Christ this thread.
Bardo117 wrote:Why is everybody so hesitant to call this a superhero type story or admit that its targeted demographic age is 12-17 years old?
Never mind the fact that this sentence is basically saying that superhero stories and young age demographics are innate and inexorably go together (as if a children's show can't NOT be a superhero story, or a superhero story can't also NOT be for children). What I love is that it even gets wrong and wildly overshoots Dragon Ball's actual Japanese age demographic by at least double. Most all Weekly Shonen Jump manga and anime, Dragon Ball/Z included, are aimed at an audience generally aged 5-12 years old. Maybe 13 at most. 15/16/17 is
well above and outside of most Shonen's usual age range.
Bardo117 wrote:They saved earth from the Saiyans, the Galaxy from Freeza, the planet from Cell, and the Universe from Buu. Not because they were looking for a good fight but because evil invaded earth, and if Goku doesn't do it, WHO WILL?!?!
1) They were trying to save largely
themselves from the Saiya-jin. Piccolo is particularly adamant about his own selfish reasons for wanting to protect his own ass from getting wiped out along with the rest of the planet. The rest of the group trained to defend themselves and their homes/loved ones, as well as to further push their own skills as martial artists. The idea of "saving the world for saving the world's sake" is something that almost never comes up the whole arc.
2) Same with Freeza. Gohan, Kuririn, and Bulma set off to Namek to revive their friends who were killed by Nappa. That's the heroes' ENTIRE goal of the story: getting back their friends who were killed. Its a 100% personal journey. At NO point do they up and decide "we gotta protect the galaxy from Freeza and his men" and set out to do so. The entire Freeza arc the main characters spend hiding, running for their lives, and playing cat and mouse games for the Dragon Balls not to protect the planet or to save the universe, but just to get their friends back.
When they finally do have a conclusive showdown with Freeza, for Gohan and Kuririn its about purely survival from the attacks of a lunatic that they've pissed off. For Vegeta its about grabbing power for himself, since at this point he's still essentially a bad guy. And for Goku its at about once again testing his strength and skills against a worthy opponent: but then it gets more personal and becomes purely about revenge. For the innocent people that Freeza killed on Namek at first, and then for Kuririn.
3) The only person who gives a rat's ass about "saving the world" this entire arc is Future Trunks. And even then I wouldn't classify him as a "superhero" per se, as he isn't someone who has dedicated his entire life to saving the world and protecting it. He's mainly trying to stop this one cataclysmic event from happening that has made his future a hellhole and taken his family from him. He's very much akin to a typical sci fi/action movie hero like Kyle Reese from Terminator (and even then still with a lot of martial arts hero elements thrown in, like wanting to get revenge for his slain master). Everyone else who isn't Trunks though? Martial artists itching to use this opportunity to test and push their strength and skills.
One of the biggest mistakes that everyone makes about the Cell arc is when they complain about how "stupid" a lot of the characters act throughout. Because people come into this arc with the misconception that Dragon Ball Z is a superhero show and that these characters are superheroes out to defend the planet, and are failing laughably at that goal. When that's NEVER been the case. Ever. At all. This is made explicitly plain, for the 90 billionth time, at the very start of the Artificial Humans/Cell arc when Goku and the whole group dismisses Bulma's VERY pragmatic and excellent idea of destroying Gero's lab right then and there before he has time to finish making the Jinzoningen.
Because none of them have dedicated their lives to protecting the planet nor is that ever a thought that has ever driven any of them at any point in any of these stories. From the very beginning, these guys are mystical kung fu masters who have dedicated their lives to training their skills and competition. And they see an opportunity here to pit their still growing skills against an even greater foe than Freeza or anything else they've faced prior. Its the same with Cell. Cell as a villain is driven by the same ideas and goals as any other martial arts fiction character (testing and growing his strength) he just goes about it through horrific methods that endangers the entire world. And even then, Goku and most of the others want to fight him mainly to push themselves as warriors, with the fate of the world being almost an afterthought at times.
The Cell arc isn't a superhero story about protecting the world: it starts out a mish mash of a martial arts revenge narrative blended with Terminator/B movie-esque sci fi which then gives way to another martial arts tournament about the characters pitting their skills against one another (only where the villain is using the threat of blowing up the world as a bargaining chip/added incentive). When you understand that, the characters action and motivations make TONS more sense, relatively speaking.
4) Again with Boo. Goku and the group begin the arc totally cavalier about the threat that Boo represents and see it as an opportunity for sport, even as Kaioshin, and upper deity, is maddeningly trying to warn them all of the gravity of the situation they face. Goku even takes this as an opportunity to further train Goten and Trunks to be better fighters rather than simply ending the conflict early himself. It isn't until Boo has destroyed the Earth and just about everyone on it, and is about to go on a rampage and wipe out all of existence itself that Goku and Vegeta, for perhaps the first time in the entire series, begin to take the idea of "saving the universe" even remotely seriously. But only when the very existence of all reality as we know it is on the knife's edge of being snuffed out by a feral, god slaying, pink bubblegum demon.
The one time a "real" superhero character EVER appears in Dragon Ball (besides of course the almighty Suppaman from Dr. Slump)? The Great Saiyaman. And he's basically a short lived joke character meant to kill time in between story arcs. Who's also a riff more on
Japanese superheroes (Henshin/Toku types like Kamen Rider) rather than Western Marvel/DC ones.
The funny thing is, the painfully,
painfully rare times that Dragon Ball EVER actually deals with "real" superhero character types, they're almost ALWAYS treated as stupid gags or jokes. Never taken remotely as seriously as the martial arts characters often are (and who aren't of course immune to having the piss taken from them themselves).
Comparing this series and these characters to the fucking Avengers? Jesus. I mean...
no. What, are we gonna next throw Wukong and his group next to the Teen Titans? Or the bandit clans of The Water Margin as comparable to the Guardians of the Galaxy? Linghu Chong as a spiritual counterpart to Squirrel Girl? I mean what, they both have superpowers and they're happy a lot! Same exact thing, right?
Note: NONE OF THIS means that Dragon Ball is somehow NOT a kids' manga/anime. Not only is it for kids, its for kids even YOUNGER than a lot of U.S. fans seem to think it is (its often seen as more a teen/young adult sort of deal by a lot of FUNimation fans, when its much more in the elementary school range).
No one,
least of all myself, is arguing that because Dragon Ball is a wuxia/martial arts narrative that that means it is somehow "not for kids". Who ever said you CAN'T make a Wuxia story for kids? Its been done countless times decades long before Dragon Ball. Fist of the North Star is, believe it or not, aimed at the exact same 5-12 demographic that DB was (seriously, it was) and predates it by a fair bit. Christ, even in the U.S. Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra are not only children's wuxia cartoons, they're aired on goddamned Nickelodeon.
To put for the idea the "kids cartoon must therefore = superhero" is the epitome of asinine. Few people on this forum hold as much disdain for the vast majority of children's media as I do, and even
I give children's media much more credit than to think that they're somehow not capable of tackling more genres (or at the very least the facsimile of different genres) than mainly superheroes.
Bardo117 wrote:There's some real rock influenced, Depeche Mode/Radiohead/Experimental type music in there (Faulconer) that is actually a good listen.
Somewhere out there, there are legions of Depeche Mode and Radiohead fans who would absolutely
weep at this kind of comparison being made. Lets not get it twisted: those are REAL legit bands and musicians (titanically important, and culturally seismic ones at that) who have made some of the most influential and boundary pushing popular music of the 80s and 90s respectively.
Bruce Faulconer, by contrast, is a complete nobody who was hired to haphazardly scrape together, on the fly and on the cheap, a bunch of synthetic noise (that in NO WAY sounds the LEAST bit contemporary to what was big musically in the late 90s and early 2000s: anyone who makes that claim is someone who did not pay the slightest bit of attention to actual music and music trends during that time) to constantly fill dead air on a repackaging of a decade-old children's anime because the neophyte company who employed him were under the belief that their audience were a bunch of ADHD-addled simpletons who couldn't pay attention to something that didn't constantly jingle car keys and make shouting noises up in their face at all times.
Faulconer is cheaply slapped together audio filler intended for what was seen and treated as a cheap, cash grab of a children's cartoon property. It is no more comparable to fucking
Radiohead and
Depeche Mode (good Christ) than those bands are to the BGM for random bullshit like Biker Mice From Mars or Mighty Max or whatever the fuck along those lines.
