Michsi wrote:
How can you tell? Goku is the MC, immensely popular and a cultural icon. He will always get the lion's of everything, because he has to. If I were the writer, I'd do the same thing even if I didn't care about the character that much in general.
And I'm not baffled at Toriyama supposedly not caring about Piccolo anymore, I was baffled at the story idea behind his elimination being so poor in general. As I said even back then, I didn't mind him getting eliminated, it's how they chose to do it that was so mindboggling. Everyone jumped at the writer being new and inexperienced (it was not a good episode overall) but if turns out the idea belonged to Toriyama himself, then that's bad.
Oh and Toriyama has been claiming Piccolo is his favorite character since forever, but that never resulted in anything substantial for the big guy, so Toriyama caring/not caring is probably not an issue when he comes up with ideas
Toriyama had no issue Goku having 0 victories and Gohan defeating the villain in the Cell arc so no him being the protagonist does not mean he will get everything.
Of course that changed in the Buu saga by Goku preaching it to us that the new generation must solve the problems along with Gohan's power up having a lot of build up and foreshadowing only to ammount to nothing,and Goku coming back to solve the issues.
Point is Toriyama had enough freedom to do mostly what he wants,now he has even more freedom to do what he wants and in both cases he did not care enough to do much if anything with Piccolo,thats all there is to it.
And that was in the past just like Toriyama saying Tien was his favourite at one point.
TKA wrote:
How on Earth are these two sentences related? Characters don't have to have high power levels or be good at "the fitenz" to be written well. It's seriously a thing I only see in the dragonball fandom, where a character HAS to be fighting before people acknowledge that they're good characters. Toriyama put Piccolo into a position we'd never seen the character before and added extra layers to him. That's good writing.
I love power levels and think they're absolutely necessary for the story to work, but Christ, there's more to dragonball (AND WRITING IN GENERAL) than "who can beat who".
Did i ever say that a character needed to be strong to be written well?No,then don't put words in my mouth.
Satan is a good example of a character not fighting,yet being written well,adding extra layers to him and still be usefull in the Buu arc,Piccolo is not.
The buu arc did nothing for Piccolo character wise(even in super babysitting Pan did more for him),nor was Piccolo usefull in that arc.
He spent the whole arc being Gotenk's straight man and babysitter(wow so many extra layers added to him) and everything remotely usefull Piccolo did was undone by the narrative.
In the end of the day Piccolo in the Buu arc ended up as a useless babysitter,got absorbed and got killed because the 3 kids he took care of screwed up that badly.
I guess you are right that this kind of role was kind of new position for Piccolo in the Buu arc,now its his default position.
I think the last time he was asked that question was in a BOG interview (or even after that) That seems fairly recent, but I don't know what you mean when you say "past".
