TheOne wrote:
I’ve seen it all now... One of the best ideas In GT was ending it with the Shadow Dragons, and now someone is saying it’s terrible. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but goodness gracious some people are reaching.
Throughout the entire series, they have relied too heavily on the Dragon Balls.
They don't rely too heavily on the dragonballs. The dragonballs have always been used when the scenario is "use the dragonballs or fucking die". That's not a morality test. A morality test is:
"You get a million dollars when you push this button, but every time you push this button a random person somewhere in the world that you don't know dies. Do you push the button?"
"There's a runaway train. You can divert the train down one of two paths. On one path, a track that is no longer used, is one stranger minding his own business. On the path the train is currently on are five strangers. Do you save the 5 careless people by killing the 1 responsible person, or do you let nature run its course?"
Those are moral dilemmas. The "Shadow Dragons" pretend to be a moral dilemma. If the same "Shadow Dragon" logic was to be applied to the aforementioned scenarios, it'd be:
"You get a million dollars when you push this button, but the minute you push it you die. Do you push the button?" Not much of a choice there.
"There's a train. There's someone by the track. You can push that person onto the track so the train runs them over... or you can not do that. Do you... do that?"
The "Shadow Dragons" are conceptually bad because there was no choice
but to use the dragonballs in the series. If they didn't use the balls, they'd have been annihilated. There is no dilemma when the choice is "live or die"; living is always the right choice, especially when it's literally billions of lives on the line as is the case in Dragonball.
The idea of the dragonballs being the bad guys is quite attractive and I found myself agreeing that it was a good idea to use them many years ago, but then I realized how silly the message is. "Hey, don't use this thing to solve your life or death problems even though there is no other way to solve those problems."
The way GT used the "shadow dragons" was less like the consequences of the heroes' actions and more like just another new villain. Well news flash, the "Z-warriors/Dragon Team/whatever other dumb branding name they come up with" have dealt with new villains since the start of the series.
Doctor. wrote:The idea behind the Shadow Dragons ties to a line from the Elder Kaioshin in the final arc of the series; it's a direct continuation of where the series left off.
Yes, exactly the thing I said earlier:
It's essentially as superfluous as a Disney Star Wars movie (more specifically, Rogue One or Solo): a story made from an innocuous detail and doesn't need to be told
Turning one line that everyone ignored because it was stupid into a series arc.
And how fucking villainous does it make Elder Kai that he never once told them "Hey, using the dragonballs will release the 'shadow dragons' and they're stronger than Buu, so maybe stop using them for a while, huh?"
It's a garbage twist that resulted in a garbage arc. It was bad at the conception level. Fixes exist, but I don't care to go into fan fiction.
