LoganForkHands73 wrote: ↑Mon Nov 01, 2021 11:50 amWhereas Luffy and the rest of his ilk covet friendship above all things, Goku's great defining moment in
Battle of Gods is expressing pure resentment for that kinda crap. Toriyama's work is never soppy and sentimental like that. That's partly why I love him, but the other manga writers that claim to want to be the Next Toriyama rarely seem to get that.
Most of the Western fanbase for Dragon Ball (particularly Western fans of
the original Japanese version no less) don't even seem to grasp this either.
Something I've long, LONG maintained for more than a decade now, but haven't had much space to really vocalize here publicly as much: I've long actually, on some level, have found a lot of Western sub fans' takes on the series (specifically since around the mid-aughts or so) to be sometimes more delusional and warped/askew from reality than that of even some of the most diehard FUNi loyalists.
By which I mean, at least the FUNimation version is an incarnation of Dragon Ball that actually EXISTS in some form or capacity in reality that can actively be consumed. It's godawful and cringe as all getout and its not even vaguely close to being in line with the original (or really, with almost ANY other translation of the series internationally: FUNimation have always been and remain an island unto themselves): but you can at the very least physically seek it out and consume it in objective reality.
When it comes to the warped "Battle Shonen Genre", One Piece-ified view of DB that so many Western fans of the subbed/Japanese version have embraced as "the true original" since around 2003/2004/2005-ish or so: its from top to bottom an almost ENTIRELY fictitious invention of the millennial Western anime fandom's collective consciousness in online/internet spaces.
SO MUCH of the stuff you've seen coming from the sub-centric areas of Western DB fandom as a means of "countering" the FUNimation/dub narrative - the "Shonen genre" thing, "One Piece is DB's spiritual successor", "DB is at its heart all about the Power of Friendship" etc. - is and has been almost ENTIRELY projected onto DB by Western millennial sub fans, based on literally
nothing at all whatsoever. Pulled from seemingly thin fucking air, a shitload of confirmation bias, and deductive reasoning from a place of complete, abject ignorance. Just an absolute figment of the online community's collective imaginations for the past 17 someodd years or so now.
The dub and FUNimation's entire "reversioned" image for this series - for all the shit I've said about it over the years (and still stand by every last word of) - is at least rooted in WAY more material reality relative to the on its face absurd, almost Care Bears-esque imagined picture painted of DB in a lot of corners of Western/English language sub fandom.
And as I've also always maintained: my view of that whole "Dragon Ball is the Power of Friendship" nonsense garbage has always been that a LOT of it was always from day one originally rooted in a misguided reflexive knee-jerk rebelling against and away from FUNimation's "Hardcore Xtreme!" schtick, but without ANY real working historical knowledge or any real sense of direction of where exactly to go from there on the part of so much of Western fandom.
I'm actually reminded now (randomly) about an old story Mike/VegettoEX used to tell back in the day about how his spelling of Goku's name had evolved over the years. As he told it, he for a long time used to use the spelling "Gokou" for literally no other reason than simply because it wasn't the spelling that FUNimation had used, almost purely to spite them. Despite the fact of course that Gokou is in NO way a grammatically correct spelling (despite it appearing on any number of Japanese sources throughout the 80s and 90s).
To me, the whole notion that "DB is embodied by One Piece and the Power of Friendship" is and always has been pretty much directly comparable to that story about Mike spelling Goku's name wrong for years just purely to spite FUNimation: its a mass, invented narrative that the Western sub fandom largely embraced out of sheer, unbridled spite against the ridiculously terrible and cringe image that FUNimation had worked overtime in branding onto DB in the U.S. and English language mainstream.
Never mind that its a view of Dragon Ball that's in NO WAY
remotely factually correct or based in any SHRED of not just historical evidence, but that's not even based in
the actual content of the series that we can all see/hear in goddamned front of us. All it had to be to gain traction amongst the sub fanbase was "the antithesis of FUNimation": and it happened to line up just perfectly with what was then the current belle of the ball New Hotness in Shonen, whose creator was/is a slobberingly adoring Toriyama fanboy who wouldn't shut up about DB to boot.
That's really all it took in the end to create a completely fabricated historical narrative viewpoint of DB's creative DNA that has lasted well up to this very day, more than 15 years later. Well, that and a membrane of suburban whitebread cultural & media insulation so thick, a fucking hollow point couldn't penetrate it.
But yeah, stuff like that is why I've continued to maintain the untold damage that FUNimation's marketing has done/continues to do to this series: without FUNimation's insanely relentless marketing push to make Dragon Ball into
exactly this type of shit, I sincerely don't even think we'd have gotten the whole "Power of Friendship" crap seemingly permanently embedded into the discourse surrounding the Japanese version, since its so plainly and objectively just
not at all present in the series in just about ANY version of it.
Obviously things like One Piece blowing up (and Oda not shutting up about how much he loves DB) played a hugely vial role as well: but I think moreover the primary motivating reason that people within English language DB circles glommed so hard onto the One Piece Spiritual Successor narrative and basically willed friendshippy maudlin sap into being a permanent part of the broader Japanese DB discourse was first and foremost sheer spite against FUNi's "hardcore xtreme" brand, and wanting
desperately for DB to be as FAR the exact opposite of something like that as anyone could conceivably get to: even if it was in no way at all reflective of the actual Japanese version's content anyhow.
Hence like I said: for all the shit that I give (and will continue to give) the dub, at least the dub's fanbase are rooted much closer to
a version of DB that actually exists in reality (shitty and ridiculous as it is) than does so much of a broad swath of the sub fanbase of the past 15 years, who basically resorted to imagining and fabricating total fan fictionized version of DB inside their heads about what it is creatively/genre-wise and treated THAT like it was a thing, rather than bothering to just.... take a few minutes to do some actual reading/research and expanding their areas of focus/interest a bit beyond the safety and comfort of the kinds of stuff that they mainlined as grade school kids.