Did you like the finale of the tournament at least? (Goku/Freeza/17 vs Jiren)Kunzait_83 wrote:No he didn't. He's simply describing a hypothetical manner in which to improve the narrative for the Revival of F arc in and of itself. Even allowing for the view that the Tournament of Power made better use of Freeza than did Revival of F (if only by virtue of even trying to put SOME unique spin on the character), that doesn't take away from the Revival of F story being bland and underwhelming by itself, divorced from the later arc.Toxin45 wrote:Then he returned in the tournament of power after the retelling in super. Dude you forget that he returned in the tournament of power and helped universe 7 win the tournament of power then being revived again by whis.
These things have to stand on their own also: all the more so with Revival of F also taking on the form of a stand alone movie as well as a recap arc of Super. Regardless of what the Tournament of Power arc did with Freeza after, it has no bearing on the story for Revival of F basically wasting the character on a complete nothing story. Freeza comes back, he fights Goku and Vegeta again, he loses again. That's almost very literally IT, with close to nothing in the way of any real twist on the formula (apart from the debut of new forms which are at a bare minimum among the least creative in the franchise's history, and a "rewind time" gimmick at the end which is almost universally reviled by fandom, and justly so due to how clunky it is).
Krump was simply trying to think of some ideas to jazz it up a little more.
What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
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Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
I completely respect your opinion, and I respect you. I enjoyed discussing this with you, even if I don't completely agree.
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Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
Don't know if this was brought up at some point during this long-winded back and forth, but, for what it's worth, Revival of F also shows Freeza do what he never bothered doing before, what he absolutely scoffed at doing before: working to improve himself. That's not a complete transformation of his personality or anything, but it certainly reflects a subtle change in how he's willing to approach things. And that's if we look at the film in isolation. Which, to be fair, doesn't mean that it's God's gift to Dragon Ball stories or anything, but, if that's indeed not been brought up, then I think that's an important small bit to recognize at least; a tiny bit of credit that should at least be thrown its way.
When it comes to "Super" (speaking of the franchise revival in general), in the broad sense, in the more complete context, I guess I have an unconventional way of looking at its story. I don't look at each film or arc in isolation. It doesn't feel right to me. In the sense of "it's its own film, look at it on its own merits" it makes sense to do so, but doing so doesn't feel like an appraisal of an accurate representation of Toriyama's storytelling style. In the original run, he would make up the story, chapter by chapter as things went along, not arc by arc. He would start an arc and for the most part have no idea where things would end up by its conclusion. Super's films/arcs feel like a far cry from this, where he's able to plan things from front to back before submitting the thing to be drawn and/or animated. In this sense, in the context of Toriyama's general approach to writing and creation, each arc of Super feels more equivalent to me to an individual chapter of the original run. Super as a whole (or at least up to this point), then, feels more comparable to any given complete story arc of the original run. In the specific context of Toriyama as a writer, looking at the film in isolation feels the same as looking at an individual chapter of the original run in isolation.
So, in essence, I kind of feel that where Freeza ends up toward the end of Super is relevant to how he's treated in Revival of F. That "chapter" sets him up as finally being willing to improve himself (though he still stumbles), and it also sets up "Goku and Vegeta learning about moving and acting without thinking" as well as "Goku and Vegeta insist that they'll never work together". The Universe Survival "chapter" shows Freeza work past that stumbling, and even become a reluctant ally; it shows Goku 'master' the skill being teased, and it shows him fighting together with Vegeta numerous times. Yes, I know this is cheating.
But any of the ills that plague the series feel, to me, like a result of Toriyama being out of his element; he's largely not telling this story in a medium where he's proficient. And those bringing it to the media where he is proficient don't seem to have a knack for expressing his bullet points in the same way he would express his imagination with his own hands. The very most simple take home point of this is: I don't think any of Revival of F's, or Super in general's, narrative ills are in any way on Toriyama's shoulders. I think each "chapter" he came up with helps form a complete "arc" that would make for a solid as fuck continuation of the series, were he the one drawing and writing all of it. In other words, yes, "Toriyama is not God" is an assertion that I agree with and feel is justified, but I don't think any of the problems with Revival of F, or Super in general, work to help justify that conclusion, were one on a mission to justify it.
Forgive me if that actually has no bearing on what's been discussed, but I think that's an important way of looking at Super, that is rarely touched upon. No, even from that perspective, I wouldn't say that it makes it a good series, but I think it's a valuable way to look at it nonetheless. Toriyama is Dragon Ball, so I think looking at what bits of Super are Toriyama makes for an important dimension in assessing it, in order to see what little Dragon Ball is actually present in this thing calling itself Dragon Ball. Y'know, for auteurist purposes, and shit.
When it comes to "Super" (speaking of the franchise revival in general), in the broad sense, in the more complete context, I guess I have an unconventional way of looking at its story. I don't look at each film or arc in isolation. It doesn't feel right to me. In the sense of "it's its own film, look at it on its own merits" it makes sense to do so, but doing so doesn't feel like an appraisal of an accurate representation of Toriyama's storytelling style. In the original run, he would make up the story, chapter by chapter as things went along, not arc by arc. He would start an arc and for the most part have no idea where things would end up by its conclusion. Super's films/arcs feel like a far cry from this, where he's able to plan things from front to back before submitting the thing to be drawn and/or animated. In this sense, in the context of Toriyama's general approach to writing and creation, each arc of Super feels more equivalent to me to an individual chapter of the original run. Super as a whole (or at least up to this point), then, feels more comparable to any given complete story arc of the original run. In the specific context of Toriyama as a writer, looking at the film in isolation feels the same as looking at an individual chapter of the original run in isolation.
So, in essence, I kind of feel that where Freeza ends up toward the end of Super is relevant to how he's treated in Revival of F. That "chapter" sets him up as finally being willing to improve himself (though he still stumbles), and it also sets up "Goku and Vegeta learning about moving and acting without thinking" as well as "Goku and Vegeta insist that they'll never work together". The Universe Survival "chapter" shows Freeza work past that stumbling, and even become a reluctant ally; it shows Goku 'master' the skill being teased, and it shows him fighting together with Vegeta numerous times. Yes, I know this is cheating.
But any of the ills that plague the series feel, to me, like a result of Toriyama being out of his element; he's largely not telling this story in a medium where he's proficient. And those bringing it to the media where he is proficient don't seem to have a knack for expressing his bullet points in the same way he would express his imagination with his own hands. The very most simple take home point of this is: I don't think any of Revival of F's, or Super in general's, narrative ills are in any way on Toriyama's shoulders. I think each "chapter" he came up with helps form a complete "arc" that would make for a solid as fuck continuation of the series, were he the one drawing and writing all of it. In other words, yes, "Toriyama is not God" is an assertion that I agree with and feel is justified, but I don't think any of the problems with Revival of F, or Super in general, work to help justify that conclusion, were one on a mission to justify it.
Forgive me if that actually has no bearing on what's been discussed, but I think that's an important way of looking at Super, that is rarely touched upon. No, even from that perspective, I wouldn't say that it makes it a good series, but I think it's a valuable way to look at it nonetheless. Toriyama is Dragon Ball, so I think looking at what bits of Super are Toriyama makes for an important dimension in assessing it, in order to see what little Dragon Ball is actually present in this thing calling itself Dragon Ball. Y'know, for auteurist purposes, and shit.
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Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
I have a hard time giving the movie too much credit for "changing" that, simply because it's an idea the movie came up with in the first place. It was the movie that introduced the idea that Freeza had never trained before, so that it could then say that he was now training. It certainly wasn't an explicit character trait anywhere prior to that, so it was certainly something that nobody was waiting or could even conceive of happening. And I remember the tone of these boards when the movie came out and how many people balked at the very idea that Freeza had never trained in his life. I'm rather ambivalent to it one way or the other. And I'm not saying a good revival story has to make use of something that comes from past appearances. Not at all. And I'm not even saying that was a bad idea. I'm just not sure how fair it is to say the movies shows Freeza doing "what he never bothered doing before, what he absolutely scoffed at before" when it's a character trait the movie introduced in the first place. It's like giving the Back to the Future sequels credit over the first movie for "finally getting Marty to develop past that whole 'chicken' problem." Regardless of whether or not you think that was a good character arc for Marty, it has jack all to do with the original Back to the Future. But the way you're wording it here makes it sound like Freeza in the original series was constantly scoffing at the idea of training, even though it never comes up a single time. And since it doesn't, I don't really see a change, per se, because there's nothing to contrast it to.Zephyr wrote:Don't know if this was brought up at some point during this long-winded back and forth, but, for what it's worth, Revival of F also shows Freeza do what he never bothered doing before, what he absolutely scoffed at doing before: working to improve himself. That's not a complete transformation of his personality or anything, but it certainly reflects a subtle change in how he's willing to approach things. And that's if we look at the film in isolation. Which, to be fair, doesn't mean that it's God's gift to Dragon Ball stories or anything, but, if that's indeed not been brought up, then I think that's an important small bit to recognize at least; a tiny bit of credit that should at least be thrown its way.
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Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
Its a well animated and choreographed fight (among the best in all of Super actually): but it doesn't really amount to much, and is undercut almost completely by the tournament's outcome, particularly in Freeza's case where he ends up.Chrono Trigger wrote:Did you like the finale of the tournament at least? (Goku/Freeza/17 vs Jiren)
Freeza ends the arc more or less right back from scratch to where he started the series from, with almost no real noticeable change to show for everything he's gone through in the tournament, or his earlier defeats. Unless his subsequent appearances later on are to actually build off of what's happened to him throughout Super and genuinely change shit up with him in some form or fashion.
Which it MIGHT to be fair; but for the moment being at least, given how the series has thus far unfolded and the number of interesting avenues and opportunities its criminally wasted, I'm suspecting that that won't be the case. For the moment being, it almost seems like Super is setting itself up for Freeza to be a constantly recurring nuisance for Goku and co. to deal with; again, as per my earlier comparison, like a cheesy and ineffectual Saturday morning cartoon villain in the vein of Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget or something.
Don't misunderstand me though: I'd LOVE to be proven wrong here, trust me. I'm in no way HOPING for ANY of that to be the case, obviously. It'd be awesome if the upcoming movie or Super's eventual TV continuation were to come up with something really special for Freeza that'll really knock our collective socks off and make all this rigmarole and nostalgia pandering feel like it was genuinely leading up to something or going somewhere interesting.
But again, for the moment being, that's not the outcome I'm holding my breath for and expecting: just being realistic, given how much in the way of sheer material Super has had to burn through so far to prove itself willing to actually push the series forward in some noteworthy or meaningful way.
Basically, while the actual ending 3 on 1 fight against Jiren is certainly cool in all the surface-level ways in which most well animated and choreographed DB fights generally tend to be, the safe, risk-adverse "keep all the iconography of these characters permanently frozen in stasis at the exact point where fandom and pop culture best knows and remembers them from" nature of the plotting in the arc cuts the knees out from under it and makes the whole fight, for all its surface "kewlness", feel mostly hollow and empty: kinda similarly to a lot of Hollywood summer blockbusters in fact.
Freeza's training WAS brought up way, way earlier. I mentioned that that idea held a TON of potential that I felt was wholly squandered by not exploring it at all in any way whatsoever. The whole notion of Freeza having to work and train and push himself for the first time in his life... that's a FANTASTIC idea that totally helps justify bringing him back. Sadly its tossed aside very flippantly so that we can just barrel on ahead to the big showdown. If said big showdown held anything of note to it, then I'd be able to totally forgive this: but it doesn't. Its almost absurdly straight forward, to the point of being pretty much an anti-climax. You're left thinking "Wait... that's it? All that build up and fanfare for Freeza to simply just lose another straight brawl with Goku?"Zephyr wrote:stuff
If more emphasis was placed on the whole "training for the first time ever" component of his character in that story, perhaps something that then tied itself into his later fight with Goku on Earth, then I would absolutely have MUCH fewer issues with his use in the RoF arc and in Super in general.
I do also agree with you though, 110% in fact, that the key issue here is the manner and process in which Super is being created. I think that in a sense, fandom as a whole are WILDLY over-estimating and grossly inflating Toriyama's level of involvement with Super. I've mentioned this earlier in the back and forth already, but all he's basically offering here are the rough approximation of napkin notes for Toei to flesh out, along with an occasional character design.
That's... only BARELY more involvement than he ultimately had with GT. He's mapping out the basic-most skeleton of the plot, but almost ALL the finer points of storytelling are coming from a writer's room (a writer's room that's FAR INFINITELY more gunshy about taking artistic/creative risks than GT damn sure ever was). That's as FAR removed from the original series' creative process as it gets.
At least with Toyotaro he has SOMEWHAT of a more hands-on involvement: but only somewhat. Ultimately, Super (in either of its incarnations) is still not really HIS creation. Toriyama's simply shepherding it from a safe distance away: and I totally agree with you that that approach is completely antithetical to his strengths as a natural storyteller, which is hinged upon his being able to change things up on a whim and wing things on the fly and improvise as he goes along.
Most of my issues with Super have little to do with most of the basic ideas and concepts (the stuff that almost certainly comes straight from Toriyama's cocktail napkin bullet points, and are thus likely the "rawest" of his contributions to Super), and a LOT to do with the actual EXECUTION of those ideas; specifically the unambitious, underachieving, and in many cases downright LAZY nature of much of that execution. The inescapable sense that the series is doing something it almost NEVER did in its original run: spinning its tires in the mud and treading water repeating stuff it knows fans liked the most from the original run, rather than really pushing the characters and the universe forward into genuinely all-new and different waters.
Concepts like Zamasu and Goku Black, Hit's time-based techniques, the multiverse, God Ki, Mushin/Wuxin, Freeza becoming more of an actively training martial artist to try and beat Goku at his own game, a free-for-all battle royal tournament to entertain the child-like gods and where the fate of the multiverse is at stake... these things are all across the board absolutely fantastic ideas to take the series into all kinds of bold and wild new directions and make a Dragon Ball revival/continuation feel both justified and well-earned.
What's holding all of it back from realizing its potential is the almost oppressive degree of corporate restraint reigning it all in: making sure that things never threaten to get TOO different or too far away from the tail-end of Z; presumably/obviously so that Toei can further wring the revived property for nostalgia dollars from the fanbase.
I also agree with much of this as well.Gaffer Tape wrote:more stuff
I think what could've been done to get a "best of both worlds" type of scenario is to establish that while Freeza had always trained to maintain his power and strength, he'd never really PUSHED himself before. The original series DID more or less establish that both Freeza and much of his army's numbers (like Zarbon, Dodoria, and the Ginyu Squad) were effectively almost "mutants" with a natural degree of strength and control over their Ki from birth: simply lacking in the finer nuances of training or knowledge about what Ki actually is that the martial artists on Earth had.
I think that Super could've run with that idea maybe just SLIGHTLY less than it does (since I think that having it so that Freeza NEVER trained a day in his life is taking that concept into almost TOO far of an extreme so as to strain credibility) by just having it so that Freeza had indeed trained, but only JUST enough for him to maintain himself and keep his skills polished: he was simply so naturally gifted as a fighter that he'd never been in a position before in his life where he'd actually needed to genuinely CHALLENGE himself and push past his limits, the way that Goku and all the Earth warriors have always had to (and that Vegeta also learns from them over the course of Z).
Thus you get Freeza now having to actually WORK and work hard to improve himself and attain levels of fighting mastery he'd never actively sought out before, because he never HAD TO before.
Again, all the raw story elements and materials for a good, solid DB continuation are RIGHT THERE: all its lacking is that extra degree of care and effort (not to mention ballsiness and creative risk-taking) to make them come together into something that actually clicks.
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Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.
Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
Um pilaf was more comparable to claw actually.Kunzait_83 wrote:Its a well animated and choreographed fight (among the best in all of Super actually): but it doesn't really amount to much, and is undercut almost completely by the tournament's outcome, particularly in Freeza's case where he ends up.Chrono Trigger wrote:Did you like the finale of the tournament at least? (Goku/Freeza/17 vs Jiren)
Freeza ends the arc more or less right back from scratch to where he started the series from, with almost no real noticeable change to show for everything he's gone through in the tournament, or his earlier defeats. Unless his subsequent appearances later on are to actually build off of what's happened to him throughout Super and genuinely change shit up with him in some form or fashion.
Which it MIGHT to be fair; but for the moment being at least, given how the series has thus far unfolded and the number of interesting avenues and opportunities its criminally wasted, I'm suspecting that that won't be the case. For the moment being, it almost seems like Super is setting itself up for Freeza to be a constantly recurring nuisance for Goku and co. to deal with; again, as per my earlier comparison, like a cheesy and ineffectual Saturday morning cartoon villain in the vein of Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget or something.
Don't misunderstand me though: I'd LOVE to be proven wrong here, trust me. I'm in no way HOPING for ANY of that to be the case, obviously. It'd be awesome if the upcoming movie or Super's eventual TV continuation were to come up with something really special for Freeza that'll really knock our collective socks off and make all this rigmarole and nostalgia pandering feel like it was genuinely leading up to something or going somewhere interesting.
But again, for the moment being, that's not the outcome I'm holding my breath for and expecting: just being realistic, given how much in the way of sheer material Super has had to burn through so far to prove itself willing to actually push the series forward in some noteworthy or meaningful way.
Basically, while the actual ending 3 on 1 fight against Jiren is certainly cool in all the surface-level ways in which most well animated and choreographed DB fights generally tend to be, the safe, risk-adverse "keep all the iconography of these characters permanently frozen in stasis at the exact point where fandom and pop culture best knows and remembers them from" nature of the plotting in the arc cuts the knees out from under it and makes the whole fight, for all its surface "kewlness", feel mostly hollow and empty: kinda similarly to a lot of Hollywood summer blockbusters in fact.
Freeza's training WAS brought up way, way earlier. I mentioned that that idea held a TON of potential that I felt was wholly squandered by not exploring it at all in any way whatsoever. The whole notion of Freeza having to work and train and push himself for the first time in his life... that's a FANTASTIC idea that totally helps justify bringing him back. Sadly its tossed aside very flippantly so that we can just barrel on ahead to the big showdown. If said big showdown held anything of note to it, then I'd be able to totally forgive this: but it doesn't. Its almost absurdly straight forward, to the point of being pretty much an anti-climax. You're left thinking "Wait... that's it? All that build up and fanfare for Freeza to simply just lose another straight brawl with Goku?"Zephyr wrote:stuff
If more emphasis was placed on the whole "training for the first time ever" component of his character in that story, perhaps something that then tied itself into his later fight with Goku on Earth, then I would absolutely have MUCH fewer issues with his use in the RoF arc and in Super in general.
I do also agree with you though, 110% in fact, that the key issue here is the manner and process in which Super is being created. I think that in a sense, fandom as a whole are WILDLY over-estimating and grossly inflating Toriyama's level of involvement with Super. I've mentioned this earlier in the back and forth already, but all he's basically offering here are the rough approximation of napkin notes for Toei to flesh out, along with an occasional character design.
That's... only BARELY more involvement than he ultimately had with GT. He's mapping out the basic-most skeleton of the plot, but almost ALL the finer points of storytelling are coming from a writer's room (a writer's room that's FAR INFINITELY more gunshy about taking artistic/creative risks than GT damn sure ever was). That's as FAR removed from the original series' creative process as it gets.
At least with Toyotaro he has SOMEWHAT of a more hands-on involvement: but only somewhat. Ultimately, Super (in either of its incarnations) is still not really HIS creation. Toriyama's simply shepherding it from a safe distance away: and I totally agree with you that that approach is completely antithetical to his strengths as a natural storyteller, which is hinged upon his being able to change things up on a whim and wing things on the fly and improvise as he goes along.
Most of my issues with Super have little to do with most of the basic ideas and concepts (the stuff that almost certainly comes straight from Toriyama's cocktail napkin bullet points, and are thus likely the "rawest" of his contributions to Super), and a LOT to do with the actual EXECUTION of those ideas; specifically the unambitious, underachieving, and in many cases downright LAZY nature of much of that execution. The inescapable sense that the series is doing something it almost NEVER did in its original run: spinning its tires in the mud and treading water repeating stuff it knows fans liked the most from the original run, rather than really pushing the characters and the universe forward into genuinely all-new and different waters.
Concepts like Zamasu and Goku Black, Hit's time-based techniques, the multiverse, God Ki, Mushin/Wuxin, Freeza becoming more of an actively training martial artist to try and beat Goku at his own game, a free-for-all battle royal tournament to entertain the child-like gods and where the fate of the multiverse is at stake... these things are all across the board absolutely fantastic ideas to take the series into all kinds of bold and wild new directions and make a Dragon Ball revival/continuation feel both justified and well-earned.
What's holding all of it back from realizing its potential is the almost oppressive degree of corporate restraint reigning it all in: making sure that things never threaten to get TOO different or too far away from the tail-end of Z; presumably/obviously so that Toei can further wring the revived property for nostalgia dollars from the fanbase.
I also agree with much of this as well.Gaffer Tape wrote:more stuff
I think what could've been done to get a "best of both worlds" type of scenario is to establish that while Freeza had always trained to maintain his power and strength, he'd never really PUSHED himself before. The original series DID more or less establish that both Freeza and much of his army's numbers (like Zarbon, Dodoria, and the Ginyu Squad) were effectively almost "mutants" with a natural degree of strength and control over their Ki from birth: simply lacking in the finer nuances of training or knowledge about what Ki actually is that the martial artists on Earth had.
I think that Super could've run with that idea maybe just SLIGHTLY less than it does (since I think that having it so that Freeza NEVER trained a day in his life is taking that concept into almost TOO far of an extreme so as to strain credibility) by just having it so that Freeza had indeed trained, but only JUST enough for him to maintain himself and keep his skills polished: he was simply so naturally gifted as a fighter that he'd never been in a position before in his life where he'd actually needed to genuinely CHALLENGE himself and push past his limits, the way that Goku and all the Earth warriors have always had to (and that Vegeta also learns from them over the course of Z).
Thus you get Freeza now having to actually WORK and work hard to improve himself and attain levels of fighting mastery he'd never actively sought out before, because he never HAD TO before.
Again, all the raw story elements and materials for a good, solid DB continuation are RIGHT THERE: all its lacking is that extra degree of care and effort (not to mention ballsiness and creative risk-taking) to make them come together into something that actually clicks.
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Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
Sorry to butt in but at the risk of causing you to write another novella in response could you elaborate on what you meant by the original DB/Z being almost always being "genuinely all-new and different"? Maybe its just me, or because it watched the Z portion first, but I've never really thought of DB in those terms. As something always changing where anything could happen like say "Game of Thrones". From the Z portion onward, the show/manga definitely seems to have a formula and doesn't veer far from it arc to arc. Gohan's short-lived promotion to protagonist not withstanding. With the show retreading the same basic concept of Goku fighting strong guys.Kunzait_83 wrote:
Most of my issues with Super have little to do with most of the basic ideas and concepts (the stuff that almost certainly comes straight from Toriyama's cocktail napkin bullet points, and are thus likely the "rawest" of his contributions to Super), and a LOT to do with the actual EXECUTION of those ideas; specifically the unambitious, underachieving, and in many cases downright LAZY nature of much of that execution. The inescapable sense that the series is doing something it almost NEVER did in its original run: spinning its tires in the mud and treading water repeating stuff it knows fans liked the most from the original run, rather than really pushing the characters and the universe forward into genuinely all-new and different waters.
Concepts like Zamasu and Goku Black, Hit's time-based techniques, the multiverse, God Ki, Mushin/Wuxin, Freeza becoming more of an actively training martial artist to try and beat Goku at his own game, a free-for-all battle royal tournament to entertain the child-like gods and where the fate of the multiverse is at stake... these things are all across the board absolutely fantastic ideas to take the series into all kinds of bold and wild new directions and make a Dragon Ball revival/continuation feel both justified and well-earned.
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Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
First of all, I never made any Game of Thrones comparisons here: I'm not into that series at all. Just want to get that out of the way up front.Commodore Krevin wrote:Sorry to butt in but at the risk of causing you to write another novella in response could you elaborate on what you meant by the original DB/Z being almost always being "genuinely all-new and different"? Maybe its just me, or because it watched the Z portion first, but I've never really thought of DB in those terms. As something always changing where anything could happen like say "Game of Thrones". From the Z portion onward, the show/manga definitely seems to have a formula and doesn't veer far from it arc to arc. Gohan's short-lived promotion to protagonist not withstanding. With the show retreading the same basic concept of Goku fighting strong guys.
Now onto the main point: Dragon Ball has a "formula" in the sense that its a martial arts story about Goku and various other characters continually fighting stronger and more dangerous opponents. But the series was always CONSTANTLY throwing new and various spanners into the works as it rolled along which always kept things fresh and interesting.
Arc by arc there's always been new and boundlessly creative concepts that push the forward momentum of the series barreling ahead and constantly expanding its world:
- The Pilaf arc obviously introduces Goku, Bulma, Muten Roshi, and numerous other series regulars, as well as the Kamekameha, Kintoun, Nyoi-Bo, Hoi Poi Capsules, and of course the titular Dragon Balls.
- The 21st Budokai arc introduces the first martial arts tournament, as well as the first training arc of the series, techniques like the Zanzoken, and of course Kuririn.
- The Red Ribbon arc is a varied world tour of an arc, taking place across numerous interesting locales (and introduces Karin Tower, Senzu, Uranai Baba and her ghostly warriors, and tons of other series staples) from underground Pirate caves to a Game of Death-like tower and even to our first high tech, futuristic city, and pits Goku against one of DB's few villains that's less any singular entity than it is a vast organization. Also Tao Pai Pai (our first real martial arts assassin) and the Dodonpa.
- The 22nd Budokai gives us Tenshinhan and Chaozu and our first true villain redemption arc, as well as the Taiyoken, the Bukujutsu, telepathy, and the Kikoho (the first self-harming technique that puts the user's life at risk).
- The Daimao arc brings in demons (including the first incarnation of Piccolo) and our first genuine world-threatening scenario and our first major character death, along with the Mafuba.
- The 23rd Budokai arc MASSIVELY ages up the cast and brings in Kami and his temple, thus pulling in gods into the mix, and of course gives us the incarnation of Piccolo we all know best. Also it marries Goku off by the end. We also get further weird techniques like growing to giant size, guided Ki attacks, stretching/regenerating limbs, and body splitting.
- The Saiya-jin arc brings in space aliens, Goku's origins, Goku's first son, Vegeta, and opens the series up to more overtly sci fi concepts. Also introduces the afterlife and the heavens, bringing the series into full on Bangsian fantasy. Also gives us the Kaioken, Makankosappo, Kienzan, and Genkidama.
- The Freeza arc gives us space travel and the characters journeying off Earth to a distant alien world and fighting legions of alien opponents. Also the first ever Super Saiya-jin form, Namekians, and a whole different set of Dragon Balls with their own unique rules and their own dragon.
- The Jinzoningen/Cell arc brings in time travel and other mad scientist concepts like cyborgs, robots, and genetically engineered super warriors. Also it introduces the idea that Super Saiya-jin is something that can be further evolved and improved upon, as well as the Shunkan Ido (Instantaneous Movement) technique.
- The Boo arc ages the characters even further, not to mention vastly expands upon DB's pantheon of deities and elaborates on the hierarchy of the gods, while also bringing in wizards, ancient demonic djinns made of mystical bubblegum, and Fusion, among all sorts of other wackiness (spit that petrifies you into stone, Majin charms, a creature that devours Ki, Kamikaze Ghosts, etc). Hell, Goku and Vegeta spend some of this arc shrunken down and traveling around said ancient demoninc djinn's bodily innards, Innerspace-style, and the whole arc opens without Goku as the central focus.
The point is, yes martial arts is the constant through-line throughout all of this: but while the central conceit of "Goku becomes an increasingly better martial artist as he fights more increasingly formidable opponents while a rotating cast of supporting characters cycles in and out of his life" remains a constant, the Dragon Ball world is ALWAYS constantly growing, changing, expanding, and opening itself up to all these wild new ideas around that central notion.
Now I'm not saying that Super is TOTALLY bereft of that type of growth: its there, but its often half-hearted and feels like its constantly being reigned in and held back. On the one hand, we now have a multiverse, which is an AWESOME idea that has the potential to wonderfully open up the series' world even further: but so far VERY little has actually been done with it, despite the INSANE potential.
Super's gone on for 5 arcs and 133 episodes, and we've yet to even so much as actually SEE or have any of the characters actually VISIT any of the other different universes: we've merely met some warriors from them at a couple of tournament grounds. For such an "anything goes" series like DB, this is a downright inexcusable and colossal fucking waste of such a promising concept.
God Ki and Mushin are fantastic Wuxia concepts to bring into DB: but they mainly act as excuses to introduce SSJ forms that are merely simple recolors and little else.
Zamasu is our first real God villain, and he's got a LOT going for him conceptually: but then his whole storyline hinges upon rehashing and retreading the whole "Future Trunks comes back to warn Goku of an apocalyptic future that kills him" rigmarole.
Freeza first gets brought back, only to have NOTHING remotely interesting or different done with his resurrection.... then later we fleetingly toy with having him in an uneasy alliance with Goku (hey, something different!)... only for THAT thread to ultimately go nowhere except having Freeza be brought back right to square one where he started the whole series, with seemingly little changed for it.
It goes on like this, but you get the basic idea. The point being, in the original run of the series, time never stood still, and every arc brought with it all kinds of massive changes and fresh new concepts that kept giving the series further and further added dimension and richness (Wuxia, Space Opera, Time Travel, B Movie Monsters, Bangsian Fantasy, etc.) despite the central core theme always remaining "Goku fights stronger foes and becomes a better martial artist".
Super full well has the CAPACITY to continue to do that, it has the concepts and the materials to do it just sitting right there... but there's this frustratingly gunshy reluctance to allow the series to ever get TOO far away from its "end of Z" phase, and a willingness to continually rehash and retread old ground, like Vegetto, Freeza, Future Trunks, etc. for every potentially fresh new idea (like Beerus and the Gods of Destruction) that gets introduced.
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Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.
Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
Meh I think Toriyama and toei was tired of what you just said as even that would get old the old formula was getting old and decides to add multiverses plus Zeno,angels,and Gods of Destruction. Frieza did get a golden form and learns to be patient is here to stay from now on though plus trunks gets to catch up plus only Universe 6 and 11 are the most important universes to goku Toriyama would add post end of z series that involve the 6 and 11 plus new foes and we see what is frieza is doing these days as the only recurring villain. It's still the same goku fights the bad guys formula and with some lore that is barely explored.Kunzait_83 wrote:First of all, I never made any Game of Thrones comparisons here: I'm not into that series at all. Just want to get that out of the way up front.Commodore Krevin wrote:Sorry to butt in but at the risk of causing you to write another novella in response could you elaborate on what you meant by the original DB/Z being almost always being "genuinely all-new and different"? Maybe its just me, or because it watched the Z portion first, but I've never really thought of DB in those terms. As something always changing where anything could happen like say "Game of Thrones". From the Z portion onward, the show/manga definitely seems to have a formula and doesn't veer far from it arc to arc. Gohan's short-lived promotion to protagonist not withstanding. With the show retreading the same basic concept of Goku fighting strong guys.
Now onto the main point: Dragon Ball has a "formula" in the sense that its a martial arts story about Goku and various other characters continually fighting stronger and more dangerous opponents. But the series was always CONSTANTLY throwing new and various spanners into the works as it rolled along which always kept things fresh and interesting.
Arc by arc there's always been new and boundlessly creative concepts that push the forward momentum of the series barreling ahead and constantly expanding its world:
- The Pilaf arc obviously introduces Goku, Bulma, Muten Roshi, and numerous other series regulars, as well as the Kamekameha, Kintoun, Nyoi-Bo, Hoi Poi Capsules, and of course the titular Dragon Balls.
- The 21st Budokai arc introduces the first martial arts tournament, as well as the first training arc of the series, techniques like the Zanzoken, and of course Kuririn.
- The Red Ribbon arc is a varied world tour of an arc, taking place across numerous interesting locales (and introduces Karin Tower, Senzu, Uranai Baba and her ghostly warriors, and tons of other series staples) from underground Pirate caves to a Game of Death-like tower and even to our first high tech, futuristic city, and pits Goku against one of DB's few villains that's less any singular entity than it is a vast organization. Also Tao Pai Pai (our first real martial arts assassin) and the Dodonpa.
- The 22nd Budokai gives us Tenshinhan and Chaozu and our first true villain redemption arc, as well as the Taiyoken, the Bukujutsu, telepathy, and the Kikoho (the first self-harming technique that puts the user's life at risk).
- The Daimao arc brings in demons (including the first incarnation of Piccolo) and our first genuine world-threatening scenario and our first major character death, along with the Mafuba.
- The 23rd Budokai arc MASSIVELY ages up the cast and brings in Kami and his temple, thus pulling in gods into the mix, and of course gives us the incarnation of Piccolo we all know best. Also it marries Goku off by the end. We also get further weird techniques like growing to giant size, guided Ki attacks, stretching/regenerating limbs, and body splitting.
- The Saiya-jin arc brings in space aliens, Goku's origins, Goku's first son, Vegeta, and opens the series up to more overtly sci fi concepts. Also introduces the afterlife and the heavens, bringing the series into full on Bangsian fantasy. Also gives us the Kaioken, Makankosappo, Kienzan, and Genkidama.
- The Freeza arc gives us space travel and the characters journeying off Earth to a distant alien world and fighting legions of alien opponents. Also the first ever Super Saiya-jin form, Namekians, and a whole different set of Dragon Balls with their own unique rules and their own dragon.
- The Jinzoningen/Cell arc brings in time travel and other mad scientist concepts like cyborgs, robots, and genetically engineered super warriors. Also it introduces the idea that Super Saiya-jin is something that can be further evolved and improved upon, as well as the Shunkan Ido (Instantaneous Movement) technique.
- The Boo arc ages the characters even further, not to mention vastly expands upon DB's pantheon of deities and elaborates on the hierarchy of the gods, while also bringing in wizards, ancient demonic djinns made of mystical bubblegum, and Fusion, among all sorts of other wackiness (spit that petrifies you into stone, Majin charms, a creature that devours Ki, Kamikaze Ghosts, etc). Hell, Goku and Vegeta spend some of this arc shrunken down and traveling around said ancient demoninc djinn's bodily innards, Innerspace-style, and the whole arc opens without Goku as the central focus.
The point is, yes martial arts is the constant through-line throughout all of this: but while the central conceit of "Goku becomes an increasingly better martial artist as he fights more increasingly formidable opponents while a rotating cast of supporting characters cycles in and out of his life" remains a constant, the Dragon Ball world is ALWAYS constantly growing, changing, expanding, and opening itself up to all these wild new ideas around that central notion.
Now I'm not saying that Super is TOTALLY bereft of that type of growth: its there, but its often half-hearted and feels like its constantly being reigned in and held back. On the one hand, we now have a multiverse, which is an AWESOME idea that has the potential to wonderfully open up the series' world even further: but so far VERY little has actually been done with it, despite the INSANE potential.
Super's gone on for 5 arcs and 133 episodes, and we've yet to even so much as actually SEE or have any of the characters actually VISIT any of the other different universes: we've merely met some warriors from them at a couple of tournament grounds. For such an "anything goes" series like DB, this is a downright inexcusable and colossal fucking waste of such a promising concept.
God Ki and Mushin are fantastic Wuxia concepts to bring into DB: but they mainly act as excuses to introduce SSJ forms that are merely simple recolors and little else.
Zamasu is our first real God villain, and he's got a LOT going for him conceptually: but then his whole storyline hinges upon rehashing and retreading the whole "Future Trunks comes back to warn Goku of an apocalyptic future that kills him" rigmarole.
Freeza first gets brought back, only to have NOTHING remotely interesting or different done with his resurrection.... then later we fleetingly toy with having him in an uneasy alliance with Goku (hey, something different!)... only for THAT thread to ultimately go nowhere except having Freeza be brought back right to square one where he started the whole series, with seemingly little changed for it.
It goes on like this, but you get the basic idea. The point being, in the original run of the series, time never stood still, and every arc brought with it all kinds of massive changes and fresh new concepts that kept giving the series further and further added dimension and richness (Wuxia, Space Opera, Time Travel, B Movie Monsters, Bangsian Fantasy, etc.) despite the central core theme always remaining "Goku fights stronger foes and becomes a better martial artist".
Super full well has the CAPACITY to continue to do that, it has the concepts and the materials to do it just sitting right there... but there's this frustratingly gunshy reluctance to allow the series to ever get TOO far away from its "end of Z" phase, and a willingness to continually rehash and retread old ground, like Vegetto, Freeza, Future Trunks, etc. for every potentially fresh new idea (like Beerus and the Gods of Destruction) that gets introduced.
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Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
My apologies if it seemed I suggest you did. I merely was using it as an example for comparison.Kunzait_83 wrote:First of all, I never made any Game of Thrones comparisons hereCommodore Krevin wrote:Sorry to butt in but at the risk of causing you to write another novella in response could you elaborate on what you meant by the original DB/Z being almost always being "genuinely all-new and different"? Maybe its just me, or because it watched the Z portion first, but I've never really thought of DB in those terms. As something always changing where anything could happen like say "Game of Thrones". From the Z portion onward, the show/manga definitely seems to have a formula and doesn't veer far from it arc to arc. Gohan's short-lived promotion to protagonist not withstanding. With the show retreading the same basic concept of Goku fighting strong guys.
Shrug. I guess my point of contention is whether the "new and various spanners" are more surface/cosmetic or not. Things like Red Ribbon didn't really change the story or the dynamics. It was simply replacing Pilaf's gang with a slightly more menacing but really no more effective group. Same with many of your other examples. A shinier Ki attack or transformation isn't new and has its roots all the way back in the first Arc. Just about every of the latter DB villains can trace their roots back to Mercenary Tao with, narratively speaking, little change. And thus, at its heart, every battle with them is the same story just repackaged. So what's the different between what DB did and say Batman which over his 70+ years had certainly expanded the mythos quite a bit from his first story. Hell he didn't even get a batarang until his second year of publication IIRC. Does that mean Batman is constantly exploring new waters? I mean if that's your opinion, that's fine.Kunzait_83 wrote:Now onto the main point: Dragon Ball has a "formula" in the sense that its a martial arts story about Goku and various other characters continually fighting stronger and more dangerous opponents. But the series was always CONSTANTLY throwing new and various spanners into the works as it rolled along which always kept things fresh and interesting.
And, just to be clear, this is a complete and separate discussion to the one on how Super compares to DB. I'm not attempting to argue or make any comparisons between the two. I don't even wholly disagree with you that Super is pulling its punches/being less risk averse.
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Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
That isn't a mere cosmetic change, unless it seems we are being incredibly broad. The first arc and the Red Ribbon arc are VERY different, especially in the manga seeing as Pilaf isn't even introduced until the final few chapters. How does every latter villain trace their roots to Tao Pai Pai? Because they are super powerful? Far too broad.Things like Red Ribbon didn't really change the story or the dynamics. It was simply replacing Pilaf's gang with a slightly more menacing but really no more effective group. Same with many of your other examples. A shinier Ki attack or transformation isn't new and has its roots all the way back in the first Arc. Just about every of the latter DB villains can trace their roots back to Mercenary Tao with, narratively speaking, little change.
The biggest truths aren't original. The truth is ketchup. It's Jim Belushi. Its job isn't to blow our minds. It's to be within reach.
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take - Wayne Gretzky" - Michael Scott
Happiness is climate, not weather.
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take - Wayne Gretzky" - Michael Scott
Happiness is climate, not weather.
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Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
Shrug. In both the Pilaf Arc and and Red Ribbon arc he searches the globe for dragon balls getting into adventures and fighting bad guys. He even squares off against an organization, however pathetic Pilaf's gang may be, which desires the dragon balls for themselves. In the context of constantly trying new and unexplored waters, this seems more a refinement of what came before than a clear departure.ABED wrote:That isn't a mere cosmetic change, unless it seems we are being incredibly broad. The first arc and the Red Ribbon arc are VERY different, especially in the manga seeing as Pilaf isn't even introduced until the final few chapters. How does every latter villain trace their roots to Tao Pai Pai? Because they are super powerful? Far too broad.Things like Red Ribbon didn't really change the story or the dynamics. It was simply replacing Pilaf's gang with a slightly more menacing but really no more effective group. Same with many of your other examples. A shinier Ki attack or transformation isn't new and has its roots all the way back in the first Arc. Just about every of the latter DB villains can trace their roots back to Mercenary Tao with, narratively speaking, little change.
As for Mercenary Tao he's a superpowerful enemy who Goku can't defeat until he trains/unlocks a new transformation/learns a new technique. Which will be the mold for just about every big bad that follows. The only real subversion to this formula would be Raditz, defeated more by tricks and determination, and maybe kid Buu, the one big bad on who the spirit bomb actually worked.
And it isn't "Far too broad" to point out every big battle follows a similar pattern with the differences of each villain affecting this little in the end. For a comparison, had Cell's or Buu's ability to regenerate prompted them to fight them differently than the villains before that would be changing things up. Instead in both cases they beat them by becoming "stronger" than them, either via super Saiyan 2 or the spirit bomb, in a way not radically different than how they defeated Freezia or Piccolo or Mercenary Tao.
Again this is no commentary on the quality of the work but I do not understand how something can be always trying something new, treading new waters while adhering to the same basic formula.
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Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
Pilaf's gang isn't an organization. It's not organized at all. It's him and two incompetent lackies. In the Red Ribbon Army arc, Goku's looking for one single DB. It's also Goku alone, whereas before he had Bulma and then others that joined him.
A protagonist having to exert effort to learn and grow so he can overcome an obstacle isn't formula, that's good writing.
But that's so general that almost every story falls into that category. For one, he's not the big bad. He's one of many antagonists thrown his way. And Goku defeated Buu without learning a new technique. It's one that existed for a while. Toriyama managed to keep the formula fairly fresh. For instance, Goku doesn't defeat Vegeta. Vegeta was defeated by a combined effort of his friends, including even Yajirobe.As for Mercenary Tao he's a superpowerful enemy who Goku can't defeat until he trains/unlocks a new transformation/learns a new technique. Which will be the mold for just about every big bad that follows.
A protagonist having to exert effort to learn and grow so he can overcome an obstacle isn't formula, that's good writing.
The biggest truths aren't original. The truth is ketchup. It's Jim Belushi. Its job isn't to blow our minds. It's to be within reach.
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take - Wayne Gretzky" - Michael Scott
Happiness is climate, not weather.
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take - Wayne Gretzky" - Michael Scott
Happiness is climate, not weather.
Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
Then toriyama made super happened and also Gohan was to be the protagonist but now he isn't since Goku came back he was just a side character from that point on.ABED wrote:Pilaf's gang isn't an organization. It's not organized at all. It's him and two incompetent lackies. In the Red Ribbon Army arc, Goku's looking for one single DB. It's also Goku alone, whereas before he had Bulma and then others that joined him.
But that's so general that almost every story falls into that category. For one, he's not the big bad. He's one of many antagonists thrown his way. And Goku defeated Buu without learning a new technique. It's one that existed for a while. Toriyama managed to keep the formula fairly fresh. For instance, Goku doesn't defeat Vegeta. Vegeta was defeated by a combined effort of his friends, including even Yajirobe.As for Mercenary Tao he's a superpowerful enemy who Goku can't defeat until he trains/unlocks a new transformation/learns a new technique. Which will be the mold for just about every big bad that follows.
A protagonist having to exert effort to learn and grow so he can overcome an obstacle isn't formula, that's good writing.
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Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
The formula that DOES bother me is Goku being taken out of commission as the other characters bide time for him to arrive. It happens TWICE in the Freeza arc.
The biggest truths aren't original. The truth is ketchup. It's Jim Belushi. Its job isn't to blow our minds. It's to be within reach.
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Happiness is climate, not weather.
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take - Wayne Gretzky" - Michael Scott
Happiness is climate, not weather.
Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
and the cell arc and the first half of the buu saga.ABED wrote:The formula that DOES bother me is Goku being taken out of commission as the other characters bide time for him to arrive. It happens TWICE in the Freeza arc.
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Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
Calling an inept little goblin dude and his equally inept dog ninja and spy girl sidekicks an "organization" is HIGHLY stretching the definition of that word. You may as well call the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers an "organization" by that logic. At best, they're a trio, and an ineffective one at that.Commodore Krevin wrote:Shrug. In both the Pilaf Arc and and Red Ribbon arc he searches the globe for dragon balls getting into adventures and fighting bad guys. He even squares off against an organization, however pathetic Pilaf's gang may be, which desires the dragon balls for themselves. In the context of constantly trying new and unexplored waters, this seems more a refinement of what came before than a clear departure.
Pilaf and his all of two stooges have a clear and unified face: Pilaf. The Red Ribbon Army, despite having a few notable generals among their ranks, are largely faceless: no one member of the army is substantially more important or dominant to the plot than the others, and all of them serve a role in the ensuing shenanigans.
Even Freeza's empire has Freeza himself who effectively acts as the key linchpin and the outwardly obvious root of all its evil. The Red Ribbon Army are less any one person than they are a mass of disparate people: in this regard, they're VERY much unique for Dragon Ball, which has ALWAYS otherwise relied on clear cut singular villains you can put a name and a face to.
And again, lets not forget that Pilaf only shows up at the TAIL END of the first arc in the manga: the Red Ribbon Army are a key and persistent obstacle that Goku must overcome, and they do FAR more to impede Goku every step of the way than Pilaf ever comes close to (anime or manga).
Point being, Pilaf and the Red Ribbon Army are in NO way comparable as villains: both in terms of general effectiveness, impact on the story, as well as just their root fundamental premise (three comically absurd dipshits versus a powerful, organized, and largely faceless militia). About all they really have in common is their motivation: that they both want to seek out the Dragon Balls for global domination. That's it. Everything else about them is hardly all that especially similar.
If the Red Ribbon come close to having anything in common with another set of DB villains, it'd be Freeza's Empire (and even there, there are still notable differences that hardly make them clones of one another).
Congratulations: you just summarized the formula for like at a bare minimum 80% (conservative estimate) of all martial arts narratives ever created. Hero faces overwhelmingly unbeatable opponent, trains, discovers and masters secret deadly technique and/or finds the bad guy's hidden weakness, then eventually beats the unbeatable opponent.Commodore Krevin wrote:As for Mercenary Tao he's a superpowerful enemy who Goku can't defeat until he trains/unlocks a new transformation/learns a new technique. Which will be the mold for just about every big bad that follows.
Quick, off-the-cuff checklist of martial arts stories this exact formula applies to:
36th Chamber of Shaolin
Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils
Fung Wan
Drunken Master 1 and 2
Buddha's Palm
Holy Flame of the Martial World
Five Fingers of Death (one of Dragon Ball's whole story arcs is almost directly copied and pasted from this one)
Challenge of the Masters
Snake in the Eagle's Shadow
Executioners From Shaolin
Invincible Armor
Secret Rivals 1 and 2
Zu: Warrior's From the Magic Mountain
Bloodsport
Duel to the Death
The Hero of Jing Wu
Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre
The Smiling Proud Wanderer
The Five Deadly Venoms
Tales of the Blood Sword
Oriental Heroes
Shaolin Prince
Fist of the White Lotus
The original version of Game of Death (so much so, Dragon Ball saw fit to rip off its entire plot for part of an arc)
The Bastard Swordsman and Return of the Bastard Swordsman
Heroes of the East
Vast chunks of Legend of the Condor Heroes
Saviour of the Soul
Fist of the North Star
Yu Yu Hakusho
Street Fighter
I can keep going (and going and going and going and going....), but then this would just go on and on and on and on and on endlessly for countless pages at a time.
Hell, my current avatar on here right now is from a Wuxia film where the girl in the avatar is teaching the main character how to perform a powerful/dangerous Ki technique in order to defeat a powerful opponent that's been kicking his and the other characters' asses throughout the film.
ABED's 100% right on this: you're being WAY too broad and generalized. By this logic, all adventure narratives are "exactly the same": they all involve good guys going on a journey through strange lands to find a McGuffin, usually before some bad guy does. Everything from Indiana Jones to North By Northwest to Treasure of the Sierra Madre to the original Star Wars to Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, by your estimate, are all the exact same story.
Likewise all monster movies would be considered the same: they all involve some fierce, scary creature terrorizing the protagonists, who have to survive and find a way to vanquish it. Nosferatu, An American Werewolf in London, The Fly, Frankenstein, Creature From the Black Lagoon, Them!, Mimic, The Blob, every Zombie narrative ever... all of them and tons more, all the exact same story by this absurd metric.
This is incredibly silly and reductive.
I don't seem to recall Goku having to go on a journey through Freeza or Tao Pai Pai's insides and suddenly get attacked by giant limbs and manifestations of them from within. I also don't remember Piccolo having access to every single one of the characters' martial arts techniques, nor to I recall Nappa and Vegeta being able to absorb other characters and take on their physical attributes, personality quirks, and fighting techniques. Etc.Commodore Krevin wrote:And it isn't "Far too broad" to point out every big battle follows a similar pattern with the differences of each villain affecting this little in the end. For a comparison, had Cell's or Buu's ability to regenerate prompted them to fight them differently than the villains before that would be changing things up. Instead in both cases they beat them by becoming "stronger" than them, either via super Saiyan 2 or the spirit bomb, in a way not radically different than how they defeated Freezia or Piccolo or Mercenary Tao.
While many (though not all) of DB's fights don't make as extensive use of strategic approaches as something like Yu Yu Hakusho does, calling every villain out as being almost exactly the same as one another in terms of how they fight is WAAAAAAY too simplistic an appraisal, to the point where its hardly at all even the case.
Then you don't understand how virtually ALL of storytelling throughout history has worked. Almost EVERYTHING by this point in human narrative fiction has been tried, at some basic level: we've LONG been at a point now where almost EVERYTHING that exists in storytelling is taking from SOME pre-existing narrative formula: either by adhering to it, turning it upside down, or some combination thereof. We can put our own different spins on things, our own personalized stamps, tweak it in interesting ways, etc. But at the end of the day, we're ALL ultimately writing SOME variation on something that other people have written a bazillion times over many years prior, and THEY in turn were likewise just putting their own spin on something that others had done many times over countless years prior to them.Commodore Krevin wrote:Again this is no commentary on the quality of the work but I do not understand how something can be always trying something new, treading new waters while adhering to the same basic formula.
This is where the phrase "there's no such thing as a TRULY original idea" comes from. Now I don't think that that's 100% ENTIRELY the case: I'm sure there are still SOME genuinely original (as in, NO ONE at ANY point has done ANYTHING like this before) ideas that come to fruition: but as time marches on and more and more works get churned out, this becomes rarer and rarer and more and more uncommon.
When people talk about "original" and "different" now, usually they mean a work not adhering to a formula SO stringently that it gets to become utterly stale and rote. A good example of this is in American action films: boil down a traditional American action movie, and usually you'll get some variation on "one-man-army of a hero shoots or punches his way through throngs of bad guys to get at main villain (usually, but not necessarily always, for revenge of some kind), often rescuing a love interest along the way". The specifics can be changed up in any NUMBER of different ways: but finding an American action movie that DOESN'T adhere to ANY BIT of this formula is VERY rare indeed.
Nonetheless, there at one time got to a point where American action films hit something of a creative slump thanks to Die Hard, which created almost its own subgenre, "Die Hard on/in a Blank". Basically taking the Die Hard particular story formula (hero has to deal with invading terrorists in an unconventional, highly enclosed area that leaves them particularly vulnerable) and simply changing up the location (a boat, a bus, an airplane, a sports arena, etc). There came a time in the 90s where there got to be SO MANY of these, that the public just got incredibly sick of it. You can still do the basic American action movie formula in a zillion different ways: but you DON'T necessarily HAVE to chain it so stringently to Die Hard's approach to it.
To COMPLETELY bypass ANY kind of narrative formula whatsoever at this point (either a faithfully adhered to one, or a subversive one), you generally have to delve into the realm of completely 100% abstract/experimental works (which are indeed out there, and are often quite awesome).
The point being: Dragon Ball's "formula" is largely a byproduct of its genre. Most (not ALL, but overwhelmingly MOST) martial arts narratives typically follow SOME variation on "hero gets beat by overwhelmingly strong opponent, trains and discovers secret technique or hidden weakness in said opponent, then eventually fights them again and wins". This is no different than slasher movies having the recurring formula of "masked killer picks off the cast one by one in grisly ways, until the last surviving one escapes and/or kills them" or romance stories following "guy and girl meet, fall in love, have falling out, then eventually reconcile".
What matters is what you DO with that formula. How you shake things up, how you personalize and put your own unique stamp on it. Or sometimes even just how WELL you're able to execute simply adhering to it.
The original run of Dragon Ball was VERY good at keeping its martial arts formula fresh, always playing with it in interesting ways, always throwing new elements into the mix and keeping it varied and always barreling on ahead. Hell, some of its combinations of ideas truly WERE unique to it and genuinely original: I've talked about this before in other threads, but I can't think of many Wuxia stories that took the Jianghu setting and melded together both its traditional elements AND sci fi/futuristic elements at the same time; for all the stuff that DB simply takes from other Wuxia stories and puts a Toriyama spin on, that particular concept is very much unique to it.
Also, while I can think of plenty of martial arts/Wuxia works that combine the genre with either pulp sci fi, B movie monsters, Time Travel, or even Japanese Henshin Superheroes, the only one I can think of that's wacky enough to smoosh ALL of these disparate things together all at once (never mind actually make it all hang together and coalesce organically) is Dragon Ball.
The issue with Super is that its introduced any NUMBER of new elements that can easily do likewise and keep this new continuation just as fresh and brimming with new stuff for DB to try... and oftentimes it instead completely wastes them, and instead will go back into the toybox to play with old ideas that we've already milked dry back in the old days, simply it seems for the sake of pandering to fan familiarity and nostalgia.
The problem with Super isn't that it takes ideas that other works have tried: EVERYTHING that exists at this point does that. The issue is that Super, too often, is Dragon Ball recycling itself. Something that DB in its original run RARELY ever did.
Last edited by Kunzait_83 on Sat Jun 09, 2018 12:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.
Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
Why not just coming old and new elements together then? Also later villains like cell,buu,and zaamasu don't have minions these days. They are more genoncidal destroyers at this point and only minor villains have minions these days. I think the reason toriyama wanted to make a major recurring villain is because of sheer popularity of some villains and that modern anime and manga have some recurring villains these days pilaf was a recurring villain but he was a gag villain,Tao and his brother showed up in piccolo arc but were minor villains,vegeta was a recurring villain tecnically but he eventually reformed at the end,Frieza returned three times in the series and was the only unreformed villain to have been ressurected twice,and pilaf like vegeta also reformed,ginyu also returned but is now gone. I mean other anime and manga have recurring villains these days maybe that was inspired toriyama to make a recurring villain.Kunzait_83 wrote:Calling an inept little goblin dude and his equally inept dog ninja and spy girl sidekicks an "organization" is HIGHLY stretching the definition of that word. You may as well call the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers an "organization" by that logic. At best, they're a trio, and an ineffective one at that.Commodore Krevin wrote:Shrug. In both the Pilaf Arc and and Red Ribbon arc he searches the globe for dragon balls getting into adventures and fighting bad guys. He even squares off against an organization, however pathetic Pilaf's gang may be, which desires the dragon balls for themselves. In the context of constantly trying new and unexplored waters, this seems more a refinement of what came before than a clear departure.
Pilaf and his all of two stooges have a clear and unified face: Pilaf. The Red Ribbon Army, despite having a few notable generals among their ranks, are largely faceless: no one member of the army is substantially more important or dominant to the plot than the others, and all of them serve a role in the ensuing shenanigans.
Even Freeza's empire has Freeza himself who effectively acts as the key linchpin and the outwardly obvious root of all its evil. The Red Ribbon Army are less any one person than they are a mass of disparate people: in this regard, they're VERY much unique for Dragon Ball, which has ALWAYS otherwise relied on clear cut singular villains you can put a name and a face to.
And again, lets not forget that Pilaf only shows up at the TAIL END of the first arc in the manga: the Red Ribbon Army are a key and persistent obstacle that Goku must overcome, and they do FAR more to impede Goku every step of the way than Pilaf ever comes close to (anime or manga).
Point being, Pilaf and the Red Ribbon Army are in NO way comparable as villains: both in terms of general effectiveness, impact on the story, as well as just their root fundamental premise (three comically absurd dipshits versus a powerful, organized, and largely faceless militia). About all they really have in common is their motivation: that they both want to seek out the Dragon Balls for global domination. That's it. Everything else about them is hardly all that especially similar.
If the Red Ribbon come close to having anything in common with another set of DB villains, it'd be Freeza's Empire (and even there, there are still notable differences that hardly make them clones of one another).
Congratulations: you just summarized the formula for like at a bare minimum 80% (conservative estimate) of all martial arts narratives ever created. Hero faces overwhelmingly unbeatable opponent, trains, discovers and masters secret deadly technique and/or finds the bad guy's hidden weakness, then eventually beats the unbeatable opponent.Commodore Krevin wrote:As for Mercenary Tao he's a superpowerful enemy who Goku can't defeat until he trains/unlocks a new transformation/learns a new technique. Which will be the mold for just about every big bad that follows.
Quick, off-the-cuff checklist of martial arts stories this exact formula applies to:
36th Chamber of Shaolin
Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils
Fung Wan
Drunken Master 1 and 2
Buddha's Palm
Holy Flame of the Martial World
Five Fingers of Death (one of Dragon Ball's whole story arcs is almost directly copied and pasted from this one)
Challenge of the Masters
Snake in the Eagle's Shadow
Executioners From Shaolin
Invincible Armor
Secret Rivals 1 and 2
Zu: Warrior's From the Magic Mountain
Bloodsport
Duel to the Death
The Hero of Jing Wu
Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre
The Smiling Proud Wanderer
The Five Deadly Venoms
Tales of the Blood Sword
Oriental Heroes
Shaolin Prince
Fist of the White Lotus
The original version of Game of Death (so much so, Dragon Ball saw fit to rip off its entire plot for part of an arc)
The Bastard Swordsman and Return of the Bastard Swordsman
Heroes of the East
Vast chunks of Legend of the Condor Heroes
Saviour of the Soul
Fist of the North Star
Yu Yu Hakusho
Street Fighter
I can keep going (and going and going and going and going....), but then this would just go on and on and on and on and on endlessly for countless pages at a time.
ABED's 100% right on this: you're being WAY too broad and generalized. By this logic, all adventure narratives are "exactly the same": they all involve good guys going on a journey through strange lands to find a McGuffin, usually before some bad guy does. Everything from Indiana Jones to North By Northwest to Treasure of the Sierra Madre to the original Star Wars to Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, by your estimate, are all the exact same story.
Likewise all monster movies would be considered the same: they all involve some fierce, scary creature terrorizing the protagonists, who have to survive and find a way to vanquish it. Nosferatu, An American Werewolf in London, The Fly, Frankenstein, Creature From the Black Lagoon, Them!, Mimic, The Blob, every Zombie narrative ever... all of them and tons more, all the exact same story by this absurd metric.
This is incredibly silly and reductive.
I don't seem to recall Goku having to go on a journey through Freeza or Tao Pai Pai's insides and suddenly get attacked by giant limbs and manifestations of them from within. I also don't remember Piccolo having access to every single one of the characters' martial arts techniques, nor to I recall Nappa and Vegeta being able to absorb other characters and take on their physical attributes, personality quirks, and fighting techniques. Etc.Commodore Krevin wrote:And it isn't "Far too broad" to point out every big battle follows a similar pattern with the differences of each villain affecting this little in the end. For a comparison, had Cell's or Buu's ability to regenerate prompted them to fight them differently than the villains before that would be changing things up. Instead in both cases they beat them by becoming "stronger" than them, either via super Saiyan 2 or the spirit bomb, in a way not radically different than how they defeated Freezia or Piccolo or Mercenary Tao.
While many (though not all) of DB's fights don't make as extensive use of strategic approaches as something like Yu Yu Hakusho does, calling every villain out as being almost exactly the same as one another in terms of how they fight is WAAAAAAY too simplistic an appraisal, to the point where its hardly at all even the case.
Then you don't understand how virtually ALL of storytelling throughout history has worked. Almost EVERYTHING by this point in human narrative fiction has been tried, at some basic level: we've LONG been at a point now where almost EVERYTHING that exists in storytelling is taking from SOME pre-existing narrative formula: either by adhering to it, turning it upside down, or some combination thereof. We can put our own different spins on things, our own personalized stamps, tweak it in interesting ways, etc. But at the end of the day, we're ALL ultimately writing SOME variation on something that other people have written a bazillion times over many years prior, and THEY in turn were likewise just putting their own spin on something that others had done many times over countless years prior to them.Commodore Krevin wrote:Again this is no commentary on the quality of the work but I do not understand how something can be always trying something new, treading new waters while adhering to the same basic formula.
This is where the phrase "there's no such thing as a TRULY original idea" comes from. Now I don't think that that's 100% ENTIRELY the case: I'm sure there are still SOME genuinely original (as in, NO ONE at ANY point has done ANYTHING like this before) ideas that come to fruition: but as time marches on and more and more works get churned out, this becomes rarer and rarer and more and more uncommon.
When people talk about "original" and "different" now, usually they mean a work not adhering to a formula SO stringently that it gets to become utterly stale and rote. A good example of this is in American action films: boil down a traditional American action movie, and usually you'll get some variation on "one-man-army of a hero shoots or punches his way through throngs of bad guys to get at main villain (usually, but not necessarily always, for revenge of some kind), often rescuing a love interest along the way". The specifics can be changed up in any NUMBER of different ways: but finding an American action movie that DOESN'T adhere to ANY BIT of this formula is VERY rare indeed.
Nonetheless, there at one time got to a point where American action films hit something of a creative slump thanks to Die Hard, which created almost its own subgenre, "Die Hard on/in a Blank". Basically taking the Die Hard particular story formula (hero has to deal with invading terrorists in an unconventional, highly enclosed area that leaves them particularly vulnerable) and simply changing up the location (a boat, a bus, an airplane, a sports arena, etc). There came a time in the 90s where there got to be SO MANY of these, that the public just got incredibly sick of it. You can still do the basic American action movie formula in a zillion different ways: but you DON'T necessarily HAVE to chain it so stringently to Die Hard's approach to it.
To COMPLETELY bypass ANY kind of narrative formula whatsoever at this point (either a faithfully adhered to one, or a subversive one), you generally have to delve into the realm of completely 100% abstract/experimental works (which are indeed out there, and are often quite awesome).
The point being: Dragon Ball's "formula" is largely a byproduct of its genre. Most (not ALL, but overwhelmingly MOST) martial arts narratives typically follow SOME variation on "hero gets beat by overwhelmingly strong opponent, trains and discovers secret technique or hidden weakness in said opponent, then eventually fights them again and wins". This is no different than slasher movies having the recurring formula of "masked killer picks off the cast one by one in grisly ways, until the last surviving one escapes and/or kills them" or romance stories following "guy and girl meet, fall in love, have falling out, then eventually reconcile".
What matters is what you DO with that formula. How you shake things up, how you personalize and put your own unique stamp on it. Or sometimes even just how WELL you're able to execute simply adhering to it.
The original run of Dragon Ball was VERY good at keeping its martial arts formula fresh, always playing with it in interesting ways, always throwing new elements into the mix and keeping it varied and always barreling on ahead. Hell, some of its combinations of ideas truly WERE unique to it and genuinely original: I've talked about this before in other threads, but I can't think of many Wuxia stories that took the Jianghu setting and melded together both its traditional elements AND sci fi/futuristic elements at the same time; for all the stuff that DB simply takes from other Wuxia stories and puts a Toriyama spin on, that particular concept is very much unique to it.
Also, while I can think of plenty of martial arts/Wuxia works that combine the genre with either pulp sci fi, B movie monsters, Time Travel, or even Japanese Henshin Superheroes, the only one I can think of that's wacky enough to smoosh ALL of these disparate things together all at once (never mind actually make it all hang together and coalesce organically) is Dragon Ball.
The issue with Super is that its introduced any NUMBER of new elements that can easily do likewise and keep this new continuation just as fresh and brimming with new stuff for DB to try... and oftentimes it instead completely wastes them, and instead will go back into the toybox to play with old ideas that we've already milked dry back in the old days, simply it seems for the sake of pandering to fan familiarity and nostalgia.
The problem with Super isn't that it takes ideas that other works have tried: EVERYTHING that exists at this point does that. The issue is that Super, too often, is Dragon Ball recycling itself. Something that DB in its original run RARELY ever did.
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Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
Sometimes too much of a good thing is a bad thing.nickzambuto wrote:Why exactly is it a bad thing for Freeza to have returned? Even if it's three, four, even five or six times now, American comic books have great success with recurring villains dozens upon dozens of times. Why are so many Dragon Ball fans against the idea? I really just don't understand it. Isn't Freeza a great character who we love seeing on-screen?
The biggest truths aren't original. The truth is ketchup. It's Jim Belushi. Its job isn't to blow our minds. It's to be within reach.
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take - Wayne Gretzky" - Michael Scott
Happiness is climate, not weather.
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take - Wayne Gretzky" - Michael Scott
Happiness is climate, not weather.
Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
The way Freeza's being treated in modern DB material reminds me a bit of Dr. Doom. A Sue-like character that always gets his way and, when faced with the prospect of change, the story just glosses over it, gets it over with quickly and the character goes right back to his old ways once he gets back on top.
Re: What's so bad about the idea of a recurring villain?
This was too long ago dudeABED wrote:Sometimes too much of a good thing is a bad thing.nickzambuto wrote:Why exactly is it a bad thing for Freeza to have returned? Even if it's three, four, even five or six times now, American comic books have great success with recurring villains dozens upon dozens of times. Why are so many Dragon Ball fans against the idea? I really just don't understand it. Isn't Freeza a great character who we love seeing on-screen?