Aspects of Dragonball Fandom that Piss You Off

[Super Sonic]

While I agree with most of the above post... "Japanophile" is pretty much an elitist term that dubbies use on fans of Japanese material. So as always, we come full circle.

Didn't mean to come across as that. I meant I've come across people who go a little too extreme.

[Adamant]

There are certainly people out there who are overly obsessed with Japan, that's true, but when it comes to people who want to watch anime in Japanese, most people just want to watch the original version rather than a (often not horribly accurate) dub. Unless they hunt down Japanese dubbed episodes of, say, The Simpsons, they can hardly be called Japanophiles.
Wanting to experience something the way the creators intended it to be watched shoul be commended, not criticized.

[Vekurotto]

Wanting to experience something the way the creators intended it to be watched shoul be commended, not criticized.

And a lot of the people who criticize others for trying to watch anime in Japanese wouldn't want to watch something where the original language was English in Spanish or French either. I mean I know I wouldn't want to watch Fresh Prince or 24 in French that'd be wrong.

I really don't ever see the point for the name calling either unless you want to come off as an arrogant jackass. To me it's sorta along the same lines as saying,

"Well yeah it is because I say so (sticks tongue out and covers ears)"

[Nikkolas]

I don't like the people who diss my poor Pan....

Of course I'm pretty sure a lot of DB fans like at least one character who a lot of people don't like and bash.

[Rocketman]

I mean I know I wouldn't want to watch Fresh Prince or 24 in French that'd be wrong.

Well, if I only spoke French...

[desirecampbell]

I mean I know I wouldn't want to watch Fresh Prince or 24 in French that'd be wrong.

Well, if I only spoke French...

The you'd be missing a lot of the original intent of the dialogue. Even if the show was adapted faithfully but good actors - you're still missing something.

[Rocketman]

The you'd be missing a lot of the original intent of the dialogue. Even if the show was adapted faithfully but good actors - you're still missing something.

Is that something worth the time and effort spent learning a new language to the point I could grasp it? I doubt so.

[desirecampbell]

The you'd be missing a lot of the original intent of the dialogue. Even if the show was adapted faithfully but good actors - you're still missing something.

Is that something worth the time and effort spent learning a new language to the point I could grasp it? I doubt so.

*COUGH*COUGH*subtitles*COUGH*

[sailorspazz]

Unless they hunt down Japanese dubbed episodes of, say, The Simpsons, they can hardly be called Japanophiles.

You know, I'd probably like to see that just to see how the hell they translate everything....apparently The Simpsons is somewhat popular over there (I saw a ranking of top selling DVDs in Japan on Anime News Network recently, and one of The Simpsons season boxsets broke the top 10). Then again, I guess I probably could safely be classified as a Japanophile

Err, what was this topic again? Aspects of fandom that piss me off? Eh, I guess any sort of Power Level/"Who was stronger than who" discussion tends to make me roll my eyes. The level of analysis gets ridiculous sometimes, and they often end with two different people yelling the same facts over and over trying to prove that their proof is more credible. Timeline discussions can also turn out this way (and they tend to give me a headache just reading them )

This just came up in another thread I was reading: people quoting the mythical source of "an interview with Akira Toriyama" without any source of where such an interview came from. How many times over the years have I heard claims such as, Toriyama-sensei hates Vegeta because he said so in an interview, yet I have never been able to find any interview with him stating that fact? Since it sounds so authoritative, people tend to believe these claims much more easily, which leads to the spread of more misinformation.....

Which brings me to another pet peeve: Fan made terms/facts that have been spreading around the Internet for over a decade and will never, ever go away. I'm talking about things like 'Mystic' Gohan, 'Ultra' Super Saiyan, and GT occurring ten years after Z (it's five years, OK? The damn informational book about GT says so). Some website starts using fan-made terms, they spread to the fans who visit the websites, those fans use the terms with other fans, and the cycle never ends. I don't see so many fan-made terms on these forums as much anymore, but they're still very prolific....

Finally, people who think screaming, "Over 9000!!!!11oneoneROFLcopter" makes them a Dragonball fan.

[Rocketman]

I'm talking about things like 'Mystic' Gohan, 'Ultra' Super Saiyan, and GT occurring ten years after Z (it's five years, OK? The damn informational book about GT says so).

I don't see the problem with Mystic Gohan or Ultra Super Saiyan. The last point is just outright wrong and should be corrected, but what's the beef with the fan names?

*COUGH*COUGH*subtitles*COUGH*

And if English grated on my ears?

[desirecampbell]

*COUGH*COUGH*subtitles*COUGH*

And if English grated on my ears?

How can a language itself annoy you? Are you seriously just making excuses? It's fine if you don't want to watch a foreign film/television show - but it's not difficult to understand that when something is translated to another language, something in the dialogue is lost. That's why I make it a point to watch everything as close to the author's intent as possible.

Hell, if you rather look at the Mona Lisa tattooed on a fat guy, that's fine too - you just might miss some of the finer points of the piece.

[Adamant]

You know, I'd probably like to see that just to see how the hell they translate everything....apparently The Simpsons is somewhat popular over there (I saw a ranking of top selling DVDs in Japan on Anime News Network recently, and one of The Simpsons season boxsets broke the top 10). Then again, I guess I probably could safely be classified as a Japanophile

Well, I didn't mean "wanting to watch something out of curiosity" (I've watched a couple episodes of Mexican DBZ despite not knowing more than about 10 words of Spanish because I wanted to see what it was like, as well as quite a few dubs of the Lion King (including the Japanese one, which was fairly blah. The German one is awesome, though. Still, none of them can stand up to the English original)), rather "wanting to watch it in Japanese because it's Japanese and thus better than the original".

Fan made terms/facts that have been spreading around the Internet for over a decade and will never, ever go away. I'm talking about things like 'Mystic' Gohan, 'Ultra' Super Saiyan

I'm pretty sure "Ultra-Saiyajin" originates from the German translation (which was sadly the basis for far too many other adaptions of the series, grr).
To add to the confusion, the term is used both for the form Vegeta and Trunks were in during their battle with Cell where #18 was absorbed (ie "USSJ") AND for what was later to be known as SSJ2. SSJ3 is called "Mega-Saiyajin".

[sailorspazz]

I don't see the problem with Mystic Gohan or Ultra Super Saiyan. The last point is just outright wrong and should be corrected, but what's the beef with the fan names?

I don't know, maybe it's just that many people use them as official and believe that they are official. 'Mystic' Gohan doesn't even make sense; he didn't receive some spiritual awakening or anything, he just got a power up. While there doesn't seem to be a clear official Japanese term for Gohan after his powerup, I've seen "Ultimate Gohan" and "Saikyou no Gohan" (Mightiest Gohan) used, and I'd prefer one of those to one that doesn't make sense.

And 'Ultra' does have an official equivalent with the distinctions of "dai ni dankai" and so on for Super Saiyan, which can easily be translated as "stage two" or "level two". Granted, throwing in the number might cause people to mistake them as being Super Saiyan 2, but the context of conversation should usually make it clear which one a person is referring to.

[Kikoha Hater]

What angers me is when people bring up the “Toriyama wanted to DBZ at Freeza” with no evidence and when someone brings them into question they can offer up nothing substantive but a bunch of theories and nothing tangible, and is not just here but everywhere else as well. And I’m not a huge fan of the “OVER NINE THOUSAND”, what the hell is so funny about it anyway.

[Rocketman]

How can a language itself annoy you? Are you seriously just making excuses?

No, I'm really not. The Japanese language just irritates me. I dunno why.

It's fine if you don't want to watch a foreign film/television show - but it's not difficult to understand that when something is translated to another language, something in the dialogue is lost. That's why I make it a point to watch everything as close to the author's intent as possible.

Quite true, which is part of the reason I like Daizex so much, since you guys can clear up any dubbed misunderstandings I have on anime topics... But wouldn't reading the manga be closer to the author's intent than any language version of the anime?

[desirecampbell]

Quite true, which is part of the reason I like Daizex so much, since you guys can clear up any dubbed misunderstandings I have on anime topics... But wouldn't reading the manga be closer to the author's intent than any language version of the anime?

If it was translated properly - which for the most part it is, but, you know, Vegerot and all that. (Plus the censorship, and the odd phrasings).

[MajinVejitaXV]

Ignorance. That's the main thing that annoys me. Ignorance, especially of the willful variety. Every single problem with DragonBall in it's North American incarnation can be traced to ignorance.

Hell, I remember back when FUNimation was a fledgling company that people felt some obligation to support because they were fighting against the big guns like Pioneer and ADV and so on...and now today, they're possibly the most popular, profitable company in the anime realm and people still feel this need to coddle them.

I can pick any number of things that might piss people off, and have. Cover art, episode counts, shitty filtering, bitrates that make VHS look good, cropping...but really, it's the fandom that pisses people off the most. Most of the negative stigma that comes from DragonBall is because of the fans themselves.

The thing that pisses me off most about the fandom is its current inability to demand a proper U.S. release of the series.

Example one. This is absolutely the truth. No other series I can think of within reason has been so poorly released and still so successful. Evangelion? Sure, ADV milked it...but each release had something new. VHS, DVD, Platinum, Platinum thinpak, etc...all were complete and offered something, if only shallow and targeted for some niche. Moreover, when Gainax remastered EVA...ADV bought the masters instead of doing some hacked up "remaster" of their own.

It's insulting.

The current contentment among fans with a mediocre product really bothers me; it's as if they don't actually care enough about the series to really want nor expect a better treatment for it.

This can be said of DragonBall and a number of other things. People have a certain sense of apathy these days about everything. Healthcare, polotics, the economy, all the way down to entertainment like this show. If people raised hell, or in this case even protested via something as simple as not buying, things might change.

Well, my curiosity ultimately led me here, where I stumbled upon a thread in which Corey was discussing the edits made, what FUNimation was saying vs. what they were actually doing, and putting up comparative screencaps so anyone could plainly see what was going on. I was very impressed, not only with the quality of this work, but that there were still even Dragon Ball fans out there, and that they weren't taking any shit.

And, in all honesty, I was happy to do it. I too had wanted to see DragonBall Z finally get the treatment it deserved, and to see FUNimation act like a completely amateur company and drop the ball in such a massive way (as well as lie blatantly about it, my main gripe) pissed me off. I thought that, by giving the facts and representing them in an easy to digest manner, the problem would remedy itself.

The end result, being the complete opposite, was nothing short of amazing to me. Maybe I set my standards too high, who knows?

Of course, one could never tell this from the description, touting its "film master" scan source, accurate colors, frame-by-frame restoration process, 1080p HD, and more visible screen area… irony at its best, in lieu of the fact that not ONE of these things actually turned out to be true—the film was not a master copy and actually damaged in some areas; the colors, although not as washed out as in previous releases, were still way off from the original; the restoration was completely automated and resulted in what otherwise would have been completely-avoidable detail loss; it wasn't HD at all and actually had a 2.25× smaller resolution than advertised; and although there was a slight gain in screen area on the left and right, the top and bottom were both cut rendering 25% of the original, previously-present picture missing!

Truth by omission, in many cases.

FUNimation claimed they used an "original Japanese film master" and indeed they did...it's just that, unlike the DragonBoxes which used the generation zero print and even then proceeded to do careful remastering, this was something along the lines of a fifth generation print with noticeable damage run on auto-pilot.

The colors...well, that's complete bullshit.

Restoration...well, it was frame-by-frame...just completed by which is admittedly a fancy piece of equipment being run by someone whose previous work was limited to commercials primarily. Anyone who has worked with digital video, even then, will tell you that animation is completely different from live action footage.

1080p. The key word there was that the footage was telecined in HD, FUNimation never said the DVD's were 1080p themselves (though that was the common belief among those who didn't know the technological limitations of DVD).

And the cropping has been discussed to death. It's obviously asinine to say that this widescreen presentation affords more footage while mocking the lost areas as insignificant, since not only is the content less ("OMG HAY ROCK! HAY CLOUD!...wait, where the fuck did Chaotzu's face go??") but the percentage itself still equates to a net loss.

Still, as you said:

"Well, it's cheap."

And that's the final line. No one really cares about anything else, so long as this applies. It happens everywhere, not just with DragonBall.

The sad part? This whole debacle has turning fans against eachother. We all like the same show, but people so desperate to both defend and attack these sets has caused a massive rift. I'm as guilty as anyone (though I do like to think that I remained somewhat on-base with facts to back up my opinions), but seriously...the bullshit people came up with is amazing to me. All born of pure ignorance.

Yeah, I own the DragonBoxes. Big deal. I didn't come into every thread going, "Woo, look what I bought." I came to say, "Here's what I think, and here's something to support that theory." Still, this was almost always taken as offensive by someone which boggles the hell out of me (I'm reminded about the Eddie Izzard joke where the guy is being beaten to death for knowing the word "transvestite" and winning with it in Scrabble).

I like the series. I like talking about the series. I like knowing things about the series, the same way I know things about cars, firearms, video games, movies and music. It's called a hobby, it's allowed. However, knowledge seems to be the devil these days in the community.

In any case, like I said in the beginning, it's nothing new. This is a different chapter with the same overarching theme. In 2000, it was poor QC, erratic schedules and price. Today, it's...everything else.

In closing:

The Japanese language just irritates me. I dunno why.

Listen to the fucking hot dog. Just...listen to him.

-Corey

P.S. - CRY FULL ZA MOON!!!!

[Kikoha Hater]

You should defiantly start a page or a petition for the Dragon Box footage exposing the crappy quality of the season sets, I’ll be happy to participate. I’ll pawn in every funimation season box and singles that I begrudgingly bought for them. But no their cheap and realistically funimation is never going to do a proper release so we should all just give up and lower our heads. Come on you guys a little cropping here and their, bright colors that rivals the solor flare, some disappearing lines, and a few sperm stains, it's not that bad.

[VegettoEX]

Let's remember that this is not a Dragon Box thread, a FUNimation season set thread, etc. Thanks!

[JulieYBM]

Dubbies that make me--a 'dubbie'--look bad. It's one thing to dislike the Japanese score and cast but to insult them or claim that the English version is better is pretty stupid, if I do say so myself.