Maphisto86 wrote:Something about the idea of shutting down the androids made me think. Even if they managed to shut down 16, 17 and 18, how would that keep Cell from being perfect. A quick scene in the anime even poses this "what if". I forget whether Bulma was aware at the time of Cell's attempt to become "perfect", but either or it seems like an iffy plan to begin with. I mean they might have been able to destroy Eighteen if Kuririn went through with it and/or by powering her down, Cell would not be able to harness her energy and transform. Both the manga and anime seem to leave this hanging from what I remember. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Bulma tells Kuririn that if the androids are shut down, they can then be easilly destroyed. Kuririn then uneasily thinks over the idea of having to destroy No.18. Presumably destroying them would also destroy whatever it was inside them that Cell needed to become complete.
So regarding the issue of multiple Super Saiyans and higher levels of Super Saiyan versus the original idea of a single, all-powerful Super Saiyan, I personally have no problem with the way things play out in this regard during the post-Freeza portion of the series. I guess it's mostly because I always found the original Super Saiyan concept to be extremely boring. There's just nothing to it: the legend says that once in 1,000 years, a Super Saiyan will appear and will be the strongest warrior in the universe. Why once every 1,000 years? No reason. Why exactly is the Super Saiyan stronger than anyone else? No reason. It's all just part of “the legend”, but it's never explained how this legend started, why it should be believed, or what forces or mechanism underlies it. So since there's never any good reason given for why the Super Saiyan is all-powerful and one of a kind, it doesn't bug me at all when multiple Super Saiyans pop up and new characters and forms stronger than the original Super Saiyan are introduced. Maybe the legend says this shouldn't be so, but legends are pretty much always wrong to some degree anyway.
What I like about the multiple Super Saiyans and higher Super Saiyan forms is that, while they still never actually explain why Super Saiyan forms exist in the first place, they at least demystify the concept enough that it doesn't need an explanation quite so much. That is, even if the actual mechanism behind the transformation is never explained in the same way Vegeta explains the Oozaru transformation, we at least get some specific rules and requirements for the transformation. And the presence of characters who are as strong or stronger than Super Saiyans takes away some of the need to explain what makes them so strong: if it were the only way to gain that degree of power, is would demand some sort of explanation, but when it's shown as one of several ways to do so, then you can at least chock it up as being part of the general inexplicable laws of the DB world. Like if there were only one really tall person ever shown walking around DB Earth, that would require some sort of explanation, but since we see lots of super tall people, we can just write it off as the way DB Earth is (not that an explanation wouldn't be nice).
Besides, I think a form that anyone can work towards achieving, and can be experimented with and improved upon, is much more interesting than one that simply “appears” in some destined individual when the stars happen to be right and is the be-all and end-all of power, end of story. I really dislike vague ideas of “destiny” as a plot device (which I would file the Super Saiyan legend under), so I'm glad the series moved away from that sort of thing after the Freeza arc (well, unless you count Broli). And it was never much of a factor before Freeza either. The only prior thing like that I can think of is Uranai Baba predicting that Goku would one day save the world, though this was more a simple prediction of the future than anything having to do with ideas of destiny or legends being fulfilled, and at any rate it wasn't focused on very much at all.
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