Toriyama's situation is unique. He's clearly a bit jaded from how Toei handled adapting his works in the past when it comes to certain character portrayals, so he consciously made decisions in the manga to make Goku more outwardly selfish, but not overly ruining the character or experience, outside of some logic problems when he overplayed it, which, admittedly, was only a few times. In every other instance, Toriyama portrays Goku as a person who fights for what's right despite his want to have a good battle. Toei's writers, & even some segments of the fandom who don't know how to properly judge the material & are afraid to criticize Toriyama as a result, meanwhile, over inflate Goku's selfishness to an absurd degree as well as his stupidity.It_Is_Ayna_You_Flips wrote: ↑Wed Jan 15, 2020 2:05 pm I haven't watched enough One Piece to really comment on whether Goku has (ironically) become a Luffy clones but I absolutely do agree that people get way too hung up on original intention. As absurd as this is going to sound, writers are the last people you should ask about their characters. They have way too intimate a relationship with them and it colors their vision. It's almost like describing a close family member to a stranger. You can describe pretty reliably what your family member would do/say but the way you describe them probably wouldn't be all that objective. Take, for example, the queen of mystery stories, Agatha Christie and her creation Hercule Poirot. If asked, Christie would consistently describe Poirot as a self-important fop not half as smart as he thinks he is and who's way too interested in his own fame. But when it came time to write him, Christie always depicted the same good natured, if vain, relentless detective clearly motivated by a strong belief in justice.
Maybe this is me giving Toriyama too much credit but that feels like the situation with Goku.
The stupidity angle, as well as this "bad father" shit, I partially blame on Team Four Star. I love DBZ Abridged & TFS as people, but their carrying on for years with those interpretations of the characters have unfortunately colored them in different lights for some people than intended & they've only more recently started to amend those, to the point where, when they showed Goku looking over Chichi & Gohan in that last short, it came off as jarring to some people as opposed to heartwarming like was intended. The worst argument against its inclusion was people pointing out how, in Z, Goku didn't know who Goten was or checked in with them over the 7 years he was gone. Yes, as if TFS doesn't introduce new things into the material that weren't there in the original version before all the fucking time. The only reason you bring it up now is because it goes against your preconceived notions of how TFS view the show, as well as how they adapt it, & how you people wrongly interpret the material in the original Z, so you don't like it. Fucking idiots. But, yeah, them tearing Goku down for the longest time with their version of him (even then, Goku's only a bad dad from Gohan's perspective, since Gohan has a lot of misplaced anger aimed at him in Abridged), as well as propping up Piccolo as a better father (which is, frankly, absurd, given Piccolo's actual characterization & place in the story) have really impacted fan interpretations of the original material, even though they're a PARODY, not the original material, which Kaiser is always quick to say himself. They're not meant to be the official version of it.
As for the Luffy comparisons, he's not 1:1 Luffy. He's still got enough traits to be recognizable as Goku, it's just that others are inflated to absurd degrees to make him more like Luffy. I'm just saying that the Toei writers have been writing Luffy for 2 decades now, so that's no surprise. DB literally ended & gave way for One Piece to take its spot as the most popular manga & anime series in Japan, so it's not surprising that they'd be more familiar with the tamplate of Luffy than Goku.
