Kenji wrote: Tue Feb 10, 2026 4:21 pm
I can't speak for everyone, but what kept me hooked in Dragon Ball was that it always managed to stay interesting, fresh, and have sort of a message attached to each arc.
Pilaf: "You don't need magic balls to make your wishes come true, they were always at your reach."
20th Budokai: "Don't let your ego get to your head and keep improving, there will always be someone stronger."
Red Ribbon: "Militarization is bad, there is no magic water to make you stronger (please disregard Piccolo), you make yourself stronger through hard work and dedication, and while there's nothing wrong with holding on to your memories, you must do the right thing if that'll make someone else's life better."
21st Budokai: "The older generations have direct impact on the newer generations, and sooner or later, they'll be surpassed for better or for worse."
Piccolo Daimao: There was never a Piccolo arc, it never happened. (I don't like it very much)
Saiyans: "With hard work and dedication, anybody can get to the top."
Where the entire problemetically-honorable and competitive protagonists shit started to happen was around the Saiyans/Namek. And even then, the protagonists were usually a little on the lighter side of the moral scale. Even in the infamous scene where they refuse to stop Gero, Goku throws around the excuse, "Well, this Gero guy didn't even hurt anybody yet, so killing him is... uh...." It was mostly Super that doubled down on the protagonists being horrible amoral pieces of shit thing.
I also tend to not like Freeza/Cell/Boo and the entirety of modern Dragon Ball because whatever message they were planning on having is either a retread of an old one or is very, very badly executed. I think Dragon Ball tried to "pass the torch" at least 5 times in a row during Cell/Boo/GT/Super and never really committed.
Okay yeah, if you don't like the Piccolo, Namek, Cell, or Boo arcs then your position overall makes a lot more sense to me. I don't relate to that, but I get it. I apologize in advance for the lengthy reply here. Not typing any of this to argue or to try and change your mind, but to try and explain what I'm getting out of the story as a whole, including those later arcs that you aren't so big on.
I think the protagonists' moral character throughout the story is reasonably complicated. As early as, and especially in, the Pilaf arc, every main character besides Goku is a scheming bastard in some way or another. I still need to read more of Toriyama's other stuff to really see and appreciate it myself directly, but I've often seen it said (mainly by
Cipher) that his stories in general tend to involve a bunch of selfish assholes accidentally making the world a better place. But I wouldn't say that makes them horrible amoral pieces of shit. Some very big mainstream schools of thought in Ethics hold the position that consequences alone determine the moral quality of an action, so I wouldn't be alone there. But even that to the side, like you said, they are clearly on the lighter side of things, and I'd say that applies no matter what story arc we're in. Even in Super. And even in the Pilaf arc: these people (sans Goku) are all using each other, but they still end up saving the world despite that. I think that's fun! That Goku himself will later develop a selfish streak of his own is also something I think is fun. It adds some texture to him, beyond being a simple do-gooder.
As an aside, I don't think Goku's choice to revive Bora is
as selfless as it's often painted. Going out of his way to continue his quest and look for the rest of the Dragon Balls and using them to bring Bora back to life were very good things to do. But remember that after the wish is made he leaps into the air and grabs the Four Star Ball before it can fly away. It returns to normal a year later. He did not have to sacrifice his grandfather's memento for the sake of others, and he got to fight more strong guys as a result of this selfless quest. He gets to have his cake and eat it too, something that will pretty much be true for all of his increasingly selfish decisions down the line.
On the topic of that selfish streak, it really starts in the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai. He gives Piccolo a free hit, stakes be damned, and he restores Piccolo to good health and longs for him to get even stronger. People give all sorts of reasons to justify these actions, and they aren't without merit, but the fact remains that they were risky moves made in part for the sake of good fights, in the present and the future. So, the moral quality of these actions is
mixed.
I think it's interesting that the first of these sorts of decisions on Goku's part comes in the first story after he's grown up (something I
think Toriyama was trying to pull an inverse of with Gohan after training in the Room of Spirit and Time). I also think it's interesting that Goku's reckless decisions like this tend to escalate alongside his strength. The implication of that, intended or otherwise, is that there is a sort of danger to reaching the top. Is there any real upshot to that? Any useful moral lesson for the reader to glean? I'm not sure, but I do think it is a fun way to subvert and pervert Roshi's lesson from the 21st Tenkaichi Budokai, that surely there is always a bigger fish out there.
What happens when someone who thrives on testing themselves runs out of ways to test themselves? They start inviting their own tests. This results in Goku developing into a more morally grey character than the pure child he was in the Pilaf arc, where he was pretty much the only one not manipulating everyone else for his own selfish desires. But even then, he's still a good dude. Again, I think that's fun. The ending with Oob works for me because Goku is now taking on as a pupil someone who rivals him in power: the final antagonist he faced, someone he couldn't even truly beat on his own. In a sense, he has a definitive healthy outlet for that endless drive (credit to
Cipher and
Nejishiki for this read). I think this is important for maintaining that moral greyness in Goku, while also keeping the overall lighthearted message of DB, that shit's gonna be okay in the end.
I do think there is some more stuff you could do with that besides simply escalating Goku's recklessness. I've seen some pine for something that reminds me a lot of Berserk or Vinland Saga, where the protagonist has a big revelation partway through the story that they've been living their life very wrong up until that point, and they spend the rest of their life trying to amend it. I think that's a good type of story, but I personally don't think that's a very interesting model for Goku to follow. What I do think would be interesting is more an examination of moral character itself, and the implications of actions on said character. Goku can ride Kinto-Un and survive Devilman's attack because he is "pure of heart". What does that actually mean, though? What I'm calling "problemetically-honorable and competitive", that moral greyness to Goku's character as he grows up and gets stronger, is what, I'm pretty sure, Toriyama meant when he said there was an element of "poison" to Goku. And, well, I would love to know how that interacts with the purity of his heart, if at all. Goku can still ride Kinto-Un in the Saiyan arc, despite all of the stuff he did for Piccolo. Could he still ride it after Namek? After the Cell arc? In Super? What does it mean if he can? What does it mean if he can't?
Another throughline worth mentioning is the way in which so many evil characters do the same thing as Goku, but from the opposite direction. Where Goku, a good guy, is willing to be maybe a little too accommodating to bad guys for the sake of a good fight (from the perspective of wanting to win and survive at any cost), so many bad guys are likewise willing to be maybe a little too accommodating to good guys for the sake of a good fight (from the perspective of wanting to win and survive at any cost). They, just like Goku, are driven by their egos, which are bound up in proving their martial superiority (to others
and themselves). Piccolo goes out of his way to enter a martial arts tournament, basically hoping to humiliate Goku at his own game. Freeza opts out of simply firing at Namek again, because he wants to fight Goku more. Cell allows everyone to train more, so that he can hold a martial arts tournament. Boo, across multiple incarnations, holds off on fully wiping humanity and Earth out, because there will be more strong guys later. In the case of Piccolo and Boo, holding off on simply killing their enemies ends up giving them time to reform. They end up becoming better people, ironically, because they will sacrifice their own self-preservation for a good fight, in the same way that Goku becomes a worse person for exactly the same reason. They mirror each other in a way.
(Goku's selfish desire for a good fight down the line also gives characters like Vegeta, #17, and #18 the chance to reform, but there wasn't a great place in the paragraph to add that)
There's maybe something to be said here, probably by someone much more well-read on the subject, about Yin and Yang in Daoism, and how existence involves a sort of swinging pendulum between the extremes, and how those extremes compliment and create each other, and together they form a sort of balance. Even bad people can reform, and even good people have some "poison" in them. Things are not black and white. Through shared striving in the context of competition, we can all meet in the middle. I believe that is a positive theme and message that Dragon Ball presents, which only truly works if Goku is allowed to become a worse person and make others better as a result, which only gets off the ground with Goku's ever-increasing strength leading to a scarcity of bigger fish and an escalation of recklessness.
Full disclosure, those last two paragraphs only fully dawned on me
while writing this post, so even if you don't agree at all with my read here, I appreciate you providing the impetus for me arriving at it.
PrinceVegetto wrote: Wed Feb 11, 2026 12:15 amDragon Ball as a franchise is built on legacy. All of Z’s best arcs recontextualize old ideas. GT may have tried to duplicate OG DB in its first arc but after that they really got the ball rolling, so if reusing old ideas for continuity sake automatically makes something uncreative, then Z itself would fail that standard with the Red Ribbon army / Android arc.
The concept for the Shadow Dragons arc where there's
finally consequences for the overuse of dragon balls is brilliant. Execution is another story...
I definitely agree. Dragon Ball has been recontextualizing stuff for the bulk of its existence.
Gaffer Tape once pointed out in Dragon Ball Dissection that the Piccolo Daimao arc remixes the Tao Pai Pai portion of the Red Ribbon Army arc. This then gets remixed all throughout the "Z" portion. You can definitely use your legacy as a vehicle for doing new things. You can iterate on the same idea multiple times, polishing and refining it each step of the way.
But I guess my point then is, what's supposed to be the problem with "constantly retreading old battles or recycling old villains" as you describe in the opening post? Why can't the adventures and battles of Goku Jr. and Vegeta Jr. involve a ton of callbacks to Namek and Boo? Why couldn't they face a new iteration of the Crane School? Which stories are actually guilty of retreading and recycling in your eyes, and why is GT (seemingly) off the hook for it?
Where does the tasteful use of legacy end and the lazy rehash begin? Where does the Temu Pilaf arc/Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans Redux arc fall on this spectrum? What about Movie 12 Redux? To be clear, I don't hate any of GT's arcs, and thought the Super 17 arc was a
very fun time last rewatch. But I'm just not sure what sets them significantly apart from later Dragon Ball stories, or why anyone should expect that a Goku Jr. series would have been any different.
