Post
by Rozay » Tue May 09, 2017 6:45 pm
I share my sentiments with a lot of you guys: bringing Freeza again is not THAT creative but can be done well if executed right, I really like the thought of a true villain (not a rehabbed villain) being on the team as it is a Universe Survival thing, but Buu getting replaced was really shitty, especially with the repetitive excuse.
All of this does, I think, is to provide us with a real telling of what Toriyama's work looks like when his direction is mostly unfiltered. Maybe this is not a popular opinion, but everyone knows that in the days of DBZ, Toriyama's ideas and direction were constantly checked by his editors. Now, Dragon Ball was never a pantheon of logic, but when he had to come up with a solution to that, things generally went well. On Super though it seems that the general plot is his alone, and they (or Toyotaro in the manga) fill the blanks as needed. Seems like some of those blanks are being barely filled by Toei, right? But I don't know that we can blame 'em if the plot they receive was literally "Buu gets replaced by Freeza because he's asleep again".
Of course we don't know that, at least not until we see if that deviates in Toyotaro's version. And I would never really defend Toei. Toriyama, though, admits he likes to surprise people, that he may very well go against popular opinion just because, and that he places his emphasis in excitement and drama over a well thought-out, logically thread story. If we think about it, there has been MANY times when general discussion about Dragon Ball got a spike because of a storyline twist or overall decision that seemed out of left field, and most times, had little to no satisfying explanation. Hell, last arc was full of those. The trend to me feels like classic Toriyama. And he accomplished what he set out to do, this Freeza-for-Boo thing got people going again, same as the Goku Black reveal, all the time travel theories, Trunks' power, Female Broly, etc.
I'm not defending anyone, not Toriyama, nor Toei. I just wrote this to point out that they know what they're doing, because they (and especially Toriyama) seem to routinely get the results they want. It's just that they don't particularly care about some things we care about, or they have a penchant for defying those, with no other reason than defiance. But to say that they're clueless and they're "ruining" Super is misguided because the show's overall direction was like this from the start.