voltlunok wrote:Is the universal destruction jumping the shark? No. Dragon Ball as a whole jumped the shark long ago and it just kept escalating things until we got into a serious relationship with the shark and this feat is just us laying in bed with the shark post coitus going "So was it good for you?"
This here reflects my thoughts pretty strongly. Given everything that had come before it, Goku being an alien was one hell of a shark jumping moment, I feel. And it only continued to get sillier from there.
RandomGuy's sig has a quote from
Herms that perfectly sums up how utterly fucking ridiculous the power inflation gets during the Freeza arc, and how it's completely played straight.
Herms wrote:The fact that the ridiculous power inflation is presented so earnestly makes me just roll my eyes and snicker. Like with Freeza, where he starts off over 10 times stronger than all his henchmen except Ginyu (because...well, just because), then we find out he can transform and get even more powerful, and then he reveals he can transform two more times, before finally coming out with the fact that he hasn't even been using anywhere near 50% of his power. Oh, and he can survive in the vacuum of space. All this stuff is just presented as the way Freeza is, without even an attempt at rationalizing it, yet the tone dictates we're supposed to take all this silly grasping at straws as thrilling danger. So I guess I don't really take the power inflation in the Boo arc seriously, but I don't take the power inflation in earlier arcs seriously either, so there's no net loss of seriousness. I think a silly story presented as serious is harder to accept than a silly story presented as silly. At least in the Boo arc Toriyama seems to know the kind of story he's telling.
Then, of course, Goku's new conveniently-revealed-and-abused alien biology allows him to conveniently fulfill an alien prophecy which conveniently allows him to one-up the already-fucking-stretching-it-powerful eunuch space Hitler. Then a local mad scientist engineer makes some robits that completely leave both of those things in the dust,
and then combines everyone's genes into a super science monster which already left those robits in the dust,
but he can eat them and leave the people who were stronger than him in the dust. Then an eldritch bubble gum genie from time immemorial is released, and of course it's stronger. But wait, now the super powerful alien-prophecy-realizing power houses can fucking combine, and become so powerful to the point where it's commonly accepted to be of gag levels.
Only now, we have a narcoleptic kitty cat with anger problems being the conscious source of entropy in the universe (and of course he leaves even the combined super space warrior fusion in the dust), doing battle with an even more powerful legendary form from the aliens who had the previous alien prophecy, and their mere clashes threaten the well being of the universe. Then Freeza comes back and of course he'll find a way to conveniently catch up (everyone else*** has been conveniently doing it at every other point in the story, why the fuck not?). And coming up next, we're likely to see it go
even further beyond.
Given DB's roots with gag logic, that whole Namek arc's worth of escalation-of-destructive-force, and the fact that they even tried to move on from there (and succeeded)....shit's already gone out the window. The creators can bring on whatever silly destructive shit they want; it's long since felt completely at home, and I'm still loving every minute of it.
***Not literally everyone else, and not at literally every point in the story, but it's still little more than the next pebble on a mountain of "gee,
that's pretty fucking convenient, isn't it?"
Kamiccolo9 wrote:A universe is more of an abstract concept. It's not as easy to conceptualize, and comes off more as a statistic (que Joseph Stalin quote here). You can't wrap your brain around it as easily; it's too big.
To be fair, given what we know of Dragon World Astronomy, the "universe" is actually a finite space that one can measure and such. And this is regardless of if we're talking about the space within the lower half of the globe, or the globe itself.
Plus, there are 12 of those globes floating around. Surely they're floating in some sort of dimension, in which one would find themselves if they were to erase their presently-occupied globe from existence (and were able to survive that level of destruction).
Then again, given the way the Kaioshin were describing what Goku and Beerus' clashes would do, it seems like they wouldn't so much destroy the globe itself, but rather everything within it. I remember Old Kaioshin mentioning the universe becoming an "empty void" or something to that effect. Which would mean that we're still not necessarily even at "Globe Busting".
.Then we have a beam struggle threatening to destroy everything only for it to be nullified by Beerus who reveals later he wasn't even using his full power.
