Weighing in on a few scattered points from the last few days and pages of posts:
Character Morality & Ethics:
I think a lot of people are looking at the morality of Dragon Ball's protagonists in too black-and-white terms. As if they could only either be 'heroes who want to protect the weak', or 'psychopaths who care only about themselves'. Morality is much more messy than that, both in real life and in fiction.
When they do some selfish shit because testing their strength is an important part of their value system, we can look at that as a moral flaw. This type of behavior that we see should give us pause and make us think, "yeah, these people aren't perfect angels, they're not saints". It should have been clear from the very first story arc that these people are kind of a bunch of selfish assholes. And many of Goku's reckless decisions are observed by various characters as not necessarily being the right thing to do. This comes across in the text, and it is given additional weight by Toriyama's many comments throughout the years, especially the one about the "poison".
At the same time, that by itself doesn't make them evil. It doesn't make them psychopaths. It doesn't make them "abhorrent pieces of shit". It doesn't make them a bunch of Walter Whites. They still do plenty of good. And they still don't like seeing evil people doing evil shit. They do still save and help others. With regards to Goku, specifically, when Toriyama mentions the "poison" he says there are elements of it, which slip in and out of sight among the shadows. Goku isn't someone who's rotten to the core, he's simply flawed like anyone else. And we are absolutely supposed to still root for him and his friends, despite these flaws.
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Vegeta Learning to Sense Ki:
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but are we talking about this like it's Vegeta's Saiyan blood that allowed him to learn to sense ki? Because that's not how it's presented in the manga. He ambushes Dodoria, crushes his scouter, and then Dodoria says:
Without that, you'll never be able to locate master Freeza or the Namekians!!
To which Vegeta replies:
I'd have agreed once. But on a little dustball called 'Earth' I found beings who could detect the location and power of a person's chi without aid of a scouter...and one of those beings was a fellow Saiyan. If he could do it, I should be able to, hm?
It's not that Vegeta's saying "I learned to sense ki because I'm a Saiyan!" It's that once Vegeta saw that one Saiyan could do this Earthling shit, he should be able to as well. Vegeta could learn to sense ki
despite being a Saiyan.
Maybe that still is too quick for some people, I don't know. But this isn't one of the many cases of Saiyan biology being treated as the reason for something happening.
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The pseudo-gatekeep-y "you just don't get it" talking point:
I know I've tried to make this point before, and I'll try to do it better here.
These characters are meatheads. They think like meatheads. They act like meatheads. Beating the shit out of each other is an extremely meatheaded thing to be into. If you can't begin to remotely understand how meatheads act and think, much of what these characters do will seem confusing and alien to you, including being interested in and enjoying fighting in the first place.
They are also
competitive meatheads. If you can't begin to remotely understand how people act and think in a competitive setting, much of what these characters do will seem confusing and alien to you, including being interested in winning and proving that you're better at something than someone else. See: them participating in martial arts tournaments for three out of ten story arcs.
This story is about martial arts. This setting is about martial arts. Goku goes to martial arts tournaments where the most gifted fighters in the world show up to strut their stuff. The world grows as Goku explores more of it, and as Goku's world grows beyond the confines of a normal martial arts tournament ring,
he's still growing into a world tailored for martial arts. The gods are martial artists. The afterlife rewards martial artists. The aliens and robots and demons he encounters are martial artists. They are the new "most gifted fighters in the world".
These life and death battles for the fate of the world are essentially martial arts tournaments with a healthy amount of window dressing. If you do not recognize them as the martial arts tournaments that they are, much of what these characters do will seem confusing and alien to you.
Dragon Ball is a story about competitive meatheads treating life and death battles for the fate of the world as martial arts tournaments. When I see Goku, Tenshinhan, Piccolo, and Vegeta opting to train to fight the Artificial Humans instead of trying to stop them from being made and I say "makes sense to me", it's not because I'm "turning my brain off", it's not because I'm treating Dragon Ball's storytelling with kid gloves, it's not because I'm looking at it through some special style of interpretation, it's not because I think it's operating under some unique rules of composition, or anything like that. I'm recognizing these characters for who and what they are, what drives them, what excites them, and what counts as a normal day in their world and their lives.
I understand the very idea of "competitive meatheads treating life and death battles for the fate of the world as martial arts tournaments" is fucking strange, and may itself take people out of the story. That is when the roots and fundamental framing of the story become relevant; Dragon Ball is also a story taking place in a weird world inhabited by weird people, being drawn and written by a weird guy with a weird style. That the entire cosmos itself seems to be structured so that competitive meatheads can do competitive meathead shit makes sense given that we're getting a kung fu parody from Slump guy. That the bad guys who want to take over or destroy the world also want to do competitive meathead shit is conceptually very fucking silly, and if it takes you out of the story, I think you are taking it too seriously. Yes, the tone becomes very serious, but a lot of tonally-serious shit is silly if you take a step back and look at it. See also: Heavy Metal as a broader musical genre.
Bad storytelling is bad storytelling. But there's a difference between "a story that was told poorly" and "a story I don't care about on a conceptual level". A story can be both of these things, of course, but when it is I think people are underestimating how easy it is to mistake a sign of the latter as a sign of the former.
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Inconsistent Meatheadedness:
Another point commonly brought up in these conversations is that the martial artists are inconsistent about whether they want to treat things like a game, or if they want to stop the bad guys. Much like the point about morality, this is also being treated as unnecessarily black and white: they want to
until they can't, after which point they won't.
Yes, they are reckless enough to treat life and death battles for the fate of the universe as opportunities for competitive meatheadedness. Yes, they want to strut their stuff like it's the next tournament, because in a way that's what it is. They've been training, and they have a new opportunity to flex on each other, and these new competitors who show up.
But here's the thing: tournament matches end. You can lose the fair fight. One thing we've seen from Goku in each and every one of the "Z" arcs is that he loses the fair fight he'd been looking forward to. Vegeta crushes him. Freeza is too much for even his strongest Kaio-Ken. He cannot beat Cell. Super Saiyan 3 drains his ki too much to beat Boo. What does he do after that? Some pretty unfair shit that involves help from others. In three out of those four fights he ends up using the Genki Dama, and in the other one he lets the stronger fighter take over.
As has been consistently brought up since
Gaffer Tape's review made this a point of contention, even in his own thread after that review dropped, characters will act differently depending on the circumstances. The characters wanting to stop Gero from waking up #17 and #18 isn't egregiously inconsistent with them wanting to train and fight after Trunks' initial warning. They had years of preparation time, and Goku was with them this time. They had reason to think things would go differently from how they went down in the future. Oh, oops, Goku's maybe dying now. When Gero runs away and Vegeta gives chase, Tenshinhan, Kuririn, and Gohan insist on following. Piccolo says "All right...but don't try to fight him. None of you can handle him."
Then we learn that these weren't even the guys who Trunks warned about. I can forgive them for having cold feet.
But I'm actually getting ahead of myself, because, really,
who is even acting inconsistently? After Trunks leaves and people start talking about training, Bulma is the one to suggest they attack Gero early. Kuririn agrees with her. Vegeta, Goku, and Tenshinhan say they want to fight. Piccolo doesn't speak up on the matter for either side when it's being argued about, but I think it's safe to assume he's down to train and fight. Now, once Gero says that he's going to wake up #17 and #18, Piccolo suggests going to the lab to destroy them first, and Trunks agrees, but Vegeta would rather still take his chances. A few pages later, Piccolo says "It might be better to destroy the Androids first after all." Tenshinhan, Kuririn, and Gohan all agree.
Tenshinhan is the only one to explicitly say that he wants to train and fight, and then 3 years later is now in favor of destroying them first. Piccolo we can presume is the same, but he does say "after all" one of the times he mentions their new approach, which to me indicates an explicit acknowledgement of him having changed his mind. And I honestly don't need my hand held to have it explained to me what might have changed his mind, I can see the different circumstances with my own two eyes. Even if some people might think he needed to spell that out for the reader, I get it. The only person who comes out of this looking strange is Tenshinhan. He explicitly wanted to see what he could do in a fight, and he just didn't seem to care once shit was going down. There's no mention of him having changed his mind.
People talk about how dirty Yamcha was done in this arc, but I think Tenshinhan actually got slighted here by Toriyama. Dragon Ball's not a romance story, so a relationship getting killed is whatever. But having a competitive meathead's martial drive just erased like that? Come on, Toriyama. Maybe could have had him lose a fight against #19 or Gero first, and have that be the thing that changes his mind?
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Why Aren't We Being This Generous With GT??
Being an anime, GT's more difficult to do an impromptu cursory re-read of, so I can't say personally what issues I might have with it today in 2024. But I will say, that the last time I watched the show (maybe around 8 years ago? Jesus) I was
incredibly generous with the Super 17 arc.
But also, I don't think I'm at least ever being overly generous with the original manga's story. Yeah, Cell surviving having his head blown off is just a straight up plothole. But don't mistake all of the talk about "well, they're martial artists, so of course they'll want to fight dudes" as people 'being too generous'; we're simply looking at the story for what it is, and engaging in very rudimentary interpretation and analysis of the storytelling based on that. I think there's fundamental disagreement regarding what the story is even about, and calls to clarify what that is get misconstrued as people trying to cover Toriyama's ass or paint him as some poor misunderstood genius.
Like, please, I am begging everyone to give the manga a fresh read with "these good natured assholes truly love to punch each other" and "the world is built around martial arts" in mind. See if new things jump out at you, or maybe even make more sense. You can still say the storytelling is bad afterwards, I promise.
