Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by Tai Lung » Tue Sep 03, 2019 8:24 pm

partly yes, but that should be part of the story of the series in any case
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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by Yuli Ban » Thu Sep 12, 2019 11:04 am

ABED wrote: Sat Aug 17, 2019 6:33 pm They were relying on something unreliable. It didn't take very long after discovering scouters to find ways to hide their full power from it. The numbers are shown to be BS in the show. The Ginyu Force underestimate Goku when he first arrives. Trunks' power was measured to be a measly 5, and Raditz didn't realize the battle power he saw from Goku and Piccolo wasn't the true extent of their power.
This, exactly. Yes, yes, yes.
I recall Kunzait stating something that confirmed what I had suspected for a long time: that the whole point of "power levels" was to show off the difference between the Earthlings and the aliens. The aliens are so technologically advanced that they have gadgets that can literally quantify spiritual energy. It's like if Grays came down from flying saucers with augmented reality apps that allowed them to see ghosts, spirits, demons, shadow people, etc.
Except they don't actually understand how ki works. Earthlings never needed to quantify ki; just get a general feel for how big one's control of spiritual energy was. And Earthlings know how to control one's flow and usage of ki as part of their meditation. It's not something you can reduce to numbers because ki isn't a static thing. To those who rely so much on numbers, though, it might as well be, hence why it blows their mind when Earthlings and Namekians alter their power level. Going back to the Grays example, it's like that old movie trope of "aliens may be technologically advanced, but they don't understand love or basic humanity".

Just to communicate how much of a non-thing power levels are, notice that we never even got a unit of measurement of what fighting power is or what a certain power level could do (until Babidi introduced kilis 80% of the way through the series).

IT'S OVER 9,000!!!!.... what? No, literally, it's over 9,000 what? What're the units? How are they measured? That's never been important to the narrative. Knowing Dragon Ball nowadays, we'll eventually get an answer.

Are power levels completely worthless? Absolutely not. For some easy shorthand to communicate where characters stand, it's definitely useful in the same way you'd see in an RPG or trading cards. The problem, however, is that the concept has been so abused and misunderstood because the spiritual nature of what ki is has been completely lost on Western fans.

I think the worst aspect of power levels is that, in reducing ki to numbers, they've essentially made Dragon Ball a mathematics game (which is ironically the very thing the series mocked on Namek). Just watch any of the "Dragon Ball What If Battles" on YouTube (like the ones from Drandosk). They're always based on a power level, known or estimated. And that's basically the limit of it. If Character A has a power level of 48 million and Character B has a power level of 58 million, Character B will always win. No amount of perseverance, stamina, or desperation tactics can overcome that gap (despite that being the one constant throughout the entire series). When you transform, it's not just you overcoming your limits to ascend to another level of being; no, you have to follow a rigid formula of power level multiplication. Which actually becomes funny when you consider the probability that Super Saiyan is its own "ascended base form" with a varying power level itself rather than just a 50x multiplier over one's resting state.
Yet that's how many fans think nowadays. Whoever has the higher number is the stronger opponent, period. And since we have no units of measurement, we rely on feats to guess what a character with a certain power level can do. And as another consequence, the numbers have to be suitably higher compared to the previous villain for the new guy to really matter. Imagine if Perfect Cell's power level was something like 200 million. Closer to the level of scaling we saw in Dragon Ball, but Z fans would never have taken him seriously because that's "too close to Full Power Freeza's power level." Even though power levels are arbitrary and you could have a power level of 200 million do whatever the hell you want it to do (and we never learned Cell's power level anyway so for all we know, it IS 200 million).

But here's the thing: I can understand where they're coming from. Power levels as measurement work because many aspects of supernatural enhancement can indeed be quantified. A power level of 58 million recognizes that Character B is simply more well trained and capable than Character A. In that case, it'd be like getting angry at a tool that measures voltage or amperes because it makes lightning feel less special. Even though it reduces the "spiritual" side of the story, there isn't actually anything that says spiritual power can't be measured much the same way a story about aliens detecting ghosts would have to contend with the idea that "ghosts are too fleeting to be measured".
It's literally just natural to want to know where characters stand in relation to each other due to basic narrative consistency. Goku is stronger than Krillin and Krillin is stronger than the average human; therefore Goku is stronger than the average human. There, you've just power scaled. Power levels themselves are picking hairs, unironically utilizing a half-baked system that was deliberately half-baked just to poke fun at the idea of overly-quantified battle powers.
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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Thu Sep 12, 2019 12:29 pm

Given that Power Scaling - as we've known it in fandom for the better part of a bit over 20 years now - grew largely out of a combination of the FUNimation dub's wonky presentation along with the average post-dub Western fan's general complete ignorance of Eastern martial arts fantasy concepts inherent to the series (qigong, xia/xian, etc) and over-familiarity with Western superhero tropes, I'm going to categorically say that its a symptom rather than a cause of fandom toxicity.

Dragon Ball simply has long had a wildly misaimed fanbase in North America/the English speaking world (that is to say, they're under the false impression that the story they're into is one thing, when its actually something entirely different), and that stems primarily from how it was originally presented officially in English way back when.

And the kind of absurdly over-pedantic "power scaling" nonsense we still see today is a natural result of what happened when DB's earliest presentation (way, waaaaaaaaaay back during the whole "Rock the Dragon" era, which the official dub in all its permutations throughout the years has never really fully lived down or distanced itself from: nor has it ever even fully and completely TRIED to, even despite halfhearted/half-assed attempts like Kai) chained itself to the whole "Power Levels" concept and misrepresented it as this key, central gimmick at the heart of all the characters' abilities. When in the actual story proper, it was simply just the one group of villains' own singular misconception of those abilities within two story arcs flush in the middle of the broader series (and one that helped lead to said-villains' own downfall).

People who are younger and may not have been around at the time won't fully appreciate just how HARD the earlier North American marketing leaned into the whole Power Levels thing. I recall even many TV ads for the series back in the late 90s marketing it with phrases like "Feel your Power Level rise with each battle!" and suchlike. They were also all over much of the merchandise, toys, etc. at the time. That stuff has STUCK permanently like superglue to this franchise well up to this very day, and stuff like Power Scaling (in the sense of the kinds of absurd back and forth debates we see in fandom today, not simply just "in the internal logic of the series, character A is a better fighter than character B") is the natural end result of it.

This was the fundamental problem with taking something whose core-most premise (reclusive/secretive martial arts masters using mystical Taoist Chi cultivation skills to engage in warriors' rivalries and feuds over magical Chinese artifacts with direct ties to Eastern deities) was as blatantly East Asian as something gets, and trying to market it to the "G.I. Joe/Transformers/Thundercats/TMNT/He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" bracket of mainstream American children's television cartoon audience: an audience that was as WILDLY divorced from and unfamiliar with these inherently Chinese concepts as can be.

So unable to really find any other "hook" (apart from the gnarly visuals and insane fight scenes) to use to "sell" it, FUNi & Saban leaned HARD into the idea of the series as a sci fi Superheroic "save the world" action epic where characters use these vaguely defined, sci fi like "energy powers" which are gauged using "Power Levels" to give it a kind of toyetic pull.

Kinda like how back in the 80s, there were this line of collectible figures (I think it might've been Battle Beasts, or something similar) that used a "rock/paper/scissors"-like gimmick where each figure had a wood/water/fire motif that denoted which was "stronger" than the other (fire burned wood, water put out fire, etc). Power Levels, conceptually as they related to the FUNi dub and its marketing of the series, became basically something along those lines for Dragon Ball Z's then-fledgling North American marketing to latch itself onto in an attempt to hook mainstream suburban American kids who would have zero fucking comprehension of concepts like Qigong, ancient martial arts hermits, Jianghu, and the like, and had never seen a Shaw or Harvest film ever.

And from that starting point of a foundation, its basically metastasized over the decades since into the ultimate form of little boys on the playground bashing their action figures together while arguing viciously over whose favorite superhero could beat up the other's. Only today, those little boys are largely a bunch of grown-ass 20 and 30 something year olds, the playground is now an internet forum someplace online, the action figures are gifs, memes, and ridiculous flowcharts: and yet the arguments themselves, while wordier and even more vile in their expletives (and racial epithets, depending on the forum), remain just as brain-numbingly stupid and juvenile as ever.

And if my above description makes these kinds of arguments/debates sound a bit too harshly pathetic: then that's simply because they are and there's zero avoiding that blindingly obvious elephant in the room. It is what it is, facts don't care about your feelings, etc.

But yeah: the nature of today's Power Scaling debates (and all the toxicity therein) is simply a natural outgrowth of stupid, ridiculous attempts at trying to find a way to market a whimsically offbeat and tongue-in-cheek Japanese by way of Chinese (or is that the other way around?) martial arts fantasy series about a distaff Sun Wukong knockoff's Taoist journey toward martial arts mastery and godhood as a boilerplate "the Justice League has unite their powers to do battle with the Legion of Doom and save the world!" kind of American 80s Saturday morning breakfast cereal action figure romp.

Despite all the years that have passed and all the myriad of releases that DB has gone through and all the mountains of resources of legit information (like that found on this very site here) that's out there for anyone/everyone to discover at anytime... we're still, in most respects as it relates to the average everyday fanboy's mainstream conception of Dragon Ball, forever enslaved to the dumbass, idiotic mid through late 1990s "WHOA KIDS, THIS CARTOON IS XTREEEEME 2 THE MAX!!!" style of marketing that this franchise was unfortunately (and wholly unnecessarily and pointlessly) saddled with more than 20 years ago and which is still quite heavily impacting and influencing most fans' (even younger ones today via sheer force of mass pop cultural momentum, inertia, and osmosis) general overview of what the series is at its root core to a pretty sizable and far-reaching extent.

Power Levels and Power Scaling debates are simply a symptomatic outgrowth of that: not the root cause in and of itself.

As I've tried to stress numerous times on here over the years: the idea that, internally within the actual storyline of Dragon Ball overall, Power Levels were EVER these all-important, conflict-deciding numbers that singularly define what the whole series is all about... that has NEVER actually been the case EVER, and is effectively a complete and utter phantasm in people's minds created wholly by the cringe-worthy American marketing for the dub and carried forward beyond that by the sheer, overpowering force of will of the online fanbase's insane degrees of RPG/stat-obsessed pedantry and hyper-literal mindedness.
Last edited by Kunzait_83 on Thu Sep 12, 2019 12:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by Dbzfan94 » Thu Sep 12, 2019 12:34 pm

:roll: Not everything is because of the dub. Jesus. Funimation wasn't the one who put out a guidebook with all the power levels up to Freeza.

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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Thu Sep 12, 2019 12:47 pm

Dbzfan94 wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 12:34 pm :roll: Not everything is because of the dub. Jesus. Funimation wasn't the one who put out a guidebook with all the power levels up to Freeza.
I'm going to assume you're referring to the Daizenshuu there. Huge difference of context being: at the time the Daizenshuu were being released (largely in 1995, bleeding a tad bit into 1996) there was up till that point almost ZERO reliance on marketing Dragon Ball with Power Levels as its major centerpiece concept.

Apart from an incredibly small one page blurb in the Daizenshuu (I kinda love how that one lone random page in a 12 volume series spanning hundreds and hundreds of pages in total has come over the years in most fans' minds to COMPLETELY define what the Daizenshuu were and encompassed: totally NOT a fanbase that's maybe a HAIR bit over-fixated on these numbers, no siree) and maybe a brief mention in a few of the early Z movie programs/flyers, the only real role that Power Levels from the series played marketing-wise outside of the actual anime & manga were mainly in a bunch of the RPG video games (where yeah, numeric stats like those make perfect sense, since its an RPG).

In Dragon Ball fandom of the early through mid-90s, Power Levels were INSANELY apocryphal, at best. They in NO way dominated the discourse around the series NEARLY to the extent that they did, hell even by the late 90s, much less today.

The difference of course being the dub, and more specifically and important, the dub's marketing and the American cultural context surrounding it at the time.

Going back to the SCANT few small scraps of Japanese marketing material (a single page from a giant multi-volume guidebook series, and a few pamphlets and leaflets here or there) that acknowledged the concept of Battle Powers and holding them up as "See? The Japanese were obsessed with them too back then!" is being ridiculously dense and obtuse.

Moreover, its a testament to how INSANELY over-obsessed and over-fixated on this concept the American fanbase is, to the point that for many, the most in-depth they'll go in "looking into the Japanese version" is digging around online for these insanely obscure, stupidly minor little blips of the original Japanese marketing (that were but a piffle in the grander scheme of the series back then) and analyzing the arbitrary numbers found on them through a fucking high powered microscope (while pestering poor Herms to translate any of the accompanying text for them, god forbid a single small detail about said numbers gets overlooked).

Fuck minor things like "where did the original idea for Bardock come from?" or "where did Toriyama get his influence for X or Y storyline idea?" or "how early did the seeds for the Saiya-jin and Namek concepts start to take root in Toriyama's writing of the original manga?" and so on. No no, fuck EVERYTHING else, what did a random flyer for a DBZ movie that played once at an anime film festival in 1991 say about Tullece henchman #4's Power Level, and does that mean he could beat Piccolo, pre-Nappa, in a fight that I completely made up in my head? These are the REAL hard DB questions we care about!
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Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by ABED » Thu Sep 12, 2019 5:26 pm

While FUNi's misrepresentation of DB no doubt played a part, it's not as though large numbers of people miss the point of genre fiction. Scarily large numbers of people miss the point of The Killing Joke and Fight Club despite coming from genres they are familiar with.
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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by Dbzfan94 » Thu Sep 12, 2019 9:30 pm

Kunzait_83 wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 12:47 pm
Dbzfan94 wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 12:34 pm :roll: Not everything is because of the dub. Jesus. Funimation wasn't the one who put out a guidebook with all the power levels up to Freeza.
Fuck minor things like "where did the original idea for Bardock come from?" or "where did Toriyama get his influence for X or Y storyline idea?" or "how early did the seeds for the Saiya-jin and Namek concepts start to take root in Toriyama's writing of the original manga?" and so on. No no, fuck EVERYTHING else, what did a random flyer for a DBZ movie that played once at an anime film festival in 1991 say about Tullece henchman #4's Power Level, and does that mean he could beat Piccolo, pre-Nappa, in a fight that I completely made up in my head? These are the REAL hard DB questions we care about!
Ignoring all that other pointless snark, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. People can wonder about when Toriyama planned for the Saiyan stuff, or where he got a certain from, and still have fun making up harmless fights like Turles’ henchman vs Nappa or Vegeta or whoever else.

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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by jjgp1112 » Fri Sep 13, 2019 9:10 am

I knew something was off when I made a thread on Reddit asking how people would rewrite the Buu saga and like 90% of the replies were about power scales and transformations. Uh, hey guys...what about the actual story and characterizations :eh:
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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by KBABZ » Fri Sep 13, 2019 10:29 am

jjgp1112 wrote: Fri Sep 13, 2019 9:10 am I knew something was off when I made a thread on Reddit asking how people would rewrite the Buu saga and like 90% of the replies were about power scales and transformations. Uh, hey guys...what about the actual story and characterizations :eh:
Kanzenshuu fan: "I wish Gohan had more time to shine after all that time with Old Kai."
US fan: "DOOD GOHAN'S POWER LEVEL WAS SO LOW WTF"

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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by Dbzfan94 » Fri Sep 13, 2019 12:28 pm

KBABZ wrote: Fri Sep 13, 2019 10:29 am
jjgp1112 wrote: Fri Sep 13, 2019 9:10 am I knew something was off when I made a thread on Reddit asking how people would rewrite the Buu saga and like 90% of the replies were about power scales and transformations. Uh, hey guys...what about the actual story and characterizations :eh:
Kanzenshuu fan: "I wish Gohan had more time to shine after all that time with Old Kai."
US fan: "DOOD GOHAN'S POWER LEVEL WAS SO LOW WTF"
The power level fanatics are a vocal minority. Plus, reddit facebook and youtube aren't eactly the best places for discussion. Most of them care more about memes and TFS than the series itself.

For every "US fan" I see whining about power levels, there's 30 "kanzenshuu fans" wishing just what you said.

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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by KBABZ » Fri Sep 13, 2019 6:55 pm

Dbzfan94 wrote: Fri Sep 13, 2019 12:28 pm
KBABZ wrote: Fri Sep 13, 2019 10:29 am
jjgp1112 wrote: Fri Sep 13, 2019 9:10 am I knew something was off when I made a thread on Reddit asking how people would rewrite the Buu saga and like 90% of the replies were about power scales and transformations. Uh, hey guys...what about the actual story and characterizations :eh:
Kanzenshuu fan: "I wish Gohan had more time to shine after all that time with Old Kai."
US fan: "DOOD GOHAN'S POWER LEVEL WAS SO LOW WTF"
The power level fanatics are a vocal minority. Plus, reddit facebook and youtube aren't eactly the best places for discussion. Most of them care more about memes and TFS than the series itself.

For every "US fan" I see whining about power levels, there's 30 "kanzenshuu fans" wishing just what you said.
That's good news to hear!

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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by Majin Buu » Mon Sep 16, 2019 3:24 pm

In my experience with this fandom, sub vs. dub debates are the ones that tend to get toxic. Power scaling debates typically amount to little more than obnoxious fan wanking.

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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by Dbzfan94 » Mon Sep 16, 2019 9:30 pm

Majin Buu wrote: Mon Sep 16, 2019 3:24 pm In my experience with this fandom, sub vs. dub debates are the ones that tend to get toxic. Power scaling debates typically amount to little more than obnoxious fan wanking.
Pretty much this. Power level debates (the majority of the time) don't have people throwing insults at one another, unlike sub v dub.

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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Mon Sep 16, 2019 10:10 pm

Dbzfan94 wrote: Mon Sep 16, 2019 9:30 pm
Majin Buu wrote: Mon Sep 16, 2019 3:24 pm In my experience with this fandom, sub vs. dub debates are the ones that tend to get toxic. Power scaling debates typically amount to little more than obnoxious fan wanking.
Pretty much this. Power level debates (the majority of the time) don't have people throwing insults at one another, unlike sub v dub.
Problem is, lots of the time in sub vs dub debates, all too many people seem to very easily and often confuse throwing insults at the sub or dub itself with throwing insults at them personally.

There's a huge, HUGE difference between ACTUALLY insulting someone personally versus insulting the audio of a children's cartoon and the person you're talking to emotionally (over)reacting as if you just personally punched out their mom right in front of them.
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Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by Yuli Ban » Tue Sep 17, 2019 12:50 am

Kunzait_83 wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 12:47 pm In Dragon Ball fandom of the early through mid-90s, Power Levels were INSANELY apocryphal, at best. They in NO way dominated the discourse around the series NEARLY to the extent that they did, hell even by the late 90s, much less today.
This is something that ought to be hammered home, especially when reading Usenet posts on Dragon Ball (which weren't very numerous, but are still a look into the series): https://www.reddit.com/r/dbz/comments/5 ... m_the_90s/
Were people still into wondering which characters were more powerful than the other? Absolutely. You can't have an action story without that.
The difference is that people weren't so obsessed with raw numbers.

Just think about the very next super-arc after the Saiyan/Freeza arc— we're introduced to entities whose ki cannot be detected.
Well first, we're introduced to a boy whose power level is 5 and thus as low as the average human's until it's revealed he's a Super Saiyan who can completely dice Freeza. And so we never get another distinct power level reading in the series for 27 years until Dragon Ball Super: Broly.
So right off the bat, the manga is outright laughing at the concept of a power level by showing off the most extreme possibility: taking someone whose initial ki reading is so low as to be lower than Son Goku's at the start of the series (allegedly) and then ratcheting it up to beyond even Super Saiyan Goku's.

And then we get the Artificial Humans. Their ki literally can't be read. Ki detection was turned on its head— from having it quantified to having it obscured by technology. Once again, technology is shown interfering with the nature of qigong. That was the whole point of why the Artificial Humans had no detectable ki.
Yet nowadays, we still try to put a number on their power level. It's almost flagrantly missing the point.


Alas, it's possible— even probable— that power level discussions may have been inevitable in the internet age because they provide some manner of a medium/ease of understanding the powers we're dealing with. Sort of like discussing earthquakes or hurricanes and how we have separate categories and tiers, even though the effects aren't always uniform across those categories. But even that's a poor analogy because again, we have no unit of measurement to work with. We saw a farmer with a shotgun has a power level of 5, so how does that work then? Does the shotgun enhance his power level? What does a power level of 1 look like? Do negative power levels exist?
As aforementioned, the series never answers that because that was never important.
Hell, take Broly's power level of 10,000— I'm just going to call them Freeza Paps from now on, deal with it— 10,000 Freeza Paps in his first movie. That was supposed to indicate that he was abnormal. The scouters were picking up extreme levels of ki in an infant, and they read that as 10,000 Freeza Paps.

Now imagine any of the older kung fu movies and imagine how they'd use that information. Compare that to a toy commercial cartoon. The toy cartoon would base the entire show around that power level and the understanding of power levels. Goku's power level is smaller than Broly's, so what does he have to do to enhance his power level to get it higher? X, Y, and Z, of course. They need to read their power levels often to keep the theme going. And I say "toy commercial cartoon" and not "Western toy commercial cartoon" because the idea this is only limited to Western shows is ludicrous— anime, especially the card/toy-trading anime popular in the 2000s— is just as bad if not worse at this than even the most egregious 80s shows.

The kung fu movie would've had this as background information because the more important question is how does this affect Broly's ability to fight? Makes him superior to everyone else? That's all we really need to know, then. Oh, his power level is 10 billion Freeza Paps when he's transformed? Neat, but that's really just a side effect of his immense control of chi. If you measured his voltage, it might be a quadrillion, but we use Freeza Paps on this forum. Knowing his exact power level doesn't really change the fight, especially when he might still pull out more chi anyway. The point is Son Goku has to beat him through any means necessary, even if he's not as strong as Broly. At the very least, he's a better martial artist, quicker on his feet, capable of some special technique Broly doesn't know, or knows how to use Broly's own power against him. Or maybe he does have the raw ability to overcome Broly. It doesn't matter what the numbers are, especially if he uses his chi to enhance some specific part of himself.

This is something that was touched upon in the series itself, but never expanded because the whole ordeal about power levels had long since passed: does power level only mean "of that whole person?" Like, does the Farmer with a power level of 5 Freeza Paps have that power because of his shotgun or because he's just that strong himself? Expanding upon that, would a scouter read power levels differently if a person condensed them into one part of their body? Answer is ostensibly yes since we saw that with Raditz, but that's not what I'm talking about— if Goku circa 8,000 Freeza Paps strengthened his fist with ki, would a scouter read his power level as 8,000 Freeza Paps but his fist as 24,000 Freeza Paps? Or is it the same? Or is it— BOOSH. Powers can increase in incredibly short bursts (a technique I recall dubbing the "hyoka-ken"), too fast to be detected and just long enough to get an attack off because that's a good technique to have in a martial arts story. Trying to figure out the power levels from that, especially if you bring in a ki reinforcement of the body (hyoka-tai?), you're practically reduced to doing quadratic equations to figure out how fights go. And that's just silly.

TLDR: One's Freeza Force Approved Freeza Paps is a nice thing to know, but obsessing over it is comical, especially in a series that flat out doesn't care about what your power level is since characters will become as strong as they need to be anyway. If Kid Goku had to fight Freeza after defeating King Piccolo, then going by the logic of the series, he'd just need to drink the Hyper Ultra Divine Water and train with Kami to do it.
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KBABZ
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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by KBABZ » Tue Sep 17, 2019 1:32 am

We've probably all said before that Power Levels are taken far too seriously, with the irony being that the series itself says that you cannot rely on their readings for many, many different reasons (suppressed, could be an Android, they're in tune with their body, could have a powered-up form, might have a special technique, etc) and thus the base reading is only a starting point and nothing more.

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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by jjgp1112 » Tue Sep 17, 2019 7:55 am

I've always noticed that the power level squad never accounts for stuff like how guys can amplify their strength to crazy degrees for a Ki attack. It's literally the very first instance we see of Power Levels being shown as unreliable.

Or worse, they treat everything like a card game and act like any attack from a weaker character is negated in the long run. A punch in the face is still a punch in the face! Even a weak scrub could break an MMA fighter's nose if he a got a free shot in.
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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by KBABZ » Tue Sep 17, 2019 8:28 am

jjgp1112 wrote: Tue Sep 17, 2019 7:55 am Or worse, they treat everything like a card game and act like any attack from a weaker character is negated in the long run.
Related: the 90s version of these was REALLY popular in my school back in the day. It probably didn't help.

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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by Dbzfan94 » Tue Sep 17, 2019 12:07 pm

Kunzait_83 wrote: Mon Sep 16, 2019 10:10 pm
Dbzfan94 wrote: Mon Sep 16, 2019 9:30 pm
Majin Buu wrote: Mon Sep 16, 2019 3:24 pm In my experience with this fandom, sub vs. dub debates are the ones that tend to get toxic. Power scaling debates typically amount to little more than obnoxious fan wanking.
Pretty much this. Power level debates (the majority of the time) don't have people throwing insults at one another, unlike sub v dub.
Problem is, lots of the time in sub vs dub debates, all too many people seem to very easily and often confuse throwing insults at the sub or dub itself with throwing insults at them personally.

There's a huge, HUGE difference between ACTUALLY insulting someone personally versus insulting the audio of a children's cartoon and the person you're talking to emotionally (over)reacting as if you just personally punched out their mom right in front of them.
Obviously, but more often than not I see much more of the latter.

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Re: Are Power Scalers a cause or symptom of toxicity in the fandom?

Post by Yuli Ban » Tue Sep 17, 2019 4:27 pm

KBABZ wrote: Tue Sep 17, 2019 8:28 am
jjgp1112 wrote: Tue Sep 17, 2019 7:55 am Or worse, they treat everything like a card game and act like any attack from a weaker character is negated in the long run.
Related: the 90s version of these was REALLY popular in my school back in the day. It probably didn't help.

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Well those are trading cards, so having power levels makes sense for them (not having them would be like having a first person shooter with no weapons). You could make trading cards about the Judeo-Christian celestial hierarchy (and there probably is such a game for all I know). What's regrettable is that playground politics over these numbers were brought into discussions of the main series.
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