Post
by xzero » Sun Jan 29, 2012 8:06 pm
I interpret "serious" as darker, somewhat more realistic while still soundly rooted in fantasy. On the one hand, it could work. If you look at the spectrum of DB/Z/GT, you've got 2 fairly "dark" parts that are more serious in tone: the Piccolo stuff in DB and the later Freeza stuff in Z. By the time GT rolled around, you kind of knew that the Evil Dragons were going to be defeated somehow. With Piccolo, the whole storyline starts out with a very serious event: Krillin being killed and Goku, upon learning about it, swearing to murder the monster that killed his friend. From there, you still get the lighthearted moments of DB, but they're contrasted by Piccolo Daimao and later, Piccolo Jr. One thing that people who've never actually seen all of DB probably don't realize is that the Goku vs. Piccolo fight in the end of DB is on par with if not far more brutal than anything we ever saw in Z. Piccolo goes out of his way to break all of Goku's limbs during that fight. Certainly the stuff with Vegeta, Freeza, Cell, and Buu is more stylized and "epic," but the Piccolo fight is just vicious.
The other dark moment is Freeza. He brutally beats Nail up, but that's hardly the worst of it. Things start to go badly when he tortures Krillin, then tortures and murders Vegeta. He then kills Krillin and, when that action produces an opponent fully capable of beating him in battle, he destroys the planet on the assumption that even if the explosion doesn't kill SSJ Goku, he'll suffocate in the vacuum of space while Freeza lives on. When I first watched the series, everything after Namek felt like a foregone conclusion that the good guys were going to win somehow. With Namek, you really get the sense that while you can guess Freeza's not going to actually win, Goku might also not make it out alive. By contrast, when Goku actually does die in the Cell Games, it's not nearly as bad because that resulted, not from overwhelming odds, but from Gohan's bad choices and Goku's own decision to sacrifice himself.
After Freeza, the only other more serious moment is Vegeta deciding to sacrifice himself. This is made serious more by the tone set and the way the whole thing plays out than by the act itself, as demonstrated by Goku's less serious sacrifice in the Cell Games about forty episodes prior.
Having said all of that, I think DB/Z/GT could have benefited from being more serious in tone more consistently. I've mentioned before on this forum that I don't like Goten and Trunks at all. In a way, it returns the series to some of the humor of DB. For my part, I almost never found any of the humor in DB all that enjoyable. I know some people like the silliness of DB and the similar moments in Z, but I prefer the more serious moments any day. As seriousness goes, you can't say serious=reality because then, as people have noted, flying, ki blasts, alien races who've sent ultra-strong babies to earth, and all of that stuff is mooted. But as far as I'm concerned, DB/Z/GT would have benefited from doing away with the silly nonsense and taking the focus to much more serious levels. Naturally, the easy counterargument is that if I want that, Yu Yu Hakusho (to some extent), Fullmetal Alchemist / Brotherhood, Death Note, and countless other shows already do that, so DBZ needn't join in. While this is true, it doesn't alter the fact that DBZ does, as I described above, delve into darker, more serious moments from time to time, and those moments tend to stand out as vastly superior to all of the dumb jokes the series has surrounding those moments. If it could go to the points that it did, it could just as easily have gone all the way.
