#dragonballsuper: super hero | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

okanra · 2 years

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⚠️ Note: This post is about Dragon Ball Super, and is written mostly for recap and research purposes, but it involves a few real-life related topics and will be pretty long so you should treat this like a blog post. If you’re comfortable with this and still curious to see what this is all about, keep your mind open and let’s go! 🤓

MY THOUGHTS/CONTROVERSIAL TAKE ON THE CURRENT STATE OF DRAGON BALL SUPER and DRAGON BALL FRANCHISE AS A WHOLE, AND THOUGHTS OF THE FUTURE OF THE BRAND

- PART 1: INTRODUCTION OF THE COMICS and TIMELINES -

1. INTRODUCTION:

Hello everyone, if this is your first time seeing me on your dashboard, my name is Kah and I’m an artist who have been working on a Dragon Ball webcomic named “Trunks and Goten in High school AU”, starring Goten and Trunks since 2021 and is still ongoing.

It’s used to appear on Google a lot until the current arc of Super happened, and Elon Musk’s decision to deleted the Moment feature on Twitter (that was the main link that mostly appeared on Google about my comic). It’s an art project that I’ve been letting it sleep inside my head for ~20 years and finally decided to manifest it into existence while infusing my style in it, until it got unexpectedly “canonized” by the Dragon Ball Super creators in late 2022 while the project is still in the beginning stage, in a way that I couldn’t predict it.

It changed everything afterwards of course. For both myself and the fandom, and maybe, the impact of this will be bigger than we think it will be 🤔

I know there’s nothing for you to believe in what I’m about to say, and I won’t force you to believe them too, of course, you have no obligation to do that. That’s exactly why you should try and read this and decide of what to think yourself, it can be something quite worthwhile.

The time this blog post is written is in January the 3rd, 2023. The incident was in December 2022, I will include timelines and many other articles down below, as well as images for you to see things more clearly. For the current me, this post is a recap for research purposes, and since I’ll be using myself and my work as an example, there’ll be some unwanted personal feelings unconsciously mixed in, but I’ll try to keep my mind as most neutral as possible.

You’re about to read my real thoughts on the current arc of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero since chapter 88, the similarity of my webcomic in it and many other deeper things, as well as my theory/glimpse at future of Dragon Ball franchise as a whole. I hope this read would be entertaining to you.

2. THE TIMELINE:

Before we get into the main topic, here’re some of my character designs and background visuals for my webcomic. If you can, read through some chapters as well, it’s not much but it will give you an idea of what to come next.

Ok so the first question to ask is, when did my webcomic project start? I say it’s around May 2021, in the midst of the Covid-era, when mostly everyone was quarantined at their homes. This webcomic art project is drawn so I can practice my drawing, storytelling and creative writing skills. It’s an indie project through and through, that takes a lot of time, effort and love. I don’t profit much from it tho, I mean my patreon is even opened in August last year and I didn’t even promote it much on any social media platform other than Twitter sometimes. So yes, the main purposes of it were mostly what I wrote above.

When did the current arc of Super start? Since 20th, December 2022. After the Granolah arc of the Dragon Ball Super manga ended, this is the arc that is currently running: the Super Hero arc. In appearances, there’re a bit of similar vibes from the manga and my webcomic in 2021, and while it may sound farfetched and like false accusation for everyone else, my intention is not exactly aiming towards that, it aims for something lying deeper. This is just the tip of the iceberg, that I would analyze and share a bit of it with you. Like I said, I would try my best to write it out as neutrally as possible.

From here on out, I’ll begin to list the entire timeline that leads to the current state:

- The last time Goten and Trunks appeared as main characters in canon was almost 30 years ago, I was talking about the Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT versions. Goten and present Trunks were not favored characters by fans, even when they have a small fanbase and have some fanworks throughout the years, they were still mostly listed as a funny dumb duo and unmarketable by the franchise. This leads to these two characters not being developed and touched upon by their creators for many years, because Toriyama is the type of artist that would draw because he likes it, yes, but he would cater to the masses of fans more (for example, a lot of his decision in the writing of Dragon Ball was suggested to alter into something else that fit the general audience more and he would mostly agreed, like his desire for Gohan to be the main character after the Cell arc, but Goku was brought back into the picture due to his iconic popularity and flat-character type, and that’s how we got 30 years of Goku’s journey). (what is a flat character: here)

This personality of his would later have a hand in him selling his ownership and license of Dragon Ball to Shueisha (main license holder), Toei (animation license holder) and Bandai (merchandise license holder). Akira Toriyama is the creator in name only, but big decisions are not depended on him. He’s pretty much like Stan Lee - the creator of Spider Man, but all the copyrights and licenses are hold by Marvel.

- In late 2019, I decided to re-picked up the Dragon Ball manga due to nostalgia. While remembering about my love for Goten and Trunks and seeing the lacked of content for them. Being forgotten by their own creators for unjustified reasons, I decided to write and draw my own story for Goten and Trunks, and published it to the internet since May 2021 on many social media platforms, but Twitter is where I’m the most active. And Twitter is the main international platform for many official account of Japanese brands, including manga, anime and of course, Dragon Ball.

- Any loyal Dragon Ball fans in the fandom community will know they mostly love the Toriyama style, and most will try to make their fan works in his style to honor him and the show itself (and will get more attention from other fans). And even though my webcomic is not as favorable as other Toriyama style fan arts and fanseries/fancomic due to the personal unique art style (I have my own drawing style) and differences in tone and storytelling (while the show mostly veers in the humor/gag/action direction, mine is more towards the dramatic/angsty/introspective side), it did raise the awareness to other fans in the community about the potential of the “forgotten half Saiyans”. Especially when two of my good friends that I usually talked and hyped with on Twitter are a Dragon Ball fanartist (@/amartbee) and a Dragon Ball content creator/YouTuber (@SLOplays) that always share official news of the show on his page, I included their handle names in here just for a few examples, in no way do I want to pull them in this whole mess of course. But anyway, both have a big following on Twitter, have big influences and love Dragon Ball.

- And they love my webcomic. The fanartist shared my webcomics a lot to her page and her community (blessed her), and while the content creator didn’t share it (except for a few times), he felt the love I have for Goten and Trunks that I put in my fan comics, and love them more and shared that feeling to his fans as well. So through my and their influences, the fans during the covid-era began to see the light on these characters, and want to see more of their potential as well as love them more. During this time, the Dragon Ball Super manga was in the Moro and Granolah arc, still focused on the journey of Goku and Vegeta defeating opponents in space, because they’re the fan-favorite, the icon of the brand for many years and Toei/Shueisha felt right to continue milking them for content and marketable purposes. Until the midst of 2021...

- After my webcomic started in summer of 2021 for a few months, the official account/website of Dragon Ball began to dropped the news of “DRAGON BALL SUPER: SUPER HERO” movie (in production) in late 2021. And everyone was curious over what’s this all about.

- Then in February 2022, we had the full key visual for DRAGON BALL SUPER: SUPER HERO movie like this. “That’s something we have never seen before right?”. Yes, indeed it was. It was. But everyone was ecstatic, including me.

- During the time of the movie being in the production stage, several visuals and interviews from the animation staff member as well as Toriyama himself were published online, twitter was always the fastest of course. Toriyama said he wanted to make Piccolo as the main character for this movie only, but Toei wanted to include Gohan as the co-protagonist to lure in the Saiyan fans, which held the more dominant side of the fanbase. Hence why the movie had two protagonists that were Piccolo and Gohan. But the weird thing is, they decided to finally include the Super’s teenager version of Goten and Trunks this time. They were drawn by Toriyama, but I can tell based on how good he was as a character designer, Toriyama himself didn’t think much about their designs due to how simple they were. This made me feel like they were not at the forefront of his mind, and more like he was “told to do”.

- When the movie was finally released across the globe from June 2022 until the rest of the year, we found out about the scene with Goten/Trunks was only about 2 minutes, and they did nothing major in the movie. This would later confirmed my theory of this movie being an experiment and a very clever survey from Toei to know the taste of the international fans at the time with characters other than Goku and Vegeta (because they had been milking them for almost 30 years and even when these two are still the icon, the taste of ithe fans have changed).

Despite that, their 2 minutes on-screen was enough for me, my friends, our friends and followers/fans to expressed our love for these two through likes, shares, fanarts and everything else.

- During this time, I still worked on my passion project aka the Goten and Trunks webcomic series, and with a few fan arts mixed in along the way. Still hyped with my friends and followers as a fan on many social media platforms. Love them, the hype in this fandom is real.

- After the movie was aired for a few months, in August 2022 chapter 87 ended with a note from the editorial staff that said the manga would go on hiatus to prepared for the next arc. This would later confirm my theory of “this break” being the time when the whole franchise and “Dragon Ball” brand’s marketing/research department to check on the stats from the movie (that acted as a survey for international fans) to know which direction to go next.

- Until August 2022, the official account/website of Dragon Ball dropped the visuals of the next arc, which included Goten and Trunks as super heroes, and this arc would be the arc before the Super Hero movie with them as the protagonists.

This is when I began to feel a queasy feeling that whispered something like “that was... Odd. Good but... Odd”. Because from the beginning of Dragon Ball Super until now, it has always been a Goku and Vegeta’s journey to space, there was no build up, no anything to lead to Goten and Trunks being protagonists at this point. Below are some examples from the Moro arc, they still remained in kid’s forms like what they have been for so many years like this.

- In November 2022, there’re leaks about the next arc of Dragon Ball Super aka chapter 88, and we found out this arc will focus on Trunks and Goten’s high school life, with Trunks as a protagonist and learn how to be a superhero.

This was when everything came crashing down on my head, shattered my rose colored glasses and connected all the dots. I decided to wait a bit longer to confirm my theory by reading chapter 88 and see the content in it. While most of the fans were ecstatic, because they finally got what they wanted: Goten and Trunks finally got their spotlight in canon; I was feeling nervous more.

- In 20th December 2022, chapter 88 got released and while it caught the eye of many fans from both Japan and the international, the first chapter of the arc got mixed reviews due to it focuses too much on Trunks’s crush on Mai to the point of forcing readers to accept it. I wrote this thread right after reading chapter 88, giving out my prediction. And later today, it got confirmed by Toyotaro himself in an interview: he did intend to put in lots of romance in this arc.

- But after all of this, I mostly saw the weird and lots of lots of “coincidence” in my theme and the Super manga theme. They are both alike, and TOTAL POLAR OPPOSITE. Imagine two similar (or same) products, but they are being produced under two different brands (in this case, it’s from a company vs a homemade one), with opposite directions and purposes.

We’ll continue the next part after this, it’ll dive deeper into the real life topics to emphasize my points and researchers. The theme of the next post aka part 2 will be:

THE CURRENT STATUS OF THE DRAGON BALL SUPER, THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE MANGA WITH FANS AND FANWORKS, AND THE FUTURE OF THE DRAGON BALL FRANCHISE AS A WHOLE

- end part 1 -

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