Cipher wrote: ↑Sat Mar 26, 2022 8:52 pm
The purpose of the mystery in the manga is that the reader has four-five chapters to wonder what’s going on—in line with similar points of light mystery in the original run during the Cell or Boo arcs. The wondering here is a bit more sustained though. The “evil Goku” reveal is the opening hook, and it gives you a little time to keep wondering about it, even though the mystery isn’t the focus of the arc. On that note, the point to start with for how long a blind reader is left to speculate isn’t Zamasu’s first appearance, but Black’s.
You also make it sound like the revealed bullet points happen immediately. There’s a
lot of stuff happening around them—literally a volume’s worth of content before everything is made clear.
By the time Kibito shows up with the final bits of news, it’s just the story confirming what it’s already slowly shown and implied up to that point. Even just timing it from Zamasu’s debut to the reveal, it’s well over 80 pages. It doesn’t feel too fast to me—just like it’s not wasting time.
It still feels rushed since Zamasu has no real reason to have gotten such an obsession with Goku when they never met, (And it becomes more ridiculous later on with the reveal that at least a mortal like Toppo can become a god of destruction), and everyone finds out he's Black before Goku even actually meets the guy, so the reaction is basically "This guy I never met stole my body?", and then they meet Black, say they know everything and Black's reaction is basically "Huh?".
The mystery itself is almost redundant to have happened because everything's revealed too fast, and the characters themselves don't care to the point that Goku's reaction to learning that Black killed his family once is "Oh, I guess that happened".
It'd probably be better if they didn't even bother as much with the mystery angle and revealed earlier that Zamasu is Black, 'cause the way the manga did it felt like a waste of time.
I feel like I’m left with a pretty clear impression of how he’s react in different situations despite his comparatively short page time. He’s full of himself when he has the upper hand, but quicker to doubts and strategic pragmatism than most DB villains. See his not trusting the situation when Trunks disappears in the Time Machine, his realizing that the past Kaioshins being onto their plan puts them in danger and requires a quick mopping up of Earth, and all his little pouty frowns throughout the arc when it seems like something’s gone wrong—against Vegeta in the rematch, when moralized to by Gowasu, etc. Even his tired frown when his parted Zamasu turns on him.
There’s quite a bit of efficient characterization for him packed into his small handful of appearances.
In general he's still just a bully who's gonna laugh and taunt when he's winning, and throw a tantrum when he's losing, which, most DB villains have done, but he lacks other things that at least made the previous villains have something compared to the others, Black feels more like a DB movie villain in blandness in his personality, though, his motivation on why he's doing what he's doing is his own at least.
Mr Baggins wrote: ↑Sat Mar 26, 2022 9:36 pm
In the manga, he's not much more than an extension of Zamasu; this technically "works" because zoning in on Zamasu plays more to the narrative and its themes than anime Black, but since I don't find Zamasu to be all that compelling on his own, I likewise don't feel particularly excited when Black shows up on re-read. He's more coherent while also less interesting. I do appreciate his origins making more sense than the anime and its absurd time loop, though.
Yeah, Future Zamasu feels more like a version of the Zamasu we saw in the present than Black himself, which's, really ironic.
Hell, the manga version of Black arc is a lot like Toyotaro's own AF before they fuse, with an evil Kaioshin helping out the explicitly stronger guy, and the guy having less of a personality and being more of a brute, though while I think manga Black is bland, he's not as bad as Xicor, at the very least.
Overall I slightly prefer the anime version of the Black arc, the slower pacing helped out in some scenes (Though a lot others were painful, 'cause Super's anime's pacing is ass), in particular, having Goku and Vegeta return to the present and finish the investigation on Zamasu, with Goku there, made it look like Goku and Zamasu would fight, and then Beerus prevents that from happening and kills Zamasu.
It's ultimately a matter of preference as there are pros and cons to both versions of him, and I say this as someone who vehemently dislikes the anime's Future Trunks arc overall. I only find it worth revisiting for Black's scenes in isolation because I think everything else is so poorly executed compared to the manga.
I find both versions to have started cool but really became disappointing in different ways, with anime Black being obnoxiously invincible to the point he might as well have pulled that scythe and the clones out of his ass, and the manga version just, not being interesting, at all, though for me, the manga has the better Future Zamasu, his anime version makes no sense lol.
Some of the issues in the arc happened because of incompetence from either Toei or Toyotaro, but other stuff like the ending having to rely on what's basically a deadly win button... Fuck that, I don't know what the hell Toriyama was thinking.