Dragon Ball Meh

WARNING: The
following contains spoilers for Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball
Super.

Introduction

I grew up watching Dragon Ball Z (DBZ) on Toonami, waiting
week after week, and hoping that this time Cartoon Network would show the rest
of the Frieza Saga. My classmates and I would act out scenes from the show
while at school and try turning super saiyan. I collected DBZ trading cards, action
figures, and video games, and I even wrote a bad self-insert DBZ fan fic once.

Why am I telling you this? Because I’m not a casual fan by
any means, nor do I look at the series through the lens of nostalgia.

Even as a tween and then teenager, I realized the series had
a fuck ton of issues in terms of power level inconsistencies, how characters
would spend whole episodes talking or powering up rather than fighting, how
anyone who wasn’t a saiyan or part saiyan ceased to matter as the series
progressed, and the formulaic nature of the show.

I say this not to shit on a show I loved as a kid and still enjoy as an adult, but to say I’m not some fanboy who hates Dragon Ball Super (Super) because it’s not DBZ.

Repetitiveness

The first major problem I had with Super, and one of the
reasons I stopped watching it after the tournament between Chompa’s fighters
and Bilis’s fighters, was the sheer repetitiveness.

The first twenty or so episodes of the series were just a
rehash almost scene for scene of Battle
of the Gods and Revival of F, and
I was bored out of my mind.

Moreover, while the introduction of the destroyer gods and
other universes seemed cool at first, upon second thought, this was just
another layer in the already bloated celestial bureaucracy that makes up the
Dragon Ball universe. The Destroyer gods are little more than souped-up, evil
Kais.

Then there’s my issue with the Super Saiyan God transformations. How many fucking times is Akira Toriyama going to beat this dead horse?

Goku going Super Saiyan 1 for the first time, and then Gohan being the first person to correctly go Super Saiyan 2 are both iconic scenes that still give me all the feels to this day. But Super Saiyan God and Super Saiyan Blue are fucking weak sauce.

All Toriyama did was change the color of Goku’s and Vegeta’s
hair and aura. Wow, what groundbreaking imagination.

And this leads me to my next issue.

Lack of Imagination

My main problem with Super was it rehashed the same ideas
and concepts as DBZ. I already mentioned the issue of Super Saiyan transformations
and how an old enemy such as Frieza was brought back and given a new
transformation for reasons I’ll never understand. And yet again, Gohan lamented
about not being as strong as the others because he stopped training.

Instead of having the series focus on this and the next
generation of Z fighters, as was alluded to in the final episode of DBZ that
featured Goku, Jr. and Vegeta, Jr. fighting at the World Martial Arts
Tournament several years in the future, the show continued to focus on Goku.

Furthermore, the concept of super dragon balls, which are so
large they’re the size of a planet, was just more of the same. First, there
were the dragon balls on Earth that could grant any wish except bringing some
back from the dead more than once. Then there were the Namekian dragon balls
that didn’t have such restrictions, but could only resurrect people who died
less than a year ago. Now there are super dragon balls, which are so powerful
even the destroyer gods want them?

Come up with some new material, bro.

Then the repetitive plot sucked what little interest I had in the series out of me.

I stopped watching Super at the beginning of the Goku Black arc because it was just the cell saga with a few tweaks.

Don’t believe me?

Let’s compare.

Cell Saga: A threat in the future (the androids and Cell)
prompts Vegeta’s son Trunks to come to the past to warn the Z fighters about
it, only for said threat to follow him into the past and they must fight it.

Goku Black Arc: A threat in the future (Goku black, an evil
version of Goku created when Zamasu, an apprentice Supreme Kai from universe
ten, fused with the version of Goku from an earlier point in Trunk’s timeline)
prompts Trunks to travel back in time to warn the Z fighters about it. Then
Goku Black follows him and they fight it out.

And once Goku Black is defeated, it’s on to the tournament
between the various universes where the losers have their universe destroyed.

From the spoilers I ran across online, this ends as you’d
expect it. Goku and company win and use the super dragon balls to restore the
universes that were destroyed.

Closing

This post has run longer than I’d expected it to, so I’ll
stop here.

I’m not hating on Super for being a shonen anime. DBZ was the grandfather of all shonen manga, and when I was a kid, I could sit through hours of filler episodes waiting for the fights to happen and not be underwhelmed when, yet again, Goku reached a new level of power and crushed his enemies.

But I stopped watching Super because it, and shonen anime/manga to a larger extent, no longer entertains me. I’ll still watch old episodes of Dragon Ball and DBZ if nothing’s on, but when I want a jolt of action, I now turn on an action movie because they can’t afford to waste time with characters talking and then powering up for an hour.

Call to action

What do you think?

Are you a Dragon Ball fan who feels the same, or do you vehemently disagree?

Let me know in comments below.  And if you liked this post, please share it with your friends.