BlazingFiddlesticks wrote:Cipher nailed it describing Toriyama as "whimsical nihilism", and boy does it let the series do a lot of silly things without getting you thinking
too much about it!
I was actually surprised at how much I enjoyed Battle of Gods, any misgiving I have with it ultimately give way to Toriyama just doing his thing. Shame the rest of the revival did not land so well...
To be clear, when I've tossed out that phrase, it's to refer not only to that sense of pure self-indulgence/desire to allow the audience to have fun, but a tendency to infuse those elements with a bit of real sentiment--primarily of a variety that acknowledges some of humanity's worst elements while neither disparaging nor championing them, and which often eschews any moral growth in its protagonists in favor of showing the positive results of initiative and interpersonal bonds.
This is the man who begins the Boo arc by having the narrator state that after a few years of peace, humanity was quickly up to foolishness again because that's just the kind of being humans are, who sends God into
Dr. Slump to consider wiping out all of humanity (a beat repeated in both
Jaco and
Jiya, for that matter). His protagonists endanger the world nearly as often as they save it; his pantheons of divine beings are largely ineffective and petty. Then there's
Cashman, which is ...
Cashman. Of course everything I just listed is also completely, utterly whimsical, and intentionally comical as well.
That phrase is also in reference to the fact that he's written essentially the same story every time he's put pen to paper: a group of seflish weirdos come together to do accidental good, while not really growing as people, but at least forming bonds through their drive. (The idea being then, without necessarily championing their selfishness a la Rand or someone similar, that personal initiative and connections to others are in themselves the positive moral influences of this universe, and worth serious weight, while everything else including humanity's most destructive tendencies are
simply ripe for laughter.)
This is all to say, he goofs around, and prioritizes goofing around, but within that goofing around are some pretty clear sentiments about the world. He claims to have no themes--and I believe that as far as intentionality--but you don't goof around the exact same way twenty-plus times because you've nothing on your mind. This is all to say, one of the reasons Toriyama's work holds up so well, in addition to his brilliance as a comic artist and humorist, is that, in both its gleeful self-indulgence and its consistency in reflecting certain world views, you get the sense you're experiencing something with very little filter. That's never going to age badly in comparison to something intentionally written to pander. (And
Dragon Ball does pander, but only when Toriyama or one of the editors he greatly trusted seems to believe pandering would be most fun--both for the audience and themselves.)
Some of its early choices for humor not withstanding (and it shouldn't take great imagination to guess which ones I'm referring to),
Dragon Ball's aged like fine wine.
