If Saiyan tails were kept, would the narrative have been more cohesive?

[Yuli Ban]

If Toei charged me with rewriting Dragon Ball, I'd tell them to stop being idiots if they don't want the franchise to be ruined, but I suppose the one thing I'd feel most comfortable about changing is "never take away Saiyan tails." They can be removed, but they must always grow back.

Personally, I would have kept Saiyans' tails. What's more, I would have increased their importance to the narrative. One of the biggest flaws in Dragon Ball is that the Saiyans are overpowered. Another of the biggest flaws is that there are no weaknesses anymore, which is the root cause of runaway power escalation. The main difference between Saiyans and the other races is that Saiyans have many transformations— I don't think Toei will stop adding more Saiyan transformations until Goku literally has 71 of them. Hell, we just got Super Saiyan: Berserk in Heroes (which clashes with 'Super Saiyan Berserker', the fan-name for Kale's LSS state) as a corrupted/dark Super Saiyan 2. So clearly there's a lot more they can draw out.

And I wouldn't feel so terrible about a race with no weaknesses. It's just that, from a storytelling perspective, it's probably not a good idea to make that the protagonist's race. If Freeza's race were invincible, that'd be one thing and it'd make it that much more epic when Goku defeats him and Cooler.
The thing is, Saiyans weren't always without weaknesses. In fact, they used to wear their biggest weakness around their waists before Toriyama got rid of them.

Once Vegeta chops off Gohan’s tail, that’s the last we see of them until Dragon Ball GT. It’s said that tails are a recessive trait, which is why Goten, Trunks, Bra, and Pan lack tails. Except why didn’t Goku, Gohan, and Vegeta’s tails grow back? My personal headcanon is that they continuously grow back in times of peace, but they’re immediately cut off so that the Saiyans don’t transform into giant hulking monkeys (and at this point, 'canon' is so fluid and changing that it's pointless to try to point to any one thing and say "this is the truth" except if you go strictly by the original run of the manga and nothing else, which is lame).

What’s more, Saiyan tails were a source of strength and weakness. That’s what I loved about Dragon Ball and the Raditz part of the Saiyan Invasion arc— Saiyans were not totally invincible. If you could grip a Saiyan’s tail, they’d be incapacitated. Only elites like Nappa and Vegeta could resist this. It was a Saiyan kryptonite. It meant Goku had to be careful because even utter weaklings could incapacitate him— sometimes by accident. If he wanted to overcome this weakness, he couldn’t be too careless in battle. And it also limited what he could do in life because he couldn’t stare at a full moon. In a manner, it would give real purpose behind making him an 'other' in society besides his already alien morality.

It set up an arc where he didn’t know he was the one who killed his grandfather. Considering that Grandpa Gohan was the only human he genuinely seems to love in a way humans can actually understand as "love", the idea that he was the monster who killed him would have destroyed him if the realization didn’t come at such a high-stakes moment. It’s probably the only thing that would have ever made Goku brood, and it’s tied to his tail. He never figured out why people kept taking his tail off until he was an adult, especially since doing so seemed to make him weaker.

There’s more that could have been done with them too— what if you could only become Super Saiyan with a tail? If Goku ever lost his tail, he’d not be able to transform. It’s something that would make Gohan’s ultimate form more impressive and gives Goku proper reason to not simply go without it. And grabbing a tail is like an instant Super Saiyan off-switch— one Vegeta does not have, making him more of a viable threat to Goku because this one weakness, this one area where Vegeta is indisputably superior to Goku, requires true talent on part of Goku to overcome. It can add stakes if their tails suffer some sort of injury— with them, they'd have access to a Saiyan's true full and limitless power, but if you take off their tail or even do something sadistic like tie it into a knot, then even a child could defeat a Super Saiyan. Perhaps Goku could learn to withstand squeezing his tail, which could tie into his endless training, but cutting it off will always yield the same result. Without it, Goku and the others would still be mindnumbingly strong, but they'd also still be within the reach of the humans and Namekians.

So there was a lot wrapped up in the Saiyan tail from a storytelling perspective. But they just went away with no explanation and I always felt the narrative suffered because of it. True, it's probably not a good idea to expect narrative cohesion from the martial arts equivalent of Monty Python and the Holy Grail; I just wonder if there's some aspect of the series that would have been drastically improved if this one element were kept in.


TLDR: See title.

[Akira]

Goku no longer had the tail weakness, he specifically trained it after his grandfather pointed it out to him at Baba's arena. When he and Krillin fought at the 22nd World Tournament, Krillin tried to grab Goku's tail, to no avail, as it was no longer his weak point. He'd spent three years training it to be as tough as the rest of his body. So really, even if Goku still had his tail by the time of the Z series, it would not have been a detriment to him. Both he and Vegeta were not phased by it being grabbed.

[OhHiRenan]

I don’t think the tails sticking around would have made the story anymore cohesive than it already is. They were phased out at the right time. The Saiyan arc used them to their fullest extent, there was really nowhere else to go with tails.