Random and scattered thoughts of Chapter 87:
- Decrepit Gas may just be the best drawing Toyotaro has ever provided for any piece of Dragon Ball media. Really sells the effects of being comprehensively defeated extremely well.
- Absolutely loved the little effect of Gas decrepit skin peeling and breaking apart every time Goku and/or Vegeta hit him.
- Everything about Gas finding out he's dying to Freeza coming in and killing him and then Gas' body disinterring as his life span ended was illustrated incredibly well. If the Heeters, and Gas specifically, well better written I would have considered this quite a tragic outcome. As it stands, Gas is just a one-note character who's now just dead and had little to no impact on the plot itself. What a waste.
- So Freeza knew about what the Heeters were doing and still let them fuck around? Huh? That is so out-of-character. This is the same Freeza that committed mass the moment he thought the Saiyan could potentially become too strong. And for 40 years Freeza deliberately turned a blind eye to a person (or really a group) who was planning to kill Freeza and take over his empire? That makes no fucking sense at all. Freeza has killed for FAR less in the past but he lets a planned hostile taker slide for decades? What?
- Elec has to go down as one the most disappointing characters ever created in Dragon Ball, he's introduced with this Chessmaster-like personality, but that gets quickly abandoned for the generic card-carrying villain. And the reveal of him being the weakest of the Heeters, just pours salt into the wound because if he doesn't have the strength the cover-up for what is very clear to be his lack of planning, inter gathering and forethought as he wasn't aware that Freeza knew what he was for 40 years. And he ultimately gets quickly killed and treated like an afterthought instantly, despite the fact he kicked started the entire arc. What a disappointment of character Elec was. Without a doubt, the worst antagonist Super has had yet and one of the worst villains in all of Dragon Ball.
- I stand by my opinion that Freeza coming in the 11th hour and murdering the major villains of the arc was such a terrible narrative decision. There was no build-up to this. Freeza killing Gas and Elec don't provide any kind of satisfying resolution for any characters arcs or any themes this narrative may have trying to portray. It just comes across as a twist ending for the sake of a twist ending.
- Black Freeza epitomizes everything wrong with modern Dragon Ball: using uninspired transformation as a shortcut for character growth and plot development. I could digest Golden Freeza because its design was intentionally a tongue-in-cheek reference to Super Saiyan from an in-universe perspective, and it would be in Freeza's character to act that petty and vindictive to create a new transformation with that aesthetic. But what is Black Freeza supposed to represent for Freeza's character? That he wants to keep up with Goku and Vegeta? He's already done that in past.
- I don't get what endgame is Freeza. It better be something really good if he's willing to let Goku and Vegeta live because that is just so out of character if he doesn't have anything major planned and needs those two alive. Unless... the plan is for Freeza to pull a heel-face turn. And that is just...
I mean, throwing a bone to Oil and Macki and not only letting them live but employing them as a waiter and cook and not killing Goku and Vegeta, certainly seems to like Toyotaro wants Freeza to become a good guy down the line. I hope to God that doesn't happen. That would be fucking
terrible. Some characters are better off as villains in Dragon Ball and Freeza is one of them. And even if you did want to do that, you would need to have truly exceptional writing to pull that off, and as much as I like Toyotaro, I don't have that faith in him doing something like that without it coming across as trite, irrational and forced.
- Honestly, at this stage, Freeza's character is just spinning his wheels and is morphing into archenemy-like status in Dragon Ball, and I really don't want that. I don't want to turn in the Joker of Dragon Ball where he just sticks around as a recurring villain to get into shenanigans with Goku and Vegeta.
- Goku smiling at seeing an image of Bardock in his scouter is the kind of sentimental shit that I don't just fuck with. Especially since Bardock was such a non-factor in the story.
- Well... that prediction from the Oracle Fish about the strongest warrior in the universe went nowhere...
Overall thoughts... the arc is finally over, and man, I have never seen a Dragon Ball arc fall off a cliff so fast and hard after such a promising start as badly as the Granolah The Survivor arc. This arc set up so many interesting narrative prospects in the beginning and just abandoned it all for fan service and for a fight that went on for
WAAAAAAYYYY too long. Character development was either non-existent or unsatisfying concluded, the pacing was atrocious, narrative themes were discarded and retroactively pissed on, and the ending was incredibly rushed and provided no catharsis for anyone or even any tangible set-up for any future arc.
Yeah... I really didn't like this arc when all is said and done. But at least the art was consistently good.
The final score for the Granolah The Survivor arc:
3/10
- One point for the great set-up/beginning
- One point for the consistently good art
- One point for the hilariously bad and yet somehow entertaining twist ending).
Brief thoughts for the future:
- If it hasn't been made clear before, it certainly has now... that 10-year period has run its course. There's simply no room left the develop the current cast of characters. A big time skip is needed, in my opinion.
- A shake-up of the central cast is also desperately needed. Give me Pan, give me Oob, give me Bra... just somebody to mix up the dynamic beyond just Goku and Vegeta. DBS Superhero did this and it paid off really well.
- I hope the next arc takes place after the end of the manga because Super really needs to create an identity for itself rather than relying on the trappings of the past. It was already becoming quite detrimental to the quality of the storytelling in Super but this arc epitomized that more than any other story arc Super has provided so far of how much relying on the past can really harm the kind of story you want to tell.
- Dragon Ball Super in general needs to seriously slow the fuck down when it comes to transformations. Especially when it comes to recolour transformations.
- Toyotaro is better than this and I hope he takes this break to really plan out the next arc better.