Is Dragon Ball really all about fighting and would it be popular without it?

[Dragono]

I 100% believe it is and no I don't think it would be.

I also don't think its a bad thing and something fans should be ashamed about.

[KBABZ]

I mean, fighting is a great emphasis, especially when the protagonist has it as his main hobby and focus in life, but at the same time the series is much more than that, which is shown in the earlier stories. Goku's fighting ability is not a huge emphasis in the early episodes and is more "he knows kung fu and he's abnormally strong!". The climax at the end isn't really a fight so much as Godzilla stepping on a building. Obviously the Tenkaichi Budokai make fighting the core focus for an entire arc, but at the same time the Red Ribbon arc had many episodes that either had only a minor conflict (like the finale to Colonel Silver and Goku's arrival in Ginger Town) or with no fighting whatsoever (like Goku at Bulma's house or just after being taken out by Tambourine). This not even getting into the manga, which divides the story up even further so there are even more examples to draw where Toriyama felt no pressure or need to have a fist thrown to "keep it Dragon Ball".

Speaking kind of broadly here for the site at large, I don't think any of us are "embarrassed" by how Dragon Ball as a franchise focuses on the fighting, but more somewhat disappointed that modern Dragon Ball has lost sight of the fact that the story can be so much more than a new villain showing up, fights going down, and a new form is discovered to beat them, with epic beatdowns along the way. Character development and moments are important too, and at the end of the day, with the possible exception for me of Vegeta standing up to Beerus after he slaps Bulma, Super has been a bit dry of that sort of thing.

Personally I think classic Dragon Ball was rife with these moments, such as Goku reuniting with Grandpa Gohan, resurrecting Bora and having fun with Upa, revealing that he a son, the training with Roshi, Vegeta's death pleas to Goku on Namek, Vegeta deciding the sacrifice himself for his family against Buu, Mr. Satan befriending Buu, Bulma in the episode where Goku's at the hospital and she goes to Yunzabit, Bulma Trunks and Gohan discovering the old Time Machine, and more. Some of those take place around or occur directly because of fighting, but they're very different from "Oh remember when Goku turned Super Saiyan and asked Frieza to shoot him?" or "Man Vegeta's Final Flash was epic!!" or "I really love when Goku helped Gohan with his Kamehameha to obliterate Cell".

[ABED]

It is a story about martial artists. No the story wouldn't be popular without it as that's what the story is about. It's like asking whether Sherlock Holmes would be popular without the mysteries. Yes, there's the endearing friendship between Holmes and Watson, but the core of those stories is the mystery.

[zarmack]

I 100% believe it is and no I don't think it would be.

I also don't think its a bad thing and something fans should be ashamed about.

Thank you. I wish many more fans were honest about this.

[Gligarman]

I initially got into Dragon Ball as a kid because I thought the fighter and the lewd humor was great. I remained a fan for decades because I love the characters. It's probably the largest cast of likable characters I can think of from a single property.

[Robo4900]

It is not all about fighting. But it would not be as popular without it.

Harry Potter is not all about magic, Buffy The Vampire Slayer is not all about fighting off demons and vampires, and Star Wars is not all about epic space battles. Yes, these are important, core aspects of what these things are, and they would not be the same without them; they'd probably be significantly worse off, in fact. But acting like that's all there is does a massive disservice to the work.

Just as Dragon Ball wouldn't be what it is without fighting, if it was just fighting, it would be total crap like we saw with the TOP arc. The show's strength is that it's a funny show with likeable characters, entertaining storylines, a great deal of variety -- with no two arcs being quite the same until Super -- so it never gets old, and just like the storylines and tone of the show, you find that the characters, the style of the fighting, and even the whole look of the show all change up massively over the course of the run, completely naturally and believably except in Super, so really the fighting is just the icing on the cake; it'd be a bit of a bland, dry, pathetic cake without the icing, but the icing on its own would be equally unpalettable -- only when consumed in tandem, with the right balance of all the ingredients, do you truly end up with a really great cake unless it's a half-baked mess that you really should have scrapped and started again with much earlier on. Every aspect of the show is equally important to why it works, and trying to argue otherwise is, in my opinion, laughable.

(Yes, I realise there are some minor caveats with "Every aspect", but I'd thank you kindly to stay away from that particular phraseological nitpick)

[Lord Beerus]

Martial arts, and other forms of combat, are ultimately what drive the plot and how 99% of the cast get their character development. So I would say that in a story centered around a martial artist who seeks for new challenges, yes, I would say that the fighting aspect of Dragon Ball is what the plot of Dragon Ball is based around and the story would be nowhere near as popular without it.

[JohnnyCashKami]

I 100% believe it is and no I don't think it would be.

Dragon Ball has always been about friendship, adventures and battles. Martial arts is what it used to be about but it has become based more on characters throwing beam attacks at each others (e.g. Super - Goku vs Golden Freeza).

I also don't think its a bad thing and something fans should be ashamed about.

Ashamed of it? Nah.

[Zephyr]

Martial arts is what it used to be about but it has become based more on characters throwing beam attacks at each others (e.g. Super - Goku vs Golden Freeza).

In the context of Dragon Ball in particular, and wuxia in general, throwing beam attacks is still martial arts.

[SupremeKai25]

Character development and moments are important too, and at the end of the day, with the possible exception for me of Vegeta standing up to Beerus after he slaps Bulma, Super has been a bit dry of that sort of thing.

I mean, in the Future Trunks arc, several episodes were focused on expanding Black's backstory. Episodes 52-59 only have one major battle, which is the first trip to the Future which ends in a crushing defeat for Goku and friends. The rest of those episodes is all devoted to showing Zamasu's descent into madness and explaining how Black came to be.

[ABED]

I'm trying to envision what DB would be without it.

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

The fighting/martial arts component comprises a good chunk of the overall story, but there definitely is more to it than just that alone. Much more prevalent especially earlier on is the sense of adventure and traveling, including such things as Bulma's quest with Goku in the first arc to locate the Dragon Balls. That ties primarily into the initial Journey to the West references of the first parts especially before the series really branched off into it's own tangent, where the theme of adventuring became more heavily mixed with combat from about the 21st Budokai onwards.

Fighting, whether it be the old fashioned one on one fights of the Budokai matches or the explosive power battles in DBZ is but one of the many things that furthers the series yet it is not the sole defining factor.

[Kunzait_83]

The fighting/martial arts component comprises a good chunk of the overall story, but there definitely is more to it than just that alone. Much more prevalent especially earlier on is the sense of adventure and traveling, including such things as Bulma's quest with Goku in the first arc to locate the Dragon Balls. That ties primarily into the initial Journey to the West references of the first parts especially before the series really branched off into it's own tangent, where the theme of adventuring became more heavily mixed with combat from about the 21st Budokai onwards.

Journey to the West itself in a great many respects is very much a martial arts story, one where many of the characters (Wukong in particular) fighting and progressing through an increasingly more powerful pantheon of gods and demons acts as one of its central-most components alongside the traveling and questing for Tripitaka's scrolls. In that regard, while DB very much quickly leaves behind the initial "JTTW parody" conceit of the Pilaf arc very early on, it very much still retains a LOT of the same core overarching spirit of Journey, in that we follow the progress of its mystical monkey kung fu hero as he becomes stronger and stronger and manages to defeat or otherwise outwit even the most fearsome gods and demons in the DB cosmos.

Traveling/Adventure is VERY much a core component of a LOT of martial arts fantasy fiction: Wuxia itself is chock full of characters traveling and questing throughout the magical lands of Jianghu looking for all kinds of various magical weapons/scrolls/potions/MacGuffins as they train, grow stronger, fight increasingly more powerful foes, etc. These things are in NO way whatsoever mutually exclusive elements.

Despite all the stuff I've said and written on the topic on here throughout the years, I don't think a lot of even the basic-most idea of what Wuxia as a genre is and what it comprises has really sunk in with a lot of folks sadly. I don't just make the Lord of the Rings/Tolkien comparisons for nothing: in many respects, a lot of the genre is VERY much the Chinese Kung Fu equivalent to a lot of that sort of Western fantasy literature, from the "long ago and far away" fantasy world setting filled with kingdoms, beautiful princesses and handsome princes, monsters, dragons, ancient and wise old mystics, mysterious curses and hexes, enchanted/magical weapons and artifacts hidden away deep within ancient temple ruins, brave, daring traveling heroes on all kinds of quests, and so on: the focus is simply filtered through that of a Chinese cultural lens with heavy and overt Taoist and Buddhist themes and high flying, awesomely powerful Chi Kung Powered martial arts magic acting as the action's centerpiece and the primary force wielded by most of the characters.

The image of a "martial arts narrative" that a lot of Westerners have from primarily Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies is only ONE small part of what the genre overall is more broadly encompassed of. The number of martial arts myths and stories that focus on characters traveling and journeying through treacherous, magical lands on a quest in search of some mystical treasure of some sort, fighting monsters and other evil warriors after the same goal, are BEYOND numerous; and those elements furthermore in NO way make them anything other than still martial arts narratives at their core at the end of the day (as the characters' training and progression as fighters is often still at the center of the stories' core themes). The Smiling, Proud Wanderer, for example, has the characters' travels across the lands in search for all kinds of hidden, secret martial arts texts and manuals acting as a central drive in the plot, as is also the case for Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre.

Again: ignorance and lack of experience with actually partaking in a lot of these kinds of stories is ultimately where a LOT of these incorrect assumptions about what Dragon Ball is ultimately "about" are generally stemming from. The idea that Dragon Ball's blend of whimsical comedy mixed with high flying martial arts fantasy mixed with travel/adventure mixed with even some science fiction elements... the idea that these things are in ANY way unique to Dragon Ball and that they make Dragon Ball anything other than a martial arts fantasy narrative at its core is just on its face factually incorrect, and stems from the audience for DB here just not having been exposed nearly enough to more of its ilk.

A lot of the other examples that people are citing in this thread are simply... basic things like character development, character's interacting and having fleshed out personalities of their own, etc. Stuff that almost ANY good story in ANY other genre ought to have. The idea that Dragon Ball somehow isn't a martial arts story simply because there are moments where characters aren't constantly fighting and are shown just interacting and having their personalities developed is just absurdly stupid and pedantically reductive. Its like saying Rocky isn't primarily a boxing/sports narrative simply because it takes time to develop a romance between Rocky and Adrian. Stories are allowed to fit into a genre whilst still having time to allow their characters to be depicted as rounded human beings engaged in other aspects of life apart from the central theme of the story.

Even then however, even in much of the character dynamics and development throughout DB, the central goal and purpose of the characters 98% of the time is their development as fighters. Even when fighting isn't actually happening or being shown on page/screen, most of the main conflict and drama that the characters are engaged in usually more often than not is tied into their progress and status as fighters. Martial arts is THE central theme that almost all of the characters' lives and storylines revolves around, even when they aren't shown actually engaged in a fight of some kind. Martial arts is the main thrust of the story and its the main thrust of most of the main characters' various trajectories throughout the series.

Dragon Ball WOULD NOT be Dragon Ball without martial arts. Period. Without martial arts (and moreover, without the core themes inherent to martial arts stories), if all it was was Goku and the gang just randomly fucking around and getting into wacky, slice of life, non-sequitur hijinks... then all it'd basically be is just a redundant retread of Dr. Slump. And Dr. Slump is already a perfectly fine wacky fucking-around-for-its-own-sake comedy series by Toriyama that already exists: if people in DB fandom are sick of martial arts and want something that just features trademark Toriyama characters plotlessly getting into silly, comic misadventures with no real rhyme or reason behind it, then go check out Dr. Slump. THAT'S clearly your Toriyama series right there.

Dragon Ball ISN'T Slump though. It's HEAVILY filtered through the same exact specific comedic sensibility as Slump (naturally) but its still something with an ALTOGETHER different direction and narrative agenda. Which yeah, is something you'd generally WANT from an author with numerous works in their oeuvre: to do different things, and not overly-repeat themselves (*ahem* like go back to the well and retread classic plot beats and concepts from 25+ year old stories).

And honestly, given the INCREDIBLE degree of versatility that DB has shown throughout its lifespan (being able to blend itself with everything from Space Opera to Kaiju monster movies to Sentai parodies, etc) the idea that none of that is enough and that there's still such a gigantic swath of fans who basically just want to have the Dragon Ball characters specifically be just randomly plugged into other, totally disconnected and martial arts-free genres because they can't let go of them and don't want to just... go read or watch something else instead that's in a different genre altogether: the point of that is something that is just 100% totally beyond me and absolutely mystifying.

Pulp Fiction is one of my all time favorite movies, but I don't and have certainly never come across anyone who has a desperate, burning desire to see Vincent and Jules get plopped into a romantic comedy or apocalyptic sci fi action movie. I'm more than happy with seeing those characters operate and interact within the genre framework that they're designed and meant to function within: and they're some of the most infinitely vibrant and palpably alive fictional characters in any movie I can think to name.

I mean, not to be a dick here or anything... but if martial arts (supernatural fantasy or otherwise) isn't something that you're in any way interested in and are bored by, Dragon Ball MIGHT NOT have ever been the series for you from the very beginning. It might be a good idea to just... move on to something else instead. Again, if you just like Toriyama's sense of offbeat, whimsical humor, and just want a 100% pure fluffy, frolicking gag-a-thon where characters just bounce off of one another and get into wacky mischief, and the tone never darkens and the story never for an instant troubles itself at any point with any real semblance of drama or tension...

...then you REALLY should just be checking out Dr. Slump instead of Dragon Ball. Dr. Slump is EXACTLY what you're actually looking for here, and trying to constantly mine that 100% kawaii purity from Dragon Ball, especially at this obscenely late date, is only gonna be an exercise in totally needless "getting blood from a stone" futility.

Most stories ultimately have SOME sort of central, unifying theme running through their central core. With something like say...Alien, its invasive body-horror (often, though not always, with a sexual subtext). With Romeo & Juliet, its tragic romance. Within the broader genre of superhero fiction (i.e. regular people with extraordinary abilities taking it upon themselves to right injustices) it runs the gamut of everything from socio-political commentary with X-Men, to coming of age parables with Spider-Men, to detective noir with Batman, to just outright genre purism with Superman or The Avengers.

And with Dragon Ball its personal growth and development through martial arts and fighting for the pure joy and sport of it. And that's absolutely perfectly more than fine, and the idea that genres and genre-themes are somehow or other things that people should somehow be "embarrassed" or ashamed of is just... frankly downright fucking WEIRD.

There's nothing wrong whatsoever with Dragon Ball just being a martial arts fantasy just like there's nothing wrong with Star Wars being Space Opera/Fantasy, or The Shining being horror, or 12 Angry Men being a courtroom drama, or Heat being a heist thriller, or the Dollars trilogy being Spaghetti Westerns, etc. Genres are nothing in the least bit bad things or anything that anyone should be in any way self-conscious about for any reason, and the very idea of that strikes me as impenetrably odd and bizarre on its face.

Dragon Ball has always been about friendship, adventures and battles. Martial arts is what it used to be about but it has become based more on characters throwing beam attacks at each others (e.g. Super - Goku vs Golden Freeza).

1) "Friendship" is simply NOT a thing that DB puts any particular emphasis on. Characters naturally, organically grow into friends over time... but they don't wallow in it and harp on or belabor the point (like a lot of... other Shonen series tend to do). Goku grows into best friends with Kuririn. Characters who once used to be deadly enemies with Goku - such as Piccolo, Tenshinhan, or Vegeta - eventually develop into either trusted friends or at least reliable allies. So its not like making friends of enemies isn't a core theme of the series obviously.

But the whole "Dragon Ball is primarily about Friendship" meme, in the way that most people on sites like this tend to throw it around, is a holdover from the early/mid 2000s explosion of contemporary post-DB Shonen into Western Dragon Ball fandom: One Piece in particular. There's a notion that, because One Piece's author laid claim to "taking up Dragon Ball's mantle" and OP quickly becoming so beloved among Shonen Jump devotees, that Dragon Ball must ALSO be centered squarely around friendship in much the same maudlin syrupy "I wuv you all so much, you're all just my bestest friends forever!" way that OP bends itself over backwards to be. All the more so since Goku making friends of enemies is such a recurring theme throughout the whole series.

And yet, despite that key central theme of Goku's enemies eventually becoming his allies, that whole notion of "Shonen friendship" as it applies to DB is... largely just 100% raw projection on the fandom's part. As much as Goku forms strong bonds with many of his former enemies that last over the course of the series... look as hard as you want, you just aren't going to find Dragon Ball (at ANY point really) doing much to rub the audience's face in the characters slobbering over one another about what good friends they all are. Its just not a thing that DB ever does, and that is VERY much to Dragon Ball's benefit over something like One Piece. Its one of a great many things that makes the series resonate as more emotionally honest and authentic than something like OP (which presents itself as much more culled from the emotional longings of a painfully shy and awkward introvert).

Dragon Ball's total and abject lack of awkward, socially inept, tone deaf displays of overwrought sentiment and "feels" is very much a clear advantage that it has over its would-be "successors", NOT something that it is in any way lesser than them for lacking (and certainly not something that it in any way actually contains itself). Dragon Ball has characters who, in very naturalistic, laid back, and non-in-your-face ways, grow to form close bonds with one another: some stronger and tighter knit than others.

There's absolutely nothing about this element of the series that in any way marks Dragon Ball as being particularly noteworthy apart from any other of countless works and stories that features characters who naturally develop and progress into friends over time in some way. Sam and Frodo over in Lord of the Rings develop a very powerful friendship over the course of that trilogy, as do everyone from the kids in The Loser's Club in Stephen King's It, to John McClane and Al Powell in Die Hard, to Andy and Red in The Shawshank Redemption, to the entire cast of The Breakfast Club, and so on and on and on and on and on.

Characters growing into friends, certainly in the very decidedly non-melodramatic and chill fashion that they do in Dragon Ball, is in a great many cases nothing in the least bit particularly distinctive: and in Dragon Ball's particular case, it certainly isn't such that it warrants highlighting as something the series is centrally "about" at its center.

The only reason that it still comes up as something that fans claim is of particular focus to DB's narrative is because its something that early/mid 2000s fans had latched onto due to the then-spate of recent Shonen megahits that claimed to be basing themselves so much on Dragon Ball (One Piece and Naruto most predominantly among them).

2) Like I already noted before, "Adventure" and "Martial Arts" are in NO WAY mutually exclusive components. Wuxia as a whole is a genre that is filled to the brim with martial arts warriors not only training and fighting, but also questing, exploring, and adventuring across magical ancient Chinese lands, looking for all kinds of magical weapons and enchanted artifacts and secret/forbidden martial arts techniques and whatnot. Journey to the West itself was a classic work of martial arts high fantasy that, apart from a big, epic quest to recover lost sacred Buddhist scrolls, also features a monkey-themed mystic kung fu warrior who spends a great deal of the story (including a whole set of chapters devoted entirely to his backstory) growing stronger and stronger by routinely challenging and beating the dogshit out of Eastern gods and demons purely just to prove that he can.

And 3) I love this one the most. "Dragon Ball stopped being about martial arts and instead became about Battle". Like... what the fuck does that even MEAN exactly? Instead of mystical Kung Fu moves, Goku turns into General Patton and leads legions of tanks and troops into military conflicts or something? Where's my Dragon Ball RTS by Blizzard?

The idea that Dragon Ball's fighting and conflicts are ANYTHING other than firmly (supernatural fantasy) martial arts is, once again, 100% the byproduct of mass fandom ignorance about VERY basic myths and tropes of Eastern Buddhist/Taoist culture that runs deep throughout all of martial arts fantasy as a genre. I don't know how often I have to push back against this idea that "Dragon Ball WAS about martial arts in the very beginning, but as soon as Goku started throwing Kamehamehas and flying around, it became some kind of generalized "Battle" genre that doesn't actually exist": because the fact that this is STILL a widely clung-to belief in 2019 is just beyond sad at this point.

[Polyphase Avatron]

I'm trying to envision what DB would be without it.

Pure gags

[Shaddy]

As it stands Dragon Ball is as much about fighting as every other series that followed from it's playbook. If you would say One Piece, Naruto, Hero Academia, Black Clover etc. are about fighting, then yes, it's about fighting. But I think most would say there's more to all of those series than just the battles (well, maybe not Black Clover, I heard it's worse than Naruto), and the same is true for Dragon Ball.

Vegeta is probably the best example. Sure, his life is modeled around fighting, but his character arc is self-destructive, self-hating, having to deal with knowing you'll never be the true best, and that life isn't always going to turn out the way you want it to, and a bunch more Yoda shit like that. If Dragon Ball was a manga about who could do jigsaw puzzles the fastest, I would wonder why so fucking many of us are on this forum Vegeta would still have that inferiority complex with Goku to deal with, that same change from fighting out of selfishness to fighting because he has something worth fighting for, etc. It obviously would be less popular without this, because beating the shit out of each other is a universally-popular subject, but the characters, the themes of the story and all that would persist.I mean, not the ones with death and stuff, I don't know how you make that work with jigsaw puzzles this metaphor is kind of falling apart.

Now that said, if you're referring to the specific style of combat in the series itself, I definitely think the series should move away from that. Some of the best things about all those other series I mentioned are that they work within sets of rules to their fights where it no longer stands that whoever trained their body to punch the hardest wins, but it's entirely based around who understands and utilizes their specific skillset the best, to the point where some of the fights in those series come off more as actual puzzles than they do physical battles, but remain engaging because they all have those themes, arcs, characters and such. So I guess, Dragon Ball's fights should be less about fighting.

[ABED]

I'm trying to envision what DB would be without it.

Pure gags

Built around what? It's like 007 without the action, Rocky without the boxing, Veronica Mars without the mystery solving...

[Michsi]

I'm trying to envision what DB would be without it.

Pure gags

Built around what? It's like 007 without the action, Rocky without the boxing, Veronica Mars without the mystery solving...

I haven't read Dr. Slump, but I guess it would be like that ? The Pilaf arc is maybe a good example, where Goku's strength and fighting skills are important, but not the leading aspect of the story. Martial arts and wanting to improve, the two things you associate most with Goku's character, only really become relevant after this arc, when he goes to Roshi.
I think it's important to note that the Pilaf arc was apparently not really popular with the readers, which is why Toriyama introduced the tournament.

[ABED]

That's what I was thinking - the Journey to the West inspired first arc. But given that it wasn't popular, I'm guessing if he didn't change, DB wouldn't have gone much further and we wouldn't be here communicating with each other.

[Dr. Casey]

1) "Friendship" is simply NOT a thing that DB puts any particular emphasis on. Characters naturally, organically grow into friends over time... but they don't wallow in it and harp on or belabor the point (like a lot of... other Shonen series tend to do).

They're actually pretty lazy friends, seeing that (as of Z's ending) Goku and Krillin have only seen each other around 30-something days in their entire life past the 21st Budokai. :P The non-martial artists are good at maintaining friendships, but as for the martial artists, I do sympathize with Bulma and her "Come on, guys, can't we see each other more than twice a decade (or at the beginning of each new timeskip)?" attitude. I know that you don't need to see your friends often to have a deep connection with them, but if I was a part of the Dragon Ball gang, I'd probably be right there with Bulma nagging everyone to be less distant from each other.

[ABED]

DB isn't about friendship. There are great friendships to be found in DB, but it's not what it's about.

DB wouldn't be DB without fighting. If you take out the martial arts, what you are left with is a mystical adventure about people searching for mystical objects that grant wishes.