Why do fans of One Piece and Naruto criticize Dragon Ball a lot?

[jjgp1112]

One Piece lays the sap on a little thick at times, moreso in the beginning when they were establishing the characters and the crew, but I feel there's a lot more effort put into the characterization and fleshing out characters' motivations, allowing a lot of stuff that happens to feel more meaningful and personal. I'm more emotionally invested in things like, say, the Water 7/Enies Lobby arc than I've ever been in something Dragon Ball related save for maybe the King Piccolo arc.

I'm not even into most anime aside from YYH, DBZ, and One Piece, anyway. Although I see no problem with One Piece being over the top with emotion because quite frankly, it's over the top on everything. That's the show. And on top of that it explores some pretty interesting angles on politics, world history, racism and government corruption that keeps me engaged in the story. There's am absolutely insane level of attention to detail that you don't even get from more "mature" shows either.

And Kunzait, I feel like you're not even bothering to explore the hodgepodge of influences that fuel Oda, etc'. and their stories because you dislike them so much, and that's not a particularly fair analysis. Is it not possible for those authors to have been influenced by the same stuff that Toriyama incorporated into his storylines, and that Dragon Ball isn't the main thing informing their storytelling? It also just seems like you're not familiar with One Piece or Naruto beyond a surface level. Like, I stopped keeping up with Naruto fairly early into the story, so for pretty much anything else pertaining to the show's quality I either don't speak on it at all or I'd really have to defer to other people's opinions

[Whatever]

Gohan is out of character at the Cell Games:
Yeah, I'll agree that him not wanting to fight isn't presented as well as it should have been. That said, him being set off by seeing someone die tracks perfectly fine. Yes, he barely knew the guy, and his friends were being beaten. But there's a difference between seeing some getting beaten and seeing someone killed. The latter packs a more visceral and emotionally-stimulating punch no matter your familiarity with the people. At least, that's my intuition.

Well outside of his willingness to fight being presented badly,this character trait of his was never present before he entered the HTC,quite the opposite really he had no problem killing bad guys less dangerous than Cell back on Namek.

There is a big difference getting beaten and seeing someone killed yes but there is no reason for Gohan being set off by a person he never know,it had happened before both on the Saiyan and Namek sagas,good people were killed left and right but only Piccolo's and Krillin's death(or at the least when he thought 2nd form Freeza killed him) set Gohan off.
I could see it working like that if it was the first death Gohan had witnessed but that is not the case.

Goku switches between extremes:
The most recent bout of discourse on this matter that I can think of is regarding his actions during the early Cell arc. Where he doesn't want to go out of his way to prevent abstract future deaths, but gets angry and tries to put a stop to actual tangible innocent death right in front of his face. I've already talked at length about this one in Gaffer Tape's thread, and that's actually really truly how real people act and react in the real world. The more abstract and far away something bad is, the less viscerally repulsive it is, and the less action it provokes. And that's not merely my intuition like the above example; that's corroborated strongly by neuroscience (and it's that corroboration which steers my intuition in the above example). There's no insecurity breeding an inability to accept a series' clear flaws, on my part, here. Nobody seemed to want to address this point over there, but you're more than welcome to here.

Another thing that was mentioned in that thread was Bulma not doing anything to stop Gero, even if the martial artists were too busy thinking with their fists. That's certainly something I'd gladly point to as a clear writing mistake. Just because Goku doesn't want to do anything to stop them from being built, nothing's necessarily stopping Bulma from doing it. Sure, there's Vegeta, but he's likely to go train in space (and the anime even depicts this).

Well to be honest i was talking about more extreme examples,like Goku leading Freeza to hit himself with his Kienzan like move(i think it called Death Saucer?)on purpose only to change his mind and tell him to dodge.Or despite how many times Goku makes it clear he wants to stop Buu and is taking the situation seriously only to reveal that he actually wanted the new generation to take over(brought out of nowhere and is dropped almost right away anyways)after he reveals ssj3.

As for the DrGero accident i agree with your view that Goku is not just one or the other and that he is both a battle junkie and someone who wants to save people when he sees them getting killed(and that he does not think longterm but is more likely to act when things happen in front of him) but the problem in this case is how it is handled.

He is being 100% aware that the androids are gonna kill everyone and he is so nonchalatant about it despite being able to prevent the bloodshed before it even happens.
Yet when the bloodshed does happen it is made perfectly clear how much he is against it several times,there is some kind of gap between the 2 instances of his behaviour even with no black or white appoach in mind.

Toriyama isn't the kind of guy to deliberately make deep themes:
You don't have to deliberately do something for it to be done. The fact of the matter is, time does constantly move forward in Dragon Ball. Characters do change over time, and move on with their lives. Goku does develop into a more immorally reckless person to satiate his thirst for challenge. Toriyama doesn't have to have intended for these to be regularities in the work he made; they are regularities nonetheless. They are themes of the work. They are reoccurring motifs and ideas. They may be such through happenstance, but they are such all the same.

Well if the author never intended for a deep meaning to be into something and we see it this way then that means us fans are thinking about it way much more than we should of.
Goku does become more of an immoral reckless person as time goes on but thats because Toriyama writes him that way to drag out the plot when its convinient,he flip flops between serious and reckless during dbz,as shown in the buu saga when he was serious and pragmatic untill it was revealed he had ssj3,which reveal changed his priorities and motivations.

Then there is the whole theme of db which Roshi taught Goku,that there is always someone stronger so you should never be content with your limits.
Then there are the many themes that Toriyama tried to built the foundations but dropped or retconed,like the whole Vegeta vs Goku fight in which they really tried to hammer down that with hard work even a low class warrior can defeat an elite which of course later retconned as Goku having more potential thus being the more special of the 2.
Or the reason Goku achieved Super Saiyan and Vegeta did not was because Vegeta was a selfish bastard while Goku was pure of heart yet later Vegeta does get Super Saiyan by being a selfish bastard and not to mention how he botched and dropped the 'pass the torch' stuff as well.

Trashcanning/assassinating characters and destroying what he built:
For this, you're going to have to bring in specific examples in order for an actual conversation to be had about it. Toriyama absolutely tosses people by the wayside when he doesn't care about using them, and pulls ideas out of thin air when he needs to, and take the piss out of his own ideas. But you mention these like they're inherent storytelling sins, rather than zeroing in on how he botches these kinds of creative decisions in execution. I don't think he generally does, but I'm curious as to what specific examples you might be thinking of.

Most of the time when a character becomes nicer(developing and being assimilated more into the good guys group)they would usually find themselves in lesser roles and fading into the background as the story moves on(well outside of Vegeta),Toriyama seems to not want a sad ending for the main timeline so all characters are brought back even if they are gonna do nothing but be punching bags in the future(despite most characters being better left of dead),then they are character that become passive when Toriyama wants them not being important despite them being a proactive character in their core.

One big example is Yamcha who is forced to repeat the same mistake of underestimating his opponent 3 times despite being suposed to learn from it the first time,all for the purpose of him being a first victim.
But i am sure you are aware of Yamcha's feats and shortcomings but for Yamcha the real character assasination comes from less fighting oriented stuff.
As we know Yamcha's purpose in life is to get married but he is branded as a cheater to justify Bulma ending up with Vegeta despite OG dragonball building up their relationship,all for sake of having a saiyan child for the plot.

Irreverence is a common theme in Toriyama's works in general; people pointing out manifestations of this artistic trait in Dragon Ball, and using them as evidence of hacky writing, seems to exemplify a failure to understand the dude's general style. And while, no, stylistic quirks aren't necessarily constitutive or a substitute for good writing, I think they're legitimately overlooked and obfuscated by what a lot of people seem to focus on instead. Acknowledge bad writing when you see it, but if you're just going to double back and praise it regardless, at least go a step above stock descriptions like "it's fun, entertaining, funny, and cool", and try to recognize the distinctive artistic flair that's making it all of those things to begin with. Chances are, the thing you think is bad writing might not actually be such in the first place.

Well there quite a few things i enjoy about dragonball but how irreverence is not one of them,i get it Toriyama has a specific writing style that he follows but that does not i agree with all the decisions that comes with it.

I honestly think that if someone turns a blind eye to Toriyama's artistic style (which mostly seems to happen passively, but I've seen some people advocate for actively turning a blind eye to it), they're likely to see manifestations of it, and mistake that for bad writing; and since that seems to be the dominant way of looking at Dragon Ball (at least from the discourse I've observed and participated in; maybe I'm just unlucky), perfectly fine narrative decisions colored by Toriyama's personality seem egregious and strange and off base. Resulting in Dragon Ball getting more shit than it deserves. And it surely deserves shit, but I think cases of mistaken identity result in too much undue criticism.

Well that depens on what you mean by or how you see his artistic style.Are you talking about the narrative of the story?How he handles the characters?
The structure of them?Maybe all of them?Since the link you posted seems to be referencing the general gist of all of those.

[Kunzait_83]

There is a big difference getting beaten and seeing someone killed yes but there is no reason for Gohan being set off by a person he never know,it had happened before both on the Saiyan and Namek sagas,good people were killed left and right but only Piccolo's and Krillin's death(or at the least when he thought 2nd form Freeza killed him) set Gohan off.

Gohan was also mighty set off by Dodoria slaughtering Dende's whole village (including his father and brother). He also didn't know Yamucha, Tenshinhan, and Chaozu from a hole in the wall during the fight against Nappa and the Saibaimen, and was shown to be pretty markedly upset and traumatized by witnessing their respective deaths (to the point where it causes him to completely freeze up in terror and not pitch into Piccolo and Kuririn's team attack).

Gohan's pretty much always consistently been shown as someone who is, to one degree or another, deeply upset by witnessing ANY kind of death or hard violence, no matter if its visited on a friend or a complete stranger. #16's death setting him off makes total and complete sense in this regard: all the more so (and Zephyr I don't think even touched on this part) because #16 had just finished delivering a rousing speech on comparing his own pacifism to Gohan's (and why Gohan has to sometimes get beyond it when things get really bad, as 16 also does) in a manner that Gohan could broadly connect with and relate to.

It seemed pretty obvious that despite his not knowing #16 hardly at all beforehand, he was greatly impacted by what 16 was saying to him in that moment... and THAT'S the exact, precise insant where Cell violently rips 16 from the world right before Gohan's very eyes.

Cue him going berserk and cutting loose.

One Piece lays the sap on a little thick at times, moreso in the beginning when they were establishing the characters and the crew,

One Piece lays the sap on overwhelmingly thick a-l-w-a-y-s. It lays it on thick almost anytime a character's mouth is open and words are coming out. Virtually EVERY other emotional beat consists of the following:



And many of its others generally thus:


”Smiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiile darn ya smiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiile!!!

Beyond my initial attempted marathons through the series back in the day (in which I'd gotten somewhere around maybe Reverse Mountain before I finally had to tap the fuck out and spare what little remained of my sanity), I've also been exposed to more than my fair share of later material over the years (thanks in no small part to my continued dealings with this place): it NEVER changes or “matures” emotionally. Every time I've EVER seen ANY of it, its always the same bipolar, emotionally manic, spastic blob of borderline personality disorder that its ALWAYS been from day one.

When it comes to sap, One Piece has no off switch and the dial is always permanently stuck on 11. Not an over-exaggeration by any stretch. I don't like to make this shit personal when it comes to just random creators I don't know who's work I just happen to not like... but going solely off his unbelievably crude and seemingly broken understanding of basic human emotional interactions continually displayed throughout his magnum opus here, the sheer amount of hugs that Oda apparently must've never received from his father growing up, the utter lack of childhood friends of any kind and the stunted development of social skills that go with it, and the amount of anti-depressants that he has to consume on a daily basis are things that I don't even want to fathom.

(Let me stress, I know virtually NOTHING about this dude's personal life and personality apart from his hero-worship of Toriyama, nor do I purport to genuinely make these sorts of assumptions about the man for real. I'm purely sketching out an overall, and obviously somewhat tongue-in-cheek, mental impression derived from the sole source I have to go off of: his work here.)

but I feel there's a lot more effort put into the characterization and fleshing out characters' motivations, allowing a lot of stuff that happens to feel more meaningful and personal.

Like I spent my past few posts in this thread blathering on about in agonizing detail: gigantic, maudlin speeches where a character spells out in glow in the dark magic markers exactly what it is they're feeling on the nose about their entire life history does not entail "characterization". You can present a character who spouts off for pages and pages at a time about every detail of what specifically it is that they feel about some fight they had with their childhood best friend 20 years ago or whatever, while still ending up with a character who is utterly boring, flat, cliched, unrelatable, and one dimensional. Meanwhile you can present a character who says NOTHING, who utters not a single blessed syllable of a word for the ENTIRE duration of the story beginning to end... and end up with a character who is multi-faceted, layered, dense, complicated, and engaging as all hell.

Outpourings of overwrought "feels" from a character is NOT synonymous with characterization: without anything of substance in the narrative or endemic to the character, without any sense of dynamism or subtlety in ANY realm of the work whatsoever, these kinds of flowery, sobbing speeches are effectively little different from a Live Journal rant from a 13 year old girl in 2004 about her first breakup. This is what constitutes "characterization" from any NUMBER of junior high school-aged would-be writers on FanFiction.net.

There isn't ANYTHING "meaningful" or "personal" about a badly-drawn (not a fan of Oda's art obviously), rubber-faced, obnoxiously over the top villain with a ridiculous cartoon personality suddenly breaking down into tears about how his friends abandoned him as a kid, or his puppy got shot, or how he's really caring and loyal to his crew, or how she really loves her mom deep down, or whatever else have you: nor is it anymore "deeply personal and meaningful" when they launch into a random, meandering speech about their beliefs in "fate" and how "there is no good or evil in this world", or whatever other thuddingly over-used, post-Nomura Final Fantasy-esque, Intro to Philosophy-level faux-profundity that about umpteen gazillions of Japanese Shonen and JRPG material are so fond of lazily leaning on like a crutch.

Again: show, don't tell. Having the character just constantly talk at me non-stop about how I'm supposed to "feel" for them via endless sob stories about their lives is NOT going to make me feel jack shit if there's nothing inherently and in the moment throughout the story about how they act, what they do, what they say, or even how they LOOK that instills the slightest bit of care in me.

This same basic concept is why most garden-variety Emo songs from the mid-2000s from bands like Dashboard Confessional and My Chemical Romance and whatnot are anything but "personal", "vulnerable", and "deep" but instead just tedious, tiresome, and trite (did not mean to make that last part so ridiculously alliterative, that's just how it worked out).

One Piece's (and really most post-DB "Battle Shonen") version of "characterization" is really no different whatsoever in principal: it has all the "personal depth" of an All American Rejects ballad, and reads like its speaking to the emotional maturity of a 3rd grader (because it is).

For all of Dragon Ball's own faults, it in no way now or ever even so much as pretends to be striving for something that's clearly THIS far out from its intellectual or emotional range. Its never anything more or less than just a martial arts epic about warrior rivalries and feuding high fantasy gods (and a touch of family thrown in from time to time as well) that distills this type of material for Japanese 7 year olds without in any way feeling like its "talking down" to them or in a way that's alienating to older readers/viewers: it doesn't ever try to carry itself like its characters are housing The Grapes of Wrath-levels of dimensionality like One Piece and its post-DB Shonen brethren ridiculously and laughably try to. Dragon Ball stays within its lane and excels there.

I'm not even into most anime aside from YYH, DBZ, and One Piece, anyway.

...

There's am absolutely insane level of attention to detail that you don't even get from more "mature" shows either.

Wait a sec...

I'm not even into most anime aside from YYH, DBZ, and One Piece, anyway.

There's am absolutely insane level of attention to detail that you don't even get from more "mature" shows either.

Do you mean "more mature shows" as in other manga and anime? Or just other TV shows in general?

If the former, then you basically just contradicted yourself ("I don't watch other anime other than these three Shonen shows here, but I can definitely say that OP has more depth than all those other so-called 'mature' anime"), and having both seen and read more than my good share of One Piece (more than 60+ someodd episodes of the anime, and almost a dozen or so volumes of the manga: and that's not even counting all the many, many times I've dropped in and out of seeing a bunch of its later stretches of material) as well as far more anime and manga in general than I'd care to admit over the course of roughly almost 30 years now...

..I can more than safely say that odds are significantly high that One Piece has probably got absolutely nothing within its hundreds of manga volumes and episodes that's any real serious "threat" towards stuff like Shamo, Lone Wolf and Cub, Akira, Kemonozume, Homunculus, Jiraishin, Rokudenashi Blues, Ultra Heaven, Area 88, Perfect Blue, Barefoot Gen, Tomorrow's Joe, The Wings of Honneamise, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, or Cowboy Bebop.

And also not Galaxy Express 999 either: and that one's both for children AND does the whole "emotional tearjerker" thing well (i.e. as in "not with all the subtlety and restraint of an escaped mental patient").

If you meant the latter then... wow. The Wire, Twin Peaks, Mad Men, The Shield, The Larry Sanders Show, Black Mirror, Breaking Bad, Oz, Key & Peele, Mr. Show, Westworld, Mr. Robot, Chappelle's Show, Roots, Orange is the New Black, Veep, Deadwood, The Twilight Zone, The Sopranos, and pretty much basically damn near ANY even moderately decent HBO or Netflix original series and about several lifetimes' worth of others across the past 50-someodd years, would all like to collectively have a few words with that type of claim. And Black Mirror (which is British) aside, that's all just on America's end.

Although I see no problem with One Piece being over the top with emotion because quite frankly, it's over the top on everything. That's the show.

Its a problem when its over the top to THAT ridiculous a degree, and yet still expects you to take it deathly serious (which it does in plenty of large stretches): it expects you to find relatable gravitas and heartfelt, impassioned emotions in characters and situations like a morbidly obese pirate lady eating her way across an island that is entirely made out of cake.

Now Dragon Ball has plenty of demented, insane shit in it as well: hell, it crosses over with goddamned Dr. Slump at one point (complete with Gatchan Angels, a talking genius infant baby, and of course Poo-On-a-Stick). But much like Dr. Slump in general did throughout its totality, Dragon Ball never, ever asks you to get dramatically invested in its more "gag manga" stretches. That stuff is there 100% purely for the lulz. Pilaf for example is NEVER at ANY point played up as some sort of deeply tragic figure that you're supposed to find mountains of sobering drama deep within the way that he (or a character like him) would be in One Piece.

Nor does Bacterian suddenly stop his match with Kuririn to reflect deeply on his long lost twin brother who was killed when they were kids, and the crippling depression he's felt ever since is why he stopped bathing his entire life: making tonal leaps THAT ridiculously stark for characters and concepts THAT over the top absurd... its certainly possible to do, sure, and I've seen things that do it: but it requires an insane amount of deftness, timing, and picking-your-battles in terms of which context they might best work within.

Toriyama has excellent natural instincts for that kind of stuff, and doles it out sparingly and lets the story flow there naturally. That's not Toriyama being "shallow": that's him understanding what kind of story he's telling (a kung fu fantasy for kids) and how to set things like tone and at least semi-believable human interactions. Oda meanwhile does his Ritalin-addicted-2nd-grader's-scribbling style of ridiculous character designs nonstop throughout, has them act out and behave like something out of a braindamaged knockoff of H.R. Pufnstuf for large, large stretches...

...and then expects you to just go with it, on a dime, when he suddenly out of the fucking blue decides "Oh yeah, but this stupid, silly, ridiculous monstrosity of over the top doofyness, he/she is also like, totally deeeeeep man as well!" That's not Oda "thinking things out" in any matter apart from pure plotting: quite the opposite, it demonstrates an almost downright unsettling lack of understanding how to make even basic emotional connections in his characters register with an audience who aren't toddlers with ADD.

There's a very fine line that separates "charmingly bent and whimsical" from "functionally retarded". Dragon Ball sure as shit isn't Henry Fool, but it straddles and walks that fine line with fairly deft precision. One Piece doesn't just walk over it, it jet-packs its way off into the distance at mach speed (while sobbing about friendship all the way).

And I think it says a lot about the - unbelievably warped - expectations and general sensibilities of much of modern Shonen fandom (all aged 20 and up of them) that they not only don't see or register this type of incredibly obvious and innate thing as an issue, they're often positively flummoxed when regular people (who also occasionally consume actual grown up works of media for fully developed people - in TV, film, books, whatever - from time to time in between Cartoon Network and Nicktoons marathons) look at imagery like this:



...and somehow for some mystifying reason aren't able to have its hamfisted, tone-deaf attempts at "compelling drama" land or resonate with them.

And on top of that it explores some pretty interesting angles on politics, world history, racism and government corruption that keeps me engaged in the story.

...

Ok, quick reminder - we're talking about THIS show here:



And this isn't like South Park, where the crude, doofy visuals house some pretty on-point satire and sharp social commentary: this clip right here is a pretty accurate representation of what much of the series effectively consists of. THIS is the "incredible emotional drama" that fans of this series go on and on about.

And don't misunderstand, I'm fairly sure I know which aspects of the series you're referring to here: stuff like the World Government, the Marines, and so forth and the oppressive roles that they play in the series' world, as well as the goals and aims of all the various pirate factions, and how all of them are in varying ways justifiable from their own perspectives.

But understand that simply having the mere presence of a genre fiction trope as widespread and cliche as a "corrupt military government" as an antagonist... that does not from there instantly and automatically entail "fascinating insight into political affairs". No more so than does the mere presence of an evil mega-corporation like Shinra in Final Fantasy VII innately mean that FFVII's themes of environmentalism and anti-industrialization are anything other then thuddingly rudimentary, childishly simplistic, and on-the-nose obvious ("Company bad. Pollution bad. Mother Earth good." about sums it up in a nutshell). And Final Fantasy VII is a game that I genuinely, very much really like a lot otherwise.

These things are all ELEMENTS and TROPES, ingredients if you will, that can potentially and in the proper context be used to make something with keen political insight and social consciousness. They do not however add instant depth and social gravitas to something in and of themselves, by themselves, just on the sheer virtue of their very presence. And One Piece, throughout all my time with it at least anyway, never at any point does anything that's even passingly unique, gripping, or interesting in the slightest with those ingredients. They're not so much clear "themes" or "messages" here so much as they are the pre-natal, uncooked, and untapped potential to have those things without actually having or developing them.

And once again, just to reiterate... we're ultimately talking about friggin' One Piece here. The same series that 95% of the time can't even nail down basic relatable human interaction on almost ANY level with anything at all approaching scene to scene regularity without coming across like a spastic, smothering weirdo's rough and hopelessly "off" approximation of how human beings emote and relate to one another.

And this unavoidable, crippling flaw in the series is also PRECISELY the reason why even some of its more well-intentioned aspects (like all of the various pirate groups all having well-reasoned goals and motivations driving their actions, even the villainous ones) end up falling flat on their face instead of actually landing effectively. Its downright IMPOSSIBLE to actually CARE about any of these people or their goals, when NONE of them behave, speak, or act in ways that can in any which way be grounded in relatable humanity of any kind.

Don't misunderstand me: I more than appreciate that One Piece at least has SOME genuinely deeper aspirations and attempts (clumsy and awkward as they are) at subtext: but even all the best intentions for a story in the world can't help but collapse in on themselves if the execution, if its basic ability to draw you in and make you empathize and care about characters on a baseline human level, just isn't fucking there. And in One Piece's particular case, the execution of something even as simple and basic as "make your characters at least halfway relatable as semi-believable human beings" is soooooooo not even CLOSE to being there.

And even for what IS there in terms of attempts at "political subtext" within certain story elements (inherent and baked into the dynamics of its fictional world largely); this stuff isn't exactly going give all the great works of Orwell, Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Sacco, and Richard Wright, or works like Dr. Strangelove, A Confederacy of Dunces, Wag the Dog, Network, Goodbye Uncle Tom, Schindler's List, Three Days of the Condor, Grave of the Fireflies, Maus, The Killing Fields, Apocalypse Now, To Kill a Mockingbird, 12 Angry Men, Mississippi Burning, Waltz With Bashir, Zero Dark Thirty, All The Presidents' Men, Do the Right Thing, United 93, Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front, Children of Men, Putney Swope, Persepolis, or The Great Dictator any kind of a run for their collective money on these sorts of matters. Hell, not even goddamned X-Men in that series' finer moments.

ALL of those titles of course being astounding works of political and social commentary and insight on all these topics (and plenty more) in question here which contain both BOUNDLESS more layers - if not whole universes' - worth of depth and intellect, and an ability to humanize its characters and make you deeply empathize with their innermost pain and feelings in ways that just about ANY children's work, never mind one as emotionally broken, awkward, and off its axis as One Piece, can ever hope to come within lightyears of accomplishing.

Most of OP's attempts at "political depth" is primarily a consequence of its vaunted "world building" and how all of its various factions are set against one another, in spite of their (largely) sympathetic aims: and yes, this one aspect of the series IS genuinely well thought out and meticulously mapped out in great nuance... its just that even all that effort and planning doesn't really amount to a whole lot much and comes across almost as a complete and utter waste when so much in the way of other thoroughly basic and essential storytelling matters within that world - particularly relating to characterization and their general presentation and interactions - are fumbled so spectacularly and cringingly.

It ends up being the kind of series that SOUNDS really fascinating and engrossing to explore on paper... but then you actually try to read/watch it firsthand and you cannot help but end up having the following response to it:



Look man (jjgp), I'm familiar with you enough from both our time on here as long-standing regulars: I remember that, at least back in the day, you were often a pretty sensitive guy on here who often got pretty upset at having his thoughts and opinions challenged too harshly. Based on our more recent interactions though, it seems like you've grown past that a lot.

But even still, let me just take a quick moment to nonetheless point out that contrary to how all of this probably sounds, I'm genuinely not trying to personally berate or antagonize you here or anything, and I damn sure don't get any pleasure out of opening up on anyone in particular this harshly (partly why I ardently went out of my way to avoid delving into this topic for so very, very long now until relatively recently). This isn't anything the least bit "personal" or what have you at all, and if anything I'm more tying this all into stuff I'd been talking about earlier in the thread before now about the fanbase for these types of works in much more broadly general sense.

Stuff like this just so happens to perfectly represent PRECISELY the very key issue with this fanbase that I've been trying to get at throughout both this particular thread and various other threads from relatively recently: people in these fanbases so often have immeasurably broken and brain-meltingly ridiculous barometers for what constitutes things like “depth” or “darkness” or what have you in ANY work of fiction or storytelling. And a lot of it stems precisely from a complete and utter lack of exploration of or intellectual curiosity for very much of anything outside of the realms of things like Shonen and their Western equivalents across various children's platforms.

It reminds me of when (far too depressingly many) people would claim that Captain America: The Winter Soldier was "a great political conspiracy thriller": 90% of the time the very same people making that very claim were usually people who, by their own admission, had never even seen a political thriller of any kind before in their lives. So how the fuck would you know what even constitutes a "political conspiracy thriller" at all, outside of raw cultural osmosis? Much less be able to call the very first thing you've ever seen that even VAGUELY RESEMBLES one "one of the greatest of its kind"?

These sorts of claims and comparisons end up coming across less as genuine, intellectually honest, and tangible assessments rooted in the reality if what's actually THERE and present in the material, and more as desperate pleas for high brow validation of people's silly childhood cartoons/comics, coming from a viewpoint that doesn't even much know or care about anything else that's not inherently connected to them.

No one can accurately gauge the relative merits of these things with any kind of even basic critical ability if they've barely ever experienced ANYTHING ELSE beyond the shallowest end of the kiddie pool. One simply cannot make these kinds of fall-on-the-floor laughable comparisons and assertions about material this exceedingly featherweight and silly and expect to have any normal, sane person in the real world take their views or critical gauge for this stuff even remotely seriously. This is no different than when several – fairly notable – Kanzenshuu regulars would continually insist to me back in the day that Digimon Tamers was, and I quote their exact wording here, “dark and cerebral cyberpunk”. Neuromancer, The Matrix, and Ghost in the Shell, eat your hearts out.

Or when countless One Piece fans (both on here and elsewhere) would INSIST that this scene here constituted a (and again, I'm quoting) “harrowing and dark near-rape scene” that shows how “intense” One Piece gets. Even the title of the Youtube clip of it in that link there, along with a whole bunch of the comments (with only maybe a small handful of sane dissenting voices) makes this absurd declaration about a scene that is... basically just Nami being held against a bathhouse wall for two seconds. By an invisible dude. In a scene that devolves into a dumb “anime perv” joke by the end and contains all the “tension” and “shock” of pretty much any given dumb toilet joke in early Dragon Ball.

Understand: I don't care at all if people, kids or adults, simply like a dumb, ridiculous pirate manga/anime just for what it is. I'm on a Dragon Ball forum, and have written WAY too much on it about what is effectively a dumb, ridiculous magical kung fu fairy tale manga/anime for Japanese 2nd grade boys: glass houses and stones and all that. That isn't at all the issue here.

But for all my own tl;dr pontifications on this silly-ass subject... at NO point have I or would I EVER even come within lightyears of claiming that Dragon Ball is anything more beyond exactly what it is: a dumb, ridiculous magical kung fu fairly tale for 7/8 year olds. Even relative to other Wuxia, Dragon Ball is stupidly fucking lightweight. Even within its own genre there is no END to more denser, mature, and infinitely more compelling and sophisticated titles that anyone with even so much as a fleeting interest in the genre ought to check out ASAP. Ashes of Time, Green Snake, The Legendary Weapons of China, Come Drink With Me, Dragon Gate Inn, A Touch of Zen, and on and on and on.

Even at my all time most Dragon Ball-infatuated levels of fanboydom for it, I would never, N-E-V-E-R even so much as think to place DB within the same damned universe of quality and sophistication as pretty much ANY of the above mentioned examples and countless more like them. Nor would or should almost anyone. The length and depth of my posting on here about DB should in NO WAY be confused for my being under the slightest hint of impression that its in ANY way possessing the breadth and depth of artistry that would make it worthy of inclusion alongside the great canon of definitive Wuxia works: up to and including its initial spark of inspiration, Journey to the West (which throughout its passages contains poetry and prose on the themes and ideals that characterize the genre that are as lovely and powerful as anything else you'll find in classical Chinese poetry).

Dragon Ball is a cute and fun (and imaginative) modern day tweaking on a bunch of the basic ideas from Journey to the West, coming from a silly and talented mind: it in NO WAY stands shoulder to shoulder with it. Not even head to hip or head to kneecap with it. Dragon Ball should by NO MEANS be seen as any kind of substitute for someone actually taking the time to sit down and actually read Journey to the West (or any other great classic of Wuxia literature). An endeavor which I would HIGHLY recommend that ANYONE here ought to do some time at their earliest possible convenience.

I can wax at length about Dragon Ball because I like the series loads and find a ton of cool stuff in it, as a fan of martial arts fantasy especially, that keeps me coming back to it as an adult; and like Zephyr, I may also comment from time to time on how some of the criticisms it gets in many corners are coming from a misguided or misaligned place stemming in plenty of cases from ignorance about certain things (while still TOTALLY acknowledging up front that its more than worthy and merited of ALL KINDS of criticism overall).

But when all's said and done ultimately, I also have some actual perspective about this shit too, because unlike a frighteningly large swath of the fanbase for this type of stuff (and I say that again from close to 15 solid years of experience interacting eyeball deep within it, combined with another almost 15 solid years with the generation prior for comparison/contrast) I have at least a baseline functional understanding of how deep the oceans for creative work across a MUCH broader spectrum beyond kids' action cartoons (which contrary to the assertions of much of Shonen's fanbase, amounts to a period-on-a-page speck of a dot in the grand scheme of things) ultimately goes.

And make no mistake about it: that's NOT to pat myself on the back and make out that I'm some kind of genius expert or arbiter on all things art-related (I'm damn sure not, trust me): just that the overall place that the critical spectrum that most Shonen fans' are coming from when judging this stuff is not at all fucking normal, healthy, or balanced in the slightest.

Like I was just saying before in one of my earlier posts in this thread: “moving on” from a series like Dragon Ball toward a series like One Piece is 100% a lateral move at best: you are in NO way “growing up” into “denser, more mature” work, as is the claim made by so many Shonen fans from the 2000s to now when discussing their overall anime history; or as seems to be the rough implication by jjgp's quote here (and forgive me if I'm mistaking or misreading its intent there):

Personally, I'll always prefer Dragon Ball from a sentimental standpoint but find One Piece to be a much more engaging story with stronger characterization.

Whether it be Dragon Ball or One Piece or Hunter X Hunter or Naruto or whatever, you are still very much playing in the anime/manga equivalent of a Toys 'R Us store either way. And compared to what else is out there - just within the realm of anime and manga ALONE, much less across ALL mediums in general – whatever the gulf of difference in intelligence and depth between Dragon Ball and One Piece or Full Metal Alchemist or My Hero Academia, or whatever the fuck... its nowhere at all even near the level of extremes that so many Shonen fans apparently seem to ardently believe is there between them; particularly relative to the gulf that exists between any given set of titles across virtually almost the entire Weekly Shonen Jump oeuvre and pretty much ANY OTHER given work, in anime/manga or anywhere else, made for people who's testicles have completed their decent (or whatever female equivalent you wish to put in place of that analogy).

Its no different than being a grown-ass man and saying with a straight face “Yeah, when I was a little kid I used to like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It was cute and all and I'm still a little sentimental for it... but now that I'm grown up, I've moved on and changed a lot: I'm much more into Power Rangers RPM now. WAY more sophisticated and intellectual.”

(Note, that Power Rangers example is NOT a hypothetical: this too is also taken from numerous actual, very much for-real exchanges I've had with flesh and blood human beings awhile back. Both here, and elsewhere.)

And Kunzait, I feel like you're not even bothering to explore the hodgepodge of influences that fuel Oda, etc'. and their stories because you dislike them so much, and that's not a particularly fair analysis. Is it not possible for those authors to have been influenced by the same stuff that Toriyama incorporated into his storylines, and that Dragon Ball isn't the main thing informing their storytelling?

Its both fairly evident from much of those authors' work that the overwhelming bulk of their influence comes more straight from anime and manga that they grew up on as kids rather than it does other, more eclectic outside influences. Not entirely of course, but largely.

That's not just my own personal opinion either. This has been a tangible phenomenon across various swathes of the younger set of anime and manga creators that both critics and older veterans within the industry alike have taken note of and talked extensively about: the degree to which younger manga artists (from roughly the late-90s/early-ish 2000s to now) have been continually divorcing their works from other facets of life and draw more and more stringently from mostly just other manga and anime that they liked throughout their life. Contrasted with older artists from earlier decades/generations, who drew inspiration from a whole WIDE assortment of different real life experiences and other totally different media interests (both native Japanese and foreign).

Its not something that EVERY younger manga/anime artist is universally guilty of doing 100% across the board of course: but its definitely a big and noticeable enough of an escalating trend that its become a relatively common point of discussion about the overall mediums and industries over the past decade and a half or so now.

As far as those Shonen authors taking influence from the same things as Toriyama did for Dragon Ball... uh uh. No way. There is almost NO remote hint or evidence of actual Wuxia influence across just about almost ANY of those works (One Piece especially for purposes of this particular discussion here), apart from VERY broad things that can easily be gleaned just from Dragon Ball itself, divorced from its broader context. Training, getting stronger, fast paced fighting and giant, destructive attacks... without almost ANY of the more particular folkloric or cinematic nuances that comes with those things seen in not just Dragon Ball, but across the ENTIRE martial arts fantasy genre. Even much of the world building and emphasis on irreverent whimsy throughout these other various series registers as if much of it all is blatantly drawing from what Toriyama did in Dragon Ball as opposed to anything else.

Kishimoto definitely did his homework on ninja fantasy at the very least: that much I can most certainly say, as Naruto is if nothing else positively loaded to the gills with references to classic ninja fiction, both high brow (Shinobi no Mono, Jiraiya Goketsu Monogatari, etc) and schlocky (Shōnen Ninja Kaze no Fujimaru and so forth): but its also just as covered wall to wall in Dragon Ball copycatting as anything else of its ilk, from various character relationships, to virtually almost everything about Naruto's personality and design, etc. And hell, most of Naruto's ninja fantasy influences are things I find infinitely more worthy to recommend to almost anyone with an interest in cool ninja stuff well above and past that of Naruto itself. Like I said earlier, throw a rock (blindfolded even) and you'll likely hit something ninja-related in anime or manga that makes Naruto look laughably sad in comparison.

But for the overwhelming majority of a lot of these latter Shonen works: beyond Dragon Ball, they very often times simply have as creative/artistic influences other manga or anime that the author was fond of as a kid or what have you, as opposed to other eclectic and varied things drawn from real life experience or other, non-manga/anime media works. Again, I'm not saying this is absolutely 100% iron clad across the board throughout all current mangaka and animators by any means: but its enough of a general, escalating trend across manga and anime for the past 20 years or so now, that even most experts and veterans within the industry (everyone from Leiji Matsumoto to Mamoru Oshii to Satoshi Kon before his death and even Hayao Miyazaki) will freely admit and discuss it, as well as the detrimental effects that this sort of thing has had on a purely creative level.

And I personally DEFINITELY think that this shows abundantly clearly through when comparing even just Shonen manga of earlier decades (Toriyama included) - where most illustrators' style was clearly drawn from still life and classical art to a fairly heavy degree - to those from the past 20 years or so now - where so many illustrators' style is clearly drawn mostly from other manga artists or cartoonists in general and very little, if at all, from still life or traditional artistic discipline.

It also just seems like you're not familiar with One Piece or Naruto beyond a surface level.

Like I said before: I've done WAY too much time on both these (and several other) series, albeit from quite a ways back (mid/late-ish 2000s), at the relative heights of their respective popularity: it isn't that I'm not familiar, I just genuinely think that they're absurdly terrible in and of themselves and that their fanbases oftentimes appear to be projecting layers upon layers more emotional depth and gravitas onto them than is actually present within them in no small part due to their being horrendously inexperienced with and ignorant of non-Shonen or most things outside of general children's works (certainly that's been my experience within Shonen fandom of the past roughly 15 years anyway). And I try my absolute best to actually back up why I think this is so.

[jjgp1112]

snip

I'm not going to get into the speficis about One Piece because I feel like it'll just amount to a bunch of "nuh uh," but don't misunderstand my intent - I view One Piece and Dragon Ball in the same tier, I just think One Piece strives for more and then succeeds in that aspect. Like I said, I don't care for anime as a whole, or at least modern "shonen" stories with its wimpy protagonists (probably why I gave One Piece a shot when one of its first scenes is Luffy punching a whiny, wimpy kid in the face and telling him hates people like him, lol) and cliche gags masquerading as comedy. I don't think One Piece is some sort of upgrade over Dragon Ball, merely a manga I got into at the very tail end of my years of actually caring about those type of shows that I actually stopped keeping up with as a teenager and only really dove into it a couple of years back.

I prefer Dragon Ball from a "sentimental" standpoint because I saw it first and it had more impact on me, not because its a categorically inferior show to One Piece but happens to hold more nostalgia value.

[Jackalope89]

Haven't touched Naruto since I finished the manga a few years back (manga ended WAY before the anime did; anime pulled a Dragon Ball/DBZ kind of thing), and I still read One Piece.

I fully gave up on the anime of both a LONG time ago. Way too long for One Piece, and way too much filler for Naruto. Now Naruto has a sequel series in Boruto. Other than it being about the next generation of ninjas, and Sasuke and Sakura SOMEHOW ending up together (despite some fan theories to the contrary still floating out there) and having a daughter. Of course the main character is Naruto's physical clone, er, son, Boruto.

Beyond that, I don't know anything about the sequel series. One Piece I read for the adventure and world building. It still has some nice twists and turns.

But I stopped following Naruto after the manga; it had the most toxic fanbase at the time. Even worse than the toxic part of the Dragon Ball fandom. They ruined it for me.

But Dragon Ball is my favorite, and it was there long before either.

[ABED]

Not being familiar with the Naruto fandom, how were they toxic?

[sintzu]

Haven't touched Naruto since I finished the manga a few years back. I fully gave up on the anime, way too much filler.

Now Naruto has a sequel series in Boruto. Other than it being about the next generation of ninjas, I don't know anything about the sequel series.

Although Naruto's filler is just as much as One Piece's, you can skip it as it isn't connected to the main story while One Piece adapts a chapter of manga (a lot of times less) in each episode while the rest is filler so you're forced to watch it.

You're not missing anything as we're 60 episodes in and they've yet to do anything worth the viewers time apart from Sarada's 5 episode mini arc. Even the movie they're retelling is reusing footage from it. There's been no main stories or anything like that, just everyone wasting time and going on filler type missions.

[ABED]

DB was long in the tooth by the end, but at least it didn't have some end goal it was heading towards. From what I know about One Piece, it does have an end goal, so I have a hard time believing it isn't constantly treading water.

“Yeah, when I was a little kid I used to like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It was cute and all and I'm still a little sentimental for it... but now that I'm grown up, I've moved on and changed a lot: I'm much more into Power Rangers RPM now. WAY more sophisticated and intellectual.”

Wow, just wow. I enjoy PR for what it is and while RPM is a little more mature, it's still very cheesy and clearly for children. It's ridiculous when I hear people refer to any PR season as "dark". It's fine to like something for what it is, but call a spade a spade and I would hope that as anyone grows up, they try more mature stories.

[sintzu]

DB was long in the tooth by the end, but at least it didn't have some end goal it was heading towards. From what I know about One Piece, it does have an end goal, so I have a hard time believing it isn't constantly treading water.

DB not having an end goal allowed Toriyama to put everything he had into each arc and try new things as he didn't have to worry about setting things up or lining things up with something that wouldn't happen till years later. Not saying that one form of story telling is better than the other, just that Toriyama's way of doing it also had its benifits, despite what some say.

[ABED]

DB was long in the tooth by the end, but at least it didn't have some end goal it was heading towards. From what I know about One Piece, it does have an end goal, so I have a hard time believing it isn't constantly treading water.

DB not having an end goal allowed Toriyama to put everything he had into each arc and try new things as he didn't have to worry about setting things up or lining things up with something that wouldn't happen till years later. Not saying that one form of story telling is better than the other, just that Toriyama's way of doing it also had its benifits, despite what some say.

Exactly. Goku has a vague goal of being as powerful as he can get. THere are specific intermediate goals, like winning the Tenkaichi Budokai, getting revenge for Kuririn's death, etc. but there's no endgame. As you said, that's not better or worse than a story where there is a very concrete overarching goal.

[Kokonoe]

I don't think One Piece existing is why people criticize Dragon Ball it's more or less people are actually happy with One Piece because it does something Dragon Ball failed to do, make many characters relevant in their own ways.

[ABED]

That feels inherently easier to pull off if the powerscaling isn't universe threatening level.

[Kokonoe]

That feels inherently easier to pull off if the powerscaling isn't universe threatening level.

I think that in itself is a flaw of the series as well. You can only go one way with that unless you get clever or stop applying logic (Dragon Ball Super).

They could've done more with characters having special traits or abilities, however.

[ABED]

I don't think it's inherently a flaw. It's a different style of storytelling. One Piece, as best I understand it, is a pirate adventure and you can't captain a ship like that all on your own. The set up lends itself to giving other characters something important to do. DB is the story of one man's quest to be the best. It's apples and oranges.

[DragonBallKing]

From what I've seen a lot of OP and naruto fans criticize Dragon Ball for having a woman voice its male lead in the Japanese version, how ironic is that?

[8000 Saiyan]

Because Dragon Ball isn't a show with a lot of depth, so that automatically means it's bad. These criticisms remind me of someone who criticizes the new Justice League show that's airing on Cartoon Network for not being like the old Justice League cartoons because they had depth while the new show doesn't have. But then again, this guy feels cheated when a show isn't being deep or meaningful.

Anyway, I did like some material from One Piece before giving up on it because the show was going on way too long, but Kunzait is right on the money when it comes to the show. I like dramatic shows if they're done well, but One Piece takes the cake when it comes to going overboard with the dramatic moments. Seriously, is there an arc that doesn't have a character with a tearjerker story?

Oda's kind of like the Stanley Kramer of anime and manga or something.

[Whatever]

Gohan was also mighty set off by Dodoria slaughtering Dende's whole village (including his father and brother). He also didn't know Yamucha, Tenshinhan, and Chaozu from a hole in the wall during the fight against Nappa and the Saibaimen, and was shown to be pretty markedly upset and traumatized by witnessing their respective deaths (to the point where it causes him to completely freeze up in terror and not pitch into Piccolo and Kuririn's team attack).

Gohan's pretty much always consistently been shown as someone who is, to one degree or another, deeply upset by witnessing ANY kind of death or hard violence, no matter if its visited on a friend or a complete stranger. #16's death setting him off makes total and complete sense in this regard: all the more so (and Zephyr I don't think even touched on this part) because #16 had just finished delivering a rousing speech on comparing his own pacifism to Gohan's (and why Gohan has to sometimes get beyond it when things get really bad, as 16 also does) in a manner that Gohan could broadly connect with and relate to.

It seemed pretty obvious that despite his not knowing #16 hardly at all beforehand, he was greatly impacted by what 16 was saying to him in that moment... and THAT'S the exact, precise insant where Cell violently rips 16 from the world right before Gohan's very eyes.

Cue him going berserk and cutting loose.

Yeah but in Yamcha's,Tienshinhan's and Chiaotzu's case,it was him more being terrified because the sight of dead bodies was still a new thing to him.on top of breaking his confidence because he found it beforehand reassuring that they had so many alies.

In the Namekian onslaught,he got set off by the action but he never got raging mad like he did on Piccolo's death and the time Krillin was assumed to have been killed by 2nd form Freeza.Just like he has been consistently shown to be deeply upset by any kind of death,he also has been consistently shown to get raging mad and get a rage power boost only when someone close to him is threatened or killed.

While Gohan's (newfound) pacifism is something that Gohan has in common with 16 and 16's words carry a lot of weight,there is still not enough of a link bewteen then to get over the edge.He knew Dende for much longer than 16 and he saw him die before his eyes as well back on Namek,yet he never had that kind of reaction(in comparison).

That feels inherently easier to pull off if the powerscaling isn't universe threatening level.

I mean its not that its actually hard to bring the others to Goku's level in order to be usefull in a sensible way.
Take the concept of God ki for example,that was the perfect chance to give others a power boost and even the playing field,not only is it for every race but you can make up all sorts of transformations about it.
Heck Toriyama had no problem before with making the humans have a bigger power boost than Goku when they trained with Kami for 1/3rd of his time or currently with 17's and Freeza's 'training' case.

What actually is the case of unwillingness to use the cast.
Divine Water,Old kai's ritual,Kaioken,God ki(even the concept of transformations itself)are all generic power boosts and no race specific,yet Toriyama has given even those power boosts only to Saiyans.

[Ripper 30]

There is a big difference getting beaten and seeing someone killed yes but there is no reason for Gohan being set off by a person he never know,it had happened before both on the Saiyan and Namek sagas,good people were killed left and right but only Piccolo's and Krillin's death(or at the least when he thought 2nd form Freeza killed him) set Gohan off.

Gohan was also mighty set off by Dodoria slaughtering Dende's whole village (including his father and brother). He also didn't know Yamucha, Tenshinhan, and Chaozu from a hole in the wall during the fight against Nappa and the Saibaimen, and was shown to be pretty markedly upset and traumatized by witnessing their respective deaths (to the point where it causes him to completely freeze up in terror and not pitch into Piccolo and Kuririn's team attack).

Gohan's pretty much always consistently been shown as someone who is, to one degree or another, deeply upset by witnessing ANY kind of death or hard violence, no matter if its visited on a friend or a complete stranger. #16's death setting him off makes total and complete sense in this regard: all the more so (and Zephyr I don't think even touched on this part) because #16 had just finished delivering a rousing speech on comparing his own pacifism to Gohan's (and why Gohan has to sometimes get beyond it when things get really bad, as 16 also does) in a manner that Gohan could broadly connect with and relate to.

It seemed pretty obvious that despite his not knowing #16 hardly at all beforehand, he was greatly impacted by what 16 was saying to him in that moment... and THAT'S the exact, precise insant where Cell violently rips 16 from the world right before Gohan's very eyes.

Cue him going berserk and cutting loose.

One Piece lays the sap on a little thick at times, moreso in the beginning when they were establishing the characters and the crew,

One Piece lays the sap on overwhelmingly thick a-l-w-a-y-s. It lays it on thick almost anytime a character's mouth is open and words are coming out. Virtually EVERY other emotional beat consists of the following:



And many of its others generally thus:


”Smiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiile darn ya smiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiile!!!

Beyond my initial attempted marathons through the series back in the day (in which I'd gotten somewhere around maybe Reverse Mountain before I finally had to tap the fuck out and spare what little remained of my sanity), I've also been exposed to more than my fair share of later material over the years (thanks in no small part to my continued dealings with this place): it NEVER changes or “matures” emotionally. Every time I've EVER seen ANY of it, its always the same bipolar, emotionally manic, spastic blob of borderline personality disorder that its ALWAYS been from day one.

When it comes to sap, One Piece has no off switch and the dial is always permanently stuck on 11. Not an over-exaggeration by any stretch. I don't like to make this shit personal when it comes to just random creators I don't know who's work I just happen to not like... but going solely off his unbelievably crude and seemingly broken understanding of basic human emotional interactions continually displayed throughout his magnum opus here, the sheer amount of hugs that Oda apparently must've never received from his father growing up, the utter lack of childhood friends of any kind and the stunted development of social skills that go with it, and the amount of anti-depressants that he has to consume on a daily basis are things that I don't even want to fathom.

(Let me stress, I know virtually NOTHING about this dude's personal life and personality apart from his hero-worship of Toriyama, nor do I purport to genuinely make these sorts of assumptions about the man for real. I'm purely sketching out an overall, and obviously somewhat tongue-in-cheek, mental impression derived from the sole source I have to go off of: his work here.)

but I feel there's a lot more effort put into the characterization and fleshing out characters' motivations, allowing a lot of stuff that happens to feel more meaningful and personal.

Like I spent my past few posts in this thread blathering on about in agonizing detail: gigantic, maudlin speeches where a character spells out in glow in the dark magic markers exactly what it is they're feeling on the nose about their entire life history does not entail "characterization". You can present a character who spouts off for pages and pages at a time about every detail of what specifically it is that they feel about some fight they had with their childhood best friend 20 years ago or whatever, while still ending up with a character who is utterly boring, flat, cliched, unrelatable, and one dimensional. Meanwhile you can present a character who says NOTHING, who utters not a single blessed syllable of a word for the ENTIRE duration of the story beginning to end... and end up with a character who is multi-faceted, layered, dense, complicated, and engaging as all hell.

Outpourings of overwrought "feels" from a character is NOT synonymous with characterization: without anything of substance in the narrative or endemic to the character, without any sense of dynamism or subtlety in ANY realm of the work whatsoever, these kinds of flowery, sobbing speeches are effectively little different from a Live Journal rant from a 13 year old girl in 2004 about her first breakup. This is what constitutes "characterization" from any NUMBER of junior high school-aged would-be writers on FanFiction.net.

There isn't ANYTHING "meaningful" or "personal" about a badly-drawn (not a fan of Oda's art obviously), rubber-faced, obnoxiously over the top villain with a ridiculous cartoon personality suddenly breaking down into tears about how his friends abandoned him as a kid, or his puppy got shot, or how he's really caring and loyal to his crew, or how she really loves her mom deep down, or whatever else have you: nor is it anymore "deeply personal and meaningful" when they launch into a random, meandering speech about their beliefs in "fate" and how "there is no good or evil in this world", or whatever other thuddingly over-used, post-Nomura Final Fantasy-esque, Intro to Philosophy-level faux-profundity that about umpteen gazillions of Japanese Shonen and JRPG material are so fond of lazily leaning on like a crutch.

Again: show, don't tell. Having the character just constantly talk at me non-stop about how I'm supposed to "feel" for them via endless sob stories about their lives is NOT going to make me feel jack shit if there's nothing inherently and in the moment throughout the story about how they act, what they do, what they say, or even how they LOOK that instills the slightest bit of care in me.

This same basic concept is why most garden-variety Emo songs from the mid-2000s from bands like Dashboard Confessional and My Chemical Romance and whatnot are anything but "personal", "vulnerable", and "deep" but instead just tedious, tiresome, and trite (did not mean to make that last part so ridiculously alliterative, that's just how it worked out).

One Piece's (and really most post-DB "Battle Shonen") version of "characterization" is really no different whatsoever in principal: it has all the "personal depth" of an All American Rejects ballad, and reads like its speaking to the emotional maturity of a 3rd grader (because it is).

For all of Dragon Ball's own faults, it in no way now or ever even so much as pretends to be striving for something that's clearly THIS far out from its intellectual or emotional range. Its never anything more or less than just a martial arts epic about warrior rivalries and feuding high fantasy gods (and a touch of family thrown in from time to time as well) that distills this type of material for Japanese 7 year olds without in any way feeling like its "talking down" to them or in a way that's alienating to older readers/viewers: it doesn't ever try to carry itself like its characters are housing The Grapes of Wrath-levels of dimensionality like One Piece and its post-DB Shonen brethren ridiculously and laughably try to. Dragon Ball stays within its lane and excels there.

I'm not even into most anime aside from YYH, DBZ, and One Piece, anyway.

...

There's am absolutely insane level of attention to detail that you don't even get from more "mature" shows either.

Wait a sec...

I'm not even into most anime aside from YYH, DBZ, and One Piece, anyway.

There's am absolutely insane level of attention to detail that you don't even get from more "mature" shows either.

Do you mean "more mature shows" as in other manga and anime? Or just other TV shows in general?

If the former, then you basically just contradicted yourself ("I don't watch other anime other than these three Shonen shows here, but I can definitely say that OP has more depth than all those other so-called 'mature' anime"), and having both seen and read more than my good share of One Piece (more than 60+ someodd episodes of the anime, and almost a dozen or so volumes of the manga: and that's not even counting all the many, many times I've dropped in and out of seeing a bunch of its later stretches of material) as well as far more anime and manga in general than I'd care to admit over the course of roughly almost 30 years now...

..I can more than safely say that odds are significantly high that One Piece has probably got absolutely nothing within its hundreds of manga volumes and episodes that's any real serious "threat" towards stuff like Shamo, Lone Wolf and Cub, Akira, Kemonozume, Homunculus, Jiraishin, Rokudenashi Blues, Ultra Heaven, Area 88, Perfect Blue, Barefoot Gen, Tomorrow's Joe, The Wings of Honneamise, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, or Cowboy Bebop.

And also not Galaxy Express 999 either: and that one's both for children AND does the whole "emotional tearjerker" thing well (i.e. as in "not with all the subtlety and restraint of an escaped mental patient").

If you meant the latter then... wow. The Wire, Twin Peaks, Mad Men, The Shield, The Larry Sanders Show, Black Mirror, Breaking Bad, Oz, Key & Peele, Mr. Show, Westworld, Mr. Robot, Chappelle's Show, Roots, Orange is the New Black, Veep, Deadwood, The Twilight Zone, The Sopranos, and pretty much basically damn near ANY even moderately decent HBO or Netflix original series and about several lifetimes' worth of others across the past 50-someodd years, would all like to collectively have a few words with that type of claim. And Black Mirror (which is British) aside, that's all just on America's end.

Although I see no problem with One Piece being over the top with emotion because quite frankly, it's over the top on everything. That's the show.

Its a problem when its over the top to THAT ridiculous a degree, and yet still expects you to take it deathly serious (which it does in plenty of large stretches): it expects you to find relatable gravitas and heartfelt, impassioned emotions in characters and situations like a morbidly obese pirate lady eating her way across an island that is entirely made out of cake.

Now Dragon Ball has plenty of demented, insane shit in it as well: hell, it crosses over with goddamned Dr. Slump at one point (complete with Gatchan Angels, a talking genius infant baby, and of course Poo-On-a-Stick). But much like Dr. Slump in general did throughout its totality, Dragon Ball never, ever asks you to get dramatically invested in its more "gag manga" stretches. That stuff is there 100% purely for the lulz. Pilaf for example is NEVER at ANY point played up as some sort of deeply tragic figure that you're supposed to find mountains of sobering drama deep within the way that he (or a character like him) would be in One Piece.

Nor does Bacterian suddenly stop his match with Kuririn to reflect deeply on his long lost twin brother who was killed when they were kids, and the crippling depression he's felt ever since is why he stopped bathing his entire life: making tonal leaps THAT ridiculously stark for characters and concepts THAT over the top absurd... its certainly possible to do, sure, and I've seen things that do it: but it requires an insane amount of deftness, timing, and picking-your-battles in terms of which context they might best work within.

Toriyama has excellent natural instincts for that kind of stuff, and doles it out sparingly and lets the story flow there naturally. That's not Toriyama being "shallow": that's him understanding what kind of story he's telling (a kung fu fantasy for kids) and how to set things like tone and at least semi-believable human interactions. Oda meanwhile does his Ritalin-addicted-2nd-grader's-scribbling style of ridiculous character designs nonstop throughout, has them act out and behave like something out of a braindamaged knockoff of H.R. Pufnstuf for large, large stretches...

...and then expects you to just go with it, on a dime, when he suddenly out of the fucking blue decides "Oh yeah, but this stupid, silly, ridiculous monstrosity of over the top doofyness, he/she is also like, totally deeeeeep man as well!" That's not Oda "thinking things out" in any matter apart from pure plotting: quite the opposite, it demonstrates an almost downright unsettling lack of understanding how to make even basic emotional connections in his characters register with an audience who aren't toddlers with ADD.

There's a very fine line that separates "charmingly bent and whimsical" from "functionally retarded". Dragon Ball sure as shit isn't Henry Fool, but it straddles and walks that fine line with fairly deft precision. One Piece doesn't just walk over it, it jet-packs its way off into the distance at mach speed (while sobbing about friendship all the way).

And I think it says a lot about the - unbelievably warped - expectations and general sensibilities of much of modern Shonen fandom (all aged 20 and up of them) that they not only don't see or register this type of incredibly obvious and innate thing as an issue, they're often positively flummoxed when regular people (who also occasionally consume actual grown up works of media for fully developed people - in TV, film, books, whatever - from time to time in between Cartoon Network and Nicktoons marathons) look at imagery like this:



...and somehow for some mystifying reason aren't able to have its hamfisted, tone-deaf attempts at "compelling drama" land or resonate with them.

And on top of that it explores some pretty interesting angles on politics, world history, racism and government corruption that keeps me engaged in the story.

...

Ok, quick reminder - we're talking about THIS show here:



And this isn't like South Park, where the crude, doofy visuals house some pretty on-point satire and sharp social commentary: this clip right here is a pretty accurate representation of what much of the series effectively consists of. THIS is the "incredible emotional drama" that fans of this series go on and on about.

And don't misunderstand, I'm fairly sure I know which aspects of the series you're referring to here: stuff like the World Government, the Marines, and so forth and the oppressive roles that they play in the series' world, as well as the goals and aims of all the various pirate factions, and how all of them are in varying ways justifiable from their own perspectives.

But understand that simply having the mere presence of a genre fiction trope as widespread and cliche as a "corrupt military government" as an antagonist... that does not from there instantly and automatically entail "fascinating insight into political affairs". No more so than does the mere presence of an evil mega-corporation like Shinra in Final Fantasy VII innately mean that FFVII's themes of environmentalism and anti-industrialization are anything other then thuddingly rudimentary, childishly simplistic, and on-the-nose obvious ("Company bad. Pollution bad. Mother Earth good." about sums it up in a nutshell). And Final Fantasy VII is a game that I genuinely, very much really like a lot otherwise.

These things are all ELEMENTS and TROPES, ingredients if you will, that can potentially and in the proper context be used to make something with keen political insight and social consciousness. They do not however add instant depth and social gravitas to something in and of themselves, by themselves, just on the sheer virtue of their very presence. And One Piece, throughout all my time with it at least anyway, never at any point does anything that's even passingly unique, gripping, or interesting in the slightest with those ingredients. They're not so much clear "themes" or "messages" here so much as they are the pre-natal, uncooked, and untapped potential to have those things without actually having or developing them.

And once again, just to reiterate... we're ultimately talking about friggin' One Piece here. The same series that 95% of the time can't even nail down basic relatable human interaction on almost ANY level with anything at all approaching scene to scene regularity without coming across like a spastic, smothering weirdo's rough and hopelessly "off" approximation of how human beings emote and relate to one another.

And this unavoidable, crippling flaw in the series is also PRECISELY the reason why even some of its more well-intentioned aspects (like all of the various pirate groups all having well-reasoned goals and motivations driving their actions, even the villainous ones) end up falling flat on their face instead of actually landing effectively. Its downright IMPOSSIBLE to actually CARE about any of these people or their goals, when NONE of them behave, speak, or act in ways that can in any which way be grounded in relatable humanity of any kind.

Don't misunderstand me: I more than appreciate that One Piece at least has SOME genuinely deeper aspirations and attempts (clumsy and awkward as they are) at subtext: but even all the best intentions for a story in the world can't help but collapse in on themselves if the execution, if its basic ability to draw you in and make you empathize and care about characters on a baseline human level, just isn't fucking there. And in One Piece's particular case, the execution of something even as simple and basic as "make your characters at least halfway relatable as semi-believable human beings" is soooooooo not even CLOSE to being there.

And even for what IS there in terms of attempts at "political subtext" within certain story elements (inherent and baked into the dynamics of its fictional world largely); this stuff isn't exactly going give all the great works of Orwell, Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Sacco, and Richard Wright, or works like Dr. Strangelove, A Confederacy of Dunces, Wag the Dog, Network, Goodbye Uncle Tom, Schindler's List, Three Days of the Condor, Grave of the Fireflies, Maus, The Killing Fields, Apocalypse Now, To Kill a Mockingbird, 12 Angry Men, Mississippi Burning, Waltz With Bashir, Zero Dark Thirty, All The Presidents' Men, Do the Right Thing, United 93, Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front, Children of Men, Putney Swope, Persepolis, or The Great Dictator any kind of a run for their collective money on these sorts of matters. Hell, not even goddamned X-Men in that series' finer moments.

ALL of those titles of course being astounding works of political and social commentary and insight on all these topics (and plenty more) in question here which contain both BOUNDLESS more layers - if not whole universes' - worth of depth and intellect, and an ability to humanize its characters and make you deeply empathize with their innermost pain and feelings in ways that just about ANY children's work, never mind one as emotionally broken, awkward, and off its axis as One Piece, can ever hope to come within lightyears of accomplishing.

Most of OP's attempts at "political depth" is primarily a consequence of its vaunted "world building" and how all of its various factions are set against one another, in spite of their (largely) sympathetic aims: and yes, this one aspect of the series IS genuinely well thought out and meticulously mapped out in great nuance... its just that even all that effort and planning doesn't really amount to a whole lot much and comes across almost as a complete and utter waste when so much in the way of other thoroughly basic and essential storytelling matters within that world - particularly relating to characterization and their general presentation and interactions - are fumbled so spectacularly and cringingly.

It ends up being the kind of series that SOUNDS really fascinating and engrossing to explore on paper... but then you actually try to read/watch it firsthand and you cannot help but end up having the following response to it:



Look man (jjgp), I'm familiar with you enough from both our time on here as long-standing regulars: I remember that, at least back in the day, you were often a pretty sensitive guy on here who often got pretty upset at having his thoughts and opinions challenged too harshly. Based on our more recent interactions though, it seems like you've grown past that a lot.

But even still, let me just take a quick moment to nonetheless point out that contrary to how all of this probably sounds, I'm genuinely not trying to personally berate or antagonize you here or anything, and I damn sure don't get any pleasure out of opening up on anyone in particular this harshly (partly why I ardently went out of my way to avoid delving into this topic for so very, very long now until relatively recently). This isn't anything the least bit "personal" or what have you at all, and if anything I'm more tying this all into stuff I'd been talking about earlier in the thread before now about the fanbase for these types of works in much more broadly general sense.

Stuff like this just so happens to perfectly represent PRECISELY the very key issue with this fanbase that I've been trying to get at throughout both this particular thread and various other threads from relatively recently: people in these fanbases so often have immeasurably broken and brain-meltingly ridiculous barometers for what constitutes things like “depth” or “darkness” or what have you in ANY work of fiction or storytelling. And a lot of it stems precisely from a complete and utter lack of exploration of or intellectual curiosity for very much of anything outside of the realms of things like Shonen and their Western equivalents across various children's platforms.

It reminds me of when (far too depressingly many) people would claim that Captain America: The Winter Soldier was "a great political conspiracy thriller": 90% of the time the very same people making that very claim were usually people who, by their own admission, had never even seen a political thriller of any kind before in their lives. So how the fuck would you know what even constitutes a "political conspiracy thriller" at all, outside of raw cultural osmosis? Much less be able to call the very first thing you've ever seen that even VAGUELY RESEMBLES one "one of the greatest of its kind"?

These sorts of claims and comparisons end up coming across less as genuine, intellectually honest, and tangible assessments rooted in the reality if what's actually THERE and present in the material, and more as desperate pleas for high brow validation of people's silly childhood cartoons/comics, coming from a viewpoint that doesn't even much know or care about anything else that's not inherently connected to them.

No one can accurately gauge the relative merits of these things with any kind of even basic critical ability if they've barely ever experienced ANYTHING ELSE beyond the shallowest end of the kiddie pool. One simply cannot make these kinds of fall-on-the-floor laughable comparisons and assertions about material this exceedingly featherweight and silly and expect to have any normal, sane person in the real world take their views or critical gauge for this stuff even remotely seriously. This is no different than when several – fairly notable – Kanzenshuu regulars would continually insist to me back in the day that Digimon Tamers was, and I quote their exact wording here, “dark and cerebral cyberpunk”. Neuromancer, The Matrix, and Ghost in the Shell, eat your hearts out.

Or when countless One Piece fans (both on here and elsewhere) would INSIST that this scene here constituted a (and again, I'm quoting) “harrowing and dark near-rape scene” that shows how “intense” One Piece gets. Even the title of the Youtube clip of it in that link there, along with a whole bunch of the comments (with only maybe a small handful of sane dissenting voices) makes this absurd declaration about a scene that is... basically just Nami being held against a bathhouse wall for two seconds. By an invisible dude. In a scene that devolves into a dumb “anime perv” joke by the end and contains all the “tension” and “shock” of pretty much any given dumb toilet joke in early Dragon Ball.

Understand: I don't care at all if people, kids or adults, simply like a dumb, ridiculous pirate manga/anime just for what it is. I'm on a Dragon Ball forum, and have written WAY too much on it about what is effectively a dumb, ridiculous magical kung fu fairy tale manga/anime for Japanese 2nd grade boys: glass houses and stones and all that. That isn't at all the issue here.

But for all my own tl;dr pontifications on this silly-ass subject... at NO point have I or would I EVER even come within lightyears of claiming that Dragon Ball is anything more beyond exactly what it is: a dumb, ridiculous magical kung fu fairly tale for 7/8 year olds. Even relative to other Wuxia, Dragon Ball is stupidly fucking lightweight. Even within its own genre there is no END to more denser, mature, and infinitely more compelling and sophisticated titles that anyone with even so much as a fleeting interest in the genre ought to check out ASAP. Ashes of Time, Green Snake, The Legendary Weapons of China, Come Drink With Me, Dragon Gate Inn, A Touch of Zen, and on and on and on.

Even at my all time most Dragon Ball-infatuated levels of fanboydom for it, I would never, N-E-V-E-R even so much as think to place DB within the same damned universe of quality and sophistication as pretty much ANY of the above mentioned examples and countless more like them. Nor would or should almost anyone. The length and depth of my posting on here about DB should in NO WAY be confused for my being under the slightest hint of impression that its in ANY way possessing the breadth and depth of artistry that would make it worthy of inclusion alongside the great canon of definitive Wuxia works: up to and including its initial spark of inspiration, Journey to the West (which throughout its passages contains poetry and prose on the themes and ideals that characterize the genre that are as lovely and powerful as anything else you'll find in classical Chinese poetry).

Dragon Ball is a cute and fun (and imaginative) modern day tweaking on a bunch of the basic ideas from Journey to the West, coming from a silly and talented mind: it in NO WAY stands shoulder to shoulder with it. Not even head to hip or head to kneecap with it. Dragon Ball should by NO MEANS be seen as any kind of substitute for someone actually taking the time to sit down and actually read Journey to the West (or any other great classic of Wuxia literature). An endeavor which I would HIGHLY recommend that ANYONE here ought to do some time at their earliest possible convenience.

I can wax at length about Dragon Ball because I like the series loads and find a ton of cool stuff in it, as a fan of martial arts fantasy especially, that keeps me coming back to it as an adult; and like Zephyr, I may also comment from time to time on how some of the criticisms it gets in many corners are coming from a misguided or misaligned place stemming in plenty of cases from ignorance about certain things (while still TOTALLY acknowledging up front that its more than worthy and merited of ALL KINDS of criticism overall).

But when all's said and done ultimately, I also have some actual perspective about this shit too, because unlike a frighteningly large swath of the fanbase for this type of stuff (and I say that again from close to 15 solid years of experience interacting eyeball deep within it, combined with another almost 15 solid years with the generation prior for comparison/contrast) I have at least a baseline functional understanding of how deep the oceans for creative work across a MUCH broader spectrum beyond kids' action cartoons (which contrary to the assertions of much of Shonen's fanbase, amounts to a period-on-a-page speck of a dot in the grand scheme of things) ultimately goes.

And make no mistake about it: that's NOT to pat myself on the back and make out that I'm some kind of genius expert or arbiter on all things art-related (I'm damn sure not, trust me): just that the overall place that the critical spectrum that most Shonen fans' are coming from when judging this stuff is not at all fucking normal, healthy, or balanced in the slightest.

Like I was just saying before in one of my earlier posts in this thread: “moving on” from a series like Dragon Ball toward a series like One Piece is 100% a lateral move at best: you are in NO way “growing up” into “denser, more mature” work, as is the claim made by so many Shonen fans from the 2000s to now when discussing their overall anime history; or as seems to be the rough implication by jjgp's quote here (and forgive me if I'm mistaking or misreading its intent there):

Personally, I'll always prefer Dragon Ball from a sentimental standpoint but find One Piece to be a much more engaging story with stronger characterization.

Whether it be Dragon Ball or One Piece or Hunter X Hunter or Naruto or whatever, you are still very much playing in the anime/manga equivalent of a Toys 'R Us store either way. And compared to what else is out there - just within the realm of anime and manga ALONE, much less across ALL mediums in general – whatever the gulf of difference in intelligence and depth between Dragon Ball and One Piece or Full Metal Alchemist or My Hero Academia, or whatever the fuck... its nowhere at all even near the level of extremes that so many Shonen fans apparently seem to ardently believe is there between them; particularly relative to the gulf that exists between any given set of titles across virtually almost the entire Weekly Shonen Jump oeuvre and pretty much ANY OTHER given work, in anime/manga or anywhere else, made for people who's testicles have completed their decent (or whatever female equivalent you wish to put in place of that analogy).

Its no different than being a grown-ass man and saying with a straight face “Yeah, when I was a little kid I used to like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It was cute and all and I'm still a little sentimental for it... but now that I'm grown up, I've moved on and changed a lot: I'm much more into Power Rangers RPM now. WAY more sophisticated and intellectual.”

(Note, that Power Rangers example is NOT a hypothetical: this too is also taken from numerous actual, very much for-real exchanges I've had with flesh and blood human beings awhile back. Both here, and elsewhere.)

And Kunzait, I feel like you're not even bothering to explore the hodgepodge of influences that fuel Oda, etc'. and their stories because you dislike them so much, and that's not a particularly fair analysis. Is it not possible for those authors to have been influenced by the same stuff that Toriyama incorporated into his storylines, and that Dragon Ball isn't the main thing informing their storytelling?

Its both fairly evident from much of those authors' work that the overwhelming bulk of their influence comes more straight from anime and manga that they grew up on as kids rather than it does other, more eclectic outside influences. Not entirely of course, but largely.

That's not just my own personal opinion either. This has been a tangible phenomenon across various swathes of the younger set of anime and manga creators that both critics and older veterans within the industry alike have taken note of and talked extensively about: the degree to which younger manga artists (from roughly the late-90s/early-ish 2000s to now) have been continually divorcing their works from other facets of life and draw more and more stringently from mostly just other manga and anime that they liked throughout their life. Contrasted with older artists from earlier decades/generations, who drew inspiration from a whole WIDE assortment of different real life experiences and other totally different media interests (both native Japanese and foreign).

Its not something that EVERY younger manga/anime artist is universally guilty of doing 100% across the board of course: but its definitely a big and noticeable enough of an escalating trend that its become a relatively common point of discussion about the overall mediums and industries over the past decade and a half or so now.

As far as those Shonen authors taking influence from the same things as Toriyama did for Dragon Ball... uh uh. No way. There is almost NO remote hint or evidence of actual Wuxia influence across just about almost ANY of those works (One Piece especially for purposes of this particular discussion here), apart from VERY broad things that can easily be gleaned just from Dragon Ball itself, divorced from its broader context. Training, getting stronger, fast paced fighting and giant, destructive attacks... without almost ANY of the more particular folkloric or cinematic nuances that comes with those things seen in not just Dragon Ball, but across the ENTIRE martial arts fantasy genre. Even much of the world building and emphasis on irreverent whimsy throughout these other various series registers as if much of it all is blatantly drawing from what Toriyama did in Dragon Ball as opposed to anything else.

Kishimoto definitely did his homework on ninja fantasy at the very least: that much I can most certainly say, as Naruto is if nothing else positively loaded to the gills with references to classic ninja fiction, both high brow (Shinobi no Mono, Jiraiya Goketsu Monogatari, etc) and schlocky (Shōnen Ninja Kaze no Fujimaru and so forth): but its also just as covered wall to wall in Dragon Ball copycatting as anything else of its ilk, from various character relationships, to virtually almost everything about Naruto's personality and design, etc. And hell, most of Naruto's ninja fantasy influences are things I find infinitely more worthy to recommend to almost anyone with an interest in cool ninja stuff well above and past that of Naruto itself. Like I said earlier, throw a rock (blindfolded even) and you'll likely hit something ninja-related in anime or manga that makes Naruto look laughably sad in comparison.

But for the overwhelming majority of a lot of these latter Shonen works: beyond Dragon Ball, they very often times simply have as creative/artistic influences other manga or anime that the author was fond of as a kid or what have you, as opposed to other eclectic and varied things drawn from real life experience or other, non-manga/anime media works. Again, I'm not saying this is absolutely 100% iron clad across the board throughout all current mangaka and animators by any means: but its enough of a general, escalating trend across manga and anime for the past 20 years or so now, that even most experts and veterans within the industry (everyone from Leiji Matsumoto to Mamoru Oshii to Satoshi Kon before his death and even Hayao Miyazaki) will freely admit and discuss it, as well as the detrimental effects that this sort of thing has had on a purely creative level.

And I personally DEFINITELY think that this shows abundantly clearly through when comparing even just Shonen manga of earlier decades (Toriyama included) - where most illustrators' style was clearly drawn from still life and classical art to a fairly heavy degree - to those from the past 20 years or so now - where so many illustrators' style is clearly drawn mostly from other manga artists or cartoonists in general and very little, if at all, from still life or traditional artistic discipline.

It also just seems like you're not familiar with One Piece or Naruto beyond a surface level.

Like I said before: I've done WAY too much time on both these (and several other) series, albeit from quite a ways back (mid/late-ish 2000s), at the relative heights of their respective popularity: it isn't that I'm not familiar, I just genuinely think that they're absurdly terrible in and of themselves and that their fanbases oftentimes appear to be projecting layers upon layers more emotional depth and gravitas onto them than is actually present within them in no small part due to their being horrendously inexperienced with and ignorant of non-Shonen or most things outside of general children's works (certainly that's been my experience within Shonen fandom of the past roughly 15 years anyway). And I try my absolute best to actually back up why I think this is so.

i think what they mean by the new shows improving upon Dragon Ball is that, how in Naruto they started the show off like a generic shounen but in part 2 it matures with the audience and covers a lot more human themes like nature of wars, cycle of hatred, "how the selfish desire to create peace initiates wars and hatred being born to protect the loved ones" and all the themes of "Shinobis are doomed to fight in wars" and seeing how the Shinobi world always had wars they find their own way of getting rid of the wars and their nihilistic views are developed due to the pasts they had and despite standing for the right cause they were betrayed and lost their loved ones. so it kind of helps in developing the mindset of the viewers and giving them a different perspective of looking at a villain who may be a villain in other's eyes but in his own way he is doing it for good.

also when people talk about One Piece being serious and Dark when it gets at that stage, they are not talking about those funny moments but something like this and also the dumb looking villain actually has a reason for why he dresses up like that at times. even though One Piece is far from some romantic drama but the one time Oda attempted to add that to it, that story was so memorable that it was loved by many fans seeing how this wasn't even a main character but a side character that too in the villain's side.

i think its Naruto which later on tries to force tear with the same flashbacks and violin music of random character in war arc we don't even give a fuck about and they showed Obito's flashback like 50 times. i think the Backstories of One Piece characters are more varied and it's not all same thing about "losing someone becoming evil", Nico Robin, Law and Nami had sad pasts but all three reacted in a different way and tried to hide their pain and work out their plan forward to survive. also Oda knows how to balance both comedy and serious elements that's why it is much more entertaining despite running for so long and the world building is creative, characters aren't forgotten, events are foreshadowed 200 chapters before the main event which makes it seem like a planned story and the world feels real in the way how their history is connected and characters have different connections. them talking about nature of wars in Marinford in a far far better way than 200+ chapters of Naruto which were disappointment to say the least.
i think the humour is top tier and people may call it shitty artwork but i think its unique mix of western and Japanese anime designs and a unique feel to it and having all types of characters from dumb looking to most badass looking, yea we have comedian Ussop or brook but also Badass characters like Law, Shanks and Zoro. martial arts masters too like Rayleigh, different races too and that too explored. it's like how Toriyama would be if he explored Oolong's race and his southern transformation school and somehow it ties with the main plot. the female characters too are better written than most battle Shounen.

[ABED]

I mean its not that its actually hard to bring the others to Goku's level in order to be usefull in a sensible way.
Take the concept of God ki for example,that was the perfect chance to give others a power boost and even the playing field,not only is it for every race but you can make up all sorts of transformations about it.
Heck Toriyama had no problem before with making the humans have a bigger power boost than Goku when they trained with Kami for 1/3rd of his time or currently with 17's and Freeza's 'training' case.

What actually is the case of unwillingness to use the cast.
Divine Water,Old kai's ritual,Kaioken,God ki(even the concept of transformations itself)are all generic power boosts and no race specific,yet Toriyama has given even those power boosts only to Saiyans.

How would they all get God Ki? All the things you mentioned sound like very lazy writing. Once Goku turns Super Saiyan, the gap becomes too vast for humans to bridge. The fact that Toriyama and Toei overuse transformations, etc. doesn't suggest that it's a good idea to give them out to every character. Besides, DB isn't an ensemble story and that's okay.

[Kunzait_83]

Just want to quickly point out that discounting Super and GT for a moment (so just the original manga and DB/DBZ anime run), the only story arc I really feel shortchanges the human characters unfairly any is the Cell arc. Apart from the Cell arc, I actually think that the human cast of fighters are, for the most part (Chaozu and Yajirobe get tossed aside fairly quickly and early: too early IMO), largely VERY well utilized and get lots to do in every other story arc.

In the Freeza arc most of them are dead, and they sort of have to be by necessity of the plot and the arc's whole entire setup/premise: but Kuririn's the sole survivor, and he almost singlehandedly makes up for the others' absence and largely shines like crazy in that arc. Hell its arguably his BEST arc as a character honestly, since he gets to take center stage as arguably the main protagonist for like the whole first half of it until Goku gets to Namek. So all in all, I don't really count Freeza as an arc where the humans are "misused" or "wasted" per se.

And in the Boo arc, the whole idea (for most of it anyway) is "passing the torch to the next generation", so it makes perfect sense to me that most of them are largely retired (except for Tenshinhan, and he at least gets a respectable and notable cameo appearance).

So that leaves us with all of original DB and the Saiya-jin arc of Z: where they all are treated more than fine by the story and get tons of development, screentime, and awesome, ass kicking fights. Even in the Saiya-jin arc, where by the end most of them are killed brutally, the overall arc of the story treats them all with great respect as capable martial artists who each get at least a couple of standout shining moments in battle before they're killed; and killed in fairly dramatic fashion no less, where the story clearly treats the loss of each of them as a substantially big deal.

So really, in my estimation, the only story arc where it feels like they're needlessly taking a backseat for no particularly good reason is the Cell/Jinzoningen arc. And still even there, they at least get the OCCASIONAL bone thrown to them every now and again.

As for GT and Super, GT is set a more substantial number of years after the Boo arc than even Super is: again, makes sense to me that if they're retired in Boo, they'd be retired still in GT as well. Super is an alternate path of continuity entirely, and thus elects to bring most of them (except for Yamucha and of course poor Chaozu) back out of retirement (even Muten Roshi); to relatively mixed results across the board. But that's of course also in part because Super is, in itself, largely a mixed bag of quality at best.

That's not to say I don't love these characters: I do, every last one of them. But Cell arc notwithstanding, I generally don't feel like most of them are tossed aside all THAT particularly much all that quickly in the grand scheme of things (again, Chaozu and Yajirobe aside). Really when all's said and done, I'd definitely agree that Toriyama should've found a much better use for them in the Cell arc, but otherwise I'm not really seeing so much where the complaint lies with them and how the story uses them. Cell arc aside, they generally serve their purpose in the narrative pretty well overall.

The main thing I would've done differently if I were Toriyama is just let the humans all learn and master the Kaioken by the tail-end of Freeza/beginning of Cell, and let the Cell arc be the final big hurrah of the original lineup of warriors before the big time jump to Boo where the focus goes more to Gohan and the rugrats.