Herms' Guide Guide (Collection of Information Awesomeness)

[VegettoEX]

Since these last years we've gotten stuff like Episode of Bardock, Battle of Gods, Dragon Ball Online, Dragon Ball Heroes, and Jaco The Galactic Patrolman, shouldn't this guide be updated at some point?

Forum threads - particularly old, pre-Kanzenshuu ones - aren't the site. Just keep that in mind. Lots of that material is already incorporated into their respective pages on the site (particularly in the "Movie Guide" for each of those items, and the "Manga Guide" for the spin-off stuff... and Victory Mission is already in-progress).

[Kamiccolo9]

Looking through the Demon Guide, it mentions that Slug's henchmen in Movie 4 are Demon Clansmen, but is anything ever said anywhere about Slug himself being one?

[RandomGuy96]

A few questions and comments:

I know it's dead, but the Battle Record seems pretty weird in places. For example, counting a one-shot non-fight against an ordinary human as a victory for 18, but not counting getting easily beaten and eaten by Cell or Buu as a defeat.

Kanzentai used to have comprehensive and detailed translations of certain parts of the Daizenshuu guidebooks, like the D7 character bios. Now, they're only available via the Way Back Machine. Is there a reason they aren't on Kanzenshuu, or linked anywhere?

The Strength-Palooza thread(s) aren't linked either. Is this a "I'll post it when it's done" kind of thing?

[kuartus4]

Herms, what does it mean when you put brackets around certain words in strength checker quotes? For example here:

Chapter: 346 (DBZ 152), P8.2
Context: Piccolo wants to fight No.20 without Vegeta's interference
No.20: “Don’t interfere, he says…Kukkukkuh…Alright, if I drain [Piccolo]'s energy again, then [I’ll win] against Vegeta…”

For example "I'll win" is in brackets here.

[Herms]

Herms, what does it mean when you put brackets around certain words in strength checker quotes? For example here:

Chapter: 346 (DBZ 152), P8.2
Context: Piccolo wants to fight No.20 without Vegeta's interference
No.20: “Don’t interfere, he says…Kukkukkuh…Alright, if I drain [Piccolo]'s energy again, then [I’ll win] against Vegeta…”

For example "I'll win" is in brackets here.

Basically it indicates things added or modified for clarity's sake; things that are clear in context, but not when the quotes are on their own. In Japanese, that bit's "if I drain this guy's energy again, then against Vegeta..." (もういちどヤツのエネルギーを吸い取ればべジータに...) So I replaced "this guy" with "Piccolo" in brackets, rather than add in a full-on note explaining that Gero is talking about Piccolo.

The "against Vegeta..." bit is more tricky, obviously. Gero trails off without finishing his sentence. Now, Japanese has subject-object-verb sentence order, while English has subject-verb-object. So when someone leaves off the end of a sentence in Japanese, they typically leave off information that would come in the middle of an English sentence, while on the flipside still including information that would come at the end of an English sentence. Which, naturally, can be a real pain in the ass if you're translating an unfinished Japanese sentence into English.

Long story short: in English we say "I'll beat Vegeta", but in Japanese that sentence would be "I'll Vegeta beat", and in the example Gero trails off without actually saying the "beat" part. But it's pretty clear from context that's what he means (he says at the end of chapter 346 that he'll be able to defeat Vegeta if he absorbs the other guys' energy, and that's his whole plan throughout 346), so I added it in brackets because "then against Vegeta..." isn't a coherent sentence fragment in English the same way it is in Japanese.

(A more famous example of this sort of thing is Super Saiyan Goku's line クリリンのことか?!, typically translated as "are you talking about Kuririn?!" or "do you mean Kuririn?!", but in Japanese pretty much just "about Kuririn?!" with the verb only implied.)

In this case it's pretty straightforward to determine the missing bit, but other times if I thought it was iffy the thing in brackets has a question mark and/or several possibilities (I seem to recall that happening a lot with pronouns). I admit, I probably should have put in more full-on translation notes throughout the Strength Checker, but at the time it was hard enough just putting the whole thing together, and I felt like if I added a note for one thing I'd end up writing notes for every quote. So I ended up erring on the side of too few notes.

[Shoryuken]

Will you be expanding on the Personal Pronoun Guide to include second person pronouns used by the characters and in addition the personal pronouns used by film-exclusive characters?

[phalangery]

Hello, I'm new to the site and I've been acquainting myself with the incredible information in these guides. I just had a quick question about Kami's age in the age guide. He's listed as being 'a little over 200' during the time of Piccolo Daimao's initial rampage.

My question is, shouldn't Kami be the same age as Piccolo Daimao? I was under the impression that before they split, Kami and Piccolo were basically a different person altogether. So the being that is 'Kami' didn't really exist until after he expelled all his evil and whatnot.

Or am I just splitting hairs? Either way, thanks for the crazy amount of work that had to go into this stuff.

[TheDevilsCorpse]

I think the idea is that they are described as two halves of the same Namekian (because there are literally two of them), but it wasn't exactly an equal split the same way Fusion is an equal merger. So Kami is probably pretty darn close to the exact same Namekian before and after the "split", as he was only expelling a bit of evil from his heart that happened to take shape into Daimao.

[phalangery]

Fair enough. I could see an argument the other way, but that makes a lot of sense. Plus the guide doesn't count them refusing as being "born" again, so I guess it should work the other way as well. Just, you know, in reverse.

[Herms]

Yeah, it's definitely a bit arbitrary. With Piccolo at the very least, if you look at it one way he's not born until after the split and is therefore 0 years old, but if you look at it another way, he's just the evil half of a Namekian who's over 200 years old at that point, and therefore ought to likewise count as over 200. And arguably the original "child of Katatz" that had been alive for those 200+ years technically ceases to exist at that point and doesn't come back again until the Cell arc. As you saw, I ultimately opted to go with "0" for Piccolo and "over 200" for Kami, mostly because I felt like it was more useful that way than just using the same age for both characters. Piccolo's age represents the time since the split, while Kami's age represents the time since the birth of the original child of Katatz. Of course, then I threw that off by resetting Piccolo's age when he becomes Ma Junior, but whatever.

I do really, really, really need to go back and give that thing a thorough overhaul one of these days. Considering it was written before the new movies/Jaco/DB Minus/etc. And that I pretty much just banged the entire thing out one morning simply by looking off the Daizenshuu 7 timeline and character bios, then just doing the math by counting each character as a year older every time the calendar year turned over. It didn't even try to address the issue of all the various ages ascribed to Gohan throughout the series, or messy stuff like that. And at the time I didn't know about those official birthdays (as opposed to simply birth years) Julian tracked down for some characters.

[johnboy1]

I think the idea is that they are described as two halves of the same Namekian (because there are literally two of them), but it wasn't exactly an equal split the same way Fusion is an equal merger. So Kami is probably pretty darn close to the exact same Namekian before and after the "split", as he was only expelling a bit of evil from his heart that happened to take shape into Daimao.

And it's worth noting that in a filler scene, the split is actually shown taking place. In the scene, Piccolo is seen splitting from the original Namekian, rather than the original dividing into two. The part that becomes Kami is treated as being the same as the original.

[DNA]

Hey so I was watching some recent Kai episodes and once again the Elder Kaioshin mentions he only had "about a thousand more years or so". I did mention this a few times back when you first built the timeline, hopefully you'll include a mention of it whenever you redo it :P

I'm simply mentioning it again as to remind you to make a note for the future! :D

[Analytical Delusion]

Just wondering (and maybe I'll have to look more closely), but is there a definitive guide/thread either by Herms or on the main Kanzenshuu website with manga plotholes/errors? Stuff like Trunks mentioning Androids #19/#20 and such. I did a search and found a few threads, but the conversation doesn't seem to have taken off enough to have produced a list in any of them (apologies if this is in error).

BTW, thanks as always to Herms and the staff for all of the hard work you guys have done to make all this information accessible to the community!

[Sandubadear]

As you might expect, Heaven is where those who Enma Daio judges to be good are allowed to go to. It’s a large planet directly above Enma’s palace. To reach Heaven, one must ride a special plane that takes off from an airport near Enma’s palace (this plane was part of Toriyama’s drawing of the afterlife, but only appears in the anime). The place where Goku is shown training for the 25th Tenkaichi Budoukai is identified in the daizenshuu as being Heaven.

which Daizenshuu?

[Herms]

First in Daizenshuu 4, then 7, and then in SEG and pretty much every subsequent guidebook that deals with the subject.

[Sandubadear]

Is "Super Evolution" a official term or is it fan made? A guy says that it comes from Daizenshuu 6, but Daizenshuu 7 only calls it "Fourth Transformation".

[TheDevilsCorpse]

Is "Super Evolution" a official term or is it fan made? A guy says that it comes from Daizenshuu 6, but Daizenshuu 7 only calls it "Fourth Transformation".

Daizenshu #6's coverage of DBZ Movie #5:

Super evolution! This is the final form!!
As opposed to Freeza, whose power was too strong in his third-transformation form, to the point where he couldn't restrain it, Coola is able to always be in his third-transformation form, and in addition is capable of one more transformation!!
Coola (Final Form)
The shape of each part of his body, including all of his muscles, bulge out and become large.

[SSJ2FutureGohan]

http://www.kanzenshuu.com/production/toriyama/#gt

In addition to these black and white designs, Toriyama also made several color pictures of Goku, Pan, and Trunks. The first is simply a colored version of the above pictures of them. There is also a stand-alone picture of Goku using alternate colors than what he ended up having in Dragon Ball GT: orange shirt and blue pants, instead of blue shirt and orange pants.

Does anyone know where to find this?

[TheDevilsCorpse]

Best I know of right on hand, but i haven't really looked either:

[xmysticgohanx]

@herms how literal are your translations?