Things that grind your gears

[GamerSkull]

Another thing that grinds my gears...

Certain parts of the fanbase considering characters to be worthless if they don't have a high power level/strength or never get as much accomplished.(People like Krillin, Android 16, etc.)

I agree. But to be fair, that's how they're portrayed in the series. Kurilin retires, suddenly he's barely relevant. Yamucha gives up fighting and is reduced to literally standing in the background. Same with Tenshinhan. I don't know how Super handles these characters, but toward the end of Z, anyone who isn't a big time fighter, is pretty much left standing around waiting to be killed.

Yeah, but even then... I still think parts of the fandom overblow this kind of thing.

[Neo-Makaiōshin]

Calling eleven years old Gohan "Teen" Gohan .

[John Pannozzi]

Is it just me, or are there not any "Nearly Complete Works of Akira Toriyama" entries available on the official DB website other than the most recent one?

[Gligarman]

I get annoyed when people give me a hard time for pronouncing several names correctly. I read the manga and I watch the show subbed I'm accustomed to their proper names. There are exceptions since if I say "Saiyan" correctly or Kuririn then 90% of DB fans I speak to have no idea what I'm talking about so I just go with the flow on those.

[Zephyr]

People using the word "Ball" as shorthand for the first 153 episodes of the anime.

[Cure Dragon 255]

I have NEVER seen people doing that in my life and for that I'm glad.

[dbgtFO]

Is it just me, or are there not any "Nearly Complete Works of Akira Toriyama" entries available on the official DB website other than the most recent one?

They are only available for a limited time for whatever reason. Herms also mentioned this on his twitter.

[Spider-Man]

When people use the terms " bad fanfiction" to hate Super.

[Dbzfan94]

People using the word "Ball" as shorthand for the first 153 episodes of the anime.

Me and my friend like to jokingly say "Balls" and "Zballs" but I've never seen anyone use it unironically.

[ABED]

People using the word "Ball" as shorthand for the first 153 episodes of the anime.

Me and my friend like to jokingly say "Balls" and "Zballs" but I've never seen anyone use it unironically.

Wouldn't it be more clever to refer to it as Ball and BallZ?

[Dbzfan94]

People using the word "Ball" as shorthand for the first 153 episodes of the anime.

Me and my friend like to jokingly say "Balls" and "Zballs" but I've never seen anyone use it unironically.

Wouldn't it be more clever to refer to it as Ball and BallZ?

Well there's that too, but Zballs kinda has a ring to it.

[Alruneia]

People using the word "Ball" as shorthand for the first 153 episodes of the anime.

Some people refer to the different parts of the franchise by their suffixes. As in calling them Z, GT or Super. What name would you suggest to them while following their name scheme? Preferably without dismissing the naming scheme altogether. I don't do this myself, but I know people who do.

[Zephyr]

Some people refer to the different parts of the franchise by their suffixes. As in calling them Z, GT or Super. What name would you suggest to them while following their name scheme? Preferably without dismissing the naming scheme altogether. I don't do this myself, but I know people who do.

"DB" seems straightforward enough (and it's a shorter abbreviation!). The only rationale I can imagine for using "Ball" over the good old "DB" is that someone might think you're referring to the entire franchise in general, rather than the first 153 episodes of the anime. I don't think that makes much sense, though, upon closer inspection.

I feel like, when talking about the different anime series as distinct things, "DB" would suffice. If you say "DB did this, while Z did this", for instance, nobody is going to think that you're referring to the entire franchise when you say "DB", because it would make no sense to contrast the entire franchise, which contains Z, to Z by itself.

I'm also apprehensive about assessing DB and Z separately to begin with, barring certain anime-exclusive bits and behind-the-scenes production stuff (like animation, voice acting, localization, etc.). Outside of those particular things, DB and Z generally don't warrant being split up and treated as distinct, in comparison to GT and Super, which are very distinct from all else in both time and creative process.

Moreover, any discussion that warrants DB and Z be split up (which essentially boils down to discussions of production), also warrants Kai be included in the conversation and comparison, as that has its own distinct production process. It's either DB vs GT vs Super, or it's DB vs Z vs GT vs Kai vs Super. In either context, what is meant by "DB" seems to me like it should be quite clear.

[Alruneia]

Some people refer to the different parts of the franchise by their suffixes. As in calling them Z, GT or Super. What name would you suggest to them while following their name scheme? Preferably without dismissing the naming scheme altogether. I don't do this myself, but I know people who do.

[spoiler]"DB" seems straightforward enough (and it's a shorter abbreviation!). The only rationale I can imagine for using "Ball" over the good old "DB" is that someone might think you're referring to the entire franchise in general, rather than the first 153 episodes of the anime. I don't think that makes much sense, though, upon closer inspection.

I feel like, when talking about the different anime series as distinct things, "DB" would suffice. If you say "DB did this, while Z did this", for instance, nobody is going to think that you're referring to the entire franchise when you say "DB", because it would make no sense to contrast the entire franchise, which contains Z, to Z by itself.

I'm also apprehensive about assessing DB and Z separately to begin with, barring certain anime-exclusive bits and behind-the-scenes production stuff (like animation, voice acting, localization, etc.). Outside of those particular things, DB and Z generally don't warrant being split up and treated as distinct, in comparison to GT and Super, which are very distinct from all else in both time and creative process.

Moreover, any discussion that warrants DB and Z be split up (which essentially boils down to discussions of production), also warrants Kai be included in the conversation and comparison, as that has its own distinct production process. It's either DB vs GT vs Super, or it's DB vs Z vs GT vs Kai vs Super. In either context, what is meant by "DB" seems to me like it should be quite clear.[/spoiler]

That's fair. Well, I mean, I already use DB. It does introduce need for context to avoid confusion with the franchise as a whole, but I can't really think of any instances where you wouldn't naturally include the necessary context anyway. So yeah, I suppose that works.

[Yuli Ban]

With the series itself? Just that vague sense that a lot of plots unfolded or concluded in rather unsatisfying ways. It's hard to really explain this one, but it's a natural result of Toriyama's "pantsing" nature to writing long storylines. Maybe I just feel that way because I'm the sort of guy that likes to over-outline things and play unwritten story events back in my head 1,000 times before ever writing them down, as well as let concepts sit and develop over the course of months and years just to see what actually works. But it's a franchise aimed at grade-schoolers in a time when shonen was still developing as a demographical genre so I'm not going to go overboard ragging on things like plot development and exposition— as much as I want to.

Another thing is how the biggest draw of the series— the fighting— feels so lackluster the further you go. It doesn't matter if your best feats of strength are "breaking a large boulder with a single megaton punch" or "vaporizing five universes with a weak pimp slap". When fight scenes are done well, they're done well. Yet so much of the choreography and impact vanished after the Freeza saga, and it's been almost totally nonexistent since the start of Super. I could go on and on about how good fights feel.

I could also go on and on about why Dragon Ball GT and Dragon Ball Supers' attempts to recapture early Dragon Ball's comedy and then give it Z-styled action failed so hard, but I actually found a video that explained everything perfectly—
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PCtIaM_GQ

In summary for that, if you want to really recapture the feel of Dragon Ball without also bringing back the adventure aspect of the show, you need to focus mostly on making the fighting funny and impactful. Super's fights are neither funny or impactful, which is why you see the sentiment towards the series balancing so dangerously between "best thing since Z" and "as bad as GT".


Meta-series: the writing. I really just don't understand why Toei writers don't understand that "Toriyama's legendary laziness and make-it-up-as-you-go writing" does not equal "aggressively stupid, pandering, and lazy writing". Toriyama's laziness came from the fact he didn't write new chapters until it was nearly time to publish them. If he did spend more time with the story, he would have made a much more cohesive product. He didn't because he was doing other things with his time. For some reason, Toei seems to think that gives them full excuse to come up with the most breathtakingly inane plotlines imaginable for anything Dragon Ball related. In this case, I point mostly to the games and their what-if storylines or original storylines when there's such a mode. It's been six years still I played the game and I am still absolutely astounded by how Satanically bad Ultimate Tenkaichi's Hero Mode story was. It floored me when I learned that the final villain of that story was, without any hint of irony, Omega Shenron. Maybe I'm too used to modern Western storytelling conventions where clever plot twists are celebrated, because I was hoping for even a weak twist like "the destroyer of the world is actually SSJ4 Goku, but he's been corrupted by the Black Star Dragon Balls!"


Fanbase: This image in a nutshell. Maybe it's because I've grown to prefer Dragon Ball's Wuxia style so much more or because the American dubs before Kai started sounding like a parody dub as I grew older. But man, I swear there's this image of a "casual" Dragon Ball Z fan that's been imprinted so hard into my brain that it's rerouted my synapses. The fans who are so stuck in their ways with nostalgia that they actually prefer Drummond-ripoff Sabat over Sabat's gruffer Vegeta voice, will defend Faulconer to Zunzabit, and hilariously miss the point involving transformations (preferring increasingly muscular/lean overdesigned transformations in particular). They tend to agree with me that a lot of the fighting's gone to shit due to a much cheaper presentation and misunderstanding of choreography, as well as that the story's been treated as completely extraneous material, and that the series has completely forgotten how cathartic it is to bloody up a battlefield, but then things differ. A lot of these casual fans want everything to be darker, edgier, and more epic to an almost Shadow the Hedgehog-level of cringiness.

Likewise, maybe it's just that I've been hanging around the wrong crowd, but a lot of the more gatekeeping DB fans I've seen act more like Dragon Ball was never an over-the-top-with-violence action-comedy and was always just a mystical comedy with action bits for little kids that started trying too hard at one point. I think that perception was shaped when one of those 'gatekeepers' acted as if an actual manga shot of Goku holding his bloodied chest during the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai was bad, overly edgy fanart done by fans who wanted more mindless blood and violence in a kid's show (which I thought was the height of irony).

Another parting thing: I don't get the hate the dub voices get. Especially with the Reddit AMA that Sabat and Schemmel did recently, where gatekeeper fans literally acted as if they had any control over how the dub was written in the first place.

[ABED]

With the series itself? Just that vague sense that a lot of plots unfolded or concluded in rather unsatisfying ways. It's hard to really explain this one, but it's a natural result of Toriyama's "pantsing" nature to writing long storylines. Maybe I just feel that way because I'm the sort of guy that likes to over-outline things and play unwritten story events back in my head 1,000 times before ever writing them down, as well as let concepts sit and develop over the course of months and years just to see what actually works. But it's a franchise aimed at grade-schoolers in a time when shonen was still developing as a demographical genre so I'm not going to go overboard ragging on things like plot development and exposition— as much as I want to.

It works just fine when the stories are simple. I'm interested in your last sentence because DB doesn't really require much exposition.

[SuperCyan2]

I don't get how "Ball" is synonymous to DB, it's such a vague word and I've only seen it being used once on this forum. Thankfully. Calling DB as "Ball" makes no sense whatsoever.

[Yuli Ban]

With the series itself? Just that vague sense that a lot of plots unfolded or concluded in rather unsatisfying ways. It's hard to really explain this one, but it's a natural result of Toriyama's "pantsing" nature to writing long storylines. Maybe I just feel that way because I'm the sort of guy that likes to over-outline things and play unwritten story events back in my head 1,000 times before ever writing them down, as well as let concepts sit and develop over the course of months and years just to see what actually works. But it's a franchise aimed at grade-schoolers in a time when shonen was still developing as a demographical genre so I'm not going to go overboard ragging on things like plot development and exposition— as much as I want to.

It works just fine when the stories are simple. I'm interested in your last sentence because DB doesn't really require much exposition.

What do you mean?
I meant that I couldn't go on about things like development and exposition precisely because DB never really did them well. Today's episode is a great example— we got a little backstory with Jiren, but it was as basic and generic of a backstory as you can possibly get. Who is the mysterious shadowy figure that we see? In a more story-heavy series, we'd go deeper into that, getting a better explanation. But in Dragon Ball, you accept it at face value and know that we'll never see that figure brought up again. He kills Jiren's family, Jiren wants revenge, Jiren develops, yada yada, now JIren believes strength is justice. Who was that guy? I'unno. Leave that one for fanfiction to fill in the blanks.

That's sort of what it's like for Dragon Ball. When Freeza remarked that Goku resembled his father, Bardock, we never got a single line further in the manga explaining who Bardock was supposed to be. He's just Goku's father and Freeza remembers him for rebelling against him. There you go. Or Raditz, when he explains that he and Goku are brothers. That's never brought up again after Raditz is killed. We're never told who Freeza is besides being emperor of the universe/galaxy (seems a bit inconsistent there which one he actually controls).

If the execution is pulled off well, no one cares. No one cared who Darth Sidious was or how he was once Chancellor Sheev Palpatine. He was just that black-robed super wizard apparently even more powerful than Darth Vader.
Similar thing in Dragon Ball.

Thing is, it works up to a point. After a certain point, refusing to explain things about your world really starts to catch up to you. If you can keep a work short enough, you won't have that problem, but Dragon Ball's big damn problem is that it's grown into a mythology all its own and yet so much stuff is still unexplained. And the things that are explained have that distinct George Lucasian feeling to them where it feels like the creator forgot the point behind his own creation at some point (most notably S-cells and that Goku was destined to be kind because his mother was a kind Saiyan). Speaking as a wannabe mythmaker, I can tell you I've forgotten things about stories I wrote a decade ago and if I were to return to them without reading over them, it'd definitely feel like I was writing fanfiction of my own material.

There's that very thin line between expanding a lore and overcomplicating it, and I just feel Dragon Ball's falling into the trap of the latter after coasting so long on not explaining anything that didn't narrowly have anything to do with Goku's current adventures. And that's how we get these contradictory elements to the lore. From an expository point, it's just building up to a point where the entire lore will collapse in on itself unless someone takes the time to go through everything with a fine-tooth comb and give us a grand Dragon Encyclopedia.

One Piece may fall into the same trap, but it's helped by the fact that there generally is an attempt at storytelling, whereas Dragon Ball is persisting with having a simplistic story in an increasingly complex mythos. Having your cake and eating it too, I believe the saying goes. It's a very strange predicament for an IP.

[ABED]

There's little need for lots of exposition in DB because it's not a complicated story.

Backstory is overrated. What's more important is knowing what he wants and what his methods are to get them. That's what truly makes a character interesting, not what happened before we met him or her. Freeza has a little backstory, but not much. We know nothing about the race he comes from. We know he wants immortality and power. And we know he will inflict pain out of personal enjoyment. He's fully formed. We don't need to know about his parents, it doesn't matter.

Thing is, it works up to a point.

I don't agree. Exposition is overrated. Audiences need less of it to follow the story and care than writers think. Honestly, I think far too many people place importance on lore and exposition than they ought to.

Explaining things often just stops stories dead in their tracks. Watch that scene where Cell tells Piccolo his whole life story and tell me that scene doesn't just go on forever.

There's a lot of lore in DB, but it's not that complex.

[8bitdee]

People not understanding the anime exists solely to sell merchandise to little children (check out one of Kanzenshuu's latest podcast to see the difference in profits between broadcast licensing and merchandise licensing. It's astronomical) and thus taking things too seriously like discussing power levels and "omg why is 17 on par with goku now??!!! " I think the fanbase would enjoy the Dragonball series as a whole if they stopped overthinking everything.