It's also worth keeping in mind that the poll was made only among Japanese fans, and their opinions are pretty different from the west in certain stuff, like how Gotenks in the west is seen as obnoxious more while there he's a fan favorite, Boo isn't as liked in the west, Cell is liked more in the west, stuff like that.capsulecorp wrote: Tue May 03, 2022 3:27 pm Let me say from the start, I don't like Cell, I think his story is the low point of DBZ by quite a bit. He's boring and very... "nothing". His personality is that he's arrogant. Yawn! So, this isn't a "defense" of him.
HOWEVER, I think we need to take the poll that seems to suggest Goku Black and Zamasu are much more popular than Cell with a lot of salt. Frankly, I think it's misleading and wrong. For one thing, it's the result of a very small set of self-selected participants. It should be obvious why its unsafe to extrapolate from such a small set of people, but because people CHOOSE to participate in the survey its also not a representative group. This means that people who choose to take a popularity survey are outliers, they don't represent the wider audience of more casual Dragon Ball fans.
Given all that, we should think about this result and look for other sources to sanity check it. One good tool for this is Google Trends. This is a service provided by Google that lets you compare how frequently people search for various terms. This is also imperfect, of course, but it is a vastly larger sample set and it is much more representative. Is there any reason why a fan of Zamasu would be less likely to use Google than a fan of Cell? I can't think of one!
So, here's what we find:
It doesn't even look close! People are searching for Cell roughly 8 times as frequently as either Zamasu or Goku Black. This, to me, suggests that the results of the survey are deeply flawed. It also aligns with my intuition. DBZ is so much more established and beloved than DBS, it would be shocking if a new character somehow managed to eclipse an old favorite like Cell, wouldn't it?
EDIT: It's possible that the search term "Dragon Ball" + Cell is picking up other, unrelated results, since of course Cell is a word that's used in other contexts. For example, someone might search "Dragon Ball Prison Cell" or (incorrectly) "Dragon Ball animation cell". I'm not too concerned about this, given the dramatic gap between the results. Even if we throw away half of the results for Cell, you're still left with a 4 to 1 ratio in his favor.
I'm not invalidating the opinion of the Japanese fanbase, just that the poll is only looking at the opinion of one part of the fanbase, not overall.
So yeah, I'm not someone excited about Cell returning, but there would be hype among nostalgic fans if he did, that much is undeniable.
