dbgtFO wrote:and the fabrication that any Daizenshuu claimed Recoom killed Gohan(which the persons claiming that have failed to provide proof of).
Well, I think I'm kinda responsible for that. For Kanzentai I mistranslated Daizenshuu 2's description of Recoom's Eraser Gun as "It's a single blow that finishes off Vegeta, Gohan, and Krillin!", when it really ought to be something like "a single blow for finishing off Vegeta, Gohan, and Krillin". That is, it's
intended to finish them off, as opposed to actually doing the job. This description comes from the manga, where before firing the technique Recoom announces that "this is the finish" (in the manga he uses the English word "finish", but Daizenshuu 2 uses
todome, the Japanese equivalent). When I was translating Daizenshuu 2 I didn't have my manga to check and misremembered the attack as actually finishing the group off. Either way, "finish" doesn't mean "kill", just that it KOs them or otherwise decides the fight. The daizenshuu description is still a little off, because the attack was aimed at Vegeta, while Gohan and Krillin only step in to save Vegeta, but it's nothing as absurd as saying that any of them were actually killed by Recoom.
At any rate, while I'd certainly never claim that the daizenshuu are infallible or should be treated as gospel, people who "question their credibility" always seem to hold the books to an absurdly high standard of perfection, especially considering how contradictory the original manga actually is. In his
Daizenshuu 4 introduction Toriyama even apologizes to the daizenshuu staff for having to make sense of a series that he drew in such a "hit-or-miss" fashion without thinking things through, and in his
Daizenshuu 7 introduction he notes that there's many things about DB that he doesn't understand anymore, and says he wishes he had had a copy of Daizenshuu 7 around when actually making the series. They're official guidebooks put out by Shueisha, the same company that published the manga, and were made with Toriyama's full support and involvement. A few bum captions don't negate this. Keep in mind that the seven hardcover daizenshuu run for a total of over 1,600 pages. Can anyone identify 16 errors from the daizenshuu? If so, that shows that the daizenshuu average a single error every 100 pages. Frankly that sounds pretty damn good to me.
And the anti-daizenshuu crowd seems almost without exception to be concerned exclusively with strength debates and fan-made power level lists, both in their attitude towards the guides and with the series as a whole. There have been quite a few debates over the whole "Tenshinhan is descended from aliens" thing, but these are a drop in the ocean compared to the endless wankery over whether Gohan was a Super Saiyan or Super Saiyan 2 when fighting Dabra, what Raditz/Nappa/Freeza's numbers are, what the "multipliers" for the various forms of Super Saiyan are and whether or not they change over the course of the series, Boo's forms, Ultimate Gohan vs. Goku vs. Gotenks, etc etc, and so forth and so on, seemingly without end. All of this despite the
undeniable fact that the author of the series neither knew nor cared about such minutiae, both when actually writing the series and afterward. All of these debates center primarily over "rules" about the characters' power that are invented entirely by fans, based on their own interpretation of carefully selected examples from a series that could hardly be less consistent or strict about such things (well OK, it's not quite up to
Kinnikuman's level of craziness in this regard, but it's within spitting distance). While I'm not opposed to this kind of fan-fiction, there really is a problem when this sort of thing threatens to overwhelm the fandom as a whole, and fans forget that their elaborate systems are their own inventions rather than something laid out in the manga in any way. Once that happens, conversations that should be light-hearted and fun morph into interminable, heated debates over nothing.
And of course it leads people to say stupid things about the daizenshuu and other guidebooks once those books inevitably turn out not to support their elaborate and invented power level schemes. While this result isn't as bad as the pointlessly vicious arguments that spoil forums (it's not like the guidebooks have feelings, after all), it does reflect what a warped perspective many fans have. Someone who wasn't completely down the fan-made power level rabbit hole might pause before rejecting out of hand the books that constitute our major source of interviews with Toriyama and everyone else actually responsible for producing the series, both manga and anime. Personally I feel that getting to see pictures of Toriyama's original character designs for Goku (where he was first an actual monkey, then a tailless boy) outweighs by far any questionable estimates of Raditz or Nappa's power level. And that being provided the original air dates for every episode of the DB/Z anime and the premiere dates for the movies is somewhat more important than anything that could ever be said about how Gotenks stacks up in comparison to the other characters. Or that learning how Piccolo, Freeza, and Boo are each modeled after whichever editor Toriyama had at the time more than makes up for a little contradictory information on Super Saiyan 2 Gohan and Dabra. For that matter, being able to know about the different editors Toriyama had throughout the series and what portion of the series they were around for (something you'd never learn directly from the manga itself) leads to speculation over what influence each might have had on the story. It's things like this that are infinitely more fascinating than any speculation on power could possibly be. In short, I feel that people who reject the daizenshuu and other guidebooks for a few mistakes are shutting themselves off from a wealth of information on the series that far surpasses in interest and scope any strength debate.
tl;dr: Power levels aren't everything. Hell, power levels aren't
anything, really. Anyone who reduces the series to them is just needlessly limiting their own enjoyment of the franchise and making the fandom a cramped, overheated place for the rest of us.
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