Who is the Anchor Being?

[Grimlock]

I mean importance in the sense that Trunks seems to be the glue holding all reality together, outside of major deities. He may not be the main hero or the most powerful, but he is a guide to the viewer and seems to be present in all major events as a time patroller. Goku himself is absent from a lot of major events.

Ah okay. Yeah, Trunks is a very prominent character in that sense. "Subverting expectations" aside, he's one I would consider to be the anchor being because of that.

Let's not forget that being "dead" doesn't always mean much in the Dragon Ball cosmos, even by the standards of other fictional settings. Goku may be technically dead in the various not-fucked-up-by-Super versions of Trunks' timelines, but all that presumably means is that he's just kicking around in the afterlife somewhere with a halo'd body, still thriving and getting stronger and very much, y'know, existent.

Because of the way Dragonball operates, I'd argue the anchor being needs to die twice to start eroding the timeline.

We are warned about this during the Kid Buu saga but a dead person dying again seems to work closer to death in other shows.

I have been trying to think of something to counter this point, but I think it's impossible. This kind of destroys this idea because it's not like the characters will die again in the Otherworld. Guess we can't have our own anchor being, after all.