Some shows have episodes revolving around characters we don't know, yet get invested in anyways. Doctor Who, for instance, had Blink, a very superb episode that no one needs any prior knowledge of the show to enjoy, as you're put in the main character, Sally's, shoes. Anthology shoes like Twilight Zone make it their business to write episodes based around new casts of characters consistently & try to bring emotional resonance to the audience. The Doctor Who comparison is more apt here, & I'd recommend it to anyone who's never seen the show before, it's that good. However, it takes a specific writer in their element to do that, of which none of the Super writers are even remotely to that level. I don't even think Toriyama's able to do that & he's 10x the writer they are when he's not lazy, in a bind, or burnt out.ABED wrote: ↑Thu Mar 19, 2020 9:21 pm No writer is strong enough to pull it off. It's ridiculous on its face. What benefit you get from the surprise you would sacrifice in terms of emotional resonance.
They didn't misunderstand Goku's character and Flanderize is a dumb useless term. He does show love for his family in Super. I don't see where ANYONE watching the show gets that idea. That's not merely me disagreeing with you, it's apparently and Unpopular DB opinion because I'm not seeing what you guys are seeing.
To explain what I mean about Goku's character for a sec...
You'd be right to say Goku still loves his family, that I can mostly give you. "Flanderize" is just as good a term as any & it's instantly recognizable, whether or not you know where it comes from, since it's a generally accepted term for making a character a shadow of their former self, so, I'd rather not spend too much time typing out the definition every time, if you catch my drift.
Where Goku falls into this is how he acts. In the hands of anyone but Toriyama, Super's go-to writing for Goku is to ramp up his simpleton traits to the point where he legitimately comes off as too dumb to live. Goku hasn't been this since he was a kid & for a reason. To have an adult act like this is stupid. There are a lot of adults who're written to act like this in media, so Goku's not the only one, but we're talking Goku here. It's not at all helped by the writers consistently using Goku as overt comic relief, even in serious moments. It's like Fry in Futurama's later seasons. He wasn't any different than in the earlier ones, but, as less episodes focused on him, & he was just used as punchlines to jokes more often, people thought he'd been dumbed down too much as a result.
I don't mind if the slice of life episodes take a more comedic approach, as they're meant to be more lax & comedic in nature, but they even used Goku as the butt of jokes in more serious moments as well. I think this is definitely shown in how Nozawa & Schemmel play him. While I haven't sampled enough of Nozawa to get a perfect fix on how she normally plays Goku, Schemmel's performance definitely got tweaked to fit this more comedic tone for the worst, which is not to say he doesn't fit the role or is a bad actor. Despite opinions I've shared on him, or what some people here may say, he's grown into the role & Kai & the 2013-on movies feature superb acting from him as he's learned how to actually voice act. He was clearly chosen to play the more commanding & powerful side of Goku's personality, as well as piggyback off of Peter Kalemis' portrayal when FUNi wanted to save money by moving the Z dub's production down to Texas in 1999. I'd say Kalemis is more capable of portraying Goku's more comedic side, as he's a more experienced actor, but it's not like Schemmel's awful in it. It's just not in his usual wheelhouse. His normal Goku portrayal is changed into a more higher-pitched one to try to both take influence from Nozawa as well as match Super's tone, which doesn't fit his usual style at all, not that it's his fault. And, listening to clips, it's definitely apparent that Nozawa's being directed to do something similar with her portrayal, as her voice is higher in delivery as well than it needs to be or probably should be.
By doing this, as well as dumbing him down to "naive, stupid manchild," it leaves Goku a shadow of his former self. I have no doubts Goku would wanna train all the time, wouldn't wanna work for a living to skip out on training, would train with Whis, & would wanna fight a bunch of strong opponents in a multiverse tournament. However, why would Goku act like a child to get out of work by running away from Chichi in a comedic scene just to catch up to Whis to train with him, or leave his 9/10-year-old son (yes, that's how old Goten is at the start of Super if you do the math) to drive a tractor around as he does some quick training while on the job, or not take the threat of Xeno wiping out every universe that loses in the Tournament of Power more seriously?
Goku took his training with Roshi, Korrin, Kami, & King Kai seriously for different reasons, had reasons to allow him to train (some selfish, but with an underlying hint of not being so), & took the 23rd World Tournament & Cell Games very seriously. Granted, in the Cell Games, he let his pride in Gohan get ahead of common sense, the same happened with Buu, but he largely took them seriously, which is why he had pride in his kids & Trunks to take care of the situations at hand, which only shows how mature he can be to analyze power levels, or just hope that his sons can get the job done when he could do so as well. Granted, that's also a problem of bad & forced writing in Buu's case, but one problem at a time here. While Goku still has these traits, they're overshadowed by the writers of Super not knowing how to write him & ramping up these traits more than they should be, making him more like Monkey D. Luffy, who's on purpose an over-the-top boisterous character. Goku's more reserved than that usually. And, Goku's selfish, but not like he is in Super by any means. It's a character flaw, not one of his main character traits, which is the problem the rest stem from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KiXfJnMVUE (timestamp 6:17)
That link is a video I think I've linked you, or someone else here, before where the guy who made it goes over it very quickly, summing up the point very well. I suggest watching it, as I don't just wanna regurgitate all of his points. He even quickly talks about how other characters were dumbed down to their base traits as well.
I mean, these writers CAN have good ideas. The problems were that they weren't given proper guidance for how to write some of the characters, or how to properly write arcs. I imagine the timeframes in which they were given to write the arcs & episodes didn't help either, just like it didn't help the animators. I'm willing to bet most of them also probably didn't have more than a few weeks to draft scripts effectively. These are probably writers more used to adapting mangas to animes, which I could believe. That's far easier to do than adapt a mostly vague plot outline that's not finished when they start production with showrunners who aren't much better off. A good showrunner will override an episode writer's decisions by correcting lacking parts, or having them write another draft of the script(s) with the corrections after instructing them on what they did wrong or what could be improved. Super had like 3-5 over its course, right? I could believe that given how inconsistent its quality was in its writing.It_Is_Ayna_You_Flips wrote: ↑Thu Mar 19, 2020 9:43 pm True but a part of me wonders if they wouldn't flourish when pushed into unfamiliar territory. And with the new characters being mostly blank slates for them to right from scratch, there would be no established characters for them to mess up.
Then there's the fact that these are pre-established characters in a pre-established world. Doing a sequel, especially without the original creator at the helm who's giving you plot outlines, is tough if you don't have the best writing staff available to do the job. A more original project with new characters is much easier to handle for most, so I have no doubts that these writers would do better with that. It's a tough call, though, for them. They really needed a series bible outlining character personalities & portrayals to follow before doing anything with Super, but nope.
