Was Dragon Ball ever spoiled for you?

bkev · Post by **bkev** » Wed Apr 22, 2009 11:30 pm

Well, I saw a (likely bootleg) action figure of Vegetto once... wondered who he was, got some BS explanation from a friend... then when he showed up I was like "WHOA I KNOW THAT GUY"! Don't know if that counts.

Also, starting after Vegeta's sacrifice so... guess you could say quite a bit was spoiled :p

Krakabeast · Post by **Krakabeast** » Wed Apr 22, 2009 11:31 pm

I'd do anything to relive my life without anyone or anything spoiling DB for me. Being a fan of the English dub, spoilers were EVERYWHERE!

Super Sonic · Post by **Super Sonic** » Wed Apr 22, 2009 11:38 pm

Thankfully I avoided spoilers. Yeah, knew about a few things of DB, due to seeing much of Z first, but not much. Heck, I avoided watching on the International Channel to do so. I still avoid spoilers when it comes to Bleach and Naruto.

rereboy · Post by **rereboy** » Thu Apr 23, 2009 7:35 am

It was never spoiled for me.

I watched DB, then DBZ and then DBGT on the TV (they were aired in order). It was great.

Adamant · Post by **Adamant** » Thu Apr 23, 2009 8:25 am

Not a whole lot, actually.
I had most everything from the beginning of the series up to the middle of the Red Ribbon arc spoiled for me through online story summaries (I knew who General Blue was, but not that he had psychic powers, so I believe I stopped reading them in the middle of the Blue sub-arc), but large parts of the story was fresh to me. I knew what a Super Saiyan was and what they looked like, but wasn't aware of other things most people would consider common knowledge, like the connection between Piccolo and God, or the fact that there was a character named Tenshinhan.

I barely knew anything about the Piccolo and Cell arcs at all, to the point I didn't even know there was a villain named "Cell" in the first place - when I played Super Butoden 2, one of my first actual exposures to the series beyond incoherent information from the internet, I believed that green villain character to be this "Mr. Satan" person I only knew by name then.

Another amusing mistake I made was that, while I knew God was a character in the series, I had no idea what he actually looked like (or that he had any sort of connection with Piccolo), so when I first saw this masked character with a halo appear at Baba's tournament, I assumed him to be God. After all, according to the translation I was reading, Akkuman was the Devil himself, so moving on to fighting God after having defeated the Devil seemed like a logical progression.
...yeah.

Puto · Post by **Puto** » Thu Apr 23, 2009 9:42 am

Nope, saw it spoiler free from the beginning of DB up to the end of Z at least, back when it aired in Portuguese TV. Actually I managed to get access to the internet and check out the end... three episodes before the show was over. Didn't watch the first 30 or so episodes of GT on TV on the first airing (though I bought the first two 3-episode VHS tapes that were sold a year before it aired), so that part was kinda spoiled for me (I only found out GT was being aired at all starting with that... weird domino game episode. Hell of a way to start)

ssjcj · Post by **ssjcj** » Thu Apr 23, 2009 6:02 pm

The Frieza to Cell stuff was unspoiled. My most vivid memory is when I saw Trunks and thought who's that guy? I was also shocked when Kuririn died at the end of the 22nd Budokai.

Captain Awesome · Post by **Captain Awesome** » Fri Apr 24, 2009 4:18 am

I completely spoiled Z and GT for myself back in 1999/2000, I would kind of regret it, if it wasn't for the fact that the low resolution realmedia videos I downloaded back then were what sparked my love for the original Japanese version.

I vividly remember the first clip I downloaded, it was the Cell arc, with Super Saiya-jin Vegeta giving second form Cell a physical and verbal beating, my first reaction (as a 13 year old) to the 30 second clip was that Cell sounded downright scary and that Vegeta was an absolute badass, this was a huge departure from their goofy and poorly acted FUNimation counterparts (Not that the dub was up to the Cell arc yet) in my eyes, and I fell in love with it right away.

So if it wasn't for spoiling everything for myself online, and seeing there was so much more to the show than the English dub, I probably would have moved on and forgotten about Dragonball years ago.

Victator Supreme · Post by **Victator Supreme** » Fri Apr 24, 2009 4:49 am

I read spoilers for the Buu saga and dismissed them for being too crazy.

xzero · Post by **xzero** » Fri Apr 24, 2009 7:40 pm

I read power level speculations from various fan sites regarding the Buu saga, so that kind of was spoiled for me. And the original series was also spoiled because, while people died early in the Piccolo storyline, they were there in the first episodes of Z, which meant that they had to eventually have been brought back with the dragonballs. I also started watching during the original dub's run, but I started watching kind of late during re-runs of seasons 1 and 2 (circa 1998), so going back and seeing Goku die had basically no impact on me.

I think Freeza, Cell, and GT (besides minor plot points elsewhere) were the only things not spoiled for me.

Ultimately, though, it could be argued that many of the major events in early Dragonball Z were, if not spoiled, certainly minimized because of the absence of Dragonball in America. Did anyone who hadn't seen the earlier series care that Goku died in the beginning of the series, that he and Piccolo (who is basically always a good guy in Z) teamed up to take on Raditz, or that Piccolo died for Gohan? These events weren't technically spoiled for us, but their impact and importance was certainly ruined. Krillin's death in Z was the first truly impactful thing I remember from the series.

Vekurotto · Post by **Vekurotto** » Fri Apr 24, 2009 10:06 pm

I spoiled small details and main villains. Thing was it was still surprising. Since I really didn't see any pictures the transformations and the shocking moments were pretty much all in tack. Mostly I got my spoilers from the video games like Gokuden and Dragon Ball Legends. But again I couldn't read Japanese when I first played those games and DB Legends vaguely only covers main points.

Piccolo Daimao · Post by **Piccolo Daimao** » Sat Apr 25, 2009 7:50 am

Video games were the ones that spoiled some things for me. Playing Ultimate Battle 22, I had already seen Majin Vegeta, Super Saiyan 3 Gotenks, Majin Boo, Super Saiyan 3 Goku, Gogeta, etc... Of course, I never knew what those forms were because I was a new fan to the series. So then, once I got into the series, I was like "Oh, so those are the characters in my games!"

I first got into Dragon Ball Z when my friend was telling me about stuff. I pretty much knew about Super Saiyan right off the bat, although I didn't really understand what it meant. Then I bought a DBZ magazine, which had information about the characters and such. Still, I didn't know any of the plots.

So I bought DBZ Budokai 2, and it was that game that I began to get a bit more understanding of the plot and the series. Even if Budokai 2 had some plot-twists from the series, I still knew the basic story.

Then I did some research on the internet. Began knowing more things. For me, it was more of a gradual process of learning things about Dragon Ball Z. I didn't have any of the channels that aired DBZ, and I currently had no friends that liked it - until secondary school, that is. Eventually, I began to learn more things, like sagas, characters that I didn't know even existed until then...blah blah blah. Yup, I didn't really watch the series because I didn't have the channels that aired it. It wasn't a "spoiler-free" experience.

Funnily enough, I didn't really know about Dragon Ball until my sister bought me the first volume of Dragon Ball for my birthday. I had seen vague pictures of Kid Goku, but never probably knew about it until then. I knew that Piccolo used to be a bad-guy though. And I've gotta owe it to my sister - if she hadn't bought me that volume, I would never have known that there even were manga of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. And before then, I didn't even know Dragon Ball was a manga. It was just some action cartoon like X-Men or Spiderman, rather than it being a Japanese manga.

Velasa · Post by **Velasa** » Sun Apr 26, 2009 4:19 am

I came into DBZ in 99, while the Sayiajin and early Freezer eps were playing in a weird mix early in the morning, and that early in my fandom I didn't know enough to go in the internet so all of that was almost completely unspoiled for me. By the point the latter half of Freezer was playing on Toonami I was on PN almost every day hunting for information and getting the basic information on who and what was going to happen in the future. So from Trunks' appearance through the end I had basic outlines of what happened- I knew major clashes, who died, who won the biggest battles. there were still shockers intermixed (I was absolutely stunned when Gohan his SSJ1 in the ROSAT, and how the Android saga ran right into Cell with no actual border between them), but the major stuff I really knew. It was the experience of actually watching it its entirety that I was really eagerly awaiting (and still awaiting in some cases. I'm almost there with these effing singles..._

An amusing snafu of logic-
When I was first finding things out about DB I didn't know what fanfiction was. the first couple I read I saw vaguely as fact. Somewhere in this mess I read about kids finding this infant named Baby who was a major evil villain later on, and upon seeing a picture like this.....

Well, look at the horns. That had to be the evil guy >> That was pretty funny down the road.

xzero wrote:it could be argued that many of the major events in early Dragonball Z were, if not spoiled, certainly minimized because of the absence of Dragonball in America.

Absolutely man. I knew so many of the things that were going to happen in the original DB for so many years before I ever saw it that it never was able to have the kind of impact on me it would have if we had seen DB before DBZ. I mean, I remember watching Dead Zone as a kid and being confused what the deal even was there.

This brings me to my last point- wherein Dragonball, the original series... was completely spoiled for most of us who watched the show in its out of order American television release. I mean.. we already knew all that old stuff. We knew right from the conversation Son had with everybody in the ep where he goes chasing after Radditz that Krillian and Muten died before, we know the backstory from characters talking to each other. the impact is more or less killed for the shockers from back then because they're all years in the past from the chars we met in Z. While I disagree slightly on none of the deaths in the beginning having an impact (pure force of shock was pretty strong as a kid, because there had never been anything in a cartoon I'd seen even vaguely like that before), it's still a valid point that it doesn't begin to relate to the shock the Japanese audience who had known these guys for years felt when they all dropped dead.

I don't really regret my intro to the show. I feel slightly cheated of the surprises of the original Dragonball? But I loved all those awesome hours trolling PN for information and chatting with other equally excited kids about what the future was really going to shape up to be.