Did Dragon Ball inspire the misconception that shounen is a genre?

[Vegeta th3 4th]

I was being cautious and patient with that question, but as someone has answered this already, all I have to add is that this is the kind of thing that needs... you know... citations.

We're just having a casual conversation on a Dragon Ball forum, not trying to publish something in an academic journal.

[WittyUsername]

Eh, it was moreso the Shonen Jump monthly mag popping up in the states back in 03 and grouping DB, Naruto, OP, etc all together under one umbrella. And honestly, I don't get why people split hairs about it. Words are malleable and there's just enough shared connective tissue among them in terms of tone, target and tropes that I'm fine tying them under an umbrella

To be honest, I don’t really get why “Battle Shonen” as a term is a pet peeve with some people. Dragon Ball, Naruto, One Piece, Bleach, etc are all stories that place a lot of emphasis on fighting and they’re all geared towards the shonen demographic, so using “Battle Shonen” as a nickname isn’t technically wrong.

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

To be honest, I don’t really get why “Battle Shonen” as a term is a pet peeve with some people. Dragon Ball, Naruto, One Piece, Bleach, etc are all stories that place a lot of emphasis on fighting and they’re all geared towards the shonen demographic, so using “Battle Shonen” as a nickname isn’t technically wrong.

It's not technically wrong, but Battle Shonen is mentioned the same way Action Adventure, Romantic Comedy or Spy Thriller are. The way people refer to the term makes it sound like they are talking about a sub genre because generally in media discourse a genre and demographic aren't lumped together. People don't call Harry Potter "Young Adult Fantasy" even though that too wouldn't be incorrect.

It's not a pet peeve, but I can understand the concern over the confusion saying "Battle Shonen" could cause without further clarity.

[JulieYBM]

'Battle shounen' is such a weird term when you consider that next to nobody is actually talking about the non-battle series aimed at young kids anyway.

People don't call Harry Potter "Young Adult Fantasy" even though that too wouldn't be incorrect.

That's because they should be calling it, "That thing I shouldn't be having anything to do with."

[WittyUsername]

To be honest, I don’t really get why “Battle Shonen” as a term is a pet peeve with some people. Dragon Ball, Naruto, One Piece, Bleach, etc are all stories that place a lot of emphasis on fighting and they’re all geared towards the shonen demographic, so using “Battle Shonen” as a nickname isn’t technically wrong.

It's not technically wrong, but Battle Shonen is mentioned the same way Action Adventure, Romantic Comedy or Spy Thriller are. The way people refer to the term makes it sound like they are talking about a sub genre because generally in media discourse a genre and demographic aren't lumped together. People don't call Harry Potter "Young Adult Fantasy" even though that too wouldn't be incorrect.

It's not a pet peeve, but I can understand the concern over the confusion saying "Battle Shonen" could cause without further clarity.

I mean, “Young Adult Fantasy” is a term that people use as well.

(https://www.goodreads.com/genres/young-adult-fantasy)

Just like with shonen, “YA” in general tends to be referred to as if it’s a genre. I can’t count how many times people have talked about how Hunger Games kickstarted the trend of “Dystopian YA” fiction.

[Hellspawn28]

People who think Shonen is a genre are usually people who don't know any better. When people think of Shonen, they think of action series for kid boys. When Kodomomuke, Shonen, Shojo, Josei and Seinen are filled with different genres. Titles like Fist of the North Star, Devilman, etc. are Shonen while stuff like K-On are seinen. Heck, Armored Trooper VOTOMS was published in a Kodomomuke magazine.

[Adamant]

Eh, it was moreso the Shonen Jump monthly mag popping up in the states back in 03 and grouping DB, Naruto, OP, etc all together under one umbrella.

Yeah, I'm going to point fingers at this at well. "I don't know what shonen means, but I'm going to assume it's the kind of stuff printed in the one magazine I'm aware of that says "shonen" on the cover". It's the same thing as with people that have only watched a tiny handful of anime series assuming that "anime" is a genre of action cartoon because all the shows they watched involved people powering up and punching each other.

[Majin Buu]

Christ, am I seriously going to have to eventually make yet another pages and pages long, hyper methodically detailed, and image-filled "explainer" thread on this subject like I did with Wuxia back in the day where I have to hand-hold people through another easily Google-able, not at all obscure topic that everyone here thinks is obscure regardless?

I'm seconding this info not being hard at all to find yourself.

For instance, me randomly coming across an ad on my Chromecast for what sounds like a gonzo 80s kung-fu film ("Furious" is what it was called) brought up a half-remembered statement of yours about how Dragon Ball never stopped being Wuxia just because it adopted more science fantasy trappings in the Z era, complete with examples.

I wanted to reference that exact post of yours for my own purposes but was too lazy to search through your post history, so I just Googled "Wuxia in the 80s" and found the information I was looking for in like 5 minutes.

Yeah, it's really not that hard to research this stuff on your own.

[Kunzait_83]

So, Toonami inspired the misconception?

The misconception - at its initial, original base point - comes from the overall generation of fans/audience that were turned onto anime initially during the Toonami-era being a combination of myopically hyper-focused on children's media (to the exclusion of most else) combined with being incredibly lazy and/or bad at using the internet to look up even incredibly basic, easily findable (we're talking like, 10 to 15 minutes max worth of Google or Wikipedia here) historical information about topics they claim to otherwise be really interested in/obsessed with.

I don't blame Toonami itself for this: I blame the fans themselves of that particular era. I even said as much quite plainly in my earlier post in this thread:

So yes, while there are of course some other outside factors that are notable to also consider (and I don't leave them out of my general assessment of all this by any means, I'm just trying to keep this post under War and Peace-lengths as best I can here), I'm still overall - and more broadly - largely placing the lion's share of the blame on the Western fanbase itself (and a lot of its Peter Pan-esque "I don't wanna grow up, you can't make me grow up!" tendencies) for this one. Much more than I ever would Dragon Ball itself, which filled a role in all this that could have just as easily occurred with any number of other, similar titles slotted in its place.

Toonami is merely the timeframe point of reference for WHEN (not necessarily HOW) this problem first started: the fans themselves of that time (broadly speaking overall in aggregate I mean, not 100% of all of them down to the very last individual, obviously) were/are the issue here.

Toonami can be said to have done a lot of things, but nothing about it made so much of its audience throughout the years maintain a self-imposed insular hyper-fixated focus on children's "action cartoons" to the exclusion of anything else well neck-deep into adulthood. The blame for that lies largely on the audience themselves.

I don't know how much more plainly clear and obvious I can possibly be about this at this point guys.

I'm seconding this info not being hard at all to find yourself.

For instance, me randomly coming across an ad on my Chromecast for what sounds like a gonzo 80s kung-fu film ("Furious" is what it was called) brought up a half-remembered statement of yours about how Dragon Ball never stopped being Wuxia just because it adopted more science fantasy trappings in the Z era, complete with examples.

I wanted to reference that exact post of yours for my own purposes but was too lazy to search through your post history, so I just Googled "Wuxia in the 80s" and found the information I was looking for in like 5 minutes.

Yeah, it's really not that hard to research this stuff on your own.

Thank you. This is is SO key here to reiterate.

This thread is obviously about the whole "Shonen is a genre" nonsense, but since you brought it up, I can just as easily point to Wuxia itself as a topic as an insanely clear, demonstrable example of how utterly, bafflingly terrible at using the internet to look up rudimentary things tied quite clearly to this fandom's love for Dragon Ball as well as how myopically focused on children's media it has been for so long now.

Longtime Kanz users here from the 2000s will likely remember plenty of posts around here about the original (as in, pre-Evolution) live action Dragon Ball film from Taiwan, called Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins.

There were a sizeable number of posts about it on here back in the day, including from site admins, and even a lot of people here went ahead and bought its U.S. DVD release at the time, and many people here even reviewed it.

Why is this relevant you might ask?

Well, speaking as someone who owns a copy of the very same DVD release that so much of this forum had posted about pretty extensively back in the mid/late 2000s, I can tell you folks that when you first start up this particular DVD, before the main menu for the film itself even comes up, you are first immediately treated to a large number of trailers for... DVD releases of live action Chinese Wuxia films and TV shows. Most of which are VERY Dragon Ball-esque in and of themselves.

I'm talking at least half a dozen or so trailers for live action Wuxia movies and TV shows from largely the late 90s and early 2000s, all of which are chocked to the brim with both heavily Dragon Ball-esque action/fight scenes (super speed, flying, firing Chi blasts, blowing up mountains, etc) and even heavily Dragon Ball-esque plotlines and story concepts. Not because these films and shows were themselves ripping off Dragon Ball: but because this is what the fucking Wuxia genre has always entailed since literally time immemorial!

And these trailers aren't even easy to skip past! They're quite literally the very first thing that comes up when you hit play on the U.S. Magic Begins DVD release, and you have to hit a very specific "menu" button on your DVD remote to skip past them to get to the main menu! The DVD all but forces you to watch these trailers!

What's even more hilarious is, several of the films/TV series shown on this DVD are titles I had used for both gifs/images and explainer examples in my original Wuxia thread from back in the day. One of those being the 2004 Wuxia film A Chinese Tall Story, the plot of which is quite literally "Sun Wukong fights an invading army of space aliens". And the trailer is NOT AT ALL shy about letting you in on that premise.

Just a few quick examples of actual gifs I used in the original Wuxia thread that literally come from titles that were actual trailers on The Magic Begins DVD that people here bought back in the day:

Spoiler:

Let me stress and remind you all: a sizeable chunk of this forum/community had bought this fucking DVD back around 2007/2008-ish or thereabouts. People who have been longtime, frequent fixtures of this very forum own copies this DVD that literally goes well out of its fucking way to spoon-feed you a veritable smorgasbord of live action footage of Wuxia movies and TV series that are all highly, highly reminiscent of Dragon Ball, showing quite clearly how not-even-remotely-close-to-unique so many of its stylistic tics and tropes are.

And yet despite that, this forum/community STILL went for another eight years being absolutely and utterly clueless about the very existence of Wuxia as a genre, whilst believing fervently that Dragon Ball's entire high-speed, explosive supernatural martial arts schtick was somehow totally unique and foreign to live action. Hell, the latter point is STILL clung to by a lot of people here!

Now maybe one could argue that I'm just being heavily biased here, as someone who had gotten into and was a fan of Wuxia since the mid/late-1980s, years well before I even got into Dragon Ball circa 1992-ish, and who had seen just about all of the titles previewed on The Magic Begins DVD years prior to that DVD's release. Maybe one could argue, that makes it much more obvious to me, and thus I'm not in a position to speak on this from the perspective of a typical Millennial Kanz fan.

But fuck it, let me try putting myself exactly in that very perspective: let me wipe my own memory banks completely of my own Wuxia fandom for a moment and put myself instead squarely in the shoes of the average, rando Kanz user from circa the late 2000s (when this DVD came out) who genuinely believed for roughly ten years at that point - as most folks in this community had believed - that Dragon Ball was singularly unique and one-of-a-kind, that Toriyama single-handedly trail-blazed and invented its concepts, themes, and style of action (or at least maybe took some of them from stuff like Western superhero comics like Marvel and DC or whatnot), and that nothing like it had ever been remotely attempted before in live action (outside of The Magic Begins or whatnot), and I had just bought The Magic Begins on DVD because of all the other folks in this forum (including site admins) who had done so and wanted to get in on the discourse about it:

In that hypothetical scenario in this hypothetical clean-slate version of myself, once I popped in that DVD and was treated to more than half a dozen trailers for a ton of Chinese movies and TV shows that looked a whole fuckton like Dragon Ball in live action, and even had many of the same concepts and themes (including Wukong fighting fucking sci fi space aliens)... as someone who (one assumes as someone who posts regularly on a site like Kanzenshuu) is a pretty massive Dragon Ball nerd, my mind would be absolutely fucking blown by this revelation!

"Wait... holy fuck, there's not one, not two, but like at least 7 or 8 fucking live action titles that do what Dragon Ball does?! This style that up till now I thought was totally unique and singularly belonging to Dragon Ball and Toriyama? Why did I not know about this?! Holy shit, I gotta see these ASAP! Are there even MORE of these like this besides what's being previewed on this DVD? If so, how many more? Why ARE there so many of these kinds of movies and shows? Are they all just copying Dragon Ball? Is Dragon Ball just copying them? This totally upends everything I ever thought I knew about Dragon Ball up to this point!"

These would just be some of the thoughts I would think would be running through my mind were I to have seen these trailers from the vantage point of someone who thought that Dragon Ball was this singularly original work that revolutionized and invented a whole style/genre of works that was only ever done in the realm of anime and manga, and never anything remotely, vaguely like it in live action.

And seeing as how I'd still be a Kanz poster in this scenario and its 2008 and not 1978 or whatnot, it would thus theoretically follow that I have access to the internet and thus I'd also have access to Google and Wikipedia and even IMDB - all websites/resources that had long been around and well known to every rando mainstream Joe/Jane Average at that point. The titles for these films/TV shows are all right there on the trailers on my The Magic Begins DVD: it's just a matter of putting those titles into IMDB or Wikipedia or Google. Or hell, even Amazon.com or Ebay (both of which were also around and readily well known to all at the time) to look for copies for me to buy and watch.

This would, one would assume/think, send this hypothetical Wuxia-ignorant version of me quite naturally and organically down an entire fucking rabbit hole that would lead me, petty naturally, to learning that these aren't fluke examples: that there's a LOT of other stuff out there just like Dragon Ball, and its all within this whole-ass Chinese/Asian genre of martial arts fantasy that's been around for literally centuries.

This isn't some far-fetched, out-there scenario I'm outlining here: 2008, as I noted, was not 1978 nor 1968 nor 1958. The internet was widely mainstream globally and easily available in pretty much every modern household not stranded in the middle of utter and total nowhere.

"Google" wasn't just a noun by '08, it was a verb by then, one that literally everyone was using in their regular day to day life and conversation. "Google it" was as common in parlance by then as "good morning" and "nice weather we're having, eh?" People living in third world countries had Youtube channels and were vlogging in 2008.

And with all due respect to everyone here, and I say this with the utmost genuine love and affection for you all, and I 1000% of course include myself in this appraisal here: its basically a given that if you post on this site, in whatever capacity, you're a hopeless fucking nerd and dweeb of preposterously dorky-ass proportions.

I remember quite well - even through a brainfog of painkillers (I was quite physically ill throughout the latter half of the 2000s and much of the 2010s) - this community's makeup from back in the mid to late 2000s quite well: everyone who posted here back then had each and every single one of all 500 and whatever-the-fuck Pokemon types committed to muscle-memory, and could quote you chapter-and-verse the most obscure rules to whichever edition of the Yu Gi Oh card game was big by then, were tracking down, saving, and uploading online quite literally every single, solitary Toonami ad and bumper in chronological order of airdate no matter how obscure it was, spoke about Bruce Timm's DCAU and the plot to Sonic Adventure in hushed-tones like it was their personal religion (I'm barely/not really exaggerating there), etc and so on and so forth.

By the early 2010s, the nerd-stench on this community was so fucking ripe that everyone here suddenly turned overnight into experts on the most technical minutia regarding animation studios, animation directors, and animation production.

Hell, people here were SUCH colossal fucking nerds that they were buying and posting reviews of the fucking 2007 DVD release of Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins!

And yet for all that, all you same folks were evidently still not QUITE so nerdy enough somehow to have any one of the half dozen trailers of "live action Dragon Ball in all-but-name" titles that said-Magic Begins DVD all but forces you at gunpoint to sit through (even throwing Wukong flying around fighting sci fi spacemen at you for Christ's sakes!) make anything even remotely resembling the least bit of an impression on them to even so much as Google or Wiki one or any of those titles out of sheer morbid-ass curiosity.

No, instead this community went on for something like 15 straight years living in abject fucking cluelessness about the very genre of the franchise that this whole site's existence is based around.

You guys even had at least one relatively notable Dragon Ball product during this site's peak years of activity (that people who post regularly here for sure bought and watched and posted about on here) basically spoonfeed you on a silver-platter the most clean and clearcut gateway into wider Wuxia as a genre that you could've possibly asked for... and you all instead STILL glazed past it, and went on for almost another additional decade thinking that the Japanese word for Dragon Ball's target demographic was actually instead what its genre was.

And even setting The Magic Begins aside: FUNimation themselves (who's various DVD releases at the time I know for a stone-cold fact you all were following religiously and closely), for at least some period of time in the late 2000s and early 2010s, were licensing and releasing classic live action Shaw Brothers Wuxia films on DVD. And advertising it on their various other anime DVD releases back then.

And just about all of those FUNi Wuxia film releases, once again, could not possibly have been more plainly and self-evidently Dragon Ball-coded for you all. Fuck, among their Shaw Wuxia releases they even had Shaolin Prince and both Bastard Swordsman movies (three of my absolute personal/sentimental childhood favorite Shaw Wuxia efforts)! I even used gifs and images from a lot of THOSE movies in the Wuxia thread as well!

Once again, however many of you didn't get on board the whole The Magic Begins thing here, plenty more of you certainly were still following closely along with FUNimation's various DVD releases and all their various marketing. Swap out The Magic Begins with "any number of trailers for FUNimation's own Shaw Wuxia releases" and the above hypothetical scenario I outlined still applies. Law of averages alone dictates that some percentage of you had to have been exposed to this stuff during those years.

This shit was staring you guys right there in the face this entire time, and it STILL took my stupid, random nobody, decrepit-ass having to post a three-page, gazillion-words, 200 megabytes of pic and gifs, War and Peace-levels of dense post that essentially said in bright, glaring neon for you all "Dragon Ball is part of this genre called Wuxia that's been around for hundreds of years and has been pumping out untold numbers of live action films and TV shows since the silent era to now, many of which are far from obscure or hard to come across. It didn't invent or create any of this shit: it is merely pastiching it in Toriyama's signature Dr. Slumpy style."

And to reiterate this once again guys: I'm saying all of this with laughter and love, and not with any remote hint of sneering anger and snobbish condescension. But guys... come on. This is all still a colossal, gigantic fucking "L" for this fanbase's nerd credibility here.

This community/fanbase deserves at least some degree of playful ribbing for being this ridiculously, comically in the dark and cluelessly dense as hell about something that is not only ridiculously basic, incredibly easy to find out, and is not at all obscure or privileged information, but was quite literally staring many of you in the face since years and years before my "literally who?" random nobody-ass started banging on pots and pans about it like a jackass.

I am without a doubt one of the least special, least impressive, most mediocre people you'll ever meet: it should NOT have taken me of all people to be the one to have "broken this news story" (that any one of you could've have easily uncovered yourselves within a few short minutes on Google or IMDB or Wikipedia or whatever) to the broader community here more than 15+ years deep into the post-Cartoon Network era.

Nor should it also take me, some random loser on a Dragon Ball forum, to have to outline for you guys (many of whom purport to be "experts" and/or otherwise super invested in and geeky about things like the history of Western anime and manga licensing and whatnot) on the basic history of U.S. anime and manga fandom and licensing pre-dating and preceding things like Cartoon Network/Toonami and outside the realm and purview of syndicated and/or cable kids' TV.

We're talking about an industry that licensed and released literally (and without exaggeration) a combined THOUSANDS of anime and manga titles outside of the purview of television from around 1985/86 to 1998, and could be found in just about any and all mainstream or local home video outlets, malls, and comic shops or bookstores.

Again: I was NOT unique or special in some way for having gotten into this stuff as "early on" as I did guys. I was far from the only child-aged nerd circa 1992 trolling the Japanimation section at Blockbuster or Hollywood Video for copies of the newest Ranma or Lupin or Project A-Ko or Patlabor or Guyver or Freeman or Gunbuster (or *cough*Overfiend*cough*). Far, far, far from it.

This was all wide out in the open, and always has been since the latter half of the 80s. This wasn't an "exclusive club" in the least bit by even the very early 90s, and it was far from being all that obscure by then. Fucking Steven Spielberg was giving interviews praising things like Castle of Cagliostro at the time for Christ's sake.

You guys are and always have been more than capable of looking up and learning all about the history of this stuff and educating yourselves about it at ANY point in the past 20/25 years now: most of you just simply never thought to do so throughout all these many years (decades!), in between repeated Sonic Adventure playthroughs, Pokemon tournaments, and obsessive cataloguing of Toonami ads and bumpers and whatever-else, for whatever silly reasons.

I'm sorry to harp on this point guys, it just will never not be funny and ridiculously absurd to me that this utterly gigantic fanbase with this fairly gigantic community in particular (made up of SO many people from around the Western world) was so obsessively nerdy and nitpicky about this very mainstream mega-franchise for over 15+ years that it had managed to absorb and pour over nearly every piece of obscure minutia about it...

...and yet somehow wasn't able to get the basic genre straight until decades down thee line; even getting to the point of researching and memorizing the most obscenely technical animation production details well before working out what the basic genre is and that there's other things like it out there outside of the pages of Japanese kids' comic magazines.

All else aside, you have to admit that this is incredibly silly and ridiculous in the extreme.

The real moral/lesson here though is exactly what Majin Buu just said earlier, quite perfectly and succinctly:

I just Googled "Wuxia in the 80s" and found the information I was looking for in like 5 minutes.

Yeah, it's really not that hard to research this stuff on your own.

This is all it essentially boils down to folks. You're all big boys and girls, and you have the internet. If you're really THIS big into Dragon Ball (to the point that you'll obsessively post about it on a forum like this and get super invested into its lore and into its real life production history and so on), then use the interwebs in your "nerd hobby downtime" for something other than just memorizing Pokemon species, or Sonic the Hedgehog lore, or production details about various international Dragon Ball dubs, or whatever the fuck.

For whatever reason, this particular generational cohort of Dragon Ball/anime fans (like mid-range to younger-ish Millennials) in communities like this one have just been, overall (overall, key word, not everyone down to the last individual), particularly and consistently terrible and lousy at using the internet to look up incredibly basic things about the medium and series that they purport to be so obsessively into, invested in, and "knowledgeable" about.

[Hellspawn28]

And yet despite that, this forum/community STILL went for another eight years being absolutely and utterly clueless about the very existence of Wuxia as a genre, whilst believing fervently that Dragon Ball's entire high-speed, explosive supernatural martial arts schtick was somehow unique and foreign to live action. Hell, the latter point is STILL clung to by a lot of people here!

I think they probably didn't pay attention to the trailers or be like, "These look cheesy and stupid. Poor special effects". People can be very basis towards foreign special effect films.

[JulieYBM]

I've never seen nor owned Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins and I literally would not remember it exists if not for how often it gets brought up, which is a lot like how Dragon Ball Evolution is for me.

[goku the krump dancer]

The term “Battle Shonen” has ever only been around for about barely half a decade, at least as far as I’ve been aware of it. Honestly it’s little more than just a fan term used to separate the fighting centric shonen manga vs non the fighting centric shonen manga. Did it originate from Dragon Ball? No, it was born out of fans admiration and love for all the fighting centric stories that came waaaaay AFTER DB and needed to specify that “Yes! I love Shonen Manga but only the fighting ones” or when they do their YouTube Video essays dissecting the modern story telling tropes of the current main stream manga and how they relate to each other and stories of the past.

I will say though, the pre-Toonami/Pokemon era of anime fans are far less vocal about what Japanimation they adored when they were young kids or teens. Outside of ironically Dragon Ball, in a lot of cases but by and large I don’t hear the 40+ somethings ranting and raving about Robotech, Vampire Hunter D or Voltron on the same level we late 20s/early 30 somethings rave about Dragon Ball and Gen 1&2 Pokémon.. oh and Attitude era Wrestling.

[WittyUsername]

So, Toonami inspired the misconception?

The misconception - at its initial, original base point - comes from the overall generation of fans/audience that were turned onto anime initially during the Toonami-era being a combination of myopically hyper-focused on children's media (to the exclusion of most else) combined with being incredibly lazy and/or bad at using the internet to look up even incredibly basic, easily findable (we're talking like, 10 to 15 minutes max worth of Google or Wikipedia here) historical information about topics they claim to otherwise be really interested in/obsessed with.

I don't blame Toonami itself for this: I blame the fans themselves of that particular era. I even said as much quite plainly in my earlier post in this thread:

For the record, my Toonami comment was partly made in jest.

[WittyUsername]

One more thing, but as far as anyone is aware, The Magic Begins wasn’t actually the original live action Dragon Ball film. The Korean film was.

[Hellspawn28]

I thought Magic begins came out in 1989 and the Korean film came out a year or two year later.

[WittyUsername]

I thought Magic begins came out in 1989 and the Korean film came out a year or two year later.

Its official release date is listed as 1991. The Korean film supposedly came out in 1990.

[LoganForkHands73]

Look. I used to be one of those people who'd get all pedantic and correct people about Dragon Ball's genre at every opportunity. I think the most important thing is education, both on how much more diverse shonen (and all other demographic categories) manga can be beyond the typical action mould westerners are most often exposed to, and the ancient origins of the tropes present in Dragon Ball and its countless derivatives.

But the older I get, the less of a shit I give. There are plenty of people who are ignorant/uneducated about all kinds of shit; probably much more important shit than the generic origins of a several-decade-old Japanese comic franchise. I've fell down a YouTube rabbithole of hayseed MAGA supporters denying that 401ks plummeting under Trump is not a problem and people should just continue working indefinitely until they fucking die I guess. Really put things into perspective.

I'm not American and I've never interacted with the stereotypical incurious diehard Toonami fanboy whose only exposure to Eastern culture has been through the same 4 or 5 anime he's watched on repeat since he was 12 years old. Well, maybe I've seen a couple people like that, but can't say I'm good pals with any of them. As far as I'm concerned, that kind of person might as well be a complete nonentity, their existence literally doesn't impact me in the slightest. I don't even talk to people like that online if I can help it.

Obviously, Toonami isn't solely to blame for Western ignorance on any of these topics. There's clearly a widespread cultural malaise that's been slowly making people unwilling to expand beyond a very narrow media palate of childhood nostalgic properties and whatever's currently trending on Netflix. Many online resources are frustrating to navigate because they're so overwhelmingly focused on a tiny keyhole rather than the bigger picture.

But, as has been said ITT, the internet is still a big place and tracking down the info you need isn't too difficult (though search engines sure aren't what they used to be). So seeing a few knuckleheads on the internet mistakenly acting like shonen is a genre that Dragon Ball singlehandedly pioneered... is a bit annoying to see, but in my experience, trying to tell them otherwise or to do their own research rarely leads anywhere, because they're simply not interested. So I'm just not that bothered about it anymore.

[GhostEmperorX]

Look. I used to be one of those people who'd get all pedantic and correct people about Dragon Ball's genre at every opportunity. I think the most important thing is education, both on how much more diverse shonen (and all other demographic categories) manga can be beyond the typical action mould westerners are most often exposed to, and the ancient origins of the tropes present in Dragon Ball and its countless derivatives.

But the older I get, the less of a shit I give.
...
So I'm just not that bothered about it anymore.

Honestly, after a brief stint in doing the same, I've more or less come to a similar conclusion the more I've come to find out and consider. Better for me to focus on ironing out those places that specialize in source-based info of various kinds. Hoping that even this site will refine what it already does even further as well, as it's gone a long way.

(I also share the same background of not being American, and I suspect that's true of many users on this site over the years as well...)

[JulieYBM]

I want to toss my two cents into the hat and say that I agree with "being too old to give a shit." I've been trying hard to generally just not be the same person I was in my twenties and lording dumb shit over people about my hobbies is just one of those things I kind of look back on and want to shake my head over.

Albeit, I did in fact know about the long history of anime in the US before Dragon Ball and the Big Three came over, but also...who gives a shit? Like, I find these things interesting, but if I'm opining about how 30-somethings need to care more in an obnoxious manner, I'm just going to roll my eyes and get back to writing that 165,000 word (and counting!) romance novel I'm writing instead.

Advice from an old woman: if you're passionate about something, don't complain that nobody else is. Just write about your passions and people will come to you like flies to honey.

[Kunzait_83]

Look. I used to be one of those people who'd get all pedantic and correct people about Dragon Ball's genre at every opportunity. I think the most important thing is education, both on how much more diverse shonen (and all other demographic categories) manga can be beyond the typical action mould westerners are most often exposed to, and the ancient origins of the tropes present in Dragon Ball and its countless derivatives.

I’m not advocating to do anything within lightyears of “getting pedantic and correcting people at every opportunity” about this topic: nor for that matter, about ANY topic this trivial in general.

I feel like this should be etched onto my tombstone at this point, given how many times I’ve had to say this throughout my life: but context is everything.

Right now, we’re on a forum dedicated to a 40+ year old children’s martial arts comic/cartoon. One that also does not have an “off-topic” section, nor does it generally (within reason) encourage off-topic convos. Everything discussed here, generally speaking, is centered primarily around all things Dragon Ball. With a particularly huge, huge emphasis on its history to boot.

Not only that, but its a forum for a website and community where a very, very large portion of its entire purpose, a large portion of its entire reason for existing in general is and has been correcting misinformation about this particular comic/cartoon, since its one that has been subject to gobs and gobs of misinformation throughout almost nearly its entire existence in the Western world (much more so once it was first officially licensed).

Do I think anyone here (or anyone in general otherwise) should be going out into the streets, getting into people’s faces and getting aggressively exact about anything to do with Dragon Ball, or anime in general?

Of fucking course not. That’s beyond idiotic and ludicrous.

But when we’re on this site of all places, we’re not in some random, normal place out in real life or elsewhere on the web even. This stupid, ridiculous site/forum’s entire purpose, its entire raison d’etre, is literally to be as pedantically specific and hyper-accurate as possible about something as trivial and absurd as Dragon Ball (without of course, also being a huge asshole about it obviously, super crucial to highlight that part of it).

This isn’t some general, all purpose internet forum: it has a very specific purpose and use. Without an emphasis on hyper-specific, exactingly accurate information about Dragon Ball and its history, then this forum/site/community here doesn’t really have much reason for existing whatsoever, and may as well instead just be some general, generic internet hangout about all kinds of off-topic random/misc stuff.

This site’s founder/owner has literally poured nearly 30 years of his whole life into trying to educate and improve this stupid cartoon’s own ridiculous fanbase’s awareness, education, and understanding about its history and the context surrounding it with as much intelligence, thought, and accuracy as possible.

He’s done everything from producing a regular podcast that has now gone on for 20 years and 525 episodes (and still counting!), to semi-regularly hosting entire panels about Dragon Ball’s history at various anime conventions across the country, to regularly moderating this very forum well deep into his 30s and 40s (which is a beyond exhausting and excruciating endeavor, I’m sure), and now to pouring god knows how many hours and resources into working on a whole entire Kanzenshuu Dragon Ball Wiki that highlights and emphasizes accuracy and, as with this site, aims primarily to correct misinformation about it, because every other attempt at a Dragon Ball wiki has been so embarassingly terrible (see above about how this franchise has had a decades’ long history of being plagued with innaccurate misinformation).

In short, this site’s founder/owner has dumped basically his entire adult life (and much of his adolecence prior to that) and Christ only knows how much money, effort, and general stress, into the project of maintaining this site across multiple decades and fostering its community as being something that’s genuinely different from other DB communities, and as something that gives a shit about painstaking accurate information.

I say all this essentially to remind you all: we’re all talking here on freaking Kanzenshuu. If the nature of the discourse here strikes one as being absurdly, pedantically slavish to accuracy about a topic as inherently inane and idiotic as Dragon Ball… well yeah! No shit! Where did you think you were again exactly?

And as far as my earlier posts in this thread (and in general): by all means, do not mistake my over-abuse of bolds and italics for me being “angry” or “aggressive”. The only, ONLY times I’ve ever been anything remotely approaching those things on here is either when someone is genuinely being an asshole, abusive, or bigoted, or on the occasions where serious, real life issues (that have a dramatic effect on people’s lives) get brought up and are trivialized in some way.

Beyond that? When I post my stupidly long, bold/italic-laden posts about whatever dumb Dragon Ball crap on here, this is just me A) doing what this site is literally supposed to be here for in the first place (i.e. be pedantically focussed on hyper-accurate DB info), and B) having at least SOME measure of fun whilst doing so.

Or to put it another way: don't mistake me being animated for me being enraged. I'm high-energy, but I'm not typically or particularly hostile (not without good reason to be at least).

Do I talk like this about Dragon Ball out in the real world?

Let me put it this way: I have some people in my personal life who’ve known me for literally decades (since I was a kid) who to this very day still have absolutely zero idea or clue whatsoever that I have now or ever in my life harbored any interest whatsoever in Dragon Ball (and in a few cases, even anime). Not because I hide it out of shame or embarrassment: but because it simply hasn’t ever really come up or been a factor in my relationship with them.

Hell, I’m sure most of those people if I told them I was a huge lifelong Dragon Ball nerd, would probably find that incredibly difficult to believe about me, given most of my other usual interests that they do know about.

Conversely, I’ve had no shortage of people on this very forum/community who, once they’ve gotten to know me better off the forums or IRL (as a few people here and there on this forum have over the years), end up finding it difficult to believe that I’m a fan of Dragon Ball: and they met me on a Dragon Ball forum to begin with!

Would I encourage people here talk to this extent and in this pedantically dorky manner about Dragon Ball with most people out in the real world?

Look at all the shit I’ve written here, on this very forum throughout the years, about how there are people here who desperately need to find other things in life outside of Dragon Ball (and Shonen, and kids media in general) to explore or get into, or become knowledgeable about. Up to and very much including non-fiction, non-nerdy IRL-focussed topics.

Hell, this includes some of what I wrote in this very thread right here!

Or fuck man, take a look at one of the quoted forum posts that’s been in my sig for almost damn near a decade now:

It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.

Let that act as my answer to that question.

Incidentally, Kamiccolo9 is one of the most awesome folks I’ve met on here who has gotten to know me (and I him) a ton off the forums, and honestly its probably been a good many years since he and I have spoken a single word about Dragon Ball (or anime) between us whenever we’ve spoken off this site.

Really the only thing that’s ever stopped me from creating a whole entire thread about all the myriad of awesome, fascinating things outside of kids’ media that so many people on this forum could get so much out of checking out since like, years and YEARS ago now, is the simple fact that this forum doesn’t have an Off-Topic section, nor does it generally allow (much) off-topic discourse here.

Its all Dragon Ball all the time here, so I’m constrained when I’m here to stick to Dragon Ball as much as humanly possible. And even then, I’ve STILL managed to slip a few bits of “here’s something else to check out that isn’t Shonen” in here and there whenever I could.

I’ve practically made the general vibe and sentiment behind William Shatner’s infamous “Get a life!” quote into my whole forum persona here.

But the older I get, the less of a shit I give. There are plenty of people who are ignorant/uneducated about all kinds of shit; probably much more important shit than the generic origins of a several-decade-old Japanese comic franchise. I've fell down a YouTube rabbithole of hayseed MAGA supporters denying that 401ks plummeting under Trump is not a problem and people should just continue working indefinitely until they fucking die I guess. Really put things into perspective.

I can add some further perspective to this, if you don’t mind:

I remember exactly 20 years ago in 2005 – only a year after this site first relaunched with this forum, and right when it first began its podcast, and incidentally this was also back when Youtube itself had first launched – I remember falling down a Youtube rabbit-hole of my own regarding Westboro Baptist Church, because someone that I knew IRL (an old friend from high school) at the time had fallen into a similarly homophobic Religious hysteria regarding queer people.

Unsurprisingly, this person was queer themselves but was raised in a super conservative/religious family, and as a result had contorted themselves into a venomous and unhinged little ball of self-hate: which manifested outwardly as hatred towards all other queer people in general.

At the time – for those too young to remember – this was right smack during the height of the Bush years, and right smack during the height of a gigantic revival of rampant and over-the-top extreme homophobia out in the mainstream the likes of which we hadn’t seen since the 80s.

And which had plunged the myriad of queer friends I’ve had my whole life into a whole ton of terror (like, more so than usual of course) for their own safety during that time. People near and dear to me were being forced to look over their shoulder when out in public (both figuratively and oftentimes quite literally), and the news at the time was filled with gay teenagers in high school and colleges across the country getting beaten and even killed by other homophobic teens, lynchmob-style.

That Westboro Youtube rabbit hole sticks out so much to me in my memories because it was really the very first ever political rabbit hole I ever fell into on Youtube (on Youtube specifically I mean, not the first political rabbit hole I ever fell into in general, as I’d been following politics and news events for pretty much my whole life since I was a kid) right during the first year of Youtube’s existence.

At the same time, during this same year (2005), most of the country was watching a whole major metropolitan city (New Orleans) be nearly destroyed with floodwater from Hurricane Katrina: a storm that was (and this was known even at the time) highly amplified to the degree it was by climate change, and which had left whole literal trails and trails of drowned corpses floating face-down in the rivers that used to be the streets of that city, due in no small part to the incompetence and mismanagement of FEMA by then-President Bush.

And ALSO at that same time, the U.S. (where I am from and do still live in) was still engaged in an incredibly bloody, grisly, and utterly pointless war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several very, very close friends of mine were in the military and fought in that war: one of whom was my very best friend since childhood, who was literally like family to me. I was an only child, but this guy was very much the closest thing I had to an actual brother growing up.

Some of my friends who were sent to fight in that thoroughly senseless conflict came back with physical wounds, and my aforementioned best friend since childhood came back around that same time (2005/2006-ish) with intensely severe mental/psychological scars from which he never, ever – to this very day – had ever gotten over.

He lost the love of his life because of it, and the last he and I spoke was maybe 15 years ago now. He’s still alive as far as I’m aware but he’s… very much unwell still to this very day (which I know via mutual friends), we’ll leave it at that.

Meanwhile, during that same time, what was I doing besides falling down that aforementioned Westboro Youtube rabbit-hole?

Convalescing at home, largely bedridden and increasingly less able to stand and walk properly due to a rare nerve infection that I came down with the previous year, which had utterly destroyed much of my life, and which I was unable to receive proper treatment or care for (and I cannot stress this enough) MANY YEARS and was left to basically rot and wallow in completely senseless physical pain and suffering the likes of which I can scarcely describe in words, due to the unwillingness of my insurance providers to provide me coverage for my medical care in our wonderful privatized, for-profit healthcare system.

This ended up forcing me instead to drop out of college, burn through my ENTIRE college life savings on what bits of medical care I could get (and had to pay for totally out of pocket), and say goodbye forever to any notion of me ever being able to afford to go back to college ever again.

For context, I was only 20 at the time I first got the infection in 2004, and thus 21 in 2005.

My being bedridden (from I need to stress a COMPLETELY treatable disease, were it not for private health insurance interfering with my ability to seek proper medical care) for basically the whole entirety of my 20s, and a decent portion of my 30s was in no small part why I spent almost any of the time that I spent in this community, and its how I had the time I had to also get to know a lot of people here off-site/off-forums.

The point of my outlining all this in response to your bit about your own MAGA rabbit hole on Youtube?

As fucked as the world currently is – and indeed it is much more fucked now than it ever has been before, to be sure – most of the problems we’re still currently facing have ALWAYS been here and have always been rotting and eating away at the world/society at large for literally decades upon decades.

Really the main reason why things are so much worse is due to these age-old problems festering and deteriorating exponentially due to their going so many decades/generations unaddressed. Things are indeed worse now than ever before… but they were ALWAYS rotten and sick to glaringly noticeable proportions since long, looooong many years ago.

Just because people of a certain age and a certain persuasion in communities like this one had their collective heads buried neck-deep in a pacifying sandpit of children's slop for much of that time in past years doesn't mean that these things weren't well known and very much noticeable and widely discussed to most other, regular people in the broader mainstream back in the day.

The thing is is that once shit hit a certain threshold by the mid-2010s, it became basically impossible for even the most insulated/sheltered little niches online like this place to ignore or keep itself free from impact anymore. Adult reality was always going to inevitably intrude on little mini Neverlands like this place at some point or other. It was always just a matter of "how" and "when".

What we’re seeing now, with MAGA and all the various online mainstreamed fascist movements (and really, global fascist political movements in general), is little more than the end-result of a steady and consistent societal collapse that has been ongoing since well before any of us here in this forum were even born.

The only difference between your recent MAGA Youtube rabbit hole and the current state of this large, ongoing societal collapse we’re in, and my 2005 Westboro Youtube rabbit hole and the state of this societal collapse back then?

Age and time. That’s it.

I'm not American and I've never interacted with the stereotypical incurious diehard Toonami fanboy whose only exposure to Eastern culture has been through the same 4 or 5 anime he's watched on repeat since he was 12 years old. Well, maybe I've seen a couple people like that, but can't say I'm good pals with any of them. As far as I'm concerned, that kind of person might as well be a complete nonentity, their existence literally doesn't impact me in the slightest. I don't even talk to people like that online if I can help it.

This is for sure, and unquestionably, a very, VERY online thing that we’re talking about here. I have at this point quite a ton of experience with this sort of thing in online spaces like this one (and have for well over 15+ years now), but I myself rarely to almost never encounter it out in real life very often.

Online though? Well...

As a microcosm of what a lot of my earliest experiences were like as someone who was engaged with this community off the forums during the worst of my above-mentioned medical ordeal: some of the other longtime members here might recall that Kanzenshuu (then-Daizenshuu) had an IRC chat where a ton of hardcore regulars here used to go. I wasn’t a “regular” of this chat per se, but I did frequent it a fair bit off and on during its day when it was active.

I have a very distinct memory of this one person there – who’s name I’ll obviously not divulge here, but who was a semi-frequent poster on the forums back in the day – who was only just a few years younger than I was at the time: so they were around maybe 18 or 19. I remember this person being utterly bewildered and lost when there was a brief reference toward the 9/11 World Trade Center Attacks.

This was someone who was American and in their late teens in the mid/late-2000s: and while they had indeed heard of the attacks before, they were utterly clueless as to what the attacks themselves actually consisted of or what buildings exactly were even attacked in the first place, or why this attack was even so noteworthy in the first place (to the point that they’d hear it referenced so much from time to time).

When I asked them, in utter disbelief, what exactly they did remember of it at the time, the response they gave was (and I’m roughly paraphrasing from memory here) to the effect of: “All I remember was that some building caught fire and the news interrupted Yu Gi Oh the whole day because of it.”

This is a true story. This is a real conversation I had with a forum semi-regular in the old Kanzenshuu/Daizenshuu IRC chat in the latter half of the 2000s.

And this kind of thing was not a unique, isolated incident. Not regarding 9/11 specifically, but regarding a blood-curdling lack of basic awareness of INCREDIBLY important and well-known basic facts about recent real world events, issues, or just simple, basic things you’re supposed to learn in grade school. From people who were ALL at the very least in their late teens to twenties.

Some actual, very much for real examples, all regarding Kanz regulars or semi-regulars that I knew and spoke to off-forums, none of whose identities/names I will reveal in the interest of privacy and basic decency:

- I remember having to explain to someone who Muhammad Ali was and why he was noteworthy historically.

- I remember having to also explain to another Kanz regular once back in the day who Princess Diana was.

- I also remember having to explain to someone else from here who Prince and David Bowie were back when they first passed away.

- I remember having to show one Kanz regular that I spent a lot of time with off-forums how to use a credit card. They were in their mid-twenties.

- I remember another who told me they literally first learned about the specifics of what sex was only a few years prior (at maybe around 15 or 16?) from talking to people in the Medabots community (this conversation was literally how I even first learned the fucking existence of that stupid anime, I didn’t know it was even a thing prior to that point).

- I remember one Kanz regular – who at the time was well deep into their late twenties – I had to meet with him on Skype over video chat and literally show him physically how to tie his own shoelaces: because his mother was still tying them for him every single day like he was a little kid. Again: late 20s.

These are just a very, very small handful of examples. I have TONS of other examples like this I could literally fill a small book with just with people I met on Kanz alone.

Basically, during the bulk of the late 2000s through mid-2010s, I was effectively acting as a makeshift parental figure to adult-aged Kanz regulars for whom their own families, and society at large, had completely and utterly fucking FAILED to prepare them for adulthood in any basic or meaningful sense. Me, some random fucking blabbermouthed jackass that they met on a fucking Dragon Ball forum.

This also wasn’t an isolated phenomenon at the time to this specific forum. I was finding people like this popping up ALL OVER various online communities of a similarly nerdy persuasion: video games, anime, comic books, furries, fanfiction, etc all across the 2000s and 2010s. People who were in their 20s and who didn’t know shit from shinola about incredibly basic life things and basic knowledge about the world around them, and instead had a head full of Saturday morning cartoon trivia and the like.

People who were over 18 or 21 and couldn’t so much as order a pizza for themselves and who didn’t know what the Vietnam War was, but could rattle off every episode title to Beyblade in order of airdate like it was nothing.

This was a worryingly large number of people I was seeing like this everywhere I looked online in specifically nerd community spaces for years.

God only knows with my physical condition still deteriorating and proper medical care being priced out from my reach and my mobility increasingly confined to my home for some time yet, I certainly had PLENTY of space to look all around online and notice these sorts of trends and sort of follow along their progression in real-time.

Obviously to varying degrees there have always been people like this around: but this was an exponentially and noticeably larger and larger amount over time. And I’m someone who has living memory of the internet and what it was like going back to the very late 1980s.

I remember sometime around 2009-ish, I had a Skype convo with Herms (yes, that Herms) about this. Herms certainly knew about all this and saw this kind of stuff I’m talking about here in the community back at the time: but he thought that it was just relegated to a smaller subset of people than I did and that maybe I was overly-worried about any wider/larger ramifications about this on a larger scale.

I can still remember the exact, specific wording I used with Herms in that convo regarding the sheer, staggering levels of unpreparedness, immaturity, and ignorance about insanely basic shit I was seeing on such a wide scale among so many adult-aged younger guys in these nerd spaces:

Me to Herms circa 2009: "This feels like a chicken that's bound to come home to roost in an ugly way one of these days."

Flash forward to about 6 years later or so, and suddenly we’re seeing a LOT of these exact same sorts of people all across internet nerd spaces getting roped into the alt-right, MAGA, and other various hate groups. Getting sucked into actual, literal “kill all the Jews and the blacks” Neo Nazi groups, often with the starting opener of “dating advice” and “how to talk to girls” or “how to understand how girls think” in the indoctrination process.

Suddenly its omnipresent online and inescapable. A few people who were just totally benign, normal posters on this site are suddenly parroting white nationalist talking points on here out of fucking nowhere (after years and years of being completely apolitical and ignorant about so much as who the fuck Saddam Hussein was) and quickly getting banned for it.

People that I knew from this forum who I was talking with off-forums were suddenly talking about shit like Phrenology and “the Jewish Question” and wondering if “women were given too many rights”.

Suddenly where once real life politics literally rarely to almost NEVER came up on the forums publicly (partly because scarcely that many regulars here knew the first fucking thing about any of it to begin with) suddenly we’re inundated with people here parroting far right, pseudo fascist garbage and people like myself, Zephyr, Kamiccolo9, Kendamu, and Julie are finding ourselves having to explain in painstaking detail to people here, on a fairly recurring basis, why its actually in fact fucking evil and sick to antagonize queer people and other minorities, and that rape and sexual assault actually ARE in fact serious issues that women have to deal with. Among other fun such chestnuts.

Suddenly I’m finding myself reading not one or two, but multiple, numerous academic books and journals and studies over the past nearly-ten years now on the subject of how fascist, far right groups have successfully infiltrated online spaces devoted to “nerd” topics and whatnot.

And to make myself more than perfectly clear on this: obviously none of this is the fault of kids’ media or Shonen or whatever the fuck. Not at all. This is all ultimately symptoms of a much deeper societal rot that has not one, but numerous root causes. Of a sort much too dizzyingly byzantine to recount here, and which you can literally read what is at this point an entire subgenre of literature about.

Since then, I’ve found myself for a few years in the mid/late 2010s volunteering for at least one online activist group (that is sadly now defunct) – that was founded by a kid who was himself radicalized into the alt-right, but got himself out of it - dedicated to helping other such young people be deradicalized away from this toxic sewage.

I’ve helped pull at least a few young guys out of this shit, and utterly fucking failed to help pull out countless, countless dozens and dozens more (one of which in particular that I failed to help still haunts me to this day).

I even in one notable incident that I’ll never, ever forget for the rest of my life, helped talk down one guy from stealing his dad’s gun collection and going on a neighborhood mass shooting spree. This same guy, the place where he was first radicalized? A Pokemon and Smash Bros. forum.

I’ve had to in the years since play a similarly makeshift “dad” figure to a whole bunch more people like this that I’ve met online outside of this particular forum. This forum is far, far from the sole, lone place I’ve come across this phenomenon/type of person. But it sticks out for me because its where I first really learned about and encountered it in this great a detail.

Had I never gotten sick and been barred from medical care for so many years due to insurance, then more than likely I would’ve just finished college and gone on to a very ordinary life, and I probably would’ve never been a very active member of this community in the first place (maybe just posted a couple of times in the first year for laughs, and that’s it).

I thus also wouldn’t have met so many of these people, gotten to know them, and I would’ve probably been about just as much blindsided by stuff like incels and the online alt-right as the next average “normie” offline.

Obviously, Toonami isn't solely to blame for Western ignorance on any of these topics. There's clearly a widespread cultural malaise that's been slowly making people unwilling to expand beyond a very narrow media palate of childhood nostalgic properties and whatever's currently trending on Netflix. Many online resources are frustrating to navigate because they're so overwhelmingly focused on a tiny keyhole rather than the bigger picture.

But, as has been said ITT, the internet is still a big place and tracking down the info you need isn't too difficult (though search engines sure aren't what they used to be). So seeing a few knuckleheads on the internet mistakenly acting like shonen is a genre that Dragon Ball singlehandedly pioneered... is a bit annoying to see, but in my experience, trying to tell them otherwise or to do their own research rarely leads anywhere, because they're simply not interested. So I'm just not that bothered about it anymore.

Art’s a funny thing: its simultaneously completely trivial, meaningless, and unimportant, and at the same time incredibly, astronomically meaningful and one of the key things that makes life and humanity as a whole so enriching and beautiful and worthwhile. Simultaneously, it can be and has also been at times used to harm and has helped push along horrific ends.

On the one hand, art should never, ever take priority over people’s physical or mental health and well-being. On the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (incidentally, the only form of hierarchy if any kind that I’ve ever found in any remote way in my life to be meaningful and worthwhile), its pretty far down near the bottom. There are any number of problems in the world who’s importance absolutely and utterly fucking dwarfs art, and its not even remotely close.

And yet at the same time on the other hand, the inspiration from art has literally saved countless people’s lives. Its helped change the world in many cases, and changed human perception.

Leonardo da Vinci used his skills as an artist to help map out the human anatomy and help push medical science forward by orders of magnitude. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writings helped energize the abolitionist movement during some of the worst years of slavery. Eadweard Muybridge’s experimental photography helped give birth to the invention of film as we know it.

Picasso’s Guernica was one of the singular defining symbols of the anti-fascist movements that rose up against the Nazis in the 1930s. Norman Rockwell’s paintings are ground zero for modern Americana as we know it, and were an especially powerful symbol used against segregation laws. Keith Haring’s street art helped significantly raise AIDS awareness in the late 80s, at a time when ignorance, fear, and stigma surrounding the disease was at an all time high. Countless actual NASA scientists were originally first inspired to go into the field of astrophysics by Star Trek.

Academic study after academic study has shown that one of the many significant factors that helped tip the scales away from homophobia and towards much more widespread gay acceptance in the mainstream by the 2010s was having more and more nuanced gay characters in TV and film which helped normalize and destigmatize them for millions and millions of people.

For my own part, I’ve known at least several people in my own personal life IRL growing up who were given the strength to resist and pull themselves out of literal suicidal despair from a song or a band or a film. I once was able to persuade one person I met on Kanz back in the day, who was starting to totter on the edge of falling into the alt-right pipeline back in the early days of the alt-right’s mainstreaming, partly just from showing them the movie Do the Right Thing.

And at the same time, art is also one of THE most crucial tools used in fascist propaganda. Birth of a Nation helped raise membership of the KKK for some time. When I was a teenager in high school, Neo Nazi groups were rather famously using carefully edited, decontextualized clips from the film American History X to help raise their recruitment numbers. Modern Neo Nazis today use internet memes as a kind of weird “pop art” to propagandize people with misleading, skewed information. The modern Christian Evangelical Right uses their own (poorly produced, laughably low-budget) films to attempt to indoctrinate kids and families.

Most fascists, both today and in the past, also view art as much as a key enemy of theirs and an obstruction of their goals as they do a tool of recruitment. Goebbels all-but moved Heaven and Earth and burned through a ridiculous amount of resources trying to locate and destroy every last copy of the film The Grand Illusion because he viewed it as such a threat to Nazi propaganda (he thankfully failed in the long run, as the original print was miraculously recovered in the 90s).

In the Wuxia thread, I also noted how in the earliest, totalitarian days of modern Communist China in the 1920s and 30s, many of the earliest Wuxia silent films (including the very first ever Wuxia silent film The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple) were seized and destroyed by the government because they were seen as too anti-authoritarian in their themes and messaging and thus a threat to the then-still burgeoning CCP’s control over the populace.

Fairly crappy, commercial art is also a helluva distraction and opiate for curbing people’s drive to seek constructive, positive change either in the world around them or just in their own personal lives. Thus the term “Bread and Circuses” and whatnot. Reality TV is often pointed to as one of the most obvious (and blatantly toxic) examples of this, and very much rightly so: but I’ve often over the years have come to think of the whole Shonen/kids’ media fixation in fairly similar terms to this.

Does any of this mean that some dumb kids’ cartoons like Dragon Ball should in any way be looked upon as being in that same level of relative importance? Of fucking course not.

I’m just noting the weird contradiction of how art is at the same time nothing and everything, a trivial piffle and simultaneously astronomically meaningful and critical to humanity. Its hardly anywhere vaguely near the level of importance as food, water, shelter, protection from violent harm, freedom and justice under the law, etc.

And at the same time, its many times over literally changed the world (for both good and ill, but overall on balance much, much more largely for good), helped save countless lives, and overall define some of the very, very best in what humanity is capable of.

A film critic that I never cared much for overall did one time come up with one of the single greatest descriptions for what film could be as an artistic medium at its absolute best and most powerful: “Empathy Machines”. Devices that create and foster literal human empathy by forcing us to see the world through the eyes of someone else for a few hours.

Art matters a whole fuck of a lot. Not to NEARLY the degree that resolving the current ongoing global collapse of modern society is: but at the same time, its still something humanity absolutely cannot do without and that will always endure and define us as a species for as long as we’re still around (however long that may be at this point).

And as trivial and silly and outright dumb as Dragon Ball is, at the same time I dunno: it’s helped lead not only me, but a LOT of folks in places like this community to find one another and form some pretty long-lasting and important friendships/relationships. Hell, it literally helped Mike/EX find his wife of however many years/decades!

Like I said: at once everything and nothing, both trivial and meaningful, in almost equal measures. A fascinating contradiction.

Better for me to focus on ironing out those places that specialize in source-based info of various kinds. Hoping that even this site will refine what it already does even further as well, as it's gone a long way.

See what I wrote above at the very start of this post: this is Kanzenshuu we’re all speaking here on. This is THE place to be as painstakingly accurate and slavish to fact with regards to something as inane and ridiculous as Dragon Ball.

We’re not on a forum about economics or social sciences here guys (even if more and more increasingly in recent years, stuff like that comes up around here more): this is THE grand emperor of all Dragon Ball Nerdshit forums.

This site was created for the express purpose of sorting out Dragon Ball Fact from Dragon Ball Bullshit Fanwankery (in a non-douchey, fun way of course). It has few other purposes beyond that, any of which are very much generally secondary to it.

So to that end, seeing as how that’s this site’s whole reason for existing, and literally what its founder/creator dumped almost 30 years of his life into building in all the myriad of ways I just outlined above… yes, forgive me for finding it IMMENSELY comical and absurd that THIS SITE of ALL sites could go THIS long, THIS many years not getting correct something as basic as DB’s genre.

And thinking that its target demographic is its genre is just the cherry/icing on top.

I’ve used this (absurdly dorky) analogy before but like... imagine you had a Dungeons & Dragon’s site/forum where everyone there, from the site’s creator on down to the staff and to every lowly random user, spent untold years cataloging every single possible detail about the game with painstaking slavish devotion to accuracy. From financial details about the company who publishes the game books, to biographies of the artists behind the game books’ artwork, to every last facet of the many editions’ rules, etc. Everything.

Everything EXCEPT… for the very existence of Western/European High Fantasy as a genre of fiction. Up to and including the works of JRR Tolkien himself. Somehow, for whatever reason, no one on this hypothetical D&D forum has ever heard of or experienced another piece of Western High Fantasy outside of D&D, and they believe that D&D is the sole, only thing that exists of it, and who will state at you blankly if you mention the title Lord of the Rings to them.

This is roughly analogous to what this whole fanbase has done with Dragon Ball here for the better part of the last 20/25+ years at least.

Is this in any remote way a matter of grave national importance? Of course not, and no one here (least of all me) ever once for a second claimed that it was.

Is it incredibly fucking funny and comically absurd on its face though? Oh hell yes it is.

Again, for the umpteenth time: these posts I’m making in this thread (and similar posts on this topic in other threads) isn’t me raging and shaking my fist at anyone in nerd-fury. Its me laughing at and comically facepalming at how utterly batshit ludicrous, silly, and dumb the whole situation in general is and has been right along.

The world’s falling apart guys, and millions upon millions of people’s lives are being systematically destroyed on the daily here: let me get my relatively few laughs wherever I can find them here.