tonysoprano300 wrote: Sat Aug 24, 2024 12:43 pmFor the rest of the points, idk what to say atp. I just disagree that these are who the characters are, I don’t believe they are genuinely that stupid but
how one interprets art is subjective.
Indeed. I'm not even interpreting them as stupid, necessarily, moreso concerned with and confident in their own abilities. I can easily call them cocky if you'd like. Maybe even arrogant. They do cocky and arrogant things fairly often, beginning (coincidentally or not) with them growing up and reaching the pinnacle of the Earth's martial pecking order. Goku gives Piccolo a free hit at the Tenkaichi Budokai, he lets Vegeta leave and recover, and he lets Freeza power up to 100%. Piccolo insists on being teleported to Namek so he could fight Freeza. All of these were needless risks that had more to do with pride and honor than anything else. You can call these decisions stupid if you like, but you can't ignore that
they keep getting made.
This is who these characters are. They do this kind of thing. They don't all do it all the time, but I don't think they have to for these instances to be salient. Like, you can't say we're all reaching when we say that these characters, who for many of the series' early story arcs
eagerly participated in martial arts tournaments, aren't competitive meatheads. So, when they do some shit that's in the spirit of competitive meatheadedness, it tracks. When they do something cocky or arrogant in the spirit of competitive meatheadedness, it also tracks. It does not feel like some contrived trait that was pulled out of thin air. It builds organically from who these characters are at their core: people who eagerly enter martial arts tournaments. Mileage clearly varies on how entertaining or interesting one finds arrogant competitive meatheadedness (ie: I find it to be very entertaining, some find it to be torture).
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As for Piccolo in the Moro arc example, I dunno, maybe? That didn't jump out at me as egregious when I gave the arc a re-read last year. I also don't really take Super in general, especially Toyble's V-Jump manga in particular, that seriously when thinking about lore or characterization in Toriyama's original comic.
That aside though, we can think about Piccolo's fusion with God. After Goku dies and decides to stay dead, Vegeta retires from fighting and Tenshinhan says they'll never see him again. Clearly, these two were still in the "I want a rematch with Goku" game. Piccolo didn't seem pouty about it at all, though. He'd also recently fused with God, which may have changed him. Could explain why he's chilling at God's temple after the 7 year timeskip, and why he's so distraught by its destruction by Boo and Gotenks.
There's also the basic aspect of how much some of these characters get left in the dust by those cultivating the most strength. The stronger someone gets, the more it's going to take to challenge and excite them. The more outmatched someone is, the less exciting or interesting the fight is going to be. See, again: Goku trying to end life-or-death fights by killing his opponent once he's lost the 'fair' part of it. Suffice to say, something that would excite, say, ToP era Goku is probably going to just terrify Tenshinhan or Piccolo from the same time period.
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At the end of the day, I think the feature of the comic itself that causes these conversations to keep happening and to keep going in circles is the apparent discrepancy between these characters exhibiting competitive meatheadery and these characters exhibiting survival instincts. These things are not mutually exclusive. Toriyama can be a very sloppy writer (especially once he was experiencing burnout during the last two arcs), and so whatever friction and negotiation exists between these two aspects of the characters thinking and behavior isn't acknowledged, let alone dramatized, to the degree that something like Guts' (ultimately mutually exclusive) quests for vengeance and healing are in Berserk.
Setting aside the (plainly incorrect, I continue to argue) view that "these characters aren't very often recklessly competitive and prideful": would it be accurate to suggest that the relative absence of this acknowledgement and dramatization is the bad writing that is taking folks like you and
Ali out of the story? If so, I can understand that. But at the same time, I think "bad writing" is too unspecific;
what is the bad thing about it, and what makes that the deal breaker it is? To me, the bad part is that the friction and negotiation between the competitive meatheadery and the survival instincts are acknowledged and dramatized less than they should be. Chiefly and specifically in the form of Tenshinhan's different thinking and behavior circa Mecha Freeza vs. circa Gero being neither noticed nor commented on by Bulma.
A better story would have had something like that. It is a missing piece. But I also think its importance is exaggerated. Partly because there's plenty of precedent in the story for a competitive meathead to switch to a more pragmatic option when their back is against the wall, and partly because Tenshinhan is not the major character at this point that he once was. This arc's story is about what the best kind of Super Saiyan is and who can figure it out, something that Tenshinhan would only ever be a side or background character for. That story isn't missing any major pieces that I can think of.
