Does Dragon Ball have the largest, least toxic, fandom in existence of fictional franchises?

[Tai Lung]

if the popularity of characters like Zangya and Fasha are any hint.

It is not very difficult, even if they only have a dialogue and then "death"

It is difficult since that didn't happen with many characters besides them, Zangya at least fought a bit, Fasha just talked then died, yet both were popular enough and it's not hard to see it's because they're females.

there are not many female characters warriors, fans settled for zangya and fasha although they did little or nothing that's why I say it's not difficult

[zarmack]

It is not very difficult, even if they only have a dialogue and then "death"

It is difficult since that didn't happen with many characters besides them, Zangya at least fought a bit, Fasha just talked then died, yet both were popular enough and it's not hard to see it's because they're females.

there are not many female characters warriors, fans settled for zangya and fasha although they did little or nothing that's why I say it's not difficult

Female fighting characters in series known to be sausage feast are bound to become popular. That's why many fans like Zangya (who seems to be more popular than Bojack himself) and Selypa/Fasha.

[divad86]

There have been a couple of times I have lost interest in Dragon ball and it was mainly because I felt the fandom was toxic. There were times where I felt I was being judged because I didn't have then Kanzenban volumes, the original 42 volumes of the manga in Japanese, and/or the Dragon Boxes. At the time it made me very insecure because all I had was what Funimation had released (DVD season sets then moving on to the Blu-Ray sets) and Viz (All 42 volumes then getting the Viz Bigs). It made me feel insecure for a long time. Even though I was aware of their problems, they were the easiest and cheapest ways for me to enjoy Dragon Ball. I hate to say this but the reason I didn't post often was because I felt that way when I came onto this forum. When I'd see the threads that say that the Funimation and Viz products were terrible I felt like I was being judged and my love for Dragon Ball was being attacked. Even though nobody came out and said it I got the impression people were saying "If you don't have the Kanzenban, the original Japanese volumes, or the Dragon Boxes then why do you even like Dragon Ball and why are you even here." Now if this came off as rude or offensive then I apologize but I just wanted to get that off of my chest. I have learned to drown out said opinions, form my own, and enjoy what I have regardless of their shortcomings. I just want to say that these were my own odd opinions of fandom being toxic and as I look back on it I feel it was a dumb way to see it as that. I do sometimes come into the the forum and when I still see threads like the ones I talked about before, I still get that impression from some people even though they are not directly coming out and saying it. Other than that, I feel that this is a good forum to talk about Dragon Ball and other than my version of toxic I don't believe the fandom is that bad.

[Tai Lung]

It is difficult since that didn't happen with many characters besides them, Zangya at least fought a bit, Fasha just talked then died, yet both were popular enough and it's not hard to see it's because they're females.

there are not many female characters warriors, fans settled for zangya and fasha although they did little or nothing that's why I say it's not difficult

Female fighting characters in series known to be sausage feast are bound to become popular. That's why many fans like Zangya (who seems to be more popular than Bojack himself) and Selypa/Fasha.

That is what I said ...
although being fair I would say that caulifla and kale probably won more the affection of the fans..of form justy in comparison to zangya and fasha that did little

[Polyphase Avatron]

there are not many female characters warriors, fans settled for zangya and fasha although they did little or nothing that's why I say it's not difficult

Female fighting characters in series known to be sausage feast are bound to become popular. That's why many fans like Zangya (who seems to be more popular than Bojack himself) and Selypa/Fasha.

That is what I said ...
although being fair I would say that caulifla and kale probably won more the affection of the fans..of form justy in comparison to zangya and fasha that did little

But then you see Youtube videos of their fights with Goku and such and lots of the comments are things like 'Yeah Goku, bitchsmack those thots'

[CJStriker_CBR]

there are not many female characters warriors, fans settled for zangya and fasha although they did little or nothing that's why I say it's not difficult

Female fighting characters in series known to be sausage feast are bound to become popular. That's why many fans like Zangya (who seems to be more popular than Bojack himself) and Selypa/Fasha.

That is what I said ...
although being fair I would say that caulifla and kale probably won more the affection of the fans..of form justy in comparison to zangya and fasha that did little

I have seen the same-thing as well with the more positive final reaction and long-term fandom a major part of the fandom has gained for Caulifla and Kale and I say that is way overdue justice for them. After the Meltdown the fandom had after the whole going SSJ thing with Caulifla and Kale against Blue Goku it felt like a never ending Toxiciness that the girls would have.

But after the end of the show and the good showing in the fight with Goku, the Girls have gained a IMO Majorly BIG Chunk of the fanbase behind them! Yea their are still those that don't like them but compared to how it was just a year about at these time, how much different a Year Makes for the Positive!

[Yuli Ban]

Youtube... comments...

Well there's where you went wrong. It's been over a decade since the meme started and it's never been wrong— YouTube comments are literally the cesspool of the internet.
I could go onto a video of a recipe on how to make sugar cookies with <1,000 views and I guarantee I'll find at least two comments containing racial slurs, Bible verses, neckbeard atheism, etc. Especially if there's a woman in the video for any reason, you can expect there to be gendered slurs or comments on her sexual capability. Even if there isn't a woman, you can usually expect. Hell, you can sometimes expect it for men too! Trolls and edgelords are typically the ones who make comments in the first place since everyone else disabled comments via extensions.
Judging the current state of the fandom based on YouTube comments is like judging the current state of geopolitics based on shit smears in the world's toilet bowls.

[Tai Lung]

Female fighting characters in series known to be sausage feast are bound to become popular. That's why many fans like Zangya (who seems to be more popular than Bojack himself) and Selypa/Fasha.

That is what I said ...
although being fair I would say that caulifla and kale probably won more the affection of the fans..of form justy in comparison to zangya and fasha that did little

I have seen the same-thing as well with the more positive final reaction and long-term fandom a major part of the fandom has gained for Caulifla and Kale and I say that is way overdue justice for them. After the Meltdown the fandom had after the whole going SSJ thing with Caulifla and Kale against Blue Goku it felt like a never ending Toxiciness that the girls would have.

But after the end of the show and the good showing in the fight with Goku, the Girls have gained a IMO Majorly BIG Chunk of the fanbase behind them! Yea their are still those that don't like them but compared to how it was just a year about at these time, how much different a Year Makes for the Positive!

I would certainly also say that the role of female characters has improved compared to before ... many warrior girls I think it is a advance good

Female fighting characters in series known to be sausage feast are bound to become popular. That's why many fans like Zangya (who seems to be more popular than Bojack himself) and Selypa/Fasha.

That is what I said ...
although being fair I would say that caulifla and kale probably won more the affection of the fans..of form justy in comparison to zangya and fasha that did little

But then you see Youtube videos of their fights with Goku and such and lots of the comments are things like 'Yeah Goku, bitchsmack those thots'

they got ahead of me but well ... you can always see this type of comments on YouTube even if they are not they this characters.

[Onikage725]

No, what I'd want at this point, ideally, is for people to just let this series go already, leave it to be a finished work for later generations to discover and enjoy as a completed story (which it was more than successfully doing for nearly 20 years in between its end and its revival), and just move on to something altogether new: something that also isn't just another Shonen flavor-of-the-moment Dragon Ball-wannabe.

Blasphemy. I want my Muten prequel. Do not stand in my way.

What I'd like is if the fanbase not only let Dragon Ball go and moved on, but also if they finally detached themselves from all the various attempts at "Battle Shonen successors to Dragon Ball's crown" throughout the years (Naruto, My Hero Academia, One Piece, Toriko, Fairy Tail, etc.) and moved on to embrace something that's TRULY unique and fresh and not reliant on past nostalgia (bonus points if its also something that isn't aimed primarily at grade schoolers). Both Dragon Ball itself as well as the "Battle Shonen/Dragon Ball formula" are both in DIRE need of permanent retirement so that maybe the broader industry and fandom alike might be more free to, heaven forbid, actually focus on something that's altogether different for a change.

I kinda feel like you're ignoring the target demo here. It's ok to not like, for example, MHA (though I wouldn't really at all compare it to Dragon Ball). But it's targeting a youthful audience that still eats that stuff up. I haven't found this at the expense of other genres or age groups, personally. When my brother was pushing me to watch Hunter x Hunter, it didn't somehow remove Parasyte and A-Jin from my queue, ya know?

[Kunzait_83]

I kinda feel like you're ignoring the target demo here. It's ok to not like, for example, MHA (though I wouldn't really at all compare it to Dragon Ball). But it's targeting a youthful audience that still eats that stuff up. I haven't found this at the expense of other genres or age groups, personally. When my brother was pushing me to watch Hunter x Hunter, it didn't somehow remove Parasyte and A-Jin from my queue, ya know?

Read my later post after that for further clarification.

But to quickly summarize: my point wasn't at all about the target demo for Shonen (i.e. grade school children). It was about the (increasingly large) periphery demographic of adults who over-fixate on this stuff, which leads to older-skewing stuff getting largely ignored (unless its lucky enough to get a Cartoon Network slot, as was the case with titles like Parasyte and Cowboy Bebop) and thus not having a bigger presence within fandom overall.

And also your brother was a teenager (and an older teenager at that) when he was pushing HxH on you. Just a quick reminder that "Shonen" as a demographic mainly targets children ages 5 to 13-ish or thereabouts. The idea that the Shonen demographic also encompasses "teens and 20-somethings" is WHOLLY incorrect and made-up by Western fans. As a general principal, if you're old enough to shave, be sexually interested in girls/guys, or take a driver's test, you at a bare minimum should probably be also growing out of solely focusing on Weekly Shonen Jump's output and probably should be delving more deeply into older-skewing material overall.

Being in late-high school/on the cusp of college and having your manga palette still mainly and overwhelmingly consist solely of stuff like Naruto and One Piece... that's shit isn't "normal" and its PRECISELY the normalization of that lack of personal growth and development of one's media diet in modern fandom ("modern" meaning of the last 15 solid years now) that I'm arguing against here: not average grade school kid.

I'm also not even arguing against being an adult and still having an interest in some (key word SOME) Shonen alongside other things. You and I are certainly guilty of that obviously. But that isn't what my general ramblings on this issue are about either. Its about adult fans who take it to a ridiculous extreme and have Shonen (and similarly immature works) effectively SUPPLANT an interest in anything else that might dare to be more intellectually or creatively ambitious, and that's unfortunately a VERY large majority of Western anime/manga fandom since the mid-2000s or so.

[Hulk10]

Personally I'm not too fond of a lot of anime series.

[Dagon]

I suppose you haven't heard of Reddit.

[Yuli Ban]

And also your brother was a teenager (and an older teenager at that) when he was pushing HxH on you. Just a quick reminder that "Shonen" as a demographic mainly targets children ages 5 to 13-ish or thereabouts. The idea that the Shonen demographic also encompasses "teens and 20-somethings" is WHOLLY incorrect and made-up by Western fans. As a general principal, if you're old enough to shave, be sexually interested in girls/guys, or take a driver's test, you at a bare minimum should probably be also growing out of solely focusing on Weekly Shonen Jump's output and probably should be delving more deeply into older-skewing material overall.

Being in late-high school/on the cusp of college and having your manga palette still mainly and overwhelmingly consist solely of stuff like Naruto and One Piece... that's shit isn't "normal" and its PRECISELY the normalization of that lack of personal growth and development of one's media diet in modern fandom ("modern" meaning of the last 15 solid years now) that I'm arguing against here: not average grade school kid.

I'm also not even arguing against being an adult and still having an interest in some (key word SOME) Shonen alongside other things. You and I are certainly guilty of that obviously. But that isn't what my general ramblings on this issue are about either. Its about adult fans who take it to a ridiculous extreme and have Shonen (and similarly immature works) effectively SUPPLANT an interest in anything else that might dare to be more intellectually or creatively ambitious, and that's unfortunately a VERY large majority of Western anime/manga fandom since the mid-2000s or so.

You need to put this into perspective to really hammer home the problem, which I completely understand.

One reason why many in the West think shonen = kids to young adults is because we don't have anything similar. Works labeled for 5-13 year olds are written completely differently from shonen; typically, they're much goofier, much more stooped in edutainment, much more controlled by moral guardians. And even works for teenagers is still strictly under the eye of the FCC and parents' groups. There are many aspects of shonen that fit with TV-Y standards, but there are also aspects of shonen that can only be listed under TV-MA. Western media is this extreme in its visual form.
When you get to literature, however, it follows the standards a bit more closely. For example: Harry Potter. It's considered grade-school literature, something that school kids are supposed to read that merely has a peripheral demographic of elders. However, if you expect an edgier, more adult Harry Potter spinoff, then you're going to be disappointed unless the Rowling estate completely loses it.

It's true that the last Harry Potter book takes up elements of YA lit and the last book could be considered a hybrid of grade school and YA, but the series was never actually YA lit itself. It's always purely children's literature. That it impacted the entire genre more than any other was a fluke. Teens and adults get uncomfortable with this because they think enjoying something primarily made for kids somehow delegitimizes it or their interest in it, so they make up excuses such as "actually, it's for all ages" or pointing to completely surface level factors like violence and heavy themes to "prove" that something is actually for adults precisely because TV and movies promote the idea that children's entertainment has to be utterly saccharine, in-your-face with teaching morals, and devoid of any realistic emotion or conflict.


As for the age group of shonen thing, I think one can draw a parallel to the aforementioned YA genre. YA, aka "young adult" literature, is written primarily for the 12-19 crowd. As such, it follows various tropes and standards. Because it's not written explicitly for children, YA works tend to deal with slightly more mature subject matter. But it's not written for adults, so the subject isn't treated with utmost maturity but instead used more as a plot backdrop. The two YA trends that have already come and gone were paranormal romance (started by Twilight and, to a much lesser extent, the last Harry Potter book) and dystopian literature (kicked off by The Hunger Games). They tended to follow common beats. And a lot of new YA literature still lives in the shadows of these books.
The thing is, YA draws in quite a few adult fans. Many were teens/young adults when the books first came out and merely grew up. Others were already mature adults who merely saw this popular thing and were attracted to what they saw. And nowadays, we have bookish types who only ever read YA stories and maybe a few classics but still consider themselves literature fans. Or people who saw the movies and use them to gauge the state of the entirety of published fiction or at least their respective genres.



So to wrap it up, imagine someone who's about your mother's age saying they love reading literature but wish authors tackled subjects with greater maturity and without following so many of the same beats. And then when you ask them what they read, they only name drop YA books, literature literally for kids in high school and early college. That's what the state of shonen is like, except for a demographic a full decade younger. You can think of Dragon Ball as being like the Harry Potter of shonen in that it brought about innumerable attempts to achieve the same success without fully understanding how and why it worked except on a functional level.

[Acetona]

The moment you start to delve deeply on any fandom, you see how toxic they are, even niche ones.
The worst case is on series that keep renewing themselves with new content every year/couple of years, like Pokemon. I think I don't need do explain why, you probably have seen it.

[DainIronfoot]

Answering the title of this thread, definitely not. Especially in these modern days! Just yesterday and today alone I witnessed enormous amounts of toxicity on social media.

It's a real shame...

[Hulk10]

I agree. People just can't respect others ideas.

I also don't think that in the case of dragon ball heroes the arcade version supercedes the anime and manga versions.

[DBZAOTA482]

I wouldn't say least toxic but yeah it's definitely heaven to the fandoms of other big franchises like Sonic the Hedgehog and even Star Wars.

[Yasai11]

Dragonball is pretty easy to get into because the plot is fairly simple. Plus, Dragonball fans tend to channel their hate into Toei's handling of the franchise, or Funimation's numerous attempts to be the primary license holder of Dragonball in the North American region.

[superfan2024]

Tbh, the most toxic I've ever experienced the fandom was during Super's run.

[TenshinFan]

I would say it is quite toxic for the GT meme-hate alone. Constant bickering about canon and sperging out about power levels. Definitely not as bad as Sonic the Hedgehog and Star Wars like the other guy said. This board is great especially compared to reddit or youtube. But even here you have a lot of dick measuring with particulars of home releases and translations. I cant hardly find a thread actually discussing movies, sagas, or characters.