Nickolaidas wrote:Eire wrote:Every time I read about Toriyama "being forced to write anything" I imagine him starring in real life re-creation of Misery.
Just to be clear, when I said "forced to have Vegeta do stuff", I meant he had to in order to maintain the status quo of Vegeta being 'the rival' - a position Toriyama *himself* wanted Vegeta to have, in order to make Goku look *better*. If Vegeta was vastly surpassed by Goku and had no screen time with the Big Bad, he's not a rival to the protagonist's power; he's just Krillin.
I never meant the fans put a gun into Akira Toriyama's head and ordered him to make Vegeta relevant.
And to be clear on another thing: Dragon Ball is Toriyama's baby, and anything he says goes - it's his and can do whatever the hell he wants with it. What I'm saying is that with this attitude of making everyone worthless and having the hero and the rival do all the (heavy)lifting, the other characters get no new fans and become irrelevant in the eyes of new fandom. Only veteran fans like these characters, not because of who they are, but because of what they used to be.
Dragon Ball Super will basically tell the new fandom that there are only two guys to root for. The others are inconsequential. Which hurts the veteran fandom because it didn't use to be that way back when they were fighting a macho alien, a squad of alien nerds, an albino lizard, an inconspicuous old man and a mime, a lizard-robot and a pink condom.
That's what has actually been pissing me off about Dragon Ball since the Buu saga, though mostly since GT. I love this series for most of its characters, primarily Goku, Krillin, Gohan, Piccolo, Future Trunks, Tien and Vegeta, but when only two of them are getting focus and the others are thereby nothing, that's where my problem with it comes into play.
Naruto is a series I've never been particularly fond of, but I will admit that the great majority of its cast has something to do or some fight that makes them impressive, makes you want to consider them a character you'd like and be interested in. They get their focus whereas with Dragon Ball Super, I'm worried whether or not it will be the equivalent of GT with Vegeta traveling in Space with Goku as opposed to Pan and Trunks and the two saving the day.
I understand the love for Vegeta. I understand the love for Goku. I like them both and always will, but this franchise was doing fine on its own when there was only Goku and the series alternated between its main protagonists for most of Z.
All I can honestly hope for from Super is focus, done similarly to Z's Frieza and Cell Saga, with multiple characters having use to the main story. You had parts with different characters were stronger than other and it was believable that someone apart from Goku could defeat Frieza and Cell, the latter actually being beaten by someone else.
Take Krillin for example. He may not get an impressive fight, but he had use in the initial battle against Frieza and was relevant to the Cell arc by his encounter with Dr. Gero, being the only one that didn't fight the androids and still sticking up to them in a way, destroying his lab with Future Trunks, retrieving the detonator from Bulma and technically being the first person to fight against Perfect Cell as well as getting Vegeta's comatose body out of the area. We're talking about a guy that was weaker than just about every major villain in that saga and here he is being this useful and important to the plot. Power doesn't solely dictate how much someone can be important.