Doctor. wrote:Kunzait_83 wrote:Zamasu is a fantastic villain and addition to the series canon
That's a surprise. I was sure you'd hate him considering he's a generic Final Fantasy boss archetype that multiple other, lesser Shounen have used as a villain. Unless you consider Zamasu and Black, by extention, to be intentional over-the-top caricatures/parodies of the archetype (that make some decent points sometimes about the fucked-up nature of the Dragon World; points that get completely ignored and/or ridiculed by everyone else because that's just how the carefree and naive cast would react), as I and some other people do.
I consider Zamasu, like so many things in post-Boo Dragon Ball material, to be a fantastic concept in search of a good story/execution. The idea of a serious, well-studied Kaioshin who is driven to the brink of total, unhinged lunacy by the thoughtless, careless nature of both mortals and his fellow gods alike is both a great concept in and of itself, as well as (as you noted) a potentially pretty cool piece of self-aware commentary on the wacky Toriyama-esque nature of the Dragon Ball universe itself.
Also on a purely surface/aesthetic level I'm quite fond of Zamasu's visual design (as I am most of the Kaioshins' in general) as well as his repertoire of techniques and general fighting style (which makes use of a lot of fun Boo-era deistic abilities like tearing holes in the fabric of reality, and so forth, and other fun stuff like Ki scythes and whatnot). If nothing else we do get some damn cool fighting bits out of it, and stuff like that - beyond acting as part of the whole reason most people gravitate to martial arts genre fare to begin with - also makes for welcome fodder for DB fighting games such as FighterZ. Plus I think that the rare times that DB delves into a quasi "mystery" type of storyline (like in the early Cell and Boo arcs) are generally very, very much underrated and unsung, and I appreciated another stab at that in Zamasu's arc.
Where Zamasu falters is in how his arc overall handles him otherwise: as you noted, at times he devolves into a familiar Final Fantasy-esque baddie, which I'm generally ok with in small doses (who doesn't love Kefka?), but has gotten to become worn the fuck out in its overuse in tons of lesser material. Beyond that, I'm also not so keen on dragging Future Trunks into it, since that lends the whole arc an air of simply retreading the Cell arc all over again (oh look, Future Trunks time travels back to the past to warn the heroes of a grave, oncoming threat that ends up killing Goku and plunging Trunks' time period into a post-apocalyptic hellhole: we've never done THAT storyline before, no sirree), along with a ton of other issues that I'd just be here all day rehashing.
But for all the problems with Super and with the Zamasu arc in particular, Zamasu himself is a really cool character idea (and design, with a cool array of fighting techniques) that could've lent itself to a really cool new Dragon Ball story. All the elements are indeed present throughout large patches of Super to make for a perfectly fine and solid enough Dragon Ball continuation: it just never gels or coheres into anything that's especially worthwhile, due to general laziness, lack of direction (not everyone can improvise as well as Toriyama could in his prime), as well as more importantly, a lack of willingness or courage to let these ideas take the series and its characters into bold new directions (which many of them EASILY could and in fact almost seem tailor made conceptually FOR that specific purpose, especially considering stuff like the multiverse): the latter of which is a crippling problem that, I would and have argued, even GT didn't have for all its own myriad faults.
Make no mistake, its not that I think that a good, solid continuation of Dragon Ball CAN'T inherently be done: I just question the ability for it to actually happen given both Toriyama's reluctance to fully commit back to doing the series properly (which is ultimately his call to make: he doesn't owe anyone or is under any obligation to do anything that he doesn't feel up for tackling as an artist), as well as moreover the general conservative and corporately safe & sterilized creative environment and overall landscape that major Shonen anime and manga, as a general whole, has been dwelling eyeball-deep within roughly since Dragon Ball had originally ended.
There was a time when genuine risque experimentation and a willingness to be thoroughly uncommercial was quite commonplace (and even encouraged) in Shonen, even within the pages of something as heavily mainstream as Weekly Shonen Jump: we're a long, LOOOOOONG ways away from that time and zeitgeist though, and things have been heavily slanted in the exact
opposite of that general direction for the better part of over 20 years now; and Dragon Ball itself is, ironically, in some part to blame for that to a certain extent.
Meaning that, in a way, Dragon Ball's runaway success all those years ago helped lead the way to helping create a greatly more commercially invasive artistic landscape for Shonen manga and anime as a whole that would help stifle the life out of most everything else... up to and including even Dragon Ball's own attempts at making a belated comeback/revival containing even an ounce of boldness or originality. No longer benefiting from the more loose, anything goes and nothing (or very, very little) is off the table type of environment of the 80s and early 90s, its now in today's world a victim of the very same formulaic Shonen-by-corporate-assembly-line monster that it (very much unwittingly and unintentionally) helped to create.
