gohann wrote:Doctor. wrote:gohann wrote:Still, they put very little depth or effort towards him these days.
They're actually making an effort to add depth, like the BoG talk about his pride and, in RF, how they set-up character development. The execution is just bad.
In those examples, they just add extra traits, but they don't really enhance his character.
Gonna hafta side with
Doctor. on this one. That
Battle of Gods scene does wonders for Goku's character and crystallizes a theme that's been slowly gestating ever since the revelation of his saiyan nature in vol. 17 of the tankōbon, and arguably since his match vs. Piccolo Jr at the 23rd budokai.
Now, it goes without mention that Goku is not an ideal hero by any stretch. He lets Piccolo and Vegeta escape so he can fight them again some day. In the Cyborg arc, he justifies not using the dragon balls to preempt Gero. And, especially later in the series, nearly his every concern for the planet's welfare is balanced against selfish motivations of some kind or other. He vows to give Freeza his just deserts for his crimes committed against the saiyans and the nameks -- but how much is his desire to fight driven by the trembling compulsion to duke it out with an opponent impossibly stronger than even Vegeta (see Goku's dialog with Kaio in vol. 22)? In vol. 35, he sacrifices himself to save the planet from Cell's detonation and afterwards requests not to be brought back to life because he has attracted one too many a threat to the Earth -- yet adds the qualification that, since he gets to keep his body, he'll get to fight plenty of strong guys in the afterlife. Even in the moment of his departure with Oob lurks the strong suggestion that he's doing what he's doing first and foremost for himself and that Earth's defense is at best an afterthought. This is the element of "poison" which Toriyama has taken pains to emphasize time and time again -- and which only continues to accrue as the series goes forward.
A lot of the time, Goku's really only a hero by accident. And if his good deeds in the past have had for their basis nothing but mere instinct and intuition, it's inevitable that his behavior should grow more and more ethically questionable as his saiyan instincts are drawn out of latency over the course of the series. By the time of the Boo arc, Goku's still the "hero" of the story, but perhaps only nominally so.
To make my point clearer, the interplay between nature and nurture is in essence what sells Goku's character. The demands on him to be a hero (which in this series always require getting lots and lots of power in a very short time) are consistently set in tension against his personal ethical and motivational philosophy as a martial artist (the desire to be the best by his own efforts), bolstered by a natural saiyan/warrior ethos that, after its activation on Namek, goes to consume his character to the degree that he even tries to foist it upon his son at the Cell Games, and by the end of the series has sent him so far tumbling down a road of moral ambiguity that by this point all but
necessitates that his shonen-hero status be reaffirmed if he's to remain at center stage. The balance has been too far skewed in the direction of Goku's "saiyan-ness" and needs to be restored. And
BoG fully delivers in this regard.
So when Piccolo says that it almost seems as if Goku is receiving training from Beerus, few plausible readings exist against the backdrop of who Goku fundamentally is as a character. My preferred (and I think the most immediate) among them is that the exchange, which makes much of the letting-go of his pride, serves in some sense as Goku's initiation to heroism, and the insert of Flow's
Hero constitutes precisely the instant of his self-actualization. Insofar as it forces him to forgo his sense of honor for his friends and family, it's Vegeta's bingo dance writ large. Goku is effectively made to learn anew what it means to be a "hero", in the truest sense -- a role which he has seemed to play only incidentally in the past. (Let us strictly specify
Toriyama's Goku, though, because this interpretation only works if we do away with all the fillery stuff Toei's injected into their adaptation that's contributed to the perception of the character as a righteous type, who's already completely -- and obnoxiously -- self-aware in his heroic functions.)
Rocketman's reading of Goku in other threads as fitting the mold of the classical hero is all too apt in this case. Goku's is a dilemma, pitting a heroic impulse against stubborn pride, that cannot help but assume Achillean dimensions in its execution, and it's something that can continue to be mined for lots and lots of conflict going forward. It's as "deep" as something like
Dragon Ball ever gets, and, if you ask me, a helluva lot more intellectually stimulating, at least in concept, than the straightforward villain-to-hero conversions or coming-of-age narrative arcs that are touted by so many as the pinnacle of the series' characterization -- however poignantly executed many of them (e.g. Piccolo, Vegeta, Mr. Boo; Gohan) admittedly are.
That said -- while I've made efforts at defending it in the past, the
'F' nonsense I'm far less keen on, now that I've seen it.
