Polyphase Avatron wrote:When you get down to it the franchise is ridiculously inconsistent about the speed of characters. The dub just makes it worse.
Oh yeah, particularly in the anime where you only have a certain amount of frames per second to work with, usually 12 but sometimes the full 24. But when you're already having fights occur on ones (that is, an animation frame change on every single frame) in the 22nd TB, you really can't show how much faster someone is without making them outright disappear (which is a tired trope in its own right) or by having characters tell the audience how much faster they are.
Kataphrut wrote:It's funny, we mock the "next dimension" stuff because of the way it cheapens death, but at the same time it's pretty accurate to how death is actually treated in Dragon Ball. Yeah, the use of that term is obviously for censorship purposes, but if the Japanese version or even the Kai dub started using it, I don't think I'd bat an eyelid.
I think the use of Next Dimension doesn't work on two levels. First, very few characters in the story would even have knowledge of life after death, unless we assume everyone, including aliens like Raditz and Frieza, knows and believes Buddhist/Chinese mythological afterlife lore. That isn't implausible given that they all speak English or Japanese or Spanish or what have you, but it's rather unlikely.
More importantly, the actual act of censorship stands out because of how obvious it is, like the dialogue equivalent of frothy mugs of water. In The Walking Dead show, Neegan says "They don't know who they're
screwing with", when it's so obviously meant to be the more intense profanity that was used in the comics. The use of something softer contrasts with the character and tone of the scene, and basically signposts that something different was intended to be used.