Piccolo Daimaoh wrote:I guess for these people Super tarnishes the legacy --- which is a perfectly valid discussion to have now or when it finishes (hopefully soon). I've seen roughly 30 seconds of Super, but I sympathize as Super (I'm told) seems to be going off in another direction where GT mostly played it safe by recycling plot points etc. But that shouldn't ruin your enjoyment of the classic shit.
I'd say its the exact reverse: GT, for all its many (well established) faults and problems, took an INSANE number of risks with the series. It immediately established a distinctive stylistic identity that was as much a radical departure from what came before as it was sort of building off of and branching out from a few of the older and more wilder tangents that Toriyama went on with the series earlier (space travel to other planets and whatnot). There were certainly recycled elements for sure without question, but overall more times than not GT was hellbent on carving out its own distinct niche from the rest of the series before it; which in and of itself is beyond admirable regardless of one's problems with its specific execution (and many people of course have them, justifiably so).
Super on the other hand is the EPITOME of playing it uber safe, a constant recycling of the series "greatest hits" moments and beats that in the greater scheme amounts to it basically spinning its wheels and stagnating the series in a miasma of pointlessness. There's certainly a bunch of cool little details and solid general concepts/characters with (mostly yet untapped) potential to like here and there (albeit mainly only if you're a stupidly obsessed fan, as most anyone here on this forum likely is, myself included)... but really about one of the only few genuinely new territories it has the series go into is to at times much more aggressively pander shamelessly to a more relatively recent crop of "slice of life" anime fandom (that were once only a VERY tiny niche of the anime fan landscape during DB's original run but who in the years since have now come to make up a much more significant chunk of today's mainstream fandom) who generally don't give two shits about even the most shallow pretense of theme, plot, character, progression, exploration, visceral thrills, etc. instead only wanting to wallow in insipid sitcom hijinks with anime characters as their stand ins and rough equivalents for youtube cats playing with balls of string.
In comparison to Super's shamelessly obvious nostalgia pandering, GT's by far and away the more ambitious and noble failure.
Insofar as the main topic here goes: Dragon Ball's trajectory from
"Disposable Journey to the West Spoof" to
"Loopy Gag Manga Author's Quasi-Serious Magnum Opus That Covers and Crams in as Many Classic and Contemporary Wuxia Themes and Tropes as Humanly Possible Until it Almost Breaks the Manga Itself and the Author's Brain in the Process" is probably one of its single best and most defining features as a creative entity.
I think that the point of a thread like this is to try and remind the "hardcore serious superhero action!" type of fans to try and keep all this shit in its real and proper perspective: Dragon Ball was NEVER at any point ever intended to be the type of series that FUNimation back in the day used to aggressively advertise and market it as (and that skewed/false image they worked so hard to cultivate for DB in America STILL persists in many corners of fandom to this very day and leads to about 80% or so of most of the worst arguments that we still have). Its actual roots are far more whimsical, fairy tale-esque, and, moreover, culturally distinctive than that.
http://80s90sdragonballart.tumblr.com/
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.
) for one's enjoyment! A lot of folk on the internet seem to have a hard time ignoring things and would rather something flop or get cancelled which I really do find infuriating sometimes.
