Bullza wrote:Zephyr wrote:Its not random, though. He trained under someone whose apprentices can heal. It's literally explained in the work for you.
The random ass pull aspect of it is that Trunks didn't know of this ability. If it's something the Supreme Kai had specifically taught him while Trunks was training with him as an apprentice then that would be fine.
But no instead Trunks had no idea he could use such an ability and it turned out the only reason he could do it is because the Supreme Kai danced around him for an entire day. Apparently he never thought to ask him what the purpose of this dance was so that Supreme Kai could say "It'll allow you to restore people".
Can we seriously stop with this and voice our concerns using real words already? Why does that make it an "ass pull"? What makes something an "ass pull"? What are the conditions? These vague weasel words are tiring, because they're impossible to reason with, because they're not given any meaning. The complaint is devoid of semantic value. I can't interact with it on any reasonable or meaningful level, unless I take the time to do your job for you and attempt to define your own undefined terms.
I get that the
consequence of one leads to Trunks being more of a focus in combat than the consequence of the other. And as far as I can tell, thats what your preference boils down to. That's silly to me, but that's your preference. I can agree to disagree there. It certainly got my blood pumping more than the healing did. But regardless of how much less "epic" it is for Trunks, it isn't as random as the Genki Sama Sword. Describing the circumstances surrounding his acquisition of the healing ability and throwing in a vapid buzzword like "ass pull" here and there isn't sufficient to challenge that assertion.
The purpose of the dance was to make him an apprentice. Being able to heal is a secondary effect. This is, once again, explained in the work for you, if not heavily implied. There aren't any questions that this raises that you can't explain yourself with mere seconds of thought and functioning long term memory:
"Why bother with the dance at all then?"
Likely so he could be allowed to go and train in the Kaioshin Realm. Remember how apprehensive Kibito was about Gohan being there?
"Why didn't he dance around Gohan in the Buu arc?"
Buu was already out and rampaging, time was more of a factor in comparison to a scenario where Babidi hadn't even gone to Earth yet.
"Why didn't Kaioshin tell Trunks?"
Because gaining that ability wasn't the point. Kibito is there. They have a healer. They didn't know about Dabura. It is in character for Shin to withhold information which could be important later on down the line.
What other questions does it honestly raise? None of my answers above are "head canon" or whatever, either. It took me no time at all to remember stuff from the Buu arc and say "oh, that makes sense, then".
Does it feeling like Buu arc writing (at worst) make it an ass pull? I suppose I can see that. The Buu arc was Toriyama running on fumes, after all. But
if that's the condition, then nah, they're not comparable in terms of "asspullery". You have to literally fabricate problems out of thin air in order to place them on equal footing in that regard.
You can still prefer the sword due to the surrounding emotion and combat focus it gives Trunks. I'm not contesting that idea at all. It's just utterly insane to argue that they're equally random and devoid of a reasonable explanation within the work itself, especially when one is actually foreshadowed. There's a whole flashback where Trunks trains with Kaioshin and everything! A literal single line of dialog at some point earlier in the arc in the anime implying Trunks went to meet Kaio at some point after killing Cell would be sufficient, but we're not even given something that simple.
To be honest, had Trunks used the sword in the manga,
with said throw away line, I'm sure we'd be seeing just as much anti-manga shitposting like this from largely the same crowd. There's some
obnoxious fucking tribalism at play there, and I don't know where on Earth the hate boner stems from. The constant cherry picking, selective interpretational charity, selective skepticism, and selective loss of memory is absolutely beyond unreal.