Are these four main women in Dragon Ball really "just house wives"?

[dragonmagico]

Chichi sure there is no doubt that she is a traditional house wife through and through. But the others just don't feel like they really fit that mold. Android 18 for example, she won a good bit of cash off satan-san. Beyond that it looks like she wears the pants and has kurilin be her work horse. "You gotta take care of my financial needs to.keep me" vibes. Plus she'll gladly fight for money.


Bulma, she's part of the richest family on the planet. She spends her time tinkering with he hobbies of inventing and wishing to be thicc instead of working.

Videl is also rich AF, and instead of working she's giving her kid the one thing her dad's money could never buy her. A mom that is actually around.

[MasenkoHA]

This feels like an oversimplification that dismisses the issue people have with this franchise's handling of its female characters.


Videl gets all the personality and spunk sucked out of her to become Gohan's Leave it to Beaver Housewife. It's like Toriyama started out wanting Gohan to marry his mom then remembered that people didn't like Chi Chi (or realized a character like Chi Chi only works if she's playing off a Goku) and decided to just remove her personality entirely. Not helping that Videl's last significant fight was getting the shit beat out of her.


The bigger issue with Bulma as a wife and mother is her entire relationship with Vegeta is predicated on Toriyama wanting to give Vegeta a son from the future and remembered that Bulma had a vagina. Every now and again the fandom has discourse on why would Bulma get with a warlord responsible for mass genocide that was complicit in the murder of most of her friends and the answer really is just How else was Vegeta gonna have a kid from the future?


There' also the issue with how Bulma was handled in the early years but I don't think that's relevant here.


18 fares the best of the four by far but even then its a bit irritating when 18 stays home with Marron while Kuririn goes out to fight Freeza despite 18 being significantly stronger.

[JulieYBM]

If I had to really only put it into just a few words, the issue is that these female characters aren't really characters for themselves, but rather their male fictional counterparts, their male 'creator' (Toriyama, JUMP editorial and marketing) and their 'male' 'audience' (what JUMP editorial and Toriyama think 'males' want or need). The women exist to serve the needs and wants of unpleasant and negative men who have bought into an ideology about how the world works. Call it toxic masculinity, the patriarchy or whathaveyou, these men (akin to many people in many different contexts and places) believe in a certain type of storytelling and passing on of customers to the next generation. As a result, we receive very little in the way of story and character focus. Hell, in the upcoming movie there's even a scene so misogynistic that they named a track of the original soundtrack after said scene of sexual harassment.

I'm not going to rehash the Videl bit because I don't think women need to be Toriyama's beloved-to-the-point-of-fetishization Aggressively Loud-type to be #ActualWomen. I also don't think Videl can't be both a calm, collected woman and a skilled martial artist that gets to kick the shit out of misogynistic sack of shit men like Barry Kahn. Women are extremely varied as people because people are in general extremely varied. Videl works in Super because Gohan isn't as terribly written a male character as any of the other male characters are.

There' also the issue with how Bulma was handled in the early years but I don't think that's relevant here.

The first three chapters of the 1984 comic are filled to the brim with so much misogyny that it isn't even funny.

[Yuji]

I don't think Toriyama knows how to write women and I don't think he cares enough to try. He relegates them to gender stereotypes because that's the "safe" play.

[Adamant]

Videl gets all the personality and spunk sucked out of her to become Gohan's Leave it to Beaver Housewife. It's like Toriyama started out wanting Gohan to marry his mom then remembered that people didn't like Chi Chi (or realized a character like Chi Chi only works if she's playing off a Goku) and decided to just remove her personality entirely.

We BARELY see Videl at all after the final timeskip, certainly not enough to get any kind of idea what her personality is like. She appears in 6 panels and has a quick line in only one of them.

[MasenkoHA]

Videl gets all the personality and spunk sucked out of her to become Gohan's Leave it to Beaver Housewife. It's like Toriyama started out wanting Gohan to marry his mom then remembered that people didn't like Chi Chi (or realized a character like Chi Chi only works if she's playing off a Goku) and decided to just remove her personality entirely.

We BARELY see Videl at all after the final timeskip, certainly not enough to get any kind of idea what her personality is like. She appears in 6 panels and has a quick line in only one of them.

Super is a thing that exist.

I'd also argue her personality was removed the entire time she was with everyone else at Kami's Palace

[JulieYBM]

Videl gets all the personality and spunk sucked out of her to become Gohan's Leave it to Beaver Housewife. It's like Toriyama started out wanting Gohan to marry his mom then remembered that people didn't like Chi Chi (or realized a character like Chi Chi only works if she's playing off a Goku) and decided to just remove her personality entirely.

We BARELY see Videl at all after the final timeskip, certainly not enough to get any kind of idea what her personality is like. She appears in 6 panels and has a quick line in only one of them.

Super is a thing that exist.

I'd also argue her personality was removed the entire time she was with everyone else at Kami's Palace

I'd argue that she never had a personality. Being angry and suspicious and hating her annoying dad is Toriyama hating women just as much as "lost her brain and becoming a submissive girlfriend for Gohan".

[VegettoEX]

I'd argue that she never had a personality. Being angry and suspicious and hating her annoying dad is Toriyama hating women just as much as "lost her brain and becoming a submissive girlfriend for Gohan".

I would argue that "poorly writing women" doesn't necessarily hit the level of "this individual literally hates women"... but then again, I'm a dude so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Consistently feels at home with his racial stereotype nonsense which is only malicious in its careless naive complacency, rather than intentional/concerted.

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

The bigger issue with Bulma as a wife and mother is her entire relationship with Vegeta is predicated on Toriyama wanting to give Vegeta a son from the future and remembered that Bulma had a vagina. Every now and again the fandom has discourse on why would Bulma get with a warlord responsible for mass genocide that was complicit in the murder of most of her friends and the answer really is just How else was Vegeta gonna have a kid from the future?

That, and legit it makes me wonder how they even progressed to that point in the first place. We can see that Vegeta really shows almost no affection or feelings of that nature toward Bulma given his tsundere, brooding Saiyan warrior personality and she seems to put more effort into the relationship than he does. Toriyama had paired them together so he could establish them as Trunks' parents in the Artificial Humans/Android arc but i doesn't see much chemistry between them as a couple, it doesn't feel like that much of a marriage especially considering Vegeta is from another world where relationships between males and females of his race were very different, at least before DB Minus upended that with Bardock and Gine because even where he has scant moments of something resembling care towards her (the whole My Bulma thing in Battle of Gods) it still feels like something steering from his Saiyan nature and not genuine romantic affection.

[Adamant]

Super is a thing that exist.

It's also a thing that's only based on loose plot outlines by Toriyama and made 20 years after Toei had started playing around with the post-Boo arc version of the character.

[Majin Buu]

I would argue that "poorly writing women" doesn't necessarily hit the level of "this individual literally hates women"... but then again, I'm a dude so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Consistently feels at home with his racial stereotype nonsense which is only malicious in its careless naive complacency, rather than intentional/concerted.

Agreed. I don't think Toriyama hates women so much as he's ignorant about women in general and doesn't care to change that (which admittedly isn't much better).

He's probably the "doesn't interact with women outside of the ones in his family" type of guy.

[nineko]

Yeah, like I mentioned in another topic just the other day, even amongst the deities there are almost no females at all.

[MasenkoHA]

We BARELY see Videl at all after the final timeskip, certainly not enough to get any kind of idea what her personality is like. She appears in 6 panels and has a quick line in only one of them.

Super is a thing that exist.

I'd also argue her personality was removed the entire time she was with everyone else at Kami's Palace

I'd argue that she never had a personality. Being angry and suspicious and hating her annoying dad is Toriyama hating women just as much as "lost her brain and becoming a submissive girlfriend for Gohan".

I mean a personality rooted in being characterized in casual misogyny and sexism is still a personality. Housewife Videl is just ...existing. Even 18 does that supportive housewife schtick better since she didn't get a lobotomy in marrying Kuririn. Bulma got far worse writing in early Dragon Ball and I would never accuse her of lacking a personality.

I dunno Saiyaman era Videl's personality didn't bother me (saying this as a cis dude of course) Gohan going for the first woman of his age that acts like his mom could have been something, if Toriyama had done anything with it or cared about the dynamics of Gohan's relationship with either of his parents

[goku the krump dancer]

Cant say Toriyama is an evil sexist if his previous main character (who was pretty popular) was a little girl who's personality was pretty much copy and pasted to Goku.

Also what constitutes a "bad female character" as opposed to just being a bad character? Is Jiren a cookie cutter "Male" antagonist or just a cookie cutter antagonist period? Is Freeza a great "male" villain or just a great villain in general? Is Tuxedo Mask a bad or generic male character because he was written by a woman for a girl's magazine? Is Videl really a bad female character or was she just not used in a the way that you would find acceptable? Because there's a difference.

Does a female character have to be like Mulan or Utena in order to be deemed NOT coded in "casual misogyny". Are Harem anime grossly mysogynistic because they consist of a bunch of women drooling over a guy? Is Fae Valentine progressive because she's sexy and confident and if so can't the same be said for Bulma?

I ask these questions not to be crass or sarcastic but I'm really trying to understand this mindset because I just don't get it.

[kemuri07]

It's important to note that I Toriyama is less a woman-hating sexist, and more a product of his environment writing manga for boys. And I think his writing pretty much exemplifies that. And thus, most of the women are created with that perspective in mind.

I've said this before, but I find Bulma interesting. Particularly her Dragon Ball variant in which she's introduced as a crude city girl who is out for her own. I think that shittiness actually her a more active character than simply "girl character." Like yeah, there's a lot of sex jokes thrown her way because she is a girl character, but I think Dragon Ball put her on even footing with her male associates, likely due to the parodic tone of the original manga allowing her to have more of a role in the story.

[kemuri07]

Cant say Toriyama is an evil sexist if his previous main character (who was pretty popular) was a little girl who's personality was pretty much copy and pasted to Goku.

I don't think thats the flex you think it is. Largely because it seems more an admittance that Toriyama doesn't really know how to write women in any believable way. So he just made a Goku with boobs.

It's never a simple discussion because its not meant to be. These discussions depend just as much on the people making them because everyone is going to have their own ideas of what constitutes a good character. For women, or any character for that matter, its less important to mack them awesome at everthing, and more important to make them have agency. They can have flaws, they can be terrible, but its fine so long as they're written in a way that allows them nuance. When we're talking about gender, we have to talk about a larger context. And traditionally, female characters play second fiddle to their male counterparts under the idea that boys don't want to read about girls in their battle manga.

[MasenkoHA]

It's important to note that I Toriyama is less a woman-hating sexist, and more a product of his environment writing manga for boys. And I think his writing pretty much exemplifies that. And thus, most of the women are created with that perspective in mind.

Pretty much this. I don't think Toriyama is actively misogynistic like he's refugee from r/incel. I just think like with the racism and a lot of the humor he's a dude who grew up in 1960s Japan and that puts things into perspective

[Soppa Saia People]

as far as Dr. slump goes with regards to female characters, i think akane is probably a bigger boon in toriyama's favor than arale, to be honest.

[MasenkoHA]

Cant say Toriyama is an evil sexist if his previous main character (who was pretty popular) was a little girl who's personality was pretty much copy and pasted to Goku.

And Joss Whedon got big on making a tv series with a female lead that kicks vampire butt.


I just don't think "made a story with a female character as lead" is the argument you think it is.

I also don't think Toriyama is an evil sexist.

Also what constitutes a "bad female character" as opposed to just being a bad character?

Typically one rooted in misogynstic and/or sexist tropes. Most of Toriyama's female characters in Dragon Ball are bitchy or homemakers. Or both. And nothing wrong with a character being a housewife but when that basically happens to all of them (except Bulma but ya know Bulma) it just says something about Toriyama's mindset on gender dynamics.

Fwiw I thought Kale and Caulifa were improvements. And Vados for a mostly non-combative female character. I also thought the writing for Bulma improved aside from some lol saggy boobs jokes.

Is Videl really a bad female character or was she just not used in a the way that you would find acceptable?

I would argue any character who goes from having a personality to having absolutely no personality is pretty poorly written. In Videl's case you can't really separate the fact that in the context of the story one of the few female fighter characters got her ass brutally whooped and then pretty much dropped off as a fighter and also lost any spunk. And this isn't like Yamcha who is just one of many many male fighters. Videl was 1 of like 2 at the time she was introduced.

Does a female character have to be like Mulan or Utena in order to be deemed NOT coded in "casual misogyny"

Nobody said that.


Context matters my dude.

[JulieYBM]

It's important to note that I Toriyama is less a woman-hating sexist, and more a product of his environment writing manga for boys. And I think his writing pretty much exemplifies that. And thus, most of the women are created with that perspective in mind.

I've said this before, but I find Bulma interesting. Particularly her Dragon Ball variant in which she's introduced as a crude city girl who is out for her own. I think that shittiness actually her a more active character than simply "girl character." Like yeah, there's a lot of sex jokes thrown her way because she is a girl character, but I think Dragon Ball put her on even footing with her male associates, likely due to the parodic tone of the original manga allowing her to have more of a role in the story.

Divorced from the context that Blooma appears in (a comic written, edited and published by men for a 'male audience') I like the idea of Blooma being an awful gremlin. The issue is that this isn't being written with any sort of self-awareness or awareness of the depiction of women in most media as well as how women are being depicted to said child audience. I started a re-read of the original 1984 comic a few weeks ago but those first four chapters pretty much killed my desire to read anymore. It isn't that hard to be a little bit more thoughtful and I think it's wrong for us to give Toriyama a pass or pray on the alter of "product of its time" (since it was shitty then, too). My disappointment with Toriyama's and Shueisha's refusal to learn to be better is just as deep.

I'm also just in general disappointed with fandom's behavior whenever the subject is broached. They'll sing songs about nonsense like worldbuilding until the cows come home but the second queer or feminist analysist of media gets brought up it's suddenly "boohoo stop reminding me about the wymynz and the fags!" I totally understand going into art for escapism but you have to earn that privilege with the bare minimum of "wow, this is a shitty aspect of the series I like". Women roll with the punches all the time, especially when participating in fandom.

Toriyama's writing an 18+ doujinshi for a mainstream and mostly child-centric audience and that...is not good.

I think it's telling that the best female characters introduced as fighters as of recent all come from staff with experience creating series for girls.