Dbzfan94 wrote:I was 10 at the time when the Buu dub ended. I still had that 'I want more' that you always get after finishing a series cause I didn't care for GT (I blame the shitty dub music). When I got older I was fully content and happy that the series was ended (and I hoped) stayed that way. Even when Battle of Gods came out and the countless rumors about a new series, I was the first one to be like "no."
ABED wrote:Let's keep in mind that for the years that I did want there to be more, I was a teenager. My tastes were (and still are) changing all the time as a natural result of reading and watching more. Back then, I had boundless energy and wanted more and more of the things I liked. Even though there was a lot of material, I still wanted more. Now, as long as something is given a satisfying conclusion, I'll take quality over quantity. I would've loved the sheer volume of weekly wrestling content the WWE puts out on a weekly basis. Now, I'll take an hour to two of one compelling weekly Raw over that 10 times out of 10. Hell, given the drop in quality as a result, I haven't watched the current product in 7 years.
Just for context: GT had ended (in Japan) the day just prior to my 14th birthday. And I'd been following the series religiously by that point since late-'92 (when I was 8 or 9 roughly). So even with the whole "I was 10 and had tons more energy back then" thing, I was roughly around the same age myself and I was a hyper-manic little spitfire of energy back then as well. EVEN THEN with that being the case... this whole Dragon Ball thing definitively felt like we were all well and truly finished and ready to move on, even to me at the time, even as someone who was still riding the high of the Cell and Boo arcs and was a bit more open to GT than many.
So even within that context... I STILL am left completely baffled by this "I want more!" mentality when it comes to this particular series, or anything in general that's as wickedly dense and as definitively concluded as it was.
ABED wrote:GT has a weird melancholy vibe throughout.
ekrolo2 wrote:Another thing I want to give GT is the aesthetics, it genuinely picked its own visual style and sets itself apart from everything else. The color choices, the environments, the designs for characters, it's all really unique to GT that you can immediately see something from it and say that it's a GT thing.
I also appreciate that it had actual intentions of making an interesting DB continuation, it doesn't realize a lot of that stuff but in a sea of sequels that purport they're desire to push a series forward while endlessly sucking the shaft and balls of the old stuff in painful detail, this earns it massive points from me.
ABED wrote:DB got as much out of the story as it was pretty much ever going to get. GT was an attempt at keeping it going but a flawed one. At least it got to end. You bring up the value of a proper conclusion. A great conclusion by itself can almost lift up the rest of the story, like GT's did.
ekrolo2 wrote:GTs ending probably benefits because from going into a near definitive conclusion route. It does leave off stuff from Goku & Vegeta Jr but unlike the Z one, it pretty definitively says the days of Goku & company are dead and gone. A lot of endings I feel don't let themselves go off into that kind of direction and try to half ass it by saying "Yeah this over folks, except there's a shit load more room left for us to milk this later!"
sintzu wrote:After knowing DB will most likely go on forever now, I'll always give GT credit for having the spine to give it an actual ending. It wasn't perfect by any means but at least it said "DB's done, we're moving on and you should to".
Just wanted to round these all up in one place and say 1000% agreed across the fucking board with ALL of this.
We can nitpick all of GT's flaws till the cows come home (and we have indeed), but ultimately it got right the most important things a sequel can get right: it pushed the story, characters, and overall universe forward into brand new territory that still felt fitting and respectful to what came before but without overly-fellating and dwelling upon the past either. It was a genuinely forward-thinking and forward-shifting series, much like the rest of the proper-Toriyama series prior to it had always been. And getting THAT aspect of Dragon Ball right, the aspect of always looking ahead to new horizons and new things to explore, is of FAR
infinitely more importance to me than meaningless nonsense like "power scaling" and all this other garbage that so many people get so absurdly hung up on.
And the atmosphere, visual direction, and tone of wistful melancholy are ABSOLUTELY of significant entries into its plus column. Its still unmistakably Dragon Ball, but it struck its own unique iconography and it also understands that this is the end of the story and the end of these characters' lives. It absolutely NAILS that sense that this is Goku and his friends'/family's twilight years, their final hurrah before finally settling down for good, and all the "man look at how far we've come and how much we've all been through together" sentiments that come with that.
Sometimes I do wonder if, aside from all the totally valid complaints with the execution of many of its concepts (complaints in which I agree myself in many cases), if maybe THAT'S ultimately what REALLY bothers so many people most about GT more than anything else. I look at a lot of the sheer, palpable vitriol and venom that people hurl at it, and while I certainly don't think of GT as anything approaching a great or flawless masterpiece of a series by any conceivable stretch... I also am just as dumbstruck that it attracts THAT palpable degree of spite its way as well.
And sometimes I do have to wonder if the real source of people's strong, emotional backlash against it maybe has less to do with the individual complaints about its execution of ideas, and more to do with its fundamental nature as a contemplative, relatively lower key point of final, definitive conclusion for these characters and their worlds, that it embodies a theme of finality and of things that have a beginning and middle also having an ending.
I get the sense from a lot of people who are fans of this series that they're still kids at heart themselves (in as much a negative way as a positive), and as kids lacking in a certain level of maturity, they have a hard time letting go of things and accepting how temporary things in life are. Hence why GT putting those themes of the series so front and center might be what it is that's REALLY so viscerally off-putting to such a large degree to so many fans. At least maybe on a subconscious level.
I mean after all, this is a fanbase that has, for the better part of the last maybe 15 or so years now, been overwhelmingly and inescapably DEFINED by a marked inability to let go of and both emotionally and psychologically move past the children's media and "action cartoon" landscape of the tail-end of the 90s and early-most 2000s: of Toonami, Fox Kids, and things of that nature. Do a word search for "Nostalgia" and be prepared to cringe and have your blood curdle at the sheer VOLUME and moreover the
nature of the content in the deluge of results that follow.
"Letting shit go" and "moving on" are CLEARLY things that this fanbase, as a collective whole, does NOT do very well with, to put it mildly. Which makes its attachment to something as fundamentally
at peace with those things as Dragon Ball overwhelmingly is all the more ironic and indicative of a MASSIVE fandom-wide cognitive dissonance and missing of the entire point of the series among so many of them.
To me though, that sense of "things in life are temporary and don't last forever, and the world is always moving on to other things" is one of Dragon Ball's (in its original run mind you) overwhelmingly STRONGEST attributes, and something that is to be absolutely celebrated and commended, rather than ignored or side-stepped. And that's something that GT not only gets right, its something that it had the balls to put forth front and center-most as a main point of focus as a proper series-wide conclusion.
I think that might be ultimately what my overwhelmingly BIGGEST problem with Super is, and that for all the minutia we can go into, why it ultimately is that it feels SO utterly un-Dragon Ball to me. Dragon Ball to me is overwhelmingly DEFINED by its ever changing and ever-shifting sense of time, of time always passing and the world and characters always changing and never stagnating. Of life in this universe always moving on, with or without our heroes.
Super is a HUGE betrayal of ALL that stuff. Its defined as a series of stagnation, of the world and the characters being permanently stuck in the short couple of episodes between the end of the Boo arc and the epilogue of Z. Its trying to introduce "new" ideas, and on RARE occasion maybe SOME of them might feel like something genuinely unique (Ultra Instinct and the Multiverse comes most immediately to mind). But ultimately most of them just cannot help but feel like reskins and retreading of past greatest hits that it knows people liked the most. Which is the very definition of "pandering". Which I am in NO way interested in.
The more I think about it, the more that Muten Roshi (of all people) as a character in many ways feels like the most telling microcosm of this whole thing. Now don't get me wrong: I utterly ADORE this character, particularly from the 21st Budokai through Daimao arcs. I think Kame Sennin's one of the most deceptively well realized characters in the series and one whom most defines the secret weapon behind Toriyama's distinctive charm (goofball silliness and stupid whimsy masking a few surprising layers of depth and real dramatic weight lurking casually below the surface). But everything about his treatment in Super, while seemingly awesome on the surface, is in actuality I think a symbol for EVERYTHING that is incorrect and wildly tone-deaf about this series and its place as a piece of Dragon Ball's story and world.
Muten Roshi is the EMBODIMENT of everything that is temporary and fluctuating about the Dragon Ball universe. He is the personification of the cast's mortality (even in a world where death is so easily reversible by the titular magic objects). Death in and of itself isn't so much the ultimate end game for most of these characters: its aging to the point where they can no longer fight and no longer train and no longer keep pace as active martial artists. Roshi summarizes ALL of that not just as a character, but also in his overall character arc and trajectory in the early half of the series, where we see him living out his final days as a participating warrior, before he bows out and retires gracefully and with an astounding degree of class and humble acceptance that his time is over and its now time to make way for his students and the next generation of warriors.
Bringing him out of retirement, while on a shallow surface level does indeed bring a fleeting emotional boost of "Holy shit, cool! He's back!"... on a deeper and much more important level, it is inescapably a HUGE betrayal of what had been to this point a series-wide theme of life going in cycles and people having their time before their time ultimately ends and that's that.
Dragon Ball has, from its very-most beginning, defined itself out the gate as existing in a world that is fluid and temporary, where characters age, move on into new phases of their lives, have children who then grow up and have children of their own, and where the world itself around them never feels like its entirely the same place from one era to the next, from one storyline to the next. Super marks the very first time that a piece of the series has been so JARRINGLY out of step with all of that. And THAT ultimately is probably one of the overwhelmingly BIGGEST areas where it cannot help but feel so soullessly "corporate" in a way that GT had managed to astoundingly and against all rational odds avoid doing.
Super embodies Dragon Ball's first step in becoming like The Simpsons or Loony Toons or any given 80s toy-based cartoon show, or something to that nature: just another piece of product that is forever stagnant and frozen in perpetual stasis at the point in the story where the most people on the most focus-group tests had the most positive reactions and is most concerned with nudging the exact same emotional beats and reactions out of you that it already knows that earlier material had successfully coaxed from you time and time again to keep you spending money on it, rather than always re-inventing itself from scratch from one story arc to the next and trying brand new things to surprise you and give you things that you didn't even KNOW you wanted rather than catering to your already pre-conceived expectations... which is the textbook definition of boring and stale.
GT may have ultimately been a creative failure in many of the finer details, but it in NO way was a creative failure I don't think in capturing the root-most heart and soul of what made Dragon Ball always stand out so much from other ultra-popular commercial entities... that of something that was never afraid to constantly re-invent itself, even at the very-most height of its popularity, and subvert and go against audience expectations of what its going to try next. That it managed to do so whilst itself being a corporately mandated, by-committee project is something that is STARTLINGLY miraculous and one of a kind unique, to the point of being a downright Unicorn.
In NO way should ANYONE have expected we'd be so lucky to get anything REMOTELY like that in a second go-round with another corporately-mandated, by-committee Dragon Ball sequel series... especially one that comes 20 years later, in an anime landscape that is ABSURDLY more corporate and by-committee than ever before.
Again, don't mistake any of this for me claiming that GT is some bastion of perfection or greatness. It isn't, and is far the hell from it, clearly. Just that in all the ways that mattered most, it
did ultimately do right by the most substantially and significantly important parts of the very core of Dragon Ball and served as about as fittingly proper and respectful a final send-off as one could hope for; and that it did so with EVERYTHING about its nature as a company product going strikingly against it, which is SUPER fucking rare and not at all something to take for granted casually.
