Anticipating DBS Super Hero, the Red Ribbon Army, Cooler, and more thoughts

Discussion specifically regarding the "Dragon Ball Super" TV series premiering July 2015 in Japan, including individual threads for each episode.

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capsulecorp
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Anticipating DBS Super Hero, the Red Ribbon Army, Cooler, and more thoughts

Post by capsulecorp » Thu Feb 10, 2022 12:37 pm

After reading and responding to various posts in the DBS Super Hero thread, I've been thinking about this movie more, particularly my own reactions to it compared to those of others. I've seen people express a thought process that goes something like this: "Why the RR army AGAIN? Goku beat them as a child and we've seen that before. They are weak. Why not introduce something more powerful or Cooler or another universe or, or, or... ?"

My initial reaction to that is extremely negative. Part of this is specific to Cooler, like I think his design is weak, he looks like Shredder from TMNT and, imo, even by Toei standards his movie was boring. There's also a lack of creativity and surprise, yes, they got away with it with Broly and to a lesser extent ROF but I don't want these DBS movies to just be a series of trips down memory lane for nostalgic fans. Finally, as many people (including Toriyama) have said, the attempt to always increase the stakes and power levels of the series can be exhausting, especially when it becomes tropey and predictable. I mean, god bless you if you enjoy DBS Heroes but if that was my first exposure to Dragon Ball I would not be writing this today :D

But, the thing is, it's also true that the RR army is not especially new, either. We saw them in DB, we saw them in DBZ, maybe it's fitting that they show up in DBS too but the question remains: why does this feel different and exciting and fresh to me compared to re-introducing Cooler or Janemba or whatever?

Well, this is not the old Red Ribbon army. From what we've seen so far, the RR is represented by a businessman and a spoiled, over-privileged child. It's likely that they're not trying to conquer the world, they are probably more motivated by greed than conquest and they probably make use of PR and propaganda as much as they do force. They may be physically weak (though their androids are probably not), but these are modern challenges that Goku is not suited to tackling, and this feels like Toriyama trying to move the story and the world forward. DB has always had an undercurrent of old vs new, ancient vs modern to it, and this could be a very compelling conflict!