PhantomSaiyan wrote: Sat Oct 24, 2026 5:20 amAs much as the powerscaler side doesn't want to admit it, DB has never been too concerned with its power system and optimizing it because that's just not the point
That's the thing though: Dragon Ball never,
ever at any point had any such thing as a "power system". The idea that it ever did is a completely made-up fan invention (that I maintain is primarily a Western phenomenon and one that's rooted primarily in the original Saban-era dub looping the Saiyan and Freeza arcs over and over and over again for the first half dozen years or so of the dub's existence).
Dragon Ball has *always* been fantasy oriented at its core, not sci fi. The sci fi aspects are purely window dressing for the actual story, which is fantasy and rooted in magic and mysticism. At the end of the day, the series has always treated its conception of Ki/Chi/Qi no differently than any other martial arts fantasy story has ever treated it: as a form of mysticism rooted in Taoist folklore.
The whole "scouter" business in the Saiyan and Freeza arcs was a means of showing how the sci fi-themed villains of those arcs
didn't understand the mystical nature of their own powers and that this was a *weakness* of theirs (that the heroes continuously capitalize on), not a strength. That's the real irony here: that the entire point of the scouters/battle power thing in the story is a demonstration of how dumb and futile it is to try and scientifically rationalize something that is ultimately at its core, a kind of magic.
There's a reason why the story stops bothering to ever again mention battle powers the moment that Freeza's army is out of the picture. Its not because Toriyama "got lazy" or "careless": its because
this concept was never at any point what you thought it was for in the first place.
There was never,
ever a an RPG-like "system" to Dragon Ball's conception of Ki - because fundamentally, its Ki works just the same as it does in 99% of most Wuxia/Xianxia fiction, where there is similarly no RPG-like system to any of it. Its not that DB's Ki is "based on" the Taoist concept of it: it literally just simply IS the Taoist concept of it plainly. They're one and the same, and they always were from the getgo to now.
This is actually one single example of something that's part of a long, recurring trend in DB fandom as a whole (and its something that isn't exclusive to the dub half of it either): taking fanmade ideas and concepts, and treating them as if they're "canonical" to the actual DB manga/anime/media that's produced, even though there isn't a hint of any of it actually there when you actually bother to sit down and read/watch any of it.
And doing it so consistently and with such insistent repetition, that the whole fanbase/culture at large actually manages to convince itself (almost deliberately "Mandela Effect"
itself in a way) that these completely fan-invented ideas are somehow present within the actual text of the series, even though nothing even close to like it was ever actually there to begin with. And this broader phenomenon is hardly just limited to the dub-centric half of the fandom either, but that's a whole other story entirely.
None of these kinds of conversations about "power scaling" were EVER a part of fan discourse surrounding Dragon Ball prior to the Saban/Ocean dub's years long looping/repetition. DB before then was treated simply for what it was: a fantasy martial arts serial about fighters who harness mystical power from Chinese folklore to do insane shit. Nobody ever RPG-ified it (unless they were actually playing a literal Dragon Ball RPG video game), and people very,
very rarely ever engaged in "strength debates" outside of an incredibly broad, non-specific nature. None of this "power scaling" shit ever became a thing until the dub looped those two arcs into infinity for years.
Based on the sheer and repeated cultural osmosis of this, it started this whole cycle where the entire fanbase basically "brainwashes" itself into treating fanon as canon and then getting confused, upset, and outright angry when the actual real story itself continuously fails to conform itself to the made-up fanon thing that everyone has convinced themselves was supposedly always there in the text, even though it never was.
And its not like Dragon Ball itself, when divorced from all this stupid nonsense, is in any way watertight or free of narrative flaws and inconsistencies on its own terms. Of course it is, same as any other story out there usually often is: but this whole "fanon is canon" thing has lead throughout the past 25/30 years to SO much in the way of
completely wasted time and conversations that were always pointless and meaningless as it pertains to the actual story that's actually there.
Toriyama of course has always played fast and loose with his narratives, famously so:
but not in this specific case. This one is
entirely on the fanbase and the fanbase alone. Even the dub's part in helping start this eventually becomes less and less to blame for it the more time and years pass and the more we're far enough out from the dub's initial influence: the Japanese version has been out there and readily accessible for decades now, and moreover the actual information from it is even more readily out there online. At a certain point, the only people you're left to blame for this is the fans' pure stubborn obstinance to change their way of thinking and looking at this.
Imagine if somehow Lord of the Rings fans invented an entire sci fi alien civilization that's supposedly a part of Middle Earth, and then continuously get outraged and upset that Tolkien media that's produced always seems to fail to acknowledge this sci fi alien race that's supposedly such a key part of Tolkien's work. Stupid and insane, right? That's not THAT far removed from what DB fans have been doing here for the better part of nearly 30 years now.
Its an incredibly dumb but fascinating phenomenon.
She/Her 
What do you mean you’re mad at me?? That’s so unfair! 
