else, they had cute little childhood crushes on eachother... Let Dende bedating Gohan AND Videl at the same time!!)

Chaozu/Tenand Ten/Yamcha maybe Chaozu/Ten/Yamcha (Tenshinhan and Chaozu are two grownass men who live in the mountains/on a farm with eachother; Ten and Yamcha have had some... Extremely gay moments in canon, including holding hands and staring at eachother for extended periods of time)

Beerus/Whis(obvious)

Kale/Caulifla(I don't know much about these lesbian saiyans, but I support them)

Burter/Jeice(dumb gamer let's player bros who are dating)

Goten/Trunks(goofy rowdy kids who grow up as eachother's sweethearts)

Nail/Piccolo(going with the “Piccolo's subconscious is the Black Lodge”theory, Nail is still intact as a separate personality and him andPiccolo are happily married. The Funimation dub of the scene wherePiccolo and Nail fuse makes it seem like Nail is flirting the wholetime while also bleeding out on the ground, which is honestlyiconic...)

Launch/Mai(THIS IS WHAT I WISH WOULD HAVE HAPPENED INSTEAD OF THEM BEINGJACKASSES AND DE-AGING MAI SO THAT THEY COULD SHIP HER 50 YEAR OLDASS WITH TRUNKS, A BABY!!!! Launch and Mai drive off into the sunseton a motorbike and become old crime lesbians together, they go outThelma and Louise style.)

I’m on the fence about/They have potential in the right hands (Good Fanfiction writers or Fanartists):

Goku/Piccolo/Chichi(This has potential to be extremely good in ways that Goku/Chichialone just are not. I don't question Piccolo's ability to be a goodspouse to both Goku and Chichi, I DO question if Piccolo's needswould be met. When Goku and Chichi are at their best-written, maybethis would work.)

Vegeta/Goku(Vegeta spends so much time pining after Goku and obsessing overhim... It may be one-sided; Bulma's ok with them rolling aroundthough)

Bulma/Chichi(maybe??? they could be cute?? Chichi really needs a WIFE, and Bulma’s the best there is.)

Just Silly:

Piccolo/Kaioshin(“I saw a man so beautiful I started crying? I immediately feltcompelled to drop out of the Tenkaichi Budokai and say “you are thebest looking person I have ever seen so I think you deserve this winand I was going to really give it my all this time but whatever.” And then I started crying. I seriously cried for an hour. I ran tothe bathroom and came out later and I was even more tired thanbefore. I was overtired and btw I am a Namekian. I don't know why Icried because of that and he was better looking than all the modelsI'd seen ever!”)

PiccoloDaimao/Lord Slug and/or Piccolo Daimao/Dabura (this is pure crack, but...what if the reason we haven't heard from Daimao in so long is that hekeeps hooking up with other evil dead dudes... Him and Slug have lotsin common, and why wouldn't Daimao try to meet 'n' fuck the otherDemon King??)

[sarahw-world]

Hey, it's me Vegetastan ☺. Got a new play along for ya. Trunks: Hey Mom, can I ask you something? Mom: Sure, what is it? Trunks: How did you know you were in love with Papa?

Bulma momentarily stopped spreading thechocolate frosting over the cake she’d just baked for her husband and shelooked at her son.

“Why do you ask?” She finally said, resumingher task.

“Well… Today is your wedding anniversary,right?”

“Yeah… And?”

“And… Every year I go to Goten’s place so youtwo can celebrate together…”

Bulma kept working on her cake, secretlywondering where her child was going with this. It was unlike Trunks to ask alot of questions about her relationship with Vegeta, particularly about theirearly rocky years.

“So?”

“So, every year Goten’s mom asks me about youtwo. Like… I don’t know… It’s almost like she can’t believe you guys are inlove or something…”

The hidden sorrow behind her son’s voice madeher heart sink a little, and her anger at her discovery of Chichi’s nosiness didn’thelp either.

‘Damn, Chichi…’

She was one to talkabout love and romance…  

Her husband only married her in order to keepsome stupid childhood promise he’d made without even knowing what marriage wasreally all about. Thankfully, it’d all worked out in the end for the two ofthem, but it wasn’t as if it’d been the ‘Romanceof the Century’ either, certainly, not at the beginning.

For Dende’s sake! Gokueven thought getting married had to do with food!

“Sweetie, come here. Sit down…” Bulma saidsoftly, encouraging the boy to sit by her side. She guessed it was as good atime as any to discuss certain things with Trunks.

She quickly finished her work and she set thefinished cake aside, peeking at the large bowl on the table, which still hadsome melted chocolate left in it.

“Wanna dip?” Bulma offered, playfully wigglingher eyebrows.

Trunks replied enthusiastically, withouthesitation. “Yeah!”

Bulma chuckled, shaking her head as she walkedto Capsule Corp.’s massive fridge to fetch some fresh strawberries. Living witha couple of Saiyans wasn’t always easy, but at least it wasn’t hard to figureout how to cheer them up: with lots of delicious food.

She set the strawberries on the table, quietly offeringthem to Trunks, who eagerly grabbed a juicy berry and happily dipped it intothe chocolate as Bulma imitated his actions.

“So… Love, uh?”

“Yup!”

“Okay… Well…” Bulma started, taking anotherbite. “I’d say it wasn’t something that happened overnight, you know?”

The little boy scowled. “So, it wasn’t like inthe movies?”

“In the movies?”

“Yeah…” Trunks shrugged. “Like, when the girlmeets the guy and she knows she’s gonna marry him and stuff…”

The woman smiled knowingly. “You mean ‘love at first sight’, right?”

“I guess…”

“Mmm… No, Trunks. From my experience, lovedoesn’t really work that way.”

“It doesn’t?” Trunks asked, honestly surprised.

Bulma finished her strawberry, picking upanother one and losing count of how many her son had already eaten.

“Nope. I think you have to get to know a personbefore you love them. I don’t believe you can really love someone you don’t knowtoo well…”

There was a brief pause, and Trunks realizedhis mom was now deep in thought.

“I guess I knew I was in love with your dadsometime before I found out I was pregnant with you…” She finally concluded.

“Really?” The child enquired, raising hiseyebrows. “So, you didn’t like him at first?”

“Oh, no! That’s not what I meant! If I hadn’tliked him I would have never invited him to live here! No… I guess… I guesswhat I mean is… You know your dad is a quiet man, right?”

“Uh-huh…” He agreed.

“So, that’s why it took longer for me to get toknow him, I guess…”

Trunks swallowed a mouthful of berries beforeasking again.

“And why is that?”

“Why is what?”

“You know… Why is dad so quiet? Is it becausehe’s Saiyan?”

Bulma tilted her head to the side a little,knowing she had to be careful with how much information about Vegeta’s past shedisclosed to her son. When Trunks was a baby and Vegeta finally agreed to stayon Earth and give their relationship and fatherhood a chance, she knew, eventhough her man had been too proud to discuss such things, that Vegeta wasprobably afraid of his son ending up hating him in the future, so she told himhe’d only talk about his past with Trunks when the child was older and only ifhe felt comfortable discussing certain matters with him.

Interestingly enough, Bulma had never beentruly scared of Trunks hating Vegeta when he’d finally discover his past. Afterall, if Mirai Trunks had ended up loving and respecting him so much withouthaving spent a lot of time with him, she knew their Trunks, the one who’dactually been raised by a dad he fiercely admired, would undoubtedly forgivehis father’s evil deeds when he was older.

“I think so, Trunks… I think a big part of it hasto do with him being Saiyan. And, also… Well, your dad didn’t have a lot offriends growing up, so I guess it was hard for him at first to open up topeople…”

“Papa had no friends?”

One look at Trunks’ sad frown told Bulma she’djust perhaps said too much…

“Hey! Come here!” Bulma asked invitingly,offering him a hug with open arms her son accepted greedily. She hugged himtightly and kissed his forehead, realizing that, even though Trunks wasn’t asmall child anymore, he’d always be her little boy to her.

“Your dad grew up in Space, and it’s harder tomake friends out there, that’s all…” She lied, after all, there’d be enoughtime for her son to discover how dark the Universe could be sometimes. Untilthen, she’d protect his innocence as much as she could, not that the child hadn’talready gone through hard times during the battle against Buu.  

“But then he came to Earth and we all welcomedhim. And now he has lots of friends, right?”

Trunks smirked, so much like his father the resemblancewas uncanny.

“He does…” He agreed.

Bulma held him closer, whispering in his ear. “Andwe all love him very much, don’t we?”

The boy blushed, embarrassed about disclosinghis feelings towards his father in front of his mom.

Oh, yeah…

He was Vegeta’s child,after all…

“Moooom…” He whined as Bulma playfully ruffledhis hair.

“We do love him! Now, be a good boy and bringyour dad his cake, he’s been in the GR for too long and he needs to take abreak anyway.”

Trunks cautiously held the massive chocolatecake his mom had baked for his dad, knowing just how much it must have meantfor her since Bulma almost never cooked, always relying on their own privatechefs to deal with all the cooking.

“Be careful, baby…” Bulma warned him tenderly.

“Mom?” Trunks asked again, already on his wayout of the kitchen.

“Yeah?”

“Then when did you finally know you were in lovewith Papa?”

“Oh, right… Um… I guess I knew when I finally realizedI’d be really sad if I ever had to live without him; that was also before I gotpregnant with you,” she honestly replied.

It was the truth.

Despite the fact that it was their mutualphysical attraction towards each other what started their sexual affair so manyyears ago, at some point around the time she discovered she was pregnant withTrunks, she finally had the courage to admit to herself she’d really fallen inlove with the proud Saiyan Prince and, even though Vegeta was still in deepdenial about their new, still very fragile relationship, she knew he’d alreadygrown fond of her on some level even then.

All in all, Bulma liked to believe there’d beensome kind of love involved during Trunks’ conception, and she unquestionablywanted her child to firmly believe that too.

“I see… Thanks Mom!”

“No problem, sweetie… Careful with that cake!And don’t drop the fork!” She cautioned as she saw the boy walking out into thegarden in search of his father.

Once he reached his destination, Trunks knockedtwice on the heavy gate of his dad’s beloved Gravity Room. Almost instantly,the buzzing noise ceased, signaling Vegeta had switched it off, and a verysweaty Saiyan opened the metal door.

“What is it, boy?” He asked, wiping off some ofthe sweat from his brow with a white towel and taking a large gulp of ice coldwater with his other hand.

“Um, Mom asked to bring you this, she made itfor you…”

One look at the sweet delicacy told Vegeta allhe needed to know about what day it was.

“I see…” He replied, sitting on the stairs bythe door and grabbing the cake, putting it carefully on his lap and picking upthe fork his woman had also placed on the large plate. When he raised his gaze,he noticed Trunks still standing right in front of him, staring at him withintrigued eyes.

“Is there anything else you need, boy?”

“Uh? Um, no, that was all… I hope you like it,Papa!”

Vegeta assented in confirmation and just as hisson was about to leave, he saw him turn around, asking him one final question.

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“You have a lot of friends now, right?”

The Prince stopped chewing on his mouthful ofcake for a moment, wondering what the Hell was the kid talking about now.Whatever it was, the expression on his face told him it was a serious question,so he pondered his words for a minute.

‘Friends.’

What a word…

He knew just how fond those damned earthlingswere of their friendships and all of those strange, sentimental attachments and,yet, hadn’t he ended up becoming one of them anyway?

The closest thing to a ‘friend’ he’d had before he landed on Earth were Nappa and Raditz,and they were more like comrades to him, subjects of the Royal Crown, and if hewas honest with himself, they basically stuck together because they were theonly ones from their kind left.

Then, did he have anyfriends?

If the definition of a friend was someone whofought by your side and that you could rely on when things got ugly, then, muchto his shame, he had to admit all these bizarre, ridiculous people had becomehis friends, so he assented.

“I do, boy. Now, why don’t you go to thekitchen and help your mother clean up?”

Trunks offered him the brightest smile, and helooked so relieved by his answer that now Vegeta knew he’d definitely have toask Bulma what that whole friend questioning thing was all about later. He hadthe feeling she’d had a hand on it.

“Sure!” He yelled, running to the kitchen. “Havefun with Mom tonight!”

Vegeta drank some more water, paying closeattention to the scene taking place now in their kitchen through its largeglass windows. Trunks was, indeed, helping Bulma place all the dirty dishes inthe dishwasher as she sat down, distractedly rubbing her belly. He noticed hiswife had been doing that a lot ever since she’d found out she was pregnantagain, and even though she wasn’t showing yet, she kept caressing her stillflat tummy at all times. It was a miracle no one had noted her strange behavioryet. Bulma had insisted they kept it a secret for as long as they could,concerned about something potentially going wrong during the early stages. Shewas older now than she was when she conceived Trunks and he’d had a hard timeconvincing her about having another child.

He smirked, pleased to see his son was growingup to be a responsible young man, obeying him without question, though he knewBulma had played a big role on Trunks becoming the kind-hearted kid he was.Without his mother’s presence around him, the child would have probably becomethe grumpy, miserable man he himself had been before the woman came into hislife, smashing his barriers down and making him see and explore life in a wayhe never thought possible.

The warrior savored another bite of thedelicious cake, secretly trying to imagine what kind of a surprise his mischievouslittle minx would have prepared for him tonight, and he wiped off his browagain with the back of his hand, looking at the summer’s bright blue sky and wonderinghow was it possible that someone like him ended up getting so damn lucky.

Yes, life was good forthe Saiyan Prince… 

There you go @lingoarchaic!

Sorry it took me so long to write this one for you!

Now I finally have more free time to write again, I hope you like it!

[petite-neko]

Trapped in the Past - 01

Fanfiction: Trapped in the Past Story Summary: The past can sometimes be a nice place to visit, however one should not spend too much time lingering in times already long gone if one can help it… Fandom: Dragon Ball Z Characters: Gohan, M!Trunks, Piccolo Pairing: Future/M!Trunks Rating: T Warnings:

Story: Depression, Character Death, angst, potentially smut, PTSD

Chapter: Mentions of character death, mentions of depression, PTSD

Author’s Notes: Hey. I actually have some inspiration for this. (Truth be told I have 6 chapters potentially ready. I'm just going through my edits to ensure I've got everything I need) So here we go, some DBZ stuff. (Y'all can thank my dream. I dreamt I was Frieza last night.) I'm also going to add some more tags :D

Also: .+++. is a Time/Scene Skip and .xxx. is a PoV Change!

(Check source for ao3 link!)

Prologue || Chapter 1: Future || Chapter 2

Future

It was something that scared him. It was something that he truly feared.

Because he knew just exactly how things could be.

.+++.

“Big brother!”

Gohan turned at the sound of his name, smiling down at that cheer-filled young face. Goten, that was the name of this child.

A child who may have never existed.

It had been nine years. Nine years. And now, Gohan could not picture a life without this young boy at his side.

But he knew such a life existed. Such a life continued to exist.

A spiky-haired head tilted to the side. “Big brother?”

Gohan shook the thoughts from his mind and picked up the child with ease. “Sorry Goten, I was just remembering something.”

He needed to hide the wince.

.+++.

This golden ki. He recognized it. It was like his father’s! It was just like it. Super Saiyajin – Vegeta called it. But wait! That wasn’t his father. No. The ki wasn’t quite right. Just who was this stranger?

He watched in awe as this stranger defeated somebody his father almost died trying to defeat. And he then watched as they defeated somebody even stronger than that.

Part of him wondered if he could get that strong.

Golden hair and teal eyes faded, and in their place was hair of flowers, and eyes of the skies. Purple and blue.

Such calming colours…

“I’m going to go meet Son Goku!”

He decided he’d follow that man anywhere.

Trunks. That is who that was, even if Gohan would not know of that name until many years later. Bulma mentioned that he looked like Vegeta – and as an afterthought that certainly made sense. Gohan did recognise that there just was this something that was familiar about him but he just couldn’t quite place it.

Perhaps it was just a childish hope, but Gohan had been the first to trust Trunks, and he was the first to follow him. Because it didn’t matter who this stranger was as long as he knew where his dad would be! It didn’t matter that there was something dark in those eyes when nobody was looking. (Or when he thought nobody was looking. Gohan knew that it was impolite to stare but he just couldn’t help it.) He wanted to figure out what this darkness was. It wasn’t evil… but he knew it wasn’t good for this man. It burdened him. A responsibility that he didn’t want or like.

And part of him wondered: was it like how he felt?

This man was so strong… Just like his dad.

Just like him.

.+++.

While Gohan had always tried to not linger on the past, he could not help but… ponder.

Certainly, he tried to think past it, certainly, he tried to believe that Trunks was fine and just… forget about it.

But there always this lingering thought. This little trail. And he wanted to just know how their saviour was doing. Because if it were not for his saviour he would have lost his father.

A father he hardly had in the first place.

Gohan had barely seen his dad in the last three years. Ever since his dad died there had been separation between them. First it was because of training and because of death. Next it was because of injuries and a need to go to Namek to revive their friends that had died because of Nappa and Vegeta. When his dad finally showed up on that distant planet in space, they had no time together. No, his dad had to face Frieza, and then they all thought him to be dead…

And when they found that to not be the case, it was space that separated him. His dad wanted to train again… and it had been so long. So long since he spend more than a scant few days with his father. Had a hug, a kiss…

He missed his dad. But he was also mad at him.

For, before everything started happening, his did spent a lot of time with him. Before these strange people started attacking Earth. Before all the people he knew started dying. He would take him out into the woods, they’d go hunting and fishing, his dad would teach him cool things. (Gohan liked martial arts, he just didn’t like to fight people.) And his dad would get him away from those big, long, scary books.

It had been so long…. He just had his seventh birthday a few months before. His dad wasn’t there: there was no smiles, no hugs, no “Happy Birthday Son!”

And it made him angry. It made him sad.

When he finally met his dad again, he didn’t know what he was going to do. Part of him wanted to hug him, but another part had wanted to scream and hit him with his fists. But one thing that Gohan knew for certain was that he wanted his dad back.

So that was why he trusted Trunks; that was why he followed Trunks. And also because of that strange familiarity what was not at all related to Bulma’s likening him to Vegeta.

It felt almost like home.

So much of that made sense now. Because Trunks was a man from the future. Trunks was the one he had trained in another life. Because Trunks had the same beliefs as he did. Because he taught Trunks the same things he learned from Piccolo.

And that was why Gohan could not help but wonder. Did their selfless hero from the future have a happy ending as they did? He worried… because was it not he who left that wondrous man all alone in a land full of terror? (Now he understood that darkness that had lay inside those cryptic sky-blue eyes, and how he wished he didn’t.) And he just so desperately wanted him to have that happy ended they were all trying for.

…Sometimes he wished that he would come and visit. Update them on how his world was going.

It had been so long… He was only seven when Frieza attacked, only eleven when he finally was able to know more about Trunks.

He missed his friend from the future.

A small smile graced the eldest son of Goku as he remembered the lavender-haired warrior that he looked up to as a kid. The warrior whom he would be training at this current moment if it weren’t for that man’s actions. (Although, it would be the Trunks of this time, if he were truly honest) He truly hoped the best for the man who saved his life.

That smile quickly faded into a twitch of something.

“Gohan! Supper’s ready!”

“Coming Mother!” There was a glance to his closet before Gohan hurried down the stairs.

It’ll be fine. It had to be.

Trunks deserved it after all.

[tigerlover16-uk]

Dragon Ball GT:My thoughts on the Baby Saga. A sort of review

The Baby Saga is often regarded by a lot of GT's defenders and even it's detractors as perhaps the best Saga in the entire series. Do I agree? Well, I haven't re-watched the Shadow Dragons Saga yet, so I can't give a clear answer yet, but going off of memory and everything I know going forward... I'm willing to say that for now, yeah, I think it probably is GT's best Saga. It's certainly leagues above the previous really boring Saga, I'll tell you that, and even if I haven't re-watched it yet I already know for sure it's better than Super 17 (Oh God, do I really have to watch that?).

But does that mean it's a great Saga, or that it can make the whole series worth watching? TLDR version: No, it's not great. It's very good, but it has it's fair share of issues that drag it down a lot. And it's worth watching on it's own, but it doesn't save what's an all around bad series.

Long version is a lot more complicated. I'm going to be going into a lot of detail about this, so bear with me, this is going to be a long ride.

I'm going to get the positives out of the way first, since the problems and things I'm mixed on are a lot easier to explain and discuss and I don't want to give the impression that I'm just harping on this Saga.

The story here is really good and interesting. While it starts off slow with the Machine Mutants arc, once baby shows up and especially when he arrives on earth, the arc has a lot of really great tension and is easy to get sucked into. There's plenty of interesting twists and turns, the drama ranges from good to great, apart from a few moments. And it's easy to care about the conflict and want to see the characters succeed in the end. The story is mostly very well paced, the villain's plans and execution of them are great, and it has a lot of that epic feeling you'd expect from Z.

The score and animation are both beautiful, and are a big part of making this story an enjoyable and often epic experience. The music for the fights is appropriately epic and tense, and the themes for the more emotional scenes like Pan getting through to Golden Ape Goku and his subsequent transformation into Super Saiyan 4 are just breathtaking. There was definitely some good emotion in this story. And while I felt a few of the fight scenes were too short or anti-climactic (Uub's initial clash with Baby for one) and a few of them cut away from the action or just had the characters talking in between attacks too often, for the most part the action in the saga was intense with some great fight scenes, though I wouldn't count them among the best in the franchise. Also side note, they really spammed the energy blasts too much for my liking.

Oh, and the Super Saiyan 4 transformation. Probably the best and most iconic new element to come out of GT, and for good reason. While I really like Super Saiyan Blue both for continuing the simplicity of the SSJ designs and the mystic blue colouring working well for what's supposed to be Godly Ki, there's no denying that from a visual perspective the Super Saiyan 4 form is just freaking cool. While i personally would have gone for golden fur if I was designing it, the red coat, tail and wild hairdo, along with the animalistic eyes give the form a cool, beastial feel that just REALLY works well. Harkening back to the great ape transformation, it feels much more like what I'd expect a "Super Saiyan" to look like, feeling much more like a proper transformed state than the glowing blond hair and green eyes ever did. The method behind transforming into it was pretty interesting, and the golden Great Ape form (Both of which were really cool too) was a good callback to the filler-only flashback of the original Super Saiyan, showing that the writers were at least trying to make GT feel like a proper continuation of the story. Sad that the show as a whole structurally fails as such, but I have a loooong rant at the end to cover that.

So overall despite everything else I'm going to say here, know that this Saga was an enjoyable experience for what it was and the production values were great, but I'm going to be very frank with the rest of this little essay. Onto the stuff I'm mixed about.

The mini-arc that starts off this saga, despite it's great premise, felt fairly lacking to me. Basically to sum it up, our heroes Goku, Pan, Trunks and Giru pass by a planet which Giru claims to be his homeworld, so the gang decide to stop by so Giru can meet up with his friends and family. However, the place at first seems deserted and really creepy, giving our heroes the impression that something is wrong. it turns out that this planet is where Dr Myuu, the evil scientist we'd been introduced to late in the last saga as an apparent evil mastermind seeking the dragon balls for universal domination is based, along with his army of robot servants, called Machine Mutants (I'm a little unclear about whether they're just robots or if the mutants thing implies they're something along the lines of Androids 17 and 18. Though looking around I think the Machine Mutants name might have just been a dub thing). He orders his most powerful servant, General Rilldo and his squad of elite robots to capture our heroes so he can disect them and research their biology for his own uses, and steal their Dragon Balls. It also turns out Giru is supposedly a traitor working for Rilldo and leads our heroes into a trap, so Goku ends up fighting some robots, then Rilldo shows up and turns Trunks to metal and sending him off to Myuu's lab. Goku fights Rilldo while Pan goes off to find Trunks, some shenanigans as she tries to save the say herself only it doesn't go that well, Goku gets captured too, then right when Dr Myuu is about to dissect them all Giru reveals that he's actually NOT a traitor, frees Goku and Pan, reveals he and Trunks had their own plan to sabotauge Dr Myuu, they fight his ultimate creation Baby who apparently goes down after one combined hit, but he really survives as a bit of goop and hitches a ride with an escaping Dr Myuu, who our heroes fail to stop but decide that since they've defeated his ultimate weapon and pretty much screwed up his operations that he's no threat to the galaxy anymore, so just let him go. But then it turns out Baby was somehow the evil mastermind behind all this and he regenerates and crushes Myuu's head, getting a dragon ball which he uses to lure our heroes into a trap in the next two episodes. And so the Z fighters leave the planet to find the rest of the Dragon Balls, killing off Rilldo in anti-climactic fashion right as they're leaving.

Did you get all that? I know that probably seems like a rushed description that leaves a lot of questions if you haven't watched the episodes, but I've got a LOT of ground to cover and this is just me giving my thoughts on the saga, not a recap, so sue me.

Honestly this arc was just okay. On paper it feels like it should be really interesting, a robot planet and the general story make it seem like this should be a very cool story, but it's execution (Like so much of GT) is a bit lacking. And the biggest problem is partly a holdover from the last Saga, and it can be summed up in one word: Investment.

(Oh yeah, I'm going to be giving some of my thoughts on the previous saga as well in this part and a few others to better explain my thoughts on the Baby Saga as a whole, so please excuse me if at some points it feels like I'm just rambling a lot).

Part of the biggest problem I realized I had with the Black Star Dragon Balls Saga is that I wasn't invested in this cast of characters. After jetisonning the majority of the supporting cast with the end of the second episode, we were left with Goku, Pan and Trunks as the stars of the Saga along with a robot sidekick called Giru, who swallowed the dragon ball radar and thus gained the ability to detect the Dragon Balls himself, so he kinda needs to hang around. Now, choosing to focus on a smaller cast of characters for the first arc wasn't the problem here. The problem is, these particular characters the way they were written... were not an interesting pair.

Goku faired the best of them overall I think, but the gimick of turning him back into a kid and the fact that he acted more like his kid self at certain parts just felt kind of weird and off-putting, especially when I later realized my biggest problem with it was how this development was pretty much the physical embodiment of the structural problem with GT as a sequel series. but again, that's for later. Pan, who I'll cover when I discuss her role in the arc as a whole, was almost completely unbearable for the previous Saga and was similarly annoying in these set of episodes, even though she did have some good moments.

And Trunks? I'm going to be honest, I was never a big fan of kid Trunks in Z. I didn't hate him or find him annoying or anything like some people, I just thought he was kind of okay, not all that interesting on his own. I much preferred Goten. But I'll give him credit, when he had Goten to bounce off of their dynamic could be pretty fun, and his more emotional moments in regards to Vegeta's character development were well done. But in GT? Honestly, I don't know if this was just me personally talking, but Trunks in this show this far was just the definition of meh. He wasn't annoying or unlikeable, he was just a bit bland. He served as an alright straight man and the more mature one of the group (Even if his introduction as trying to shirk his responsibilties as Capsule Corp CEO really don't paint him as such at first glance), but he really wasn't that interesting as a character. Just sort of... there for me. And honestly, looking at him a lot of the time I just kinda wish I was watching Future Trunks instead.

And Giru was... boring. He had no character apart from being the sorta cute robot sidekick that makes annoying noises and gets abused by Pan (Making her oh so much more likeable). Honestly he felt entirely pointless apart from one episode where he was kinda cool, but that was my least favourite episode for other reasons so I never really liked him.

So to sum up, we had one good character who also had a bit of a distracting gimick, one bland character, one terribly written character that feels like depressingly wasted potential, and a worthless character. Yeah, with a cast like this and stories that either felt like a weaker rehash of an older story or just weren't that interesting and with uninspired comedy and action, I was really, really bored by the end of the first Saga of GT. And since I wasn't invested in the characters, that really affected how I felt about the Machine Mutants arc.

On paper I feel this arc should work, because a lot of the writing is good and the action, while not all that great, was a big step up from what had come before. But I couldn't care that much because I didn't care about most of these characters at all. Giru's supposed face turn was the worst of it. The show seems to expect us to feel shocked and betrayed about this revelation, and to feel sorry for Pan and how hurt she was about this turn of events and everything else happening. But the fact is, I wasn't upset. I was apathetic. Why should I care that this boring robot with no interesting characteristics or real purpose other than I assume failed kid appeal might be a traitor? While I think I cared more as a kid, as an adult watching this I was just shrugging my shoulders and saying "Okay, so let's move on to the next part". And any efforts to make me sympathise with Pans feelings fell flat due to her poor characterisation. And while I cared if the characters survived, because I'm a decent human being and I do really love Goku however he's portrayed, I wasn't really on the edge of my seat for a lot of this arc. The action was okay, there were some good moments, when the revelation that Giru wasn't a traitor happened I just shrugged again and watched the rest of the episode mildly interested. If I cared about the characters more, I might have enjoyed this arc a fair bit, but as it was I remember having a constant sense of "Just get to the good parts" throughout most of it and it feels like they didn't really come. Just meh all around.

I think this was also why I thought the Saga really improved the moment we got back to earth. After so many episodes with just these four characters travelling around on a bunch of underwhelming adventures, it was just so darn refreshing to get back to the familiar setting and characters of earth. Not that I don't have my issues with how many of the characters are portrayed, but it was sitll a big improvement.

As for the villains here? Wasted potential. I described this in a previous post, but it bears repeating. General Rilldo was an interesting concept on his own, and honestly I wish he'd been the main villain of his own Saga. He's evil sure, but he actually seems to have a sense of comraderie with his fellow robots, making him perhaps the one good boss villain we've had in a Dragon Ball series, his design while not great was decent and his demeaner and powers made him an intimidating foe and just really cool and dangerous in his own right. He's stronger than Majin Buu, can regenerate as long as he's surrounded by metal to absorb (On a planet that seems entirely made of metal), and can shoot a beam that gives anyone it strikes the Han Solo carbanite treatment, probably the single most op attack outside of Akkuman's power to blow people up by harnessing the evil in their hearts. This guy was awesome and interesting in his own right with plenty of potential for some good development and creative, intense battles. So what does he amount to?

He has one good fight with Goku, then disappears until the episode after the gang already foiled Dr Myuu's plans, wherein he gets beaten by a combined beam attack from Goku, Pan and Trunks. Which not only doesn't make much sense considering his pre-established regenerating ability, but feels increadibly anti-climactic. Oh and also apparently he was being controlled by Baby too, which really seems kind of pointless unless Baby just wanted to try and abosrb some of his power for himself, but it just made me raise my eyebrow and wonder what was the point of that since last we saw of Baby he was fleeing on Myuu's ship and we next see him on that damaged ship the Z Fighters come across. Okay, so how'd he manage to come back and possess Rilldo, and then fly on ahead of the gang to attack that other ship? It was just kind of confusing and pointless.

My problem with Rilldo is basically the same issue I have with characters like Dedoria and Tagoma. He's a really good elite minion character, but we don't see nearly enough of him to make use of his full potential as a villain, and he had a lot of it so it's just disheartening.

Especially when you compare him to Dr Myuu. The guy was boring. Really, really boring. I honestly can't remember much about him at this point apart from the goofy accent Funimation gave him, no idea how he sounds in Japanese. He's underdeveloped and his character just amounts to generic evil scientist guy who's evil, backstabs minions that are no longer of use to him and his overall motivation is that he's power hungry and insane. That's it. There's no depth to this guy, he's like a low budget Dr Gero with a worse design and none of what made Gero interesting in his own right. His introduction sets him up as some sort of mysterious and threatening big bad, but when we actually meet him he just becomes so much less interesting and generic compared to Rilldo. And then he has that breakdown when he finds out Trunks discovered and tampered with Baby, and I think we were supposed to feel sorry for him like Pan did, buuut... I just couldn't.

Maybe part of that was the delivery of his voice actor, which doesn't sell it as all that upsetting, but I had no reason to feel sorry for this creep. Myuu was a bland villain, a horrible person with no redeemable qualities on display and he did nothing to earn my sympathy. I heard someone say this scene made them feel sorry for him because they thought he was just insane, and yeah, I do sympathise with mental illness and all that. But between how he was portrayed both last saga and here, and the general way he behaved before and during his breakdown... no, I don't think this was simple mental illness. I think he was just generically evil mad scientist guy who was just pushed to having a breakdown in that moment because he was horrified his plans for domination and doing horrible things to the people of the universe were foiled and what he believed was his finest work was ruined.

And if he was mentally ill, while I would feel sorry for him, I would feel more offended and disgusted that the writers would include a mentally ill character only to portray them like THIS. Fiction has a long and shameful history of portraying the mentally ill as violent, disgusting criminals that are a danger to those around them, and it's contibuted to society's mistreatment and abuse of the mentally ill. So to have a mentally ill character who's an evil, mass murdering madman who wants to backstab everyone who's loyal to and cares about him, perform twisted experiments on the corpses of his enemies and victims and take over the universe for his own greedy ambitions... no. This is a TERRIBLE use of a mentally ill character if that was the intention. I don't think that was what they were going for, so I didn't feel sorry for him during his breakdown. Like with most of the main cast, I just wasn't invested.

So, with all I've ranted on was this a bad start to the saga? Eh, I thought maybe at first, but like I said, the action's decent and it had at least one good idea. So, I just thought it was a meh start that at least set up the real, more interesting villain.

Mercifully too, because once Baby takes over as the main threat, everything starts to become a million times better. I already did a post a few days ago covering my thoughts on the two episodes after the Machine Mutants mini-arc so go read that for full details, but I'll say that, while a few of Baby's traits make him seem like a rehash of Buu and partly Cell here, that quickly becomes a non issue and they effictively sell how creepy a villain Baby is. WIth his mannerisms and disturbing, The Things-esque power to possess people by turning to goop and sinking into their bodies, it makes the character terrifying and makes him feel unique and different enough from previous villains in his own right. And things get even better when he arrives on earth as Goku and the gang are still off hunting for the Dragon Balls. In three episodes, Baby arrives on Earth, starts gradually possessing the saiyan characters there, before working his way up to Vegeta, the tension rising higher all the while before he takes control of Vegeta, using the saiyan prince as his final host before infecting the entire planet with parasites that put them under his hypnotic control. Making Baby the one villain besides briefly King Piccolo to effectively take over the Earth. Wow. And during that fight we learn his backstory too.

Anyone remember the Tuffles? The race of technologically advanced, humanoid aliens that lived on what became Planet Vegeta before the Saiyans massacred them? Well, before they were all killed in a strike orchestrated by King Vegeta, their greatest scientists pooled their resources and some tuffle dna to create a powerful bio-weapon that they sent into space that would eventually evolve into a powerful, parasitic life-form that would take revenge on the saiyans, destroying them and rebuilding the tuffle race and their empire. Now this backstory is a fantastic concept, and it really helps to tie this saga into the lore of the franchise and create a villain with a fascinating motivation that gives him a really good, logical reason to want to attack the saiyans and do battle with Goku. This great motivation and concept are one of the things that really help sell Baby, which is unfortunate given it kinda reflects what I'm going to say about him in a bit because while it's a great idea, it has a few issues.

For one, the portrayal of the saiyans arriving on planet plant in their pods and King Vegeta being the one to lead the massacre of the Tuffle race doesn't gel at all with the backstory of the saiyans King Kai establishes early on in Z (And it seems to become a tradition in other media involving the Tuffles to make the whole backstory even more convoluted from what I've seen), where King Kai seemed to imply it happened too long ago for King Vegeta to be the one to lead the attack, and definitely before the saiyans made a deal with another race to be able to travel across space. Plus how the original backstory played out, the saiyans were supposedly a race that also inhabited the same planet as the Tuffles, but the two races apparently just stayed seperate from each other and didn't interact much until one day the saiyans randomly attacked, starting a war that ended one night when the full moon transformed all the saiyans into great apes. A pretty good backstory on it's own, and while the idea of the saiyans invading and turning into great apes carries through to GT, literally everything else about the set up is changed.

Now retcons are nothing new, Dragon Ball and Z had plenty of them, but with a few exceptions they all normally fit in really well with the story, served as decent answers to open ended questions and tied up loose ends, or they were at least handled well enough that you could buy the different interpretation. The revisions to the Tuffle backstory here though? Honestly, given that a lot of things in this saga are built on lore established in Z's filler so it's obvious the writers must have watched Z, the retcons to the Tuffle backstory don't make any sense and can't be rectified with Z's interpretation of events. The only explanation that would make any sense about how this could still work if we're taking this as genuinely a follow up to Z is if King Kai was lying and making stuff up in places when he was telling Goku about the saiyans backstory, which yeah King Kai is shown to not be as all-knowing as he tries to pass himself off as, but this makes him look pathetically incompetant and ignorant if that is the case.

If we want to accept this as an alternate universe take (Which GT technically is, but it wasn't meant as such at the time so i won't count it as in how I choose to judge it, which'll factor in to another criticism later) like the movies that don't fit snugly into canon, then fine, the new backstory works on it's own, but for something trying to tie into Z's continuity as a direct sequel... no. Just, no. So while the reasons behind Baby's creation and his subsequent motivations are fantastic, the ham-fisted retooling of the Tuffle backstory hurts the presentation a bit.

Also, while it might have been explained better in the Japanese version, the dub at least does a poor job explaining the part where he ended up in Dr Myuu's lab. Apparently, he created Dr Myuu and programmed him to think he was actually Baby's creator, but he was just using Myuu to help him develop a more powerful form for himself that could stand up to the saiyans. And somehow Dr Myuu found out about the Black star dragon balls, though all that and how Baby knows about earth are poorly explained or not at all (Please tell me the subs do a better job), and, and it's all just pretty convoluted and confusing.

Honestly it felt like the writers had a great idea, but then tried way too hard to make it complex to try and make this backstory seem as "Deep" as possible and be surprising, when really it's a bit head scratching and combined with the aforementioned retcons just makes everything needlessly messy and confusing. Honestly, wouldn't it have made a lot more sense if Dr Myuu was a Tuffle scientist who'd managed to escape the planet before the saiyans massacred his race, and he did create Baby himself partly using his own dna and memories and having events play out largely the same as they ended up doing? As well as turning himself into an android like Dr Gero to extend his life while also creating the Machine Mutants, going insane after finding out the saiyans were killed by Freeza, robbing him of his own revenge so he decided to take over the universe himself to outdo Freeza as compensation? Just saying, it would have made things flow a whole lot more smoothly. As it is, this backstory sounds very great on paper, until you start analysing certain aspects of it and it becomes a real mess.

So yeah, his backstory sounds good at first, but it's a real clunker that could have been ironed out better. But does that stop his take over of the planet and subsequent actions from being creepy, awesome and tense as all heck? Thankfully, no! Just about everything he does in these episodes is great, despite the issues his confrontation with Vegeta was well handled, and then once Goku and friends return to earth only to be confronted by their possessed relatives, it's all really great drama. After managing to possess Trunks and smashing up Giru, robbing Goku and Pan of some of their few remaining allies and backing them right up into a corner, Baby then proceeds to confront Goku in Vegeta's body, dominate him in a fight and then seemingly MURDER Goku, leaving Pan, Mr Satan and Buu in shock and horror as everything goes to heck. And then Baby uses the Black Star Dragon Balls to create his own new version of the Tuffle Planet, where he plans to transfer the enslaved human race to use them to rebuild the Tuffles society and spread his empire throughout the universe, undoing everything our heroes had worked so hard in all the previous episodes to accomplish up to this point and leave us on a cliffhanger where all hope seems officially lost.

That. Was. All. BRILLIANT! While there were a few minor complaints I could lobby at these episodes and that backstory was sloppy as I've explained, it only slightly detracts from what was a very well executed plan that sets Baby up as a powerful, disturbing and fearsome foe and ramps the tension right up to eleven. It was a ton of fun to watch and is some of the best set up to a villain in all of Dragon Ball, and if things continued as great as they did here with Baby then he could have easily been one of the best villains in the series.

Sadly though, this is the point where things start to fall flat. While everything about his introduction and rise to power except the execution of his backstory was almost perfect, everything about Baby as a villain after the main action moves to the Tuffle Planet becomes very... meh.

Honestly I think his set-up set the bar a bit too high on the "Crowning moment of Awesome" stunts meter, and since it was a while before he really got to do anything as close to as awesome as taking over humanity and beating Goku, he would have needed to rely on his personality and mannerisms to sell him as an interesting villain from here out until he became a golden Great Ape. And that's where his shortcomings become clear.

Because while he starts off terrifying and just plain creepy, he's aleady possessed and taken over all of humanity by this point, so his gimick of turning to goop and infecting people stops becoming a factor from then on, taking away the creepy factor somewhat. Kind of like where Cell stopped absorbing people after 18, becoming less creepy and more just smug and in love with himself in his later forms, though still entertaining and threatening. But Unfortunatly, Baby just doesn't have as much of a personality or charm as most of the major DBZ villains to carry him without that creepy factor, so he gradually becomes increasingly less interesting after taking over the world. His personality from this point really does just feel petulant, petty, cruel and a bit whiny at parts. And I don't mean whiny and petulant in the same way as Zamasu, who's demeanor and some of his dialogue would at least make him amusing and the kind of person you took great satisfaction in seeing get their face beaten in, just normal whiny. Overall he justs comes off as "Generic Evil Space Emperor guy #99926547". He's still threatening, but only on the basis of being much more powerful than the good characters, the drama tends to revolve around the other characters like Pan being confronted by her possessed parents, and when characters do confront Baby before Goku achieves SS4, mainly just Uub, the conflicts are very brief and as I'll explain in a bit, the results there are iffy.

The show seems to be wanting to set up some kind of a moral conflict with Baby's takeover of the human race, with Goku confronting him about how the saiyans paid for their evil ways already and the earth didn't deserve to suffer for his petty revenge, and later on Baby saying something along the lines of bringing peace with Goku reprimanding him over how stripping humanity and presumably all other races in the universe Baby wants to control of their free will is not the way to do it. This could have been a fascinating moral debate and really deepen Baby's character if they actually went deeper into this, but it's only brought up in those two instances and nothing ever comes of it, with Baby just quickly dismissing and moving on with what he was doing both times. He ends up coming off like he just wants to take over the universe for the sake of being an evil ruler. And his claims that humanity under his control are now the new race of Tuffles... makes no sense, since genetically they're all still humans. Technically he's still the only being in the universe even close to a real Tuffle since he has Tuffle cells mixed into his DNA, so he just sounds delusional there. If I had been writing this, I would have had Baby assign Bulma and Earth's top scientists to work on a way to clone an entire civilization's worth of new Tuffle's from the Tuffle cells in his DNA, or have the Z Fighters under his control go out to eventually find the earths Dragon Balls to wish the Tuffles back to life himself.  His plans for humanity would basically be making them his brainwashed slaves serving the Tuffles, and he would still want to conquer the other races in the universe in the same way. But actually explore the implications of that. Show Baby talking to Bulma and some scientists about his plans for the Tuffles, and have him show genuine joy and happiness over the idea of bringing the Tuffles back. Maybe have him shed a few tears that all his years of waiting and planning are paying off.

Then when Goku comes back and starts to overpower him as an SS4, have Baby break down over this and how he's going to be the saviour of the universe, keeping all races subdued so that all conflicts would cease. Only to have Goku drag him through the coals for his methods and all the moral implications that would arise from his turning all living creatures into his puppets (In this scenario none of the possessed characters would show any personality at all at most times and would basically come off as soulless robots, with only the possessed Z Fighters, Videl, Chichi and Bulma showing any slightly twisted hints of their own personalities just to screw with Pan and Goku). But Baby would refuse to listen, thinking that Goku's just evil and here to take away everything he's worked so hard for like the Saiyans did to his race in general, having a complete mental breakdown as Bulma then transforms him into his Golden Great Ape form, where he really isn't in control at any point. Just imagine the dialogue and emotion we could have gotten out of this scenario? And I came up with this on the spot as I was watching the episode.

I really liked the potential of that conflict, but it just felt like the show only cared about hinting at the possibilities there rather than exploring it, which just leave Baby feeling flat from the second half of the saga onwards.

Also, I didn't like most of his designs. His first two designs were just bleah all around, and Baby-Vegeta was... I don't want to say bad, but something just didn't look right about it to me. I don't know how to describe it, but I guess it just felt a little too try-hard and coming off a bit silly in parts that were meant to make him look cool. The only design I wholesale liked was his Golden Great Ape form, which was where he was at his least interesting as a character since by that point he was mostly just going nuts to the point of gleefully opening fire on his own people (Not that he hadn't endangered them willingly before. So much for wanting to rebuilt his beloved race, which he claimed they were now).

So, overall? Baby was an effective villain, but between the designs, the convoluted nature of his backstory and the poorly done retcons that just seemed to be done in a forced attempt to add weight to his possession of Vegeta as his main host that come to the detriment of the story, and his increasingly less interesting character as the arc goes on, Baby just becomes a big mixed bag of wasted opportunity. Not that I think he was an overall bad villain, he started off fantastic, he was still very threatening and he brought about a lot of great moments (And a bunch of bad ones, but again, be patient) but let's just say Team Four Star's placement of him on their best villains list was pretty fitting. He's not top 10 material in any way. Which is sad, because he felt like he should be right up there with the likes of Freeza and King Piccolo on concept alone. The humour the saga had was very hit or miss. Nothing really struck out to me as pretty funny in the Machine Mutants arc or the episodes immediately after it. Some of the jokes were just outright pacepalm worthy, like the baby deer trying to nurse from Pan, or they were just meh and didn't do much for me. The only times I really laughed were a bunch of the moments with the Kai's (Can always count on Old Kai to be fun), and I guess some antics in that weird parallel dimension with the space beavers (God that sounds silly), but other than that not a lot sticks out to me.

Okay, I've talked about the Machine Mutants arc, Baby and the hit or miss humour. So, I guess it's time to talk about how the supporting cast was used. For the record, this is where things start to get negative. Because almost NONE of the supporting cast I thought were used particularly well. Not that they were all used badly, some were, but with a lot of other characters it just felt like they were just there... because they kinda had to be, more or less.

The only supporting characters that I thought were used well overall were Kibito Kai and Old Kai. The two of them were actually very helpful and crucial to making sure Goku succeeded in saving the day, Kibito rescuing him from Baby's final attack on earth (Even though that led to it's own issues), sneaking into the lookout to get the sacred water and healing the fallen Saiyan characters (Though I'm still a little unsure whether they were supposed to have been killed by Baby's attack and Kibito's using his mystic Kai powers to bring them back, or if Baby's attack simply injured and scattered them and Kibito simply found and healed them. Again, maybe the Japanese version explains things better but if it did, the dub copped out of explaining this clearly). And Old Kai, apart from just being really amusing, actually came up with some clever ideas and plans that helped to win the day. Arguably they were both more helpful in ultimately saving the day than in the Buu Saga where most of their ideas ended up failing, which, yeah, good job GT.

Wish I could say the same for everyone else.

Starting with the ones I'm not angry over, Goten and Gohan got to be in this Saga. Goten was the first person to fight and get possessed by Baby on earth and we see him going on a date. Cool, having a social life and it's following up on his change of interests established at EoZ. A pity then that impressing said girlfriend is just about the only thing about his character that gets explored outside of him trying to help out in the next two sagas, since quite honestly, he feels kind of meh here. Honestly he comes off as kind of flat compared to Z, and his boringly generic design doesn't help. We lost his much more unique and interesting teenaged look for a white shirt and a hairstyle that together just make him look like "Generic anime guy number 90-something". It's boring, and he doesn't really get to do anything except get possessed and transfer power to Goku (Because God forbid he and Trunks were actually allowed to turn into adult Gotenks and actually do something cool and plot relevant in the final act, right?).

It probably doesn't help for me that his scenes with Valese, the only downtime he has for us to explore his life outside of being involved in all the usual saving the world shenanigans apart from episode 2, were... kinda awkward. And that's entirely because of Valese herself. It feels like the writers wanted her to be the cute, really sheltered character that was endearing in how innocent she was, but... they really overdid it. She just came off as so uninformed and stupid that it was a little creepy. I mean, there's being sheltered, and then there's not knowing how to eat ice cream off a cone when you're supposed to be an adult in your early 20's. How stupid and overprotective were her parents, exactly? Kid Goku would have made sense for that joke because he was completely isolated from humanity besides Grandpa Gohan before Bulma crashed into him, but with an adult woman the joke just doesn't work. In fact, it was a little bit disturbing. She was just awkward, and didn't really play well off of Goten.

Back to Goten himself, while I like the guy just fine, he got so little to do and was such a static character that he came off a little boring here, though cool enough when he tried to save the day himself. Just wish his fight with Baby was longer. Gohan also felt a bit flat. He didn't get any noticeable character moments that showed off his personality, and he only got one cool moment where he recognized something was wrong with Goten so got him to somewhere secluded from Chichi, Videl and Bulma to try and sort that out, though it didn't work. Outside of that, just became another brainwashed servant, which was hit or miss in how that was carried out. It was certainly sad to see Pan's reaction to her brainwashed parents wanting to kill her on the Tuffle planet so props to how well that scene played out, and the ambush when Goku and Pan got back started off well, but the fact that Goku in his base form was able to beat Gohan and Goten pretty easily in their super saiyan states not only made that scene feel anti-climactic and made them both look like a bunch of complete wimps. If Goku had gone super saiyan I wouldn't have minded it, but the two of them had earlier managed to curbstomp Vegeta while working together (Even if Baby was in the drivers seat of Gohan's body), so the result is that all three characters look like wimps compared to kid Goku who's body supposedly can't even sustain his full super saiyan 3 power five minutes later. Other than that his only other contribution is also transferring energy to Goku. Honestly for a character who was practically the co-protagonist of the previous series, Gohan's character and role were pretty meh here.

Vegeta has some good scenes near the start, mostly relating to his interactions with his daughter which were excellent. Bulla for everything we see of her seems like she'd be an interesting character. And that bothers me to no end since after teasing us with some good scenes, she disappears after the story moves to the New Tuffle Planet and she does nothing of significance for the rest of the series. Way to throw away all potential for an interesting character and a possible action girl there, GT. Other than those cute moments, Vegeta only gets an okay fight with the possessed Gohan and Goten before becoming Baby's main host. Which, no, I don't consider that a particularly good use of his character since it takes Vegeta as himself out of the story until the very end and he's just any other puppet for Baby, just the one he happens to use for the rest of the saga. And the evil possessed Vegeta concept just screams re-hash of Majin Vegeta, minus the great character development for Vegeta that lead to and how it helped cap off his redemption arc. The attempts to add some sort of a deeper meaning to this by revealing it was Vegeta's father who massacred the Tuffles as I've already explained was ham-fisted and stupid, so no points there. So much for one of the other most important characters from Z. Now he has to wait until near the very end of the final saga to become actually relevant again.

Oh, and Krillin gets some cameos... and they're nothing special, really they just reinforce that he's the butt monkey and imply that 18 has low expectations of her husband, which I didn't like. And yeah, his design is pretty bad here. I'll rant about why I don't like how Krillin's used in the next saga when I get to it. Also, the show really wastes the potential for Marron to develop an actual character, so minus one more point.

Trunks I pretty much already explained my thought on his role at the start of the saga, it was nice to see him making a clever plan with Giru to beat Myuu, but after he gets back to earth he becomes as quickly irrelevant as the other half-saiyan characters. And he's not that interesting of a character here. And if you're wondering, yeah I am glad Giru was kept out of the rest of the saga. No I am not glad he came back, I just hope he's less pointless going forward.

Mr Satan was... basically Mr Satan. He got a few amusing though not laugh-worthy moments being his usual show-boating self, it was clever how he had Buu help him get around Baby's mind controlling parasites, and he got a few good moments here or there being a supportive grandfather to Pan and when he was about to stand up to Golden Great Ape Baby when he thought all the saiyan character were out for the count and Pan and Goku were dead, but honestly he didn't really contibute anything meaningful to the story on his own, so his use here was just kinda meh, though appropriate for his general role in the cast. Oh, and he also got a goodbye scene with Buu... yeah, let's talk about Buu.

I HATE what this Saga did with Buu. First off, despite how he's pretty much positioned to be extremely helpful, being immune to Baby's control and saving Mr Satan from it, he never does anything significant as himself in this saga apart from sneaking Pan and Mr Satan on to Baby's planet. Which, yeah, the writers could have easily come up with another excuse to that. And despite how he's one of the strongest Z Fighters next to Goku, Buu NEVER fights anyone in this Saga. His first role in a story following his redemption, his first real outing to prove himself useful as a hero and a Z Fighter, and Buu doesn't get one action scene. For crying out loud, despite being not very far away he doesn't even fly in to save Pan when Gohan starts trying to choke her to death, when there's literally nothing stopping him and she needed to be saved by Uub showing up from out of nowhere. Which makes Buu look more stupid and incompetent than he really is. And after that, what does his role amount to? He takes a fatal attack meant for Uub, which results in him sacrificing his physical form to merge his power with Uub to give him a power up.

(Takes deep breath and begins to shake with barely suppressed rage. A few minutes later I take another breath and proceed to talk through gritted teeth)

What. The. Heck!

THIS is what they chose to do with this character? No, no. Just. NO. This moment was completely unearned. The writers sacrifised an interesting and fun character, one with tons of potential for interesting development and interactions with the other supporting characters, a character with a range of cool and useful abilities as well as being one of the few supporting characters to almost match Goku and Vegeta and thus be a critical ally in serious fights. The writers discared Buu, who we'd only JUST gotten to see come back from being eaten by his corrupt counterpart and completing his redemption arc, all just for the sake of giving a far more criminally underdeveloped character a power boost. And what does Majuub, the transformation of Uub that we sacrifised a FAR more interesting charater for the sake of achieving, amount to in the Baby Saga and GT as a whole?

ALMOST NOTHING.

Seriously, Majuub gets one fight with Baby that lasts five minutes, then gets turned to chocolate and eaten by Baby taking him out of the story for several episodes, only coming back to serve as a distraction to stop Baby from whiping out Goku when the other saiyan characters are charging him up. That's it. And while his fight was good, it was far too short for something built up in this fashion and comes off as a slap in the face to any fan who cared about Buu and wanted to see Uub actually used to his full potential. Honestly I didn't remember the scene with Uub in Baby's stomach as I was re-watching the saga, so after I watched Majuub get taken out so quickly I was absolutely livid and left with a bitter feeling as I was watching the next few episodes, since it made it feel that Buu's sacrifice was rendered completely irrelevant and pointless. And yeah that little moment helped, but barely, especially when the results for the rest of the series are that it was still a pointless move.

It's a real sore point for me to see interesting characters with potential get killed off. And yes, I know Buu wasn't entirely dead and his consciousness could still communicate with Uub since they were one being now, but let me ask, when does that ever come up again after that concept is introduced? ... Yeah, that's what I thought. Majin Buu sacrificing himself was just so poorly handled. Buu didn't actually get any good moments himself in GT, and the way his merging with Uub was set up felt like the writers throwing in a concept that could have been interesting without doing anything to earn it. Losing Buu as a seperate character honestly just feels like it wasted more story potential than it offered. Let's compare this incident to Piccolo merging with Kami for a second since that's what this idea most resembles, and I'll explain why Kami becoming one with Piccolo actually worked fine. The two characters from the late part of Dragon Ball were established as being two beings that used to be one. Kami had an interesting character and he got some development through his interactions with Goku, and he continued to be a useful supporting character for the early parts of Z right through the Freeza saga.

In the anime he even gets to be a plot relevant character for the Garlic Jr Saga which, controversial as that was and I haven't watched it in years, I do remember that arc giving Kami some good moments. Kami had plenty of moments to shine and screentime relevant to his position in the cast and the series, but there wasn't really anywhere else to go with him as far as developing him as a character was concerned by the Androids Saga. So merging him with Piccolo, effectively removing him from the cast, didn't feel like a waste since it stopped him from gradually fading into irrelevancy as more higher power characters were introduced. With the position of Earth's Guardian long established as being a role passed on throughout the ages, it also provided the opportunity to bring Dende back and develop him some more as Earth's new Guardian, so we lost one character only to have another we'd all grown to like come back in his place. And most fittingly his merging with Piccolo provided adequate closure to his character and brought things full circle for the two of them, since as well as giving Piccolo more power it purged his heart of any remaining darkness, solidifying Piccolo as a truly heroic character if that wasn't already firmly established with his own character development up to this point. Piccolo and Kami merging together was well executed and perfectly timed, so it didn't feel like Kami as a character was being thrown under a bus all of a sudden just for the sake of plot convenience that didn't even solve the issue it was meant to.

But for all the reasons I've already mentioned, Buu's merging with Uub doesn't work anywhere near as well and is just an insulting waste of Buu's own character. And the worst part is... I wouldn't have even minded if, in a theoretically much better version of GT where be served the role of secondary main character like he logically should have, Buu and Uub merging happened much later in the series. After we'd gotten to see Buu interacting more with the supporting cast properly integrating into the group dynamic. After we'd gotten to see him form some kind of friendly, surrogate familial relationship with Pan, who he really should have interacted with on a personal level and had some sort of relationship with since she's his best friend's grandaughter. And have a decent relationship with Uub too, on that note. And of course, after Buu had gotten plenty more development and made more useful contributions to protecting the earth to make it seem like his character and all the possibilities he had weren't being needlessly tossed aside. And more importantly, Majuub should have won the fight against whatever villain the Z Fighters were battling so the results of this incident were satisfying, though still fittingly bitter sweet.

Because Buu's sacrifise could have been a compelling tragedy if it was done at a more fitting time and didn't feel so close to meaningless in the long run. As it is, Buu's character and his sacrifise felt completely misused and infuriating in how they were executed. The best that comes out of it is that the scene where they merge was fairly touching in it's own right and his goodbye to Mr Satan was pretty sad, though personally I thought that even that was too rushed for it's own good.

And that wasn't even the only aggravating waste of a supporting character. Oh strap yourselves in folks, because Piccolo's use in the story felt equally as bad, if not somehow worse.

Now, I'll say this right off the bat. Piccolo is one of my favourite characters in the franchise, so I take what happens here very personally. His role in the story of the Baby Saga is pretty much completely pointless. He shows up in one episode sensing that somethings up, shows up after Gohan gets possessed by Baby to fire his special beam canon at the guy (Missing him by a mile, might I add) and then just gets blasted by Baby. And we don't see him again until the very last episode of the Saga. The audience is left hanging on what the heck really happened to him in that moment for the rest of the story, and it's never properly explained what happened to him and where he's been when he does show up again. So his earlier scene could have been cut entirely and literally would not have made any difference. In fact, it would have made things a lot better since viewers wouldn't have been left confused about what happened to him and left hanging for so long for no real reason. It's practically a big lipped alligator moment.

And then there's what happens in the final episode of the saga when he does show up. He gives Goku some ki to help him teleport himself and a wayward kid off of the doomed planet earth before it explodes... and stays behind on the planet as it explodes. In his last few moments of life, he telepathically contacts Gohan, explains that the Black Star Dragon Balls are connected to him because of his connection to their creator Kami. And he's decided to nobly sacrifice himself so the Black Star Balls will be turned to stone and can't be used to cause any more damage ever again. This scene was emotionally gripping and well executed. Piccolo's moving goodbye speech to Gohan, his heartbroken reaction to the thought of losing his beloved friend and former mentor, and the music accompanying the breathtaking scenery of the dying planet earth around Piccolo all come together to create a powerful, moving death scene.

And the fact that Piccolo's death was done in a way that was so powerful... makes it all the more aggravating for how STUPID and needlessly mean spirited this whole thing was.

Now to properly explain why killing Piccolo off like this makes me want to pull my hair out in a fit of madness, I need to talk about something that I've wanted to get off my chest since I decided I was going to re-watch GT for the fun of it. For anyone who might be reading this who hasn't actually watched GT or needs a reminder, the Black Star Dragon Balls were introduced in the first episode as a set of even more powerful dragon Balls that Kami had created but stored away in the Lookout at an unspecified time in the past. The biggest differences between them and the normal dragon balls, is that the black star dragon balls scatter across the universe when their shenron (Who's design is a lazy recolour of normal shenron, way to be creative) grants a wish... and they set off a timer where the planet they're used on will be destroyed within a year afterwards. I HATE this idea. I hate it so, so much. And 90% of that has to do with the outright HORRIBLE implications it opens up for Kami's character. WHY would Kami create these darn things? I mean, Kami by the time we met him was old, bitter and jaded with humanity, but he wasn't a monster or a creep willing to risk the fate of the planet he'd sworn to protect. There's no logical reason for why Kami would need to create something so dangerous, especially when he'd already produced a perfectly useful and less destructive set of Dragon Balls. We never get any explanation as to why he would make these things, and none of the interpretations one might be able to come up with in pondering this idea paints his character in a very good light.

At best they could have been created as an experiment to see how much more powerful a shenron he could make, with the whole "Destroys the planet it's used on" idea being an unintentional side effect that he only figured out after the fact and so he hid them away, which doesn't ruin his character much but it does turn him into a reckless idiot, especially with what ended up happening. And at worst they make him look like an intentionally reckless creep that was willing to potentially endanger the planet for the sake of an experiment to see if he could really make these things. Like, what if he intended to wish himself to go to a planet that was much better off and more peaceful and leave humanity to rot? Probably isn't what happened, but it's as valid a headcanon as any else, and that's what makes the Black Star Balls existence really disturbing.

Whatever way you look at them, there's not only no reason for them to exist, but any explanation there is harms Kami's character in retrospect. Especially since it means he's now officially the only guardian in Earth's history who's actions directly led to the end of the world, no matter how briefly that lasted. The Black Star Balls are the foundation of the plot for the first half of GT, and that foundation is one of the biggest and most infuriating plot holes in the entire franchise. And it's made even more stupid by the fact that not only did Emperor Pilaf somehow find out about them, but apparently King Kai knows about them too and he was able to do some research into them by the sound of things. Somehow, even if it's not a well known fact, knowledge of these balls DID get out there, even though Kami obviously never gave them to humanity as a gift like the other dragon balls. And no, we don't get an explanation for how Pilaf found out about the or how King Kai knows, so that just adds to the stupidity and raises further questions.

There's also this other plot hole. Why didn't the black star balls disappear when Kami merged with Piccolo? It was a big deal how the original dragon balls turned to stone after the two characters merged, to the point they had to get Dende to recreate them from the old ones, so how come the black star balls were exempt from that? And don't tell me Dende's using the dragon statue to create the new balls reanimated them, because then Dende would have had to be the one to die. The black star dragon balls existence is a stupid contrivance that violates the previous series logic and defiles one of it's most underrated supporting characters all to set off a stupid plot, and the horrible way this was all executed to kill off Piccolo makes his death feel needlessly mean spirited and completely unfair, and the fact it's the only major character death to stick besides Android 16 and also Buu in this series makes it all the more aggravating.

I might not even be so mad about it if the next saga doesn't get Piccolo stranded in Hell where despite Goku hoping he gets back to heaven, we never find out if that's the case. So Piccolo gets to do nothing useful for one saga, and he gets stranded in the deep dark pits of Hell for the rest of the series with no indication he gets the happy ending his character deserves for all the development and experiences he's been through. All for a cheap attempt at "Drama". Screw you GT, way to insult one of the franchises best characters and everyone who was a fan of him!

(Deep breaths)

And, yeah, now it's time for me to talk about Pan, isn't it. Okay, this is another one where I'm going to have to describe my reaction to her right from the beginning. I'm not going to hold any punches on this one, because personally Pan to me was the most disappointing waste of a character in Dragon Ball history.

She gets a pretty decent introduction in the first episode, but then she quickly becomes a whiny, self-centred and pretty selfish, entitled, arrogant brat completely lacking the skills to justify her boasts. She starts off the adventure by sneaking onto the ship and setting it off prematurely, also denying us the chance to see Goten in a leading role for the saga in the process, and in doing so she ends up damaging the ship and causing it to crash on an alien planet, almost getting Goku and Trunks killed and thus dooming the mission and the earth. Then throughout the Saga she proceeds to whine a lot and be a hindrance almost more than she actually meaningfully contributes to conflicts, making her increasingly unlikeable and tiresome as the episodes passed with only a couple good moments here and there. And then the final episode of the Saga became my least favourite episode of the whole show, possibly the whole franchise simply on how badly it FAILED at it's job of making Pan's supposed character arc work and justifying her place on the team.

Oh yeah, Pan has this bit of a character arc where she's fed up of being treated as a little kid and wasn't allowed to go on the mission to gather the dragon balls at first. On paper it's not a bad idea, but if it wasn't executed poorly up to this point, episode 15 killed it completely. Basically after overhearing Goku and Trunks talking about sending her back to earth for her own safety, Pan gets really upset and after the ship is damaged while landing on a desert planet where another black star ball was located, Pan sneaks out to find it herself, almost dying from heat exhaustion and needing to be saved by Giru from a giant worm that would have eaten her. EVERYTHING about this set-up fails. Trunks and Goku's logic is that Pan should be taken back to earth and swapped out for the more powerful and experienced Goten, since she's a lot less strong and experienced and might be in danger if she continues being on the mission. And everything she does here proves them right. In her attempts to prove herself, she stupidly wandered into the scorching hot desert alone and very nearly got killed if not for Giru, and at the end Trunks basically decides to keep her along for the rest of the journey because even though she almost got herself killed, her actions still led them to the dragon balls location so therefore she proved herself useful.

Except no she DIDN'T. Well, okay, she led them to the Dragon Ball, but Trunks and Goku could have found it easily on their own. More easily probably and quickly enough and with proper supplies that they wouldn't have succumb to heat exhaustion first, especially since they would have taken Giru who can track the dragon balls. Pan's stunt didn't actually accomplish anything except nearly get her killed, and it's treated in the episode as proof that she's a capable Z Fighter that deserves to be on this important, world saving mission. When in any logical story it would have been the exact opposite.

That's pretty much how her character arc plays out. She tags along and almost ruins the mission. She whines and complains every time things don't go precisely her way (I lost track of how many times she said "I want to go home"), and any of the helpful things she does could have been done as well or better by another character. Things really would have gone a lot more smoothly with Goten or anyone else tagging along, especially when she's often a hindrance or needs saving. With the dialogue and the way it's set up, it seems the show wants her to be sympathetic and have us want her to prove how great she really is, but her attitude and lack of meaningful contributions outside of a few minor cases completely go against that, and episode 15 especially may be the worst written episode in the series. The only thing it accomplished is giving Giru a good character moment and finally helping move Pan past the point of bullying him a lot, everything else was an unsatisfying mess.

But does she get better in the Baby Saga? Yes... and no. On the bright side, after she gets back to earth and from being confronted by her possessed family onwards the whining and bratty attitude is tones down a great deal and it becomes easier to sympathise with her as so many harsh things happens to her. Especially when she gets a really sweet moment where she sees her grandpa in his Golden Great Ape state and she manages to get through to Goku, which helps him to unlock the Super Saiyan 4 transformation. That entire sequence was beautiful, and it really shows how Pan's character can shine by buckling down on the element that was most interesting and touching about her in EoZ: Her relationship with Goku. Something GT until then hadn't been doing a great job at exploring. The scene of Pan desperately trying to get through to her grandpa and everything that comes out of it was probably my favourite scene in the entire series so far.

But sadly, there's another problem with Pan's character underlying that scene. That moment, outside of maybe a scene or two in the Machine Mutants arc... that moment and her helping to power up SS4 Goku for the final battle are really her only meaningful contributions to anything in the grand scheme of the saga. Even if Pan isn't as unbearably annoying as she was for the rest of the show going forward, the fact remains that Pan, despite being arguably the secondary protagonist considering how much screentime and focus her character got, is pretty weak and doesn't contribute as much to saving the day as she should have. She is strong for crying out loud, from what I recall she easily beat Android 20 in the next Saga, so she's not a complete wimp. But against the major villains she's very unhelpful, like the majority of other characters she gets repetedly sidelined from having meaningful contributions for the stupid idea of "Goku's the main character, so he has to do everything that matters himself" Which is a gross oversimplifications of DB's formula that disregards how the supporting cast was used in DB and Z.

And she NEVER. Goes. Super Saiyan. For God's sakes Toei, it wouldn't have taken much effort to do that, I've been bitter about this all my life.

And the reason I'm so upset about this, the reason I'm hard on how Pan is used in this series... is because I REALLY wanted to love her character. Pan had amazing potential as a character. Her scenes were the best part of the EoZ episodes of Z, every second she was on screen there was pure gold and her character was dripping with potential. Think about it. We have a female saiyan hybrid character, one who's established early on as a prodigy with great power and an adorable, endearing personality. She's the granddaughter of Goku, and she wants to train and get stronger. She would have been an ideal choice as Goku's successor if you think about it.

With her being a main character in GT, we could have had our first female super saiyan. Our first major action girl desides 18 who contributes greatly to the fights against villains and is a well developed character (I don't count Chichi and Videl because Chichi had one fight in Dragon Ball where she didn't land one hit and Videl never reached the level where she would be able to actively contribute much to the conflict in the Buu Saga, even if she was awesome she kinda faded into the background in the second half of it). The franchise has a huge female fan following, and it's a sticking point for many that the Z Fighters are dominated by men with only 18 being on the level where she can actively contribute to the fighting, and even she got a lesser role after becoming a married mother in Buu Saga. Pan's inclusion would have solved this issue very naturally, and she could have been a great, endearing character with some interesting development if the writers just followed what was set up with her in Z and put the right effort into making her interesting and awesome.

And they completely dropped the ball. It's a disappointing waste that makes me really upset. Especially since this portrayal turned her into the franchises version of Scrappy Doo for the next 20 years, with it taking her portrayal in Super to finally help salvage her reputation in the fandom. And you know you did something wrong when a version of a character you use who's a baby manages to be more endearing and popular than how you wrote her.

Pan may be less annoying and has more good moments after the middle of the Baby Saga and onwards, but the rest of how she's portrayed makes her perhaps the worst character in any Dragon Ball series. And she's our second most prominent character. Is it any wonder people hated this show?

And I guess there's only one more character to discuss for this saga, and this is another big one. Uub. Let's be straight here, Uub is TERRIBLY used in this Saga and in GT in general. So, after Z ended with Goku deciding to take on Uub as his successor and training him for FIVE YEARS (Incidentally between that and the ending to the show, it really does push the whole narrative of "Goku's a deadbeat who cares more about training than his family" since they were apparently only at the Lookout which means Goku could have visited his family at any time or vice versa, what the heck?) Uub leaves for home in the first episode, then shows up literally out of nowhere in episode 30 to rescue Pan, in a scene I've already mentioned makes Buu look slow witted and incompetant. We then get a handwave explanation on how Uub managed to avoid getting possessed by Baby's plague, though for the life of me I can't remember now if he explained how he reached the Tuffle planet, and he declares that he's going to avenge Goku and save the earth and it's people from Baby. And then he goes down in barely a minute... wow, great way to bring back a character that was built up as being so very important.

Now I want to say this right now, I like Uub. I think the guy's perfectly fine as a concept, the good re-incarnation of Kid Buu who becomes Goku's protege as a child. I have some issues with how that was executed and how both Goten and Pan were shoved aside for that role when either one of them could have made a more logical choice as Goku's successor, but I was happy to give this kid a chance. Uub could have been very interesting and cool if written well, and I've always wondered how that story would go. But Uub's use here and in the show is pretty pathetic.

I've already gone into how I feel about his becoming Majuub, but even apart from that he gets the short end of the stick. He gets no real personality other than "Noble hero type", we don't learn much of anything about him for the whole show. His re-introduction is kind of cool, but it's so sudden and it took so long for him to come back for a character that was set up to be so much more important than he ultimately was that everything he does in this Saga feels so underwhelming. His first fight with Baby is far too short and anti-climactic, making his training with Goku seem like a waste, and while his second fight as Majuub was good and probably the best individual fight in the whole Saga, it's still much shorter than it feels like it should have been and thus does a disservice to both him and Majin Buu. His only meaningful contribution is to stall Baby at one point, which still doesn't make up for how badly he's used here and in the show as a whole since it's barely anything.

We don't get any significant interaction with Uub and any character here besides Goku and arguably Buu, and if I recall I don't think we get any for the rest of the series too, where he's even less relevant. For how he was set up as a character, GT refuses to use him for anything worthwhile and doesn't even try to explore the concept of Goku being a mentor.

And it was as I was thinking about that halfway through watching the Saga that I made a revelation. I realized then and there why GT failed so badly. Because you see, it's not just the common complaints of "Good ideas, bad execution". It's not even that it wasn't good compared to Z or the original Dragon Ball. It's a greater issue with the show as a whole that Uub is right at the heart of. By it's very nature and conception, GT structurally fails as a proper follow up to the Dragon Ball story.

These days it's regularly agreed that GT and it's story are an alternate timeline in the Dragon Ball franchise. A what-if, non-canon story that doesn't connect to the actual canon of Dragon Ball. So, naturally we should judge it as an alternate universe story that doesn't need to be completely subservient to canon, right?

Wrong.

While it's more specifically a follow up to the anime due to it's use of several anime exclusive elements, back in the day when it was being made and people were watching it as it aired, GT was meant to be an actual follow up and continuation of the story. It aired very soon after the Z anime concluded, and while Toriyama only had minimal involvement in it's conception mostly in designing things, it was specifically back then intended as a proper sequel. So that's how we should judge it. And that's where it screws up the most, because GT's story is not a natural progression. It's taking things backwards.

The story of Dragon Ball always moved forward in one way or another, and so did it's main character. Characters changed, matured. The universe expanded naturally as the threats steadily escalated, and even though Toriyama literally made everything up on the spot, the story flows very naturally step by step, never losing momentum. While his development in Z may have been a bit more subtle compared to in the original Dragon Ball, Goku did naturally grow as a character all throughout, naturally because Dragon Ball was his story and his life, every new saga (Except Garlic Jr, but that's non-canon soooo doesn't really count) being the next step in that. As set up by the ending of Z, Goku's next step after saving the universe from Majin Buu should have naturally been to train his new student to pass on the torch. Bring things full circle, since close to the start of the story he became a pupil to a wise but laid back martial arts master, and now he IS a wise but laid back martial arts master. This was the part of his story where he was still a great powerful hero, but he was getting older so as much as he loves fighting and all that it's time to realize that he's getting old and the world needs a new hero to protect it for when he's gone.

GT should have been about Goku training Uub, as well as possibly other characters like Pan or even Bra, so the new generation could grow strong and carry on in his and the other Z Fighters place when the time came. Goku still would have fought to protect the universe if danger showed up at his door, but the focus would have been as much on Uub taking on the role of Earth's defender and ultimately saving the day when he needed to with Goku's encouragement and support, the same as Goku did with Gohan except here he wouldn't take the torch back when Uub's calling in life turned out to be elsewhere. Which it wouldn't, because he was literally born to be Goku's pupil.

Instead what happened? Uub was shoved aside in the first episode to not be heared from again until just short of halfway through the series, never really amounting to anything. None of the other younger characters do either. And how does the series actually start off? With Goku turning into a kid, and a group of three having to go into space to find some dragon balls. And then later on it turns out they have to fight an evi villain who wants to collect the dragon balls to achieve his goal of universal domination. Yeah, you heard right. It's basically a re-hash of the Pilaf saga, except it's "IN SPACE". They're pretty blatant about it too, since there's two episodes that're essentially a re-hash of the episode introducing Oolong except not as good. So yeah, instead of moving the story forward, we regress the story and the main character back to the very beginning, ditching all the other supporting characters we'd come to love for a while in the process and pretty much dropping what should have actually been the main storyline starting out with no fanfare.

Continuing on from Z, the show is an awkward tonal shift where we go from epic story where Goku saves the entire universe from the biggest baddest villain yet, to goofy stories about a planet where everything is giant sized, Trunks dressing up as an alien bride for some giant fatso, and a bunch of weird guys in spandex who have the power to make people dance by singing really bad songs. Yeah, it's kind of stupid. And then once we get to the Baby Saga things suddenly go back to being much more serious like in Z, as if the writers suddenly realized "Oh crud, this isn't working! We've got to fix this" The tone is just off for a while. And the stories themselves just don't work for what the series should have been like.

The Baby Saga and Shadow Dragon Sagas are often cited as being fantastic concepts for a continuation of Dragon Ball, and that's because they really are. With proper tweaking and if the story followed it's natural progression, they could have worked great in a proper follow up to Z. The Shadow Dragons especially were theoretically the perfect final boss for Dragon Ball, being the corrupt physical embodiments of the Dragon Balls themselves. But not only was their execution poor in places, but as we've established the natural progression of the story was derailed from the get go. Uub should be the secondary main character, the series should be about his journey to becoming earth's new hero ending with Goku's retirement and settling down, or deciding that even if he's old and not the true hero of the story anymore he can still carry on with his love of fighting with whatever time he has left. Uub should have been a greater focus and defeated at least some of the villains, including Omega Shenron with Goku's help perhaps so they both strike the final blow, and probably not have it be a cheap rehash of Buu's defeat.

But no, the story was broken from the start and no-one seemed to realize it along the way and make any effort to re-rail it. Goku barely developed at all, and his being a kid again at the start was the physical representation of the stories regression and desperately clinging to the past to try to appeal to the mindset in Japan that the original series was where Dragon Ball was at it's best and most iconic. And his remaining a kid throughout the series despite it's apparent shift to correct that misstep embodied the wonky tone that made it seem like the series was caught between moving forward or not. He doesn't really grow much as a character from these appearances, stuff just happens to him and he reacts the way you'd expect him to. And Goku does pretty much everything that really matters most himself while every other character gets sidelined 90% of the time. It really took the untrue idea people have of Goku making everyone else irrelevant around him and made it true for this series.

And then there's that ending... look, I know a lot of people really like it and I can see the value in it, and I can understand people loving it and I suppose from one point of view it works... but I don't like it. I have never liked it. I've never been satisfied with it and it makes me happy to know for sure these days that GT is non-canon so I don't have to think about it as how this story ends. I'll get into it when I talk about the Shadow Dragons Saga and go into great detail looking at it from multiple viewpoints, but just know that it kills the series for me.

So, yeah, that's how I feel. GT could have been an amazing series if it took the natural route that Dragon ball should have gone, but the fact that they chose to regress the story in a cheap attempt at pandering and all the other issues I mentioned and more really derail the series beyond repair.

So then why did I say this Saga was good back at the start? For all the reasons I mentioned and the simple fact that, aside from this laundry list of complaints, it was still an overall enjoyable experience with some great moments and ideas. It wasn't great, it could be boring or enfuriating at times and wasn't anything special in the grand scheme of Dragon Ball stories. But for the most part, it was fun. It could have been a fantastic saga with the right tweaking, and while it can't save a broken, bad series like GT, on it's own it could be entertaining and fun for the most part. If you were to watch anything from GT, the Baby Saga is definitely the one you should check out because it is worth watching at least once if you're a Dragon Ball fan. (Though maybe not if Piccolo is your fave).

Overall, I'd give the Baby Saga a B-

I had fun overall, and as much as I don't really see myself re-watching anything from this show again anytime soon, the best parts of this Saga make me really wish I could love the show more and it turned out better. It does prove that the series had value and while I can't say the same for the previous arc, I'm glad I watched it again.

Well, I guess now that I've gotten my thoughts on the Baby Saga out of the way, I guess it's time to re-watch the Super 17 Saga... ugh. Pray for me, people.

[dragon-ball-meta]

This one of THE worst analysis videos I’ve ever seen, for a number of reasons. For one, half the time, the footage or clips they show have literally NOTHING to do with the thing they’re talking about. Just plain sloppy editing. For another, their points are... well, wrong, even counting their title as simple clickbait hyperbole. Let’s have a look at the damage

-Goku is apparently “evil” for liking to fight and... obsessed with winning above all else, even the lives of his friends. Their example? Trying to observe how Beerus fought as opposed to simply rushing in to face him and ensuring an ass kicking. Again. Yes, this somehow proves he’s not obsessed with having a good fight, but with winning it at all costs. ...That’s not Goku, boys. Goku WANTS a fight that pushes himself to his limits. They also accuse him of literally picking fights with alien entities who then “turn their wrath toward earth”... when the sole time that ever happened was with Beerus, who was headed to Earth regardless, and not out of wrath. Most of Goku’s fights were incidental in that regard. -They repeat the “Goku got all these universes genocided” argument that has been debunked countless times and even disproven within the series itself for OVER HALF A YEAR NOW. For comparison, this is the equivalent of making theory videos based on the first episode of Season 1 of a show after the season finale aired... for Season 3. After you’ve already reported on relevant episodes on your own site. -They... literally blame Goku for Resurrection F and what happens. It’s because of Goku’s “arrogant actions” that the Earth is destroyed, because... he didn’t run into the ROSAT before fighting Freeza? He didn’t NEED to. That’s literally got NOTHING to do with what happened. Or because he went to train with Whis INSTEAD of using the ROSAT? Cuz uh... training with Whis is literally what got them the form that gave them even a tiny chance. And Freeza destroying the Earth happened because Vegeta took the time for one last taunt and never dreamed Freeza would risk killing HIMSELF by destroying the planet while he was still on it. Y’all literally rewrote the arc/movie to pull that one out of your asses. -...they literally, LITERALLY try to blame him for Zamasu’s insane actions. Because he wanted to spar with him. Holy hell, way to blame the victim, ScreenRant. Besides, Zamasu already hated Mortals. Seeing Goku’s power simply scared him into acting early, and gave him the idea to steal Goku’s body to do it in. They also claim nothing bad would ever happen if Goku would just give up fighting but... the entire series says you’re an idiot. -Okay, so... I have no idea what the actual hell their next point is. It seems like they’re talking about the Tournament of Power again, but they’re showing footage of the Tournament of Destroyers with Universe 6. Assuming it’s the latter... Goku never cooked that tournament up. The stakes and the rules were agreed upon by Beerus and Champa. If they mean the ToP... still not his idea. Zeno came up with that. As for the consequences, they sound more like the ToP consequences, so idk, but they’re def not the stakes of the ToD. So either this is plain bad research, or laziness. Or both. Probably both. -Goten and Trunks fighting Buu? Really? First, not even his choice. He wanted to fuse with Gohan to fight. Popo was the one who suggested the boys. Second, Goku also explained, in detail, why he felt the need to stay out of this; he was dead. The living needed to be able to handle things without him being there, he wanted them to not be so dependent on him now that he was gone. And using his new Transformation required so much energy, it shortened his time back in the realm of the living to boot. But finally: Gotenks stood more than a chance against Buu in that form. He was evenly matched, in fact. But Goku had no idea Buu would take that form, or even could besides, so... not sure how he’s somehow wrong for that? Besides, isn’t throwing untrained kids into deadly situations something Piccolo gets praised for? Also why was this segment called “Tournament of Power”??? More sloppy editing. -They literally call Goku a “super villain who doesn’t care about Earth” because he conserved his energy and didn’t go all-out against Frost. No. Seriously. They do. -Aaaand now they’re citing anime filler when he was training Gohan in the ROSAT. Even in the context of said filler, their criticism here is ridiculous. Apparently, in trying to push Gohan into going Super Saiyan, he “evilly” fires a Kamehameha at his son who doesn’t have the form yet. Which is evil. Or something. Screw the fact that this was a desperate situation that required Gohan to tap into that latent potential at will to stand a chance vs Cell, he’s evil for doing it. -AND THEN... AND. THEN. They have the absolute nerve to suggest he was evil for having transported Cell off of the Earth. Why? because he went to King Kai’s planet, so he merely “traded one planet for another instead of dropping Cell off in some desolate place like deep space”. Two problems there: 1. King Kai’s planet is the size of a city block rolled into a ball with four inhabitants. Far, FAR cry from comparable to the Earth. Even King Kai was understanding of the decision. 2. Goku’s Instant Transmission requires him to either be able to specifically see where he wants to teleport to, or to have an energy signal to lock on to to get there. It’s why Gohan had to flare his power as high as it could go to get Goku back to Earth when Freeza came. It’s why Kaioshin had to rescue them when Buu destroyed the Earth, as Goku couldn’t find an energy signature to lock onto in time. This is BASIC. STUFF. Holy sweet Jesus, you should be embarrassed by this. It’s ignorant AND poorly-made.

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball Z 265

Last time, Majin Buu got his ass kicked by Gohan, so he blew himself up and came back an hour later.... to challenge Gotenks instead.    No one knows why he would want to do this, but Goten and Trunks insist on taking him on, and Gohan doesn’t seem very firm about stopping them.

Meanwhile, some flesh off of Buu’s back has sloughed off and is slithering around among all the rocks, but that probably doesn’t mean anything...

So there’s a few things at play here.   First of all, no one gives Buu any credit for intelligence.   He’s demonstrated on more than one occasion that he’s smarter than he lets on.   The problem is that the characters who know that aren’t around to warn the boys.   Babidi got killed, and Goku’s stuck in Otherworld.  The Supreme Kai’s been warning anyone who will listen not to underestimate Buu, but no one’s ever listened to him on this point.  

Of course, Goten and Trunks’ immaturity plays into this as well.    They take Buu’s challenge at face value, and wonder why he’d ask for something so stupid.   It never occurs to them that maybe he’s asking to fight Gotenks precisely because it isn’t stupid at all, so maybe they shouldn’t play into his hands like this.  

What’s really dumb about this is that Buu made it pretty clear in the last episode that he was never in any real danger of losing his last battle with Gotenks.    He only kept fighting so he’d have something to do while he waited for Gohan to show up.   Gotenks knows this, but he doesn’t seem to care.

Finally, and most crucially, why is Gohan just standing around letting this unfold.    He knows it’s risky to let Gotenks fight instead, but when they complain, he just yields the floor and lets them fight in his place.   What was the point of getting that power up from the Old Kai if he wasn’t going to deal with Buu himself?   Why isn’t he attacking Buu right now, instead of standing there like a dope waiting for Buu to make his move?

It’s inexperience, pure and simple.   Gohan dominated Buu in their last encounter, and he probably figures that there’s no harm in letting Gotenks go first.    If the kid loses, Gohan can step in to help, right?  

I’d ask why Piccolo doesn’t object to any of this, but he had a nervous breakdown three or four episodes ago, so who can blame the guy?  The only one who does suspect something’s up is Bee.   I guess he can smell deception in the air?   Anyway, no one listens to him because he’s a dog.

So he has to run towards the fight and show them what he’s seen, but by then it’s too late.

Suddenly, the pieces of Buu’s body jump on Piccolo and Gotenks and envelop them...

Then they recombine with Buu, apparently infusing Piccolo and Gotenks into his body somehow.

Look, I don’t want to be too hard on Gohan, but this is EXACTLY HOW CELL TRICKED HIM SEVEN YEARS AGO.   Gohan was stronger than Cell, and he could beat him senseless without even trying, and then Cell revealed that he had a power Gohan couldn’t stop with punching.   Yeah, Gohan had no idea he could do this, but why did he let Buu live long enough to demonstrate this kind of ability.    In theory, he has the power to kill Buu with a single Kamehameha.    If he doesn’t, then there was no point in sending him down here, but if he does, then he should have just done that two episodes back.

Incidentally, why didn’t the Supreme Kai tell anyone about this?   We haven’t gotten to that episode yet, but later, he’ll explain how he’s seen Buu absorb people before, so it seems kind of odd that he didn’t anticipate this, or warn Gohan about it.   

When the process is complete, Buu has Gotenks’s Fusion vest, a longer tentacle, and a nose.    Also, he talks more eloquently.   This form is sometimes referred to as “Super Buu 2″.   I think I’ve seen “Buutenks” used before, but that sounds kind of dumb.  

Buu declares himself to be the “Mightiest Majin”, which is a line I’ve never understood.   Throughout this story, characters have referred to him as a “Majin”, as if he were one of a group of other Majin, and I’m pretty sure it’s just a word Toriyama made up for this story.   It’s supposed to be a portmanteau of “ma”, the Japanese word for “evil” and “djinn”, or “genie”.   Are there other Majins?  Does Buu know of any besides himself?  Wasn’t he already stronger than any of them to begin with?

Anyway, this whole development reveals a crucial flaw in any anti-Buu strategy.   As powerful as Majin Buu is, it’s not enough to just match him in strength.  If he runs into anyone strong enough to defeat him, he’ll just absorb that guy, or however many other guys he need to in order to stay on top.   It almost feels like this is some overriding aspect of Buu’s nature, like Bibidi programmed this into him.  

So why didn’t Buu just absorb Gohan, since he’s the strongest one.   Ah, but Buu wanted to have someone to fight once he increased his power.   There’s an element of risk to this plan, because Buu’s power-up is mostly contributed by Gotenks, and the fusion will expire soon.   That’s why Buu waited an hour before coming back to pull this stunt.   He didn’t want to absorb Gotenks back in Episode 262, because he didn’t know how much longer they would last.   This way, he got them right after they fused, so he has the full time at his disposal, however short it is.   

Even so, he has to beat Gohan before that time runs out.   It probably would have been smarter to just absorb Gohan, but Buu loves a good fight too much to pass this up.    Besides, he can always absorb Gohan later.

Seriously, why did anyone think Toriyama was going to make Gohan the main character?   More to the point, why did anyone want Gohan to become the main character?  

Let me back up and explain that for anyone who didn’t know about the story.   Years ago, there was this legend that Toriyama planned to make Gohan the protagonist of the Buu arc, but fans in Japan sent him death threats or something, demanding that he bring Goku back, so he changed the ending.  Kanzenshuu.com has a pretty thorough article debunking this rumor, but the quick version is that Toriyama did plan on Gohan taking the lead, then changed his mind at some point, because he felt Gohan wasn’t suited for the role.  

I’m pretty sure the rumor only got started because of wishful thinking and changed premises.    There was a time, however brief, where Toriyama made it clear that he was making Gohan inherit the role from Goku.    And then Goku came back anyway.    The simplest explanation is that he changed his mind, but I think fans have trouble accepting the possibility of authors calling an audible in the middle of a story.   They like to imagine that the story exists fully-formed in the creator’s mind, and any inconsistencies or changes are due to outside influences.   When Gohan got sidelined from the Buu Saga, it was easier for fans to believe that there was some sort of conspiracy at work.    Either Toriyama’s editor made him change it, or Toei pressured him to bring the more marketable Goku back, or misguided Japanese fans coerced him into rewriting the story.  

My take on this is that the situation looks pretty obvious when you watch the show.   Maybe I shouldn’t say “obvious”, because when I first watched the Buu Saga, I kept obsessively checking Funimation.com’s episode list to see what would happen in upcoming installments, and I knew that Goku and Vegeta would somehow return, use fusion, and fight Buu themselves.  And that was the main event, as far as I was concerned.   For my money, the whole point of this fusion business was to see Goku and Vegeta use it, so what do we need Gohan for?  

But besides that, what exactly is the alternate scenario here if Gohan remained the protagonist?   Presumably, we’d get this far, I would think.   Gohan is too much for Super Buu, so he absorbs Piccolo and Gotenks to give our hero a greater challenge.   And it’s not an impossible task.    If Gohan can hold out until Gotenks’ fusion expires, he’ll have the advantage again.

But then what?    Do Goku and Vegeta come back to help him anyway?  Does Gohan journey into Buu’s body to rescue his pals, or does he just kill Super Buu and wait four months on an empty planet to wish everyone back to life?   Does Kid Buu ever factor into any of this?  

These aren’t insignificant questions.    I get the impression that anyone who believes that Toriyama changed the story because of fan pressure or editorial pressure or whatever, they believe this because they’re huge Gohan fans who resent him getting a raw deal.    Or they just don’t care for the Buu Saga in general, and they like the idea that there’s a better version floating around in Toriyama’s brain, or maybe even scribbled into a notebook.   Basically, they’re just rejecting this story, the one we got, and they’re clinging to a potentially better story that probably doesn’t exist.   

But I think that’s unfair.   It’s easy to say that an imaginary comic is better than the one that saw print.   It’s completely safe from criticism, because no one can read it, and no one can say for certain what is and isn’t in it.   So my question to the Gohan-truthers is: What was supposed to have happened instead?   How does Gohan being in the lead and beating Buu improve anything?    Because the way I see it, the story we got kicks ass. 

This part of it?   Not so much.   This is just Super Buu dominating Gohan for three episodes.   That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, except that we’ve been getting a steady diet of Majin Buu steamrolling everyone this whole time.    Hell, this isn’t even the first time he’s beaten Gohan.    It’s just taking a little longer tis time, that’s all. 

What does work is that this new development only adds to the burden on Goku’s conscience.    He was the one who insisted on staying dead, that he was the one putting the Earth in harm’s way, and that Gohan could protect the world better than he ever could.    He was the one who taught the boys the fusion technique, and assured his wife that they would be more than powerful enough to stop Buu and save the world.   And none of it is working.  

For me, that’s the most compelling thing about this leg of the story.    There was a period where, yeah, it looked like Goku was going to stay dead, by choice, and for keeps this time.    And everyone was comfortable that he was making the right decision.    But this arc is revealing that Goku was wrong.  He never should have left, and the world now suffers for his mistake.   

That’s a sort of pathos that Gohan just can’t grasp.   He’s a good character and maybe you could make him the protagonist of some other story, but he’ll never be quite as compelling as his father.    These are fictional characters, after all.   Gohan can’t just inherit his father’s qualifications as a heroic archetype.   Goku’s an alien refugee who grew up in the woods.    He’s an outsider to everyone, and somehow he keeps making miracles happen.   He has friends and family, but he never quite feels like he belongs.   He has a restlessness to him, and a profound modesty.   That’s why he was so sure that staying dead and trusting his sons to carry on in his stead was the right call.   He just blithely assumed others could do the things he did.   But he’s lightning in a bottle.   The Legendary Super Saiyan.   Others can learn to imitate his powers, or even surpass him in strength, but that still doesn’t change the fact that there’s something special about him. 

Let me blow your mind with a crackpot theory of my own.   I think Toriyama changed his mind about making Gohan the main character pretty early on.   A lot earlier than people may think.    Goku died in Episode 188, but he continued to appear in the show all the way up to Episode 199.   And then... he returned in Episode 205, to tell Gohan that he would return to Earth for the tournament.     From there on, the whole story revolved around Goku.   Everyone wanted to see Goku again, and even though Gohan was still in the lead role for a few more episodes, all he was interested in was hanging out with his dad. 

To put this in terms of the manga, Gohan’s first chapter as the main character was #421, published on May 11, 1993.    The chapter where Goku announced his return was #426, published on June 15, 1993.   Goku’s actual return to the comics happened in Chapter 430, published July 13, 1993.   From there, he remained a fixture in the manga until it concluded two years later.  

My point here is that Goku never really went away.   He was absent from the Namek Saga longer than he was absent from the post-Cell Games era.  In-universe, yes, he’d been dead for seven years, but for us, the audience, we basically flashed forward right up to the point where he returns.    My suspicion is that Toriyama tried telling new stories with Gohan and Videl in Satan City, got frustrated with it, and decided to bring back Goku after about a month.   But fans who took Gohan-as-protagonist as a guarentee, they assumed that Goku was returning as a supporting character, and he would eventually leave and let Gohan have the reins again.    When that didn’t happen, they assumed foul play.  

Anyway, Super Buu is clobbering Gohan at will.   If Goku doesn’t save him, who will?   Tien?   Pfft, yeah right, like Tien’s gonna... oh, wait.  

[darkot]

Today was a good day.

Well... yesterday was a good day. It is currently 9am, the morning after the day I was referring to.

I went up about 100 SR in Overwatch last night. Got on a 4 game win streak, and was really close to a 5th, but we lost our next match after that. But, it didn’t feel as bad as many of the final games of the night have lately. Which is odd, because we DEFINITELY could have tied it.

In that last match, we had a Widowmaker that did not switch until the very end--at which point, it was too late. It was pretty frustrating at the time, because they weren’t doing a whole lot, and they were taking up a DPS role slot. So, most of the damage dealing was left up to me. Not to mention that the enemy team had an absolutely INSANE Widow. I am not even exaggerating that, they might have been the best Widow that I have ever played against. And this guy on our team faced their Widow in a previous match where he was getting destroyed by them, and he STILL didn’t switch! I mean, I get it. He had something to prove. He didn’t want to concede defeat to that enemy Widow by playing something else. But for the love of god, man. Do you want to lose SR??

Despite that disadvantage, we actually did really well. We were playing on Volskaya. Both teams captured both points in their first offence round. We ALMOST managed to capture both points on our second offence round, but just fell a little short of that (we had 2 ticks on the cap, and were really close to a third. But they respawned too fast, and we ran out of time). Then, on that defence round, we almost held them at first point. We stopped about three of their pushes, but they got through on the fourth. So, we were fighting for a tie, but.. I don’t know what happened, really. We just couldn’t hold them off. Our comp just didn’t have the damage to wipe them, which we desperately needed. But, despite that being a disappointing end to the night, it still didn’t feel awful. I was absolutely DESTROYING during that session, and that made me happy.

I got what I believe was my first competitive sextuple kill as Pharah. Here is that, for anyone interested:

https://gfycat.com/splendidclearcutbubblefish

(tried to embed the gif in a post, but Tumblr’s stupid)

You have no idea how good it felt to hear the announcer yell “SEXTUPLE KILL!” Technically, that was eight eliminations. And you better believe that got play of the match, with one of them being an environmental! 

Pretty much all of my games yesterday were like that. There was this one Ilios match where I just kept knocking the Reinhardt on the other team into the pit over. And over. And over. He seriously must have been getting sick of me. I did it about four times. Got a quintuple on that match as well. Reinhardt knocked in the pit + Ana & Pharah killed with a single rocket + Soldier 76 and Lucio killed in an ult. Not as impressive as the one above, but it was nice.

I REALLY would have liked for that last match to have been a tie a least. A win preferably, but I would have settled for a tie with our handicap. It doesn’t feel good losing SR because of somebody else. But, all in all, I’m okay with it. 5 wins would have been nice, or 4 wins and 1 tie, but I can say that I was preforming amazingly. Even in that Volskaya match, I was giving them hell while essentially being a solo DPS. I can live with 4 wins and a loss, knowing that I was playing great.

I’m participating in a tournament with the rest of my team this Monday as well! This time, I intend on bringing home the gold! We’ve improved a lot since our last tourney. I think that we still aren’t ready for another “Team Silky”, with three top 500 players. But, barring that, I’m actually really confident that we can win this outright.

So.. yeah, that’s that about Overwatch. But, that wasn’t the only good thing to come from today. FIVE new episodes of Steven Universe were released, and holy fuck were they amazing!

I’m not going to go into too much detail about them, but they were really plot heavy episodes, which I LOVE! Everything was so intriguing. I was on the metaphorical edge of my seat the whole time! Yellow Diamond’s song was incredible, and the art direction was amazing! I loved the tone of the music. It felt reminiscent of old Disney villains, but with a more realistic touch. And something about seeing the scale of Yellow Diamond and Blue Diamond moving around while Steven and Greg were hiding was really powerful. Their height felt appropriately intimidating. They are colossal in comparison to the little bundle of preciousness that is Steven. I could easily see that being a video game level, haha. Trying to hide behind pillars whenever Yellow Diamond is looking in your direction. That’d make a great stealth level!

On top of that, episode one of BOTH Dragon Ball Z Kai: The Final Chapter and Dragon Ball Super english dubbed came out! The kid inside of me was so excited to see my childhood heroes in action again! While the DBZ Kai episode was meh, the Dragon Ball Super one was surprisingly awesome! 

DBZ Kai’s episode felt very filler-y, even though it sets up a plot point later. It revolves around Gohan going to highschool, trying to limit his powers to blend in with the humans and failing and... well, that’s about it. It wasn’t bad. I laughed at quite a few moments in that episode. I also REALLY liked Videl. I had almost totally forgotten how amazing she was around her introduction. Aside from finding her incredibly cool though, overall it just wasn’t fantastic. It’s just nothing in comparison to the core Majiin Buu arc. I really want it to get on to that whole story ASAP. I’ve been waiting for it since DBZ Kai proper ended with the Cell Saga. I was so disappointed by that! I just hope this doesn’t dwell on the “Great Saiyaman” shit too long. I have never been a fan of that, or Hercule. Some hardcore fans would lynch me for saying that, but I just can not stand the Great Saiyaman’s goofiness or Hercule's arrogance. However, in the Dragon Ball Super episode, I must admit that he’s been redeemed a little in my eyes...

Now, THAT was a good episode. It’s pretty filler-y in its own right. Goku is working as a farmer at ChiChi’s demand that he get a paying job, Goten (ugh) and Trunks are trying to get “toilet water” from a hotspring to give to Videl as a wedding gift now that her and Gohan are married.. Didn’t mind it. I had heard that DBS is very “slice of life” oriented, so I’m a little worried about how I will feel about it in the long run. It was good, but in a similar fashion to the DBZ Kai episode, I really want to get to some core plot and action. However, there WERE two very impressive highlights from this episode.

First, as I had alluded to earlier, Hercule has a moment that actually makes me like him a bit more. I still can’t stand how outrageously pompous he can be, but they follow up on the events of the Buu saga a bit. Hercule (ugh) wins a noble peace prize (uggggh) for saving the planet from an apocalyptic disaster (ugggggggggggh), and is awarded 100,000,000 Zeni (uggggggggggggggggggh), BUT, in the end, he gives the money to Goku (awwwwww). Honestly, it was a pretty touching moment. He admitted that Goku deserved it more because he was the one who actually stopped Buu. Perhaps there is another good moment like this in the Buu Saga that I just don’t remember (I guess we’ll see later into the ongoing Kai episodes!), but this felt like the first humanizing moment that Hercule has had since he was introduced in the Cell Saga. It was nice seeing that, behind that massive ego, he can be humble.

The second highlight outdoes that one, though. And that’s our first taste (pun intended) of Beerus. The tone that they set for him is amazing. At his whim, a planet’s (presumably) greatest chefs gather to cook a feast for him, to appease his appetite for delicious food. He admits that it is pretty delicious, but is displeased with a greasy feeling that one of the dishes leaves in his mouth. And just like that, BOOM, he destroys half of the planet! And that’s what he considers merciful! It was such a strong introduction to a character that is silly but at the same time scary powerful. It was honestly pretty chilling.

I know he’s not a villain in the traditional DBZ villain sense, but it feels like there are more long term goals for him to eventually be Goku’s next big enemy. That is really what I look forward to the most in the Dragon Ball franchise. Every saga ups the ante in incredible ways. Aside from the original Dragon Ball, which was AMAZING in its own right, we start off with a brat of a tyrannical overlord who is feared throughout the entire galaxy, a biomechanical android obsessed with perfection to feed his narcissism, who is created with the cells (ha) of that previous villain PLUS every major protagonist thus far, and then a primordial being who is the embodiment of evil and rage itself! DBZ may be more oriented around action than a complex story, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t have some of the most hype, iconic villains around. And for good reason! Every one sets the bar higher and outdoes the other. They continually create a greater and greater challenge for the main characters to overcome. And now, we have a GOD of nonchalant destruction who is entirely neutral in terms of personal morality. If they do have larger, long term plans for him to be a main villain in the series like I’m thinking, then I’m glad that they’re not jumping into that immediately. I don’t think that the bar can go much higher than a god, but that’s fine. Because if they are setting him up to be a major antagonist at some point, then they made that bar faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar out of Goku’s reach. I believe that even at the point that DBS is at in Japan, Goku isn’t even remotely as strong a Beerus. He can’t hope to defeat him right now. So, they have to continue to appease him. If there is a point where he becomes a serious threat to earth and Goku has to stop him, then that will be much later on. Unless they have no intentions of making him a villain and he is just a main character now, then they are really playing a long con with him. So long in fact, that another main villain appears and is beaten. Who even knows how many more will come before it’s Beerus’ turn? Regardless, I find it brilliant how (in my speculation) a core villain is being kept around for multiple arcs in the story, as a looming threat and ultimate milestone for the protagonists to slowly reach.

On another note, my laptop is totally fucked. While typing all of this, it has been an absolute pain trying to keep it up. Currently, I have a big box on my bed from a heater that my mom got for Christmas, propping up the screen of my laptop. The hinge that keeps the screen anchored to the base is broken. So, now, it doesn’t stay open on its own. Either it falls back all the way, or it will fall closed if I pull it too far forward. On top of this, the screen is horribly cracked, like those Iphones you see that still work despite the glass being broken (the screen was protruding out from the shell of the laptop, so I tried to push it back in. Turns out there was a magnet out of place behind it that was supposed to go in this indent in the shell, but.. well, wasn’t when I tried to push the screen back in. So, the screen pressed against the magnet and now I have five or so long cracks across my screen). It has a LOT of trouble turning on too. Like, I’m scared to turn it off, because every time I turn it back on, it takes about 30 minutes to boot up the OS. It’s also missing 3 keys, the touchpad no longer pushes in (I don’t know what happened to it, but it’s raised now o.O), and it is INSANELY slow.

These are honestly probably the last couple weeks of this laptop’s life. But, that’s understandable. I’ve had it for a little over five years now. It’s had a really good run. What I’m dreading more than its eventual failure however, is getting its replacement.. I’ve had my eyes on Wacom’s “Mobile Studio” since it was revealed late last year, as a replacement for this laptop once it goes, as another portable computer. But, I’ll have to drop about 3 grand to get it. It’s an investment, I know. But I just.. really don’t want to spend that kind of money right now. I’d certainly be drawing more often if I had it. I’d probably be more productive overall, because it would be faster. I could take it around with me. Work from anywhere, unlike with my laptop in its current state of falling apart. I don’t know.. I’ve wanted a mobile tablet for years now. The spiritual ancestor to the Mobile Studio, the “Wacom Companion” was what I had my eyes on since this laptop started showing problem. This has been something a looooooooong time in the making. But, at no point since I wanted the first Wacom Companion in 2013, to now when I want the Mobile Studio in 2017, have I been willing to bite the bullet and pay that $3000 pricetag. It seems my hand is going to be forced soon, however...

Wow.. I’ve been typing for almost two hours. It’s 20 minutes to 11am. I should get some sleep. At this point, it might be a better idea to just stay up through the day and go to bed early tonight. Either way though, I’m ending this here.

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball Z 219

So let me just recap the last twenty episodes.  Gohan went to high school, and he didn’t want anyone to know about his super powers, so he invented a superhero persona to disguise himself.   Videl learned his secret, and blackmailed him into entering the 25th Tenkaichi Budokai, because she also learned that he was the son of former Budokai champion Son Goku.    Videl is, of course, the daughter of former Budokai champion Mr. Satan, so she thinks it would be a dream match to fight Gohan, but she has no idea how much stronger Gohan is.   

Overhearing Gohan talking about the tournament, Vegeta invited himself to the competition, just so he can Gohan could have a real competition instead of Gohan just steamrolling the others.   Then Goku decided to join in, cashing in his one day to return to the living world.    And before you knew it, we had this feel-good reunion on our hands, with most of the Z-Fighters and their friends having a fun time.   

Except the Surpreme Kai is also in the tournament, as he and his sidekick Kibito have entered undercover, apparently for reasons having to do with two other entrants, Yamu and Spopovitch.    As far as anyone can tell, Y&S were once ordinary humans, but they’ve been drastically changed, and they seem to have some evil agenda for the tournament.   

And that brings us to this episode, the finale of the “World Tournament Saga,” as Funimation reckoned the story arcs back in 2001.    The irony is that the past ten episodes have been all about this tournament, but it’s actually been nothing but a sideshow.    The real story unfolds here, with Kibito facing Gohan in the fourth match of the first round.    Kibito just wants Gohan to turn Super Saiyan, and the Supreme Kai explains that this is because he expects Yamu and Spopovitch to assault Gohan.     Gohan could easily fight those two off, but Shin plans to psychically restrain Gohan, allowing Yamu and Spopes to do their business.    The point of all this, as we’ll see later, is that the Supreme Kai wants to follow Yamu and Spopovitch back to their boss.     

I say all of this because Episodes 200-219 are sort of a lull in DBZ.   I don’t know if everyone sees it that way, or maybe it’s just me, but it is tempting for me to write this part off as kind of boring.    Mostly, I look back on it fondly because I was excitedly buying these episodes on VHS tapes in the summer of ‘01, because I really wanted to know what happened next.    I don’t know why I’m so nostalgic for those days.    I felt kind of pathetic at the time: this huge nerd, fresh out of college, sitting alone in his apartment watching anime tapes.   A couple of liveblog posts ago, I used a joke that I’ve been sitting on for 18 years because I had no one I could share it with.   This batch of episodes is a little lower-energy than the rest, but they’re still special to me, and they do carry a heapin’ helpin’ of plot, even if it looks like it’s just the gang sort of whiling away an afternoon.  

Sometimes you can just do that, you know?    You can blow a day doing something fun instead of something that “keeps the plot moving”, and it’s not wasted time.   I don’t regret those nights watching these episodes on tape over a glass of milk and a bag of white chocolate macadamia nut cookies.   If anything, I regret that I might have ever regretted it.    Sometimes you just gotta chill out.   DBZ knows it, and we should know it too.   

Anyway, Gohan’s agreed to Kibito’s request that he turn Super Saiyan, but he decides to up the ante and offers to turn into a Super Saiyan that has advanced beyond a Super Saiyan by further overcoming the Super Saiyan wall that separates Super Saiyans from Ascended Ultra Super Saiyans who have surpassed the Super Saiyan.    In case you’re wondering, the term “Super Saiyan 2″ still hasn’t been coined yet.   It can’t happen soon enough.

When I watched these episodes the first time, I didn’t understand the distinction between SSJ1 and SSJ2, mainly because the show hardly bothered to distinguish them as separate forms.   I just assumed that Gohan powered up when he beat Cell, but he hadn’t actually transformed into something other than what he was when he first started fighting him.   You can tell the difference between SSJ1 and SSJ2, but it’s kind of tricky, and it helps to have a side by side comparison.    With Kid Gohan, it’s pretty easy, because you see him in both forms for several episodes, and he switches back and forth a couple of times.   

With High School Gohan, good luck, because his hairstyle looks about the same either way.

Here he is in Super Saiyan 1, back in Episode 205.   

And here he is again in Episode 200.   Not much of a difference.    Really, the only reason I think I can tell is because of context clues in the story.   Gohan only transformed in #200 to disguise himself, so why waste energy using his strongest form just to clobber bank robbers?    In #205, he was just training, and while he might have eventually worked his way up to training in SSJ2, Episode 205 was his very first day of whipping himself into shape, so it doesn’t seem likely.    And in Episode 210, I assume he went to SSJ2 because he offered to do it.     Why bring it up at all if he wasn’t planning to use the form?

Everyone’s amazed, especially Videl and Gohan’s other friends, who now realize that Gohan was the “Golden Warrior” and Great Saiyaman.   But Vegeta’s not impressed, becuase he senses that Gohan is actually weaker now than he was when he defeated Cell seven years ago.   

Lines like this are evidence that Vegeta must have mastered the SSJ2 transformation himself by this point.   I’ve seen this hotly debated in the fandom, since we really have no direct proof, but Vegeta was certain that he could beat Gohan here, and I don’t see how he could believe that unless he managed to replicate the power Gohan used to beat Cell.    Make no mistake, Gohan may be weaker than he was in Episode 192, but that’s still way, way stronger than almost everyone else here.   

The live crowd starts to figure out that Gohan must have something to do with those guys from the Cell Games, which is exactly why Gohan asked everyone not to transform at this event.  

Meanwhile, Yamu and Spopovitch ready some weird device and they prepare to go into action.    As they do...

The Supreme Kai uses some sort of power to immobilize him long enough to allow Y&S to do their thing.   

I’m not really sure how these two expected this to go.    They were scouting the tournament for strong powers, but did they really think Spopovitch would be strong enough to restrain such a person all by himself?    Shouldn’t they be a little suspicious at how easy this is?    They don’t know that the Kai is helping them right now, but you’d think it would occur to them.     In any event, they jab Gohan with some sort of bottle, and it sucks the ki energy right out of his body.  

Krillin tries to make the save, but Piccolo stops him because this is too important.  I do like that Krillin is the one to try to jump in.   He’s been riding with that kid for years, and he’s just used to having Gohan’s back.   You might as well as a fish to give up swimming.   

Videl tries to jump in too, but Goku stops her.    She’s pretty upset about it...

But Goku assures her that his son can survive this.    He doesn’t know what’s going on, and he may not entirely trust the Supreme Kai, but he trusts his son’s toughness.     There is something I really like about Goku and Videl’s interactions.    They barely appear together, but there’s a lot of untapped potential there.    For Videl, Gohan is this magical boy, a pure cinammon roll who can do wonderful things and sweep her off her feet.     But his dad is this Legendary Super Saiyan who grew up in the woods and pees wherever he wants.   Goku embodies a lot of the stuff Gohan is trying to hide from her, and that must surely intrigue and frighten Videl.

Cool shot of Mighty Mask (Goten and Trunks) watching this play out from the nosebleed seats.    I’m not sure why they don’t jump in.   I guess they figure if the adults aren’t getting involved then they shouldn’t either, but that seems contrary to what they’ve been doing up to now.

Then Yamu announces that their doohickey is full, so they can stop now.   Mission accomplished, whatever that was.

Kibito just stands there like a goof.   I guess they have no idea what he’s all about, so they must think he’s too scared to intervene.    They did threaten to kill anyone who got in their way, but it’s strange that they came here to steal ki from powerful fighters, and never considered that they might meet people stronger than themselves.

Spopovitch even remarks on how easy this was.    Seriously, they filled that whole bottle after attacking just one guy.    You’d think that would make them a little wary, but no.

Then they just fly away.   The Supreme Kai waits for them to get a decent head start, then he announces that he’s going to follow them, and he asks the Z-Fighters to join him if they wish.   

Goku’s in, because he wants to know what’s happening, and he’s not worried about Gohan, since he survived, just as the Kai promised, and Kibito’s going to stay behind and heal him, so they must be on the level.

Yeah, Gohan’s alive, but he looks to be in pretty bad shape.   See, this is exactly the skin color Yamu and Spopovitch have all the time, and I’m pretty sure that’s meant to indicate how physically messed up they are.   But Turles looked like this all through Movie 3, with no explanation given.   Was the Tree of Might’s fruit doing that to him?   Who knows?

Videl asks Gohan to shake it off.    I don’t think Taylor Swift songs can fix what’s wrong with Gohan right now, but I’m betting that usually perks him right up.   

Piccolo and Krillin are going to go with Goku, but Vegeta hates this idea, because their match is next, and Vegeta wants to fight Goku above all other business.    Whatever the Supreme Kai is up to, it could waste Goku’s whole day, and they might never get a chance to have their fight.  

So ultimately, Vegeta joins the Supreme Kai, since the only way he can ensure he gets his fight with Goku is by sticking close to him and making sure this situation gets resolved in timely manner.  

And 18′s staying behind, because the Tournament has a cash prize but the Supreme Kai is doing this pro bono.   

She also tells Krillin to bug out if things get too rough.   I’m pretty sure Krillin’s been fighting above his class for decades now, so it’s a little late for that.   18 knows that, but she’s gotta say it anyway.

So everyone leaves, and Kibito heals Gohan in the ring, promising a full explanation later.   

Then Videl asks if she can join Gohan and Kibito.   Gohan isn’t thrilled with that idea, but she insists,so they leave together.

Mr. Satan hates that, but he can’t really do anything about it.    Also, this is the first time he’s seen Videl fly, which is a shock.

Chi-Chi is worried.   I’m not sure why everyone in the stands is all beat up.   Maybe Chi-Chi did that while she was worried about Gohan earlier.    Tbh, I only took this screencap because I like Chi-Chi’s mussed-up hair.  

So... what about the tournament?    What about the tournament?   This is kind of a shame, really, because when I first watched these episodes, I just naturally assumed they were really going through with this event, and in a few episodes we were really going to see Goku fight Vegeta in a Budokai match.   But in hindsight, the 25th Budokai looked like a real clusterfuck of a tournament.   16 participants, many of them hopelessly outclassed, and the brackets were completely screwed up.    Was anyone really looking forward to seeing Yamu fight Goten and Trunks in a Might Mask costume?   The reality is that this tournament really was never meant to happen.  

Far away, the Z-Fighters catch up to the Supreme Kai, and he starts filling them in on the plot.    Long ago, there was an evil wizard--or “Madoshi”-- named Bibidi, who “accidentally conjured up” a monster.    Okay, that’s interesting, because the dub always said that Bibidi created Majin Buu, but I’ve seen other sources state that Buu existed long before Bibidi hooked up with him.    So that explains that.   

All Buu ever did was wreck shit, and he destroyed hundreds of inhabited worlds, which sounds kind of nostalgic to Vegeta, since the Saiyans basically did the same thing in the day...

But the Kai can hear his thoughts, and he quickly points out that Buu is far beyond the power of the Saiyan species.  Frieza killed nearly all of the Saiyans in one attack, and the four Supreme Kais could have killed Frieza in one blow, but Buu killed the other Supreme Kais, which is why Shin is the only one left.  

The problem with Majin Buu was that even Bibidi had trouble handling the guy, so he would store him in a magic ball from time to time.    I’m not quite sure how that worked, but I assume Bibidi would unleash Buu on a planet, then put him into storage before heading off to the next target.   

So this is a pretty big infodump.  It takes up half of this episode and half of the next one.    One thing I like about how this is executed is that we keep shifting from one group of characters to another.   It’s a little thing, but it keeps the scene from getting stale.   Also, Shin and Kibito are just telling the same story, so it’s not like we lose anything this way.  

So Shin managed to kill Bibidi while Buu was sealed up, and that ended the Buu crisis, except they never actually disposed of Majin Buu.    The thought was that there was no need, since only Bibidi had the ability to free Buu from his seal, and life on Earth was primitive and undeveloped, so this planet seemed like a good place to leave Buu.    They put the ball somewhere that Earthlings would likely never go to, and called it good.  

That’s a bit of a plot hole, though, because later, a major plot point will be that Buu might end up getting released prematurely, which implies that the magic ball is a lot easier to open than this, even without a wizard.   But we’ll get into that later.

As it turns out, the Supreme Kai recently discovered that Bibidi had a son, Babidi, who is just as evil as his dad, and has resolved to break the seal and unleash Majin Buu all over again.   

I have seen sources that say Babidi wasn’t actually the flesh-and-blood offspring of Bibidi, but actually a sort of magical duplicate of Bibidi, one that survived Babidi’s death and vowed to carry on where the original left off.   Sort of like how Piccolo Junior began as a virtual copy of King Piccolo, but gradually developed into a distinct being.   I suppose that’s more plausible than Bibidi getting laid, but otherwise, I don’t know that it really changes the story at all.

So Babidi wants to release Majin Buu, and he’s apparently getting close to reaching that goal.   So what does that have to do with Yamu and Spopovitch, and their mission to collect Gohan’s energy?   Well, that part has to wait for the next episode.   

And that’s the World Tournament Saga.   Next up is Babidi, and he’s a real treat.  

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball GT Retrospective (6/7)

[Note: This was originally written on January 15, 2013.]

So now we come to the end of the Shadow Dragon Saga, with only one composite Shadow Dragon left to go.  

What sucks about Omega Shenron is that he's so lukewarm as a villain.   He's supposed to be the most powerful bad guy ever, but he mostly stands around gloating, and he's incapable of actually finishing anyone off.   All of the major Dragon Ball villains left a pretty heavy toll before they were finally beaten.  The only guy Omega manages to kill is his own teammate Nuova Shenron, and he has to do that twice.  He's immune to every attack, shrugging off the combined offense of two Super Saiyan 4's, and yet he kicks Mr. Satan in the gut without hurting him.  The result is a long, boring slog where neither side make any progress.   Now, by comparison, my favorite Dragon Ball villain is Cell.  Cell kills thousands of civilians to gather strength, and he cowardly flees the Z-fighers when they try to force a confrontation.  He can recover from injuries, but he still has to resort to guile in order to gain the upper hand.   He then absorbs the Androids to attain his final form, which carries dramatic weight because Krillin was in love with Android 18.  He then flaunts his superiority by holding a tournament, daring anyone to oppose him.    Goku is no match for Cell, but he still gets his licks in, and that's an important element for any domineering villain.  Cell mocks Gohan for challenging him next, and tortures the other good guys to amuse himself, and this backfires disastrously.  Gohan begins demolishing Cell, and suddenly he's reduced to a pathetic mess.  He miraculously survives a desperate suicide attack, but he overplays his hand, returning to the battlefield for one last attack, which Gohan manages to overcome.  While he's a dangerous and supremely powerful bad guy, Cell always managed to be just vulnerable enough to make you think the good guys had a chance.   Omega Shenron offers none of that.  When he absorbs all seven Dragon Balls he claims to have all the powers of the other Shadow Dragons, but so what?  He was kicking Goku's ass without any of that.  Besides, the other Shadow Dragons sucked.  Goku laughs off their powers, but Omega no-sells all of Goku's best moves, including the Super Dragon Fist (again).   Omega can just reassemble his body, so it's no use.  Goku decides the only course is to self-destruct while holding Omega's arms behind his back, but Vegeta shows up in the nick of time and convinces him that it won't work.   Omega then presses his advantage by standing perfectly fucking still and watching while Bulma drives a Blutz Wave Generator Truck onto the battlefield.   She fires it at Vegeta, who turns into a Great Ape.   Everyone worries that Vegeta will go on a rampage, except the fans, who remember that Vegeta could retain his intelligence while in Giant Ape form.   Vegeta goes on a rampage anyway, then reveals he was just playing a little joke.   This wouldn't annoy me so much except this entire process takes like a hundred years to get through.   Vegeta finally turns into a Super Saiyan 4, and Omega Shenron just takes it in like none of this matters.   After all that, Vegeta admits that his joining the battle will make little difference, and he suggests to Goku that they should use the Fusion Technique.   See, this is what pisses me off so much about Dragon Ball GT.   One of the few lasting concepts from the show that anyone cares about is the Super Saiyan 4 form.  It looks really stupid, but fans dig it anyway, if only because it's the ultimate power in the Dragon Ball franchise.   They put SSJ4 Goku on the cover of the DVD box set I bought.   But the dirty little secret of GT is that SSJ4 barely gets used.   Goku doesn't even transform into Super Saiyan 4 until the series is more than halfway over.   Once he learns the power, he seems to be able to use it whenever he wants, as long as he wants, but he barely ever takes advantage of it.  Super 17 defeats SSJ4 Goku, so Goku kills him in base form instead.   There's (a little) internal logic to that scenario, but what was the point of introducing a new power-up to the franchise if they weren't going to use it?  The Shadow Dragons are the same deal.   Most of them weren't even worth using Super Saiyan 4, so why were they introduced in the first place?   The ones who were worthy opponents don't show up until near the end, and SSJ4 Goku doesn't really get rolling until Episode 56.   Meanwhile, the fans want to see if Vegeta can do it too, and he can, but by the time he pulls it off, they don't even let him do anything.   You have to wait until the series is nearly over before you get to see SSJ4 Vegeta, and then it's straight into the Fusion.   And guess what? The Fusion's a one-off deal, too.  Goku and Vegeta manage to to the Fusion Dance to become Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta, but the fusion wears off by the end of that episode.  They spend most of that one episode talking about fusion instead of letting the audience enjoy Gogeta's cool powers.   The whole point of GT is that, without the schedule headaches of adapting a comic book serial, Toei could tell a streamlined story without using filler.  And yet something as crowd-pleasing as SSJ4 Gogeta gets maybe 15 minutes of airtime.  How many episodes was Master Daltaki in?  Remember, the guy who liked to play with dolls and he wanted to take off Pan's clothes?   "Gosh, Master Daltaki's my favorite character!" said absolutely no one, ever.   What really, really, sucks about the limited use of SSJ4 Gogeta is that Gohan, Trunks, and Goten run interference so Goku and Vegeta can have time to create him.   This is in spite of the fact that they were no match for Omega Shenron to begin with, and they already spent their insufficient energy in a failed bid to recharge Goku.   Somehow Trunks manages to not only survive against Omega, but he manages to get in a decent kick while he's at it.  If base form Trunks can surprise Omega Shenron, then what do they need with a Fused Super Saiyan 4?   Why buy any time at all if every character is treated as interchangeable? Anyway, SSJ4 Gogeta nearly beats Omega Shenron, but he spends too much time screwing around, and the fusion wears off.   Omega does seem to be worn down some from the assault, but he just re-absorbs the Dragon Balls and he seems to be back at full power.   You know, it would have been a lot more tolerable if Omega had shown at least some fatigue from all of this.  What made Vegeta and Nappa's invasion so classic was that the Z-Fighters were hopelessly outclassed, but they managed to chop down the big oak by hanging in there and taking every advantage they could find.   Goku does manage to swipe the four-star Dragon Ball, preventing Omega from absorbing the full set.   The problem is that it appears to make no difference whatsoever.   Goku swallows it for good measure, and he and Vegeta spend a whole episode trying to fuse again, even though you have to wait at least an hour between Fusion Dances.  Finally, Omega Shenron toys with them by allowing them to do the dance unhindered, but by that time Goku has run out of gas.  He reverts to base form, which means he's no longer compatible to fuse with Vegeta because he's a little kid.   You'd think he could try fusing with Pan, but no one ever bothers to point out alternatives.   So now it looks like Vegeta will have to tackle Omega Shenron by himself, except at this juncture the four-star Dragon Ball pops out of Goku's forehead, and Nuova Shenron reappears.  At first he seems to be evil again, but he turns on Omega and traps him in an inescapable sphere of flame.   I don't see why this would be fatal to Omega Shenron since nothing else works on him, but Nuova is convinced that this will kill Omega and spare himself, because only his body is protected from the intense heat.  Omega simply possess Nuova's body, and we're right back where we started.   Oh, and Vegeta runs out of gas too, so that's also an issue.   Omega Shenron finally quits screwing around, and launches a big-ass energy ball at Goku.   Despite being completely exhausted, Goku not only holds back the attack, but survives it when Omega makes it blow up.  Vegeta and their sons make a last-ditch effort to fight Omega, and this goes about as well as you'd expect.  They're all hopelessly outmatched, yet Omega fails to kill a single one of them.   Finally, Goku emerges from the rubble with a Spirit Bomb.   He asks King Kai to help him summon energy from people all over the universe, so that the Spirit Bomb will be big enough to work.   This is smart thinking, and my only objection is that Toei just cribbed this strategy from the end of the Majin Buu arc.   Of course, GT Logic is an original creation of Toei, so while Goku readies the Spirit Bomb, Omega Shenron fires energy blast at him from pointblank range, and it doesn't hurt Goku at all.  Seriously, why did they worry so much about the fusion dance when Base Form Kid Goku was stronger than Omega Shenron the entire time?    Goku finally launches the damn attack, and it's the only thing that works on Omega, ever, so the fight is over.   All that's left are the Dragon Balls, which spontaneously spit out the original Shenron, now back to normal.  Shenron explains that he must exile himself from the Earth, but he grants one final wish from Goku to resurrect all the innocents killed in the conflict.  For no apparent reason, Goku then jumps on Shenron's back and leaves with him.  He makes a couple of pit stops to say good bye to Krillin and Piccolo, then he falls asleep on Shenron's back.   The Dragon Balls then float up to Goku's body, where they are absorbed somehow.   I have no idea what any of that means.   Goku doesn't even explain to his friends and family what he's doing or where he's going.    The Kais, who usually provide exposition for things like this, are never heard from again.   It's like Toei just assumes you can understand why this is necessary.   It's also unclear where Goku and Shenron went.   Is Goku dead?  Because Pan discovers his clothing lying on the ground, as if he faded away like Yoda.  In the GT Movie, which is set one hundred years later, an elderly Pan prays at Goku's gravesite.   So it makes sense that he was presumed dead at some point.   My guess has always been that Toei wanted to write Goku out of the story to end things once and for all, but he's been dead twice before already, so the only way to send him away for good was to do it so ambiguously that no one was sure where he went.   Trunks speculated that when the people of Earth learned to get along without the Dragon Balls, Shenron would eventually return.   Since the Balls were stuck in Goku, you'd have to assume he'd show up as well.   This was addressed by the Dragon Ball AF rumormongers, who held that Goku would return in that nonexistent series as "The Dragon God".   While Goku's motives are never revealed, the final episode of GT at least makes it clear that he never returned in a meaningful way.  A century later, Pan watches her own grandson fight one of Vegeta's descendants in the World Martial Arts Tournament.   She spots Goku in the crowd, but she can't find him, and decides it wasn't real.  Instead, Goku wanders around the stadium, apparently taking in the sights before he jumps into the air and flies away.   That doesn't answer a lot of questions, but it does demonstrate that he never visited Pan, or she would have been less likely to dismiss this sighting as an illusion.  No, the other Dragon Ball heroes are long dead, barely remembered by their descendants.   Goku doesn't seem to be dead, but in a world that moved on in his absence, he might as well be a ghost.  Whatever he's become, it'll never go back to the way it once was.   Personally, I find the ending of GT pretty weak.   For one thing, they ended Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z in similar fashion.  Goku leaves the World Tournament to marry Chi-Chi, then Goku leaves another World Tournament to train Uub, then Goku leaves another World Tournament... for no clear reason. The first two represented phases in Goku's life.   He becomes a young man and starts a family, then he becomes a middle-aged man and takes an apprentice.  The GT ending fittingly avoids any such milestones of life, since it spent the whole series cramming a fifty-something Goku into a ten-year-old body.    I've heard of fans crying at the end of GT, but I think it has more to do with the fact that the series is utterly finished, rather than the drama of a beloved character moving on to whatever it is he's going to do.  I think I would have preferred a proper epilogue, something to show us what happened to the rest of the cast, and why Goku left and what will become of him now.  But after sixty-four episodes of crap, I should be used to disappointment by now. NEXT: 100 Years Later