What are the dumbest ASSumptions you've made about DB?

[jjgp1112]

Back when we were all getting into Dragon Ball, we all of course likely didn't have that great of an idea of what was going on and made assumptions of the characters and settings that were rather stupid sounding in hindsight. I actually used to think that Yamcha (Cell saga) was Goku's short haired clone, and that Emperor Pilaf was Garlic Jr.'s brother (the voice didn't help). I know there are more, but I can't think of them right now. What are some ASSumptions that you've all made in the past?

[VegettoEX]

I've told this story before, and I don't know if it's an "assumption", but I was pretty convinced that in one of the movies Broli wished Raditz and Nappa back to life to battle against Goku (which Broli, himself, just sat back and watched/laughed). Probably just something I read in an AOL chat room one day (JAPAN - Dragon Ball Z... who remembers, that...?!)

As for an actual "assumption", I just automatically assumed Yamcha died 'cuz I saw an image of Dr. Gero with his entire arm through the dude's freakin' chest.

[penguintruth]

I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but I thought Yamcha and Kuririn were related to Goku, simply because they wore the same gi, and Yamcha looked to me a lot like Goku.

I also thought Kuririn was a kid.

[Herms]

Ducard posted a great misconception he had in an old thread, and it’s so awesome I thought I’d post it here (hopefully he won't mind). Although far from being an ass-sumption, this idea is arguably better than the actual story of DB:

I mistook the 'next dimension' business for something depressingly creepy. This is from way back when I first caught the show in syndication, pre-Toonami broadcast.

I had seen the first handful of episodes with Raditz, so I knew the basics: what Goku and Piccolo and some others looked like (even if I hadn't learned their names quite yet), that people could get resurrected sometimes if they wanted to, and that guys got sent into 'the Next Dimension' when they got killed. Check. Next, somehow I managed to catch just the tail-end of the episode where characters train in the Room of Spirit and Time. Watched it just in time for the guys to get slaughtered by the Saiyans and be sent back to that room. Since I was late coming to the episode I actually thought that the main characters (Goku, Piccolo, Krillin) were just now getting killed off in the real world again, and that this was the moment when we finally get to see what the afterlife was like for them.

CREEPY. It's a dank, dark room, with only a disturbing ticking clock, and everyone is standing around looking vacant and completely different. Here's Piccolo... except he looks old, serious, and decrepit?! (Unbeknownst to me, that was Kami) Goku is no longer the joyful man from before, he has a much more serious persona... his image is also entirely different, with unkempt hair and plenty of scars. (Also unbeknownst to me, that was Yamcha) And Krillin? Well, he looks the same. That just made the whole ordeal weirder, like there was no set rhyme or reason why everyone's souls looked different after dying, or why their personalities took a total 180. All in some vapid dimension devoid of time.

Then "Piccolo" says that everyone had been standing in this room the entire time, and what they encountered before--even their own demise--was only an illusion separate from their real selves. <Gasp!> Again I misinterpreted, thinking he was referring to everyone's entire lives beforehand. So Goku's whole life, including his days as a husband and father, was an illusion. This scarred man, who didn't even look or act like Goku, was the Real Thing. Weird. Even Goku's personality and ability to age were part of the illusion he had ... until this moment, when they were ultimately cast aside in favor of revealing his true identity. Ditto with Piccolo and the others.

In other words, their entire lives were a lie; heck, the world as they knew it, everyone they knew, and the passage of time itself were lies. Their personas in life merely served as masks or false personalities masquerading in place of their true identities: these solemn, alien, and entirely different people who simply stood and watched alone in this empty eternity, doing nothing. And only by dying could Goku and the others see themselves for who they truly were: empty beings in some empty eternity.

Well "Goku", Krillin and the others vowed anyway to go back and train for the Saiyans. The next time I saw an episode, I saw the real Goku and Piccolo out in the open. It struck me how these guys decided to return to this world and fight for their lives there, even though they had learned that everything and everyone they knew were superficial facades which would all inevitably awake/return to the real dimension where their real personalities exist forever in desolate stillness.

Even when I saw more of the show and realized my error, I still couldn't shake the nihilistic context I had formed in my mind whenever anyone was sent to "The Next Dimension."

[Shadow-Link]

I started watching Dragon Ball somewhere around where Nappa was killing most of the Z warriors, and by the time the Freeza arc came around they started airing a trailer/commercial for it.
And I couldn't figure out who the hell that blond guy in the trailer was . I assumed it was a completely new character that would be introduced into the series, but it turned out to be goku himself.

[DemonRin]

I don't know where the hell it came from, but there used to be a rumor going around in my neighborhood during the Toonami days that Son and Vegeta were Brothers...
It's apparently so widespread that it's even on Daizex.

Where the hell did that one come from?!

[caejones]

I assumed that Vegeta would just disappear after Namek, That Yajirobe was telling the truth to the press during the Nappa fight, that Gohan was a few years older than even the FUNi dub made him...
When I first heard of Vegetto, I assumed he was a completely separate character from Vegeta and Goku. I mean, sure, arguably he is, but... you know... more so.
When I first heard that there was a character called Trunks, I was expecting some new, green-skinned, possibly blond-haired villain intent on gathering the dragon balls.

And I briefly considered it likely that the SSJ transformation was permanent, and that Goku was going to be a blond badass forever after. As in, even while chillin' in lawn furniture.

Which reminds me... I also kinda failed to realize, despite how overwhelmingly obvious it was, that all of the characters didn't just live/hang out at the same place. As in... I once tried to start a fanfic with SSJ Goku lounging in a chair in the backyard of this place, and Bulma ran out to yell at him that a new alien was attacking the Earth.

And it took the longest time for me to accept that the DB Earth is geographically nothing like our own. I kinda just tended to assume that everyone lived in Japan.

[jordanator]

When Goku hadn't appeared in DBZ for a while (Trunks saga -- he was in space), and Trunks came into the timeline, I assumed Trunks was Goku. But I also thought that Trunks was the revived Goku, as I was convinced Goku died on Namek.
If I can remember anymore, I'll edit this post.

[B]

That "Kakarot" was Goku's last name.

[jjgp1112]

When Goku hadn't appeared in DBZ for a while (Trunks saga -- he was in space), and Trunks came into the timeline, I assumed Trunks was Goku. But I also thought that Trunks was the revived Goku, as I was convinced Goku died on Namek.
If I can remember anymore, I'll edit this post.

Heh, when I first saw DBZ's Toonami intro (Season 4) I thought that Trunks was a clone of Goku with a different wardrobe in this scene:

[Thanos]

For so long I thought the Buu era was the whole Dragon Ball story. I read about it online and had some friends who were into it, and I guess they found bootlegs of those episodes and so I thought the Z-Fighters were just some aliens who came to Earth to protect it.

[cRookie_Monster]

I actually watched DB#1-? first, then a couple DBZ movies(Tree of Might, Deadzone) as my intro to the DB world so I wasn't quite as confused.

+1 on the Pilaf\Garlic Jr relationship though. I think I might have gone a bit further and thought they were the same person.

That story about the other "dimension" was awesome! Kinda Matrix like.

[jjgp1112]

Also, when I saw this AMV from 2001 that had a clip of Kid Vegeta beating up a bunch of Saibamen from Bardock: The Father of Goku, I thought it was a clip from OG Dragon Ball - they were already setting up the Saiyan saga even when they were still kids!

[mysticboy]

SSJ1 + SSJ1 + SSJ1= SSJ3!

[Codarik]

I actually never made a dumb assumption before, even though I was a kid during the Toonami days, I understood everything that was going on. Nothing in the series ever really confused me.

[Perfect]

All of my friends assumed Cell and Piccolo were brothers because they're both green. >.>

[Great Saiyaman I]

All of my friends assumed Cell and Piccolo were brothers because they were both green. >.>

It doesn't help that Cell actually says that they're brothers, refering to Piccolo's cells being used in him.

[Travis Touchdown]

For some reason, I thought Goku & Yamcha had the same face in the Saiyan Saga. Today I can clearly see that Yamcha's eyes are drawn with closed lines, but back then, I guess I missed it. When my friends who got me into Dragon Ball told me Goku was an alien, I just assumed Yamcha was the "Earthling" or "Human" Goku.

In my defense, I was only like... 12 or 13 at the time.

[Gaffer Tape]

Let's see what I can remember. I thought that Gohan was Goku's son until I saw the Princess Snake episode where a seemingly-totally-different-looking boy in yellow was shown to be Goku's son. Then I just shrugged off that the almost-identically dressed Gohan was just a coincidence.

Some of my friends thoughts Yamucha was Goku's brother. A pretty common one it seems.

Since one of my friends had actually seen the dubbed DB back in '95, he tried to make the connection to this new series and swore to me that Piccolo was in those episodes he had seen. It turns out he was actually talking about Pilaf!

When that same friend and I first found Curtis Hoffmann's manga summary of volume 1, we at twelve years old were shocked! All this stuff about Bulma shooting Goku, panties this, boobies that. Since he'd seen the dubbed DB, I asked him if any of that had happened in the show. He assured me it had not. So we became convinced that this "summary" was someone's porn-addled, mangled interpretation of Dragon Ball. We got quite a kick out of it nevertheless.

I remember thinking at some point that, in DB (which of course hadn't been widespread distributed here) there was only one tournament throughout the course of the series, and that that one tournament was the vehicle in which Tenshinhan and Chaozu were introduced.

For some reason, I always had it in my head that teleportation was a skill that came to Goku as a result of his Super Saiya-jin transformation, and that he actually used that skill to get off of Namek in its last seconds. I guess I was mismashing information together.

I remember reading the timeline that kept floating around all the DB sites back then (was that Greg Werner?) and seeing entries for Piccolo being brought back to life, Kuririn and Yamucha being brought back to life, and Tenshinhan and Chaozu being brought back to life. I guess I didn't pay attention to the dates too well because when season three came stateside, I was convinced that those were the three wishes they'd make with the Namekian dragonballs: the first for Piccolo, the second for Kuririn and Yamucha, and the third for Tenshinhan and Chaozu.

Oh, and for at least a year and half, I believed all the crap about the series that FUNimation rewrote! Silly, naive me!

But nothing beats Ducard's Next Dimension story!

[Goku100xKamehameha]

When I'm first heard Dragon Ball Kai, I thought it's a show about Kaio. I know it's not dumb at all because every DB fans that doesn't understand Japanese at the time and don't know what DB Kai is about will thought the same but I just want to say it.