Is It Good Storytelling that Trunks Killing Freeza...

[NeoKING]

Caused everything in the arc to go wrong? Literally the entire Future Trunks arc is because he needlessly killed Freeza 3 hours before Freeza was destined to die in addition to meeting the others. And the kicker is that Trunks explicitly mentions this once he meets Goku. The reason for the Heart Virus infecting Goku earlier, Androids 17 & 18 being different from the ones of the future, in addition to 16, Cell, and everything else is because of Trunks.

Would you consider this good story-telling?

[Doctor.]

I believe it was Trunks coming back in time that affected things, not him killing Freeza. Things were screwed up before then.

[ekrolo2]

The only thing that Trunks messed up in his first visiting is thinking Goku & co would do the sensible thing and just kill Gero before the Androids can become a thing. Hell, you could even say his mistake is not simply taking matters into his own hands, using the DBs to kill Gero, have his mom look at the data he had to make a kill switch then go back in time to save the future all on his own.

The Cell arc is a mess. There's barely anything in its execution I'd call good story-telling and this is a good example of that, a character who's usually portrayed as pragmatic doing.... shit like this.

[Cetra]

Cell arriving caused the Time Split. He was here before Trunks even arrived.

[sintzu]

I think Cell arriving before him is what messed everything up but him arriving as well probably made everything worse.

[Kamiccolo9]

Cell arriving caused the Time Split. He was here before Trunks even arrived.

Yeah, but Cell only arrived prior to Trunks' arrival because Trunks was returning to tell Goku and co. of his success. In the timeline Cell came from, Trunks had already gone back in time before.

[B]

I'm going to paraphrase another user, I believe it to be the long-gone Dayspring, who noted that the very fact Trunks made any time travel attempts at all irrevocably changed the future. The very fact he's standing in a spot where he's not supposed to be standing, and that dust that was supposed to just fly around some rocks are now hitting his body, is more than enough change to result in any number of alternate events.

He kind of had to kill Freeza. He needed a clear example of his power so that when he claims to be Saiyan it won't immediately seem like a lie, and killing an enemy helps establish that he is ostensibly on their side. It was all the proof he could muster in order to gain credibility. For all of the Cell arc's follies, I wouldn't consider that one of them. It's a clear example of Trunks being tactical. He pretty much always is; it's Goku, Vegeta, and Gohan who keep fucking things up for everybody.

But that's just in-universe. There are partial Mary Sue-esque problems with introducing a new character out of nowhere and allowing him to kill the previously-believed-to-be-unbeatable villain, but everything I just said more or less justifies Trunks's actions. Without the gift of hindsight and how the story shakes up from there, I think Toriyama earned the benefit of the doubt from the audience, and allowing the events to unfold before writing everything off was needed.

Also, it's true Dragon Ball fashion to subvert everything. The expected result after a battle like the one on Namek is that Goku's final blast killed Freeza, and that his last moments were him making an embarrassing expression. But that's the same way most shonen do it. You could argue King Piccolo's death-by-final-punch is very straightforward(albeit infused with Toriyama's unique sensibilities). I wouldn't say there's one right or wrong way to do it, but I don't think most kids reading the manga would have assumed Freeza survived Goku's blast plus the exploding planet. And really, that's where Toriyama's genius lack of concern or forethought comes in; he probably thought he really was drawing Freeza's final scenes on Namek. The reveal of Mecha Freeza manages to feel organic because it was organic; not even the author knew he was gonna do that! It's very thematic, in the sense that DB doesn't really have a lot of themes, to ignore what came before.

[Snow_Lilies]

Cell arriving caused the Time Split. He was here before Trunks even arrived.

Yeah, but Cell only arrived prior to Trunks' arrival because Trunks was returning to tell Goku and co. of his success. In the timeline Cell came from, Trunks had already gone back in time before.

Oh boy, strap yourselves in. We're going to work backwards a bit on this one.

So that Cell killed his timeline's version of Trunks (who I'll call C-Trunks, for Cell's Trunks) which I believe is a different Trunks than the one we saw (who I'll call F-Trunks, for whom we usually refer to as Future Trunks or Mirai Trunks). The reason Cell needed to use the Time Machine was because C-Trunks had managed to destroy the Androids in that timeline. This is explicitly stated.

Now a lot of us take it a step further and infer some events from there (though you could make several branches of arguments).

So C-Trunks was killed by Cell when Cell wanted to take the time machine. If you make the assumption that Cell was stronger than C-Trunks (which seems like the obvious road to go), then C-Trunks may or may not have been strong enough to have defeated the Androids head on. However, we do know that schematics for a remote to shut them off exists. And so from here we assume that C-Trunks had gone back in time, gotten a remote made, returned to his time, shut off the Androids, destroyed them, and was killed by Cell. Obviously this couldn't have been the Main Timeline that he went to: 1) The events had not been set in motion yet and 2) Krillin ultimately destroys that remote. It would've had to have been a different past (Not the Main Timeline, not F-Trunk's Timeline, not Cell's Timeline).

On the other hand, if you think C-Trunks was able to defeat the Androids head on, you could reasonably make the argument that perhaps he'd just been blindsided by Cell (though keep in mind that X > Androids does not necessarily equate to X also being > than Cell; we saw him achieve great gains just by absorbing humans). F-Trunks is tipped off that a version of himself (C-Trunks) was killed by Cell in another and him being not only prepared physically, but also being aware that Cell is a danger and a threat back home, is able to keep his guard up and deal with Cell properly, bringing things around to a nice full circle.

Of course this also assumes that the F-Trunks that killed Freeza and the one that reappears after No. 19 is defeated are one in the same. I believe if you presume they might be different you can make arguments for there either being 3 timelines (or 5!), but it's been a few years since I last drew this out on a whiteboard. I'm going from memory.


To sum up, ignoring the very real possibility that there could've been an infinite number of Trunks and that all of these events may have happened simultaneously across time and space...

- C-Trunks goes back to Unnamed Past Timeline > (things could play out similarly-ish to Main Timeline, we may not know) > Gets remote made and brings it back to Cell's Timeline.
- C-Trunks uses the remote to destroy the Androids > C-Trunks is killed by Cell > Cell takes the Time Machine to the Main Timeline (to one year before F-Trunks appears in the Main Timeline).
- F-Trunks shows up and kills Freeza > Main Timeline events take place (basically what we see on screen) > Cell reaches Perfect Form and is defeated by SSJ2 Gohan.
- F-Trunks returns to his Future Timeline > He defeats both No. 17 and 18 with ease (thanks to his RoSaT training no doubt) > F-Trunks kills F-Cell.

Again, ignoring very possibly real time/space physics, from a narrative standpoint, C-Trunks seems to be the one that sets things in motion, NOT F-Trunks. Now how Cell and F-Trunks managed to both make it into the Main Timeline, who knows? Maybe at that point, for every timeline that had an Android takeover there was a Trunks that went back to make a new timeline. But then things get weird because the Future Timeline didn't have its own Trunks appear (or did it? =O DUN DUN DUUUUNNN!) So I personally stick to the narrative ruleset.

I believe this line of reasoning is in conflict with a semi-official(?) timeline that was put out recently, but it's what I came to when I drew this out two years back. I'd like to see both/either improved upon. Feel free to tear this analysis down or question it. I find assembling these things fascinating. At the end of the day, we'll probably have to throw up our hands at some contradiction as Dragon Ball most likely wasn't meant to be scrutinized this closely. I still find this a fun arc though. It's one of my favorites.