How much do you think Gine impacted the Story ?

[Matches Malone]

Thing is, it might've been a Sparta situation where the Saiyans themselves promoted such a viewpoint to give themselves a more fearsome reputation. Of course a Proud Warrior Race would want the universe to fear them and see them as barbaric savages that kill everything that moves. In reality, if they had a functioning civilization at all, they couldn't have been all destruction all the time. We only ever met the warrior Saiyans. It's like if aliens from Alpha Centauri only encountered Earthling humans who are a part of the Navy Seals or Waffen SS— of course they'd think humans are bloodthirsty warriors engineered for combat.

I have no issues with this being the case. Saiyans had an entire planet to themselves, so it makes sense that there were other kinds of Saiyans living there, despite the ruthless fighters being the majority. The issue I have is Toriyama deciding to have Goku be part of that minority, despite being part of the majority for literally decades. This just makes the lore seem smaller. Why not just write a story of a new group of good Saiyans trying to co-exist on such a barbaric planet ? What was the point of changing Goku so much it has a negative impact on the entire story ? Like I said in a previous post, I'll never understand the need for some authors to take existing stories and completely change them when the ability of telling new ones can be just as effective, if not more so.

[miguelnuva1]

The same reason Toriyama is trying so hard to make Goku an unlikable protagonist.

I wouldn't even say Goku is a good saiyan currently, he loves to fight and luckly he bullies the bully. As long as a villian promised a good fight he'd willing put lives at stake.

[Yuli Ban]

The same reason Toriyama is trying so hard to make Goku an unlikable protagonist.

I wouldn't even say Goku is a good saiyan currently, he loves to fight and luckly he bullies the bully. As long as a villian promised a good fight he'd willing put lives at stake.

He's not trying, though. That's how Son Goku literally always behaved under his pen.

It's just that the anime made Goku out to be more overtly heroic than he actually was and got away with this because that portrayal was still roughly within Goku's character and Toriyama never made a big fuss about the incongruencies that did exist. He has never cared much about the characters, as he himself stated. At least not as much as other people do. But now that he's Akira Motherfucking Toriyama, the anime team can't just go against his intentions. So those existing incongruencies no longer exist. Super Goku is who manga Goku always was.


To that end, it makes sense to me that the FUNi cast decided to go ahead and change the script to make "Super our own" as that other thread mentioned: the Dragon Ball we grew up with comes from bizarro world, so far removed from the original manga that our Goku isn't even Goku. It's like if the American version of Harry Potter was rewritten, and "our" Harry Potter was Luke Skywalker. As I surmised when examining how the American fanbase got "lucky" that our dub came well after the series was over & thankfully Toriyama (at the time) was aggressively against the idea of continuing the story, if Super started happening in 2005 instead (before FUNi cared about making anything about the series "faithful" to the original), we'd have been in some serious shit trying to explain why Kung Fu Space Jesus was the way he was in Super.

[Yuli Ban]

Thing is, it might've been a Sparta situation where the Saiyans themselves promoted such a viewpoint to give themselves a more fearsome reputation. Of course a Proud Warrior Race would want the universe to fear them and see them as barbaric savages that kill everything that moves. In reality, if they had a functioning civilization at all, they couldn't have been all destruction all the time. We only ever met the warrior Saiyans. It's like if aliens from Alpha Centauri only encountered Earthling humans who are a part of the Navy Seals or Waffen SS— of course they'd think humans are bloodthirsty warriors engineered for combat.

I have no issues with this being the case. Saiyans had an entire planet to themselves, so it makes sense that there were other kinds of Saiyans living there, despite the ruthless fighters being the majority. The issue I have is Toriyama deciding to have Goku be part of that minority, despite being part of the majority for literally decades. This just makes the lore seem smaller. Why not just write a story of a new group of good Saiyans trying to co-exist on such a barbaric planet ? What was the point of changing Goku so much it has a negative impact on the entire story ? Like I said in a previous post, I'll never understand the need for some authors to take existing stories and completely change them when the ability of telling new ones can be just as effective, if not more so.

What I meant was more something that admittedly doesn't feel like Dragon Ball but does reflect real life: it's not that the evil savage Saiyans are the majority but that we only ever met the Saiyans who are a part of the military/warrior class (an organization universally expected to house more bloodthirsty types than the general population). Besides Gine and Beets, we've quite literally never met a non-warrior Saiyan, even though we've been told that they exist (as the Saiyans who didn't make the cut as warriors). It's entirely possible (though boring as it is) that a good chunk of Saiyans are quite like Goku and presumably Gine— kindhearted as far as a Saiyan can be though still with a high level of aggression (as even Gine was a part of the military once but was kicked out over her lack of physical strength and, presumably, greater emotional range). But these Saiyans are too weak to affect change compared to the fanatically violent warriors. You know, something like the Namekians who have different clans. All living Saiyans (at the time) were evil by DB rules, but not everyone was in the military, and those not in the military had a higher chance of being kindhearted just because they weren't actively slaughtering people or being trained to slaughter others.
See, this is still thematically weaker than the original way the story played out where Goku was a diamond in the rough, but it does at least somewhat reflect how things really work. To a pig, all humans probably look evil because most of our lot would happily eat it and its brethren, but those military guys probably look like demons wild with bloodlust with how they shoot at each other and blow each other up seemingly haphazardly. The tale of the sole human who loved pigs so much as to not eat them or harm another without reason certainly would be gripping, and the knowledge that there are vegetarians and vegans and those who refuse to eat pork just waters it all down.


As for why Toriyama changed it— I mean, that's really our own fault. Toriyama didn't even want to do anything more with Dragon Ball until Evolution happened, and a very large chunk of stuff that we've come to know and understand as the "lore" didn't even exist in the manga because Toriyama didn't care about it or think any of it through. So when he came back and had to build off of the success of Battle of Gods, he answered a question people kept asking— "Who is Goku's mom?"— as a throwaway comic and didn't give a shit about it for half a decade until someone said, "Hey, Broly's popular, let's make a movie about him."

[miguelnuva1]

The same reason Toriyama is trying so hard to make Goku an unlikable protagonist.

I wouldn't even say Goku is a good saiyan currently, he loves to fight and luckly he bullies the bully. As long as a villian promised a good fight he'd willing put lives at stake.

He's not trying, though. That's how Son Goku literally always behaved under his pen.

It's just that the anime made Goku out to be more overtly heroic than he actually was and got away with this because that portrayal was still roughly within Goku's character and Toriyama never made a big fuss about the incongruencies that did exist. He has never cared much about the characters, as he himself stated. At least not as much as other people do. But now that he's Akira Motherfucking Toriyama, the anime team can't just go against his intentions. So those existing incongruencies no longer exist. Super Goku is who manga Goku always was.


To that end, it makes sense to me that the FUNi cast decided to go ahead and change the script to make "Super our own" as that other thread mentioned: the Dragon Ball we grew up with comes from bizarro world, so far removed from the original manga that our Goku isn't even Goku. It's like if the American version of Harry Potter was rewritten, and "our" Harry Potter was Luke Skywalker. As I surmised when examining how the American fanbase got "lucky" that our dub came well after the series was over & thankfully Toriyama (at the time) was aggressively against the idea of continuing the story, if Super started happening in 2005 instead (before FUNi cared about making anything about the series "faithful" to the original), we'd have been in some serious shit trying to explain why Kung Fu Space Jesus was the way he was in Super.

Original Manga Goku didn't even act like Super Goku. The biggest dick move Goku did in the manga was letting Buu go and at least he felt regret. Super Goku would have been, oh well we have ssj3 and the dragonballs let me finish my fight with Vegeta.

[preds4343]

She has no effect, really.

[FireFly]

Not very much, considering she's just a prequel character that dies in every iteration of Freeza blowing up her planet.

[Yuli Ban]

people and can only see the error of their ways when they're gonna die like Bardock

Not even that.

My memory's atrocious and I don't recall if I wrote it in my post (and I'm too lazy to check at the moment), but the gist of Bardock's story was that he was a common Saiyan henchman through and through. Period. Basically no different from any of Freeza's other men besides the curious factoid that he's the father of the series' protagonist. He was never a "good guy." He never repented. He never realized that Freeza had to pay for his cruelty, nor did he come to understand that Saiyans were living a barbaric lifestyle. Bardock's whole raison d'etre was to show how different he was from Son Goku. He casually murdered in cold blood and, when shown a vision of Freeza destroying Vegeta, stood up against him out of proactive vengeance and rebellion. As he died in Freeza's Supernova blast, his hope was that his son would avenge him and the rest of the Saiyans— not grow into a kind man who fought for justice, but a bloody avenger. Fans, especially Western fans who grew up with a dub that actively tried to whitewash him, are what turned him into the antihero he is now.

Bardock was basically one of these guys (NSFW):

Two Croatian fascist executioners revel in the latest round of killing Serb prisoners while smeared with their blood: Croatian Independent State, WWII

That's partially why adding Gine (and, to a lesser extent, Tarble) broke the whole dramatic irony of the story, that the sole "good" Saiyan (in fact, arguably the Saiyan of Legend who defeated the great tyrant Freeza) came from low-class henchman trash, a literal background bad guy whose only cosmic importance was his son.
It's nothing even to do with Gine as a concept; just how she was written. At least Tarble made sense— he was sent off world for being weak and presumably kind, which fit with what we knew the Saiyans to be like in that they'd treat kindness like a mental illness (except from what I got, it was mostly because he was weak). If Gine had just been written slightly differently, like say, closer to the notoriously cold 18 (who herself was basically just the human version of a Saiyan woman, at least pre-Super), there would've been no problems at all.