How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Discussion specifically regarding the "Dragon Ball Super" TV series premiering July 2015 in Japan, including individual threads for each episode.
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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by JazzMazz » Fri Mar 30, 2018 1:46 am

Robo4900 wrote:
JazzMazz wrote:I would argue that presentation has always been an area of improvement for the show and I think the TOP in particular drew attention to that fact.

I'm not saying better presentation would fix a plot that is stupid, but it would certainly make it considerably more bearable, if the themes and idea's were consistently structured and plotted throughout the arc, and foreshadowing was established between episodes to set up major plot points like that.

I personally think the TOP is certainly the arc that could best benefitted from better presentation, communication and planning. I would say there was nothing inherently wrong narratively with the TOP, however, the main criticisms and causes for boredom lie in its disjointed presentation and a lot continuity hic-ups that occur between episodes.

If the TOP had a more coherent and structured presentation, I think we can all agree it would have benefitted greatly on the whole and probably could have turned the arc into something at least somewhat watchable.
Except...
[spoiler]What about all the universes getting revived? All the tension in the entire arc being undercut in one moment, much in the same way as the Black arc.[/spoiler]
Yes, that is true. However, I think the ending for the TOP only further cements my point on the importance of presentation.
however, the ending to the TOP was saved from an overtly negative response by the best direction and storyboarding in the series. Turning something that should have been really wholly unsatisfying, and making it carry loads of emotional weight through its fantastic presentation of those narrative points.
That's something that was really less true for the FT arc, where the ending is pretty renowned for its terrible presentation of idea's, and how poorly it lands on appropriate narrative beats.

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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by PFM18 » Fri Mar 30, 2018 12:45 pm

Outside of 17 having that strange moment where he was even with Jiren and Vegeta getting his new form against Jiren just to do very little I dont think I would change anything about the ToP. I would have had 17 not have his strange ppwer scaling inconsistencies ans have Vegeta achieve the new form against Toppo with maybe not quite as many times where he thinks about his family and Cabba.

Not certain what "writing problems" people are referring to.

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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by Rakurai » Fri Mar 30, 2018 4:09 pm

It's quite obvious that the anime needs more input from the base sources in order to become consistent and coherent at storytelling, powerscaling, character portrayal, or any of these things that encompass Dragon Ball. Like more direct involvement from Toriyama/Toyotaro, for example.
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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by Asura » Sat Mar 31, 2018 1:44 am

The question should be more like "How can they" instead of "How will they", because lets be honest, after 131 episodes they never fixed it, or came close to fixing it.
There are too many cooks in the kitchen, episodes aren't completely coherent from one to the next sometimes, things happen because they look cool and not because they make sense, power scaling is BEYOND fucked, and I'm not talking about power levels like one of those people who just cares about the numbers, just some damn consistency and some basic logic would do wonders. If A beats B and B beats C, C should not be somehow beating A out of nowhere without any kind of power-up, and when the characters do get a power-up usually it comes from out of nowhere with no explanation or build-up.

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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by JazzMazz » Sat Mar 31, 2018 3:04 am

Asura wrote:The question should be more like "How can they" instead of "How will they", because lets be honest, after 131 episodes they never fixed it, or came close to fixing it.
There are too many cooks in the kitchen, episodes aren't completely coherent from one to the next sometimes, things happen because they look cool and not because they make sense, power scaling is BEYOND fucked, and I'm not talking about power levels like one of those people who just cares about the numbers, just some damn consistency and some basic logic would do wonders. If A beats B and B beats C, C should not be somehow beating A out of nowhere without any kind of power-up, and when the characters do get a power-up usually it comes from out of nowhere with no explanation or build-up.
I think a complete lack of a series composer throughout Super contributed greatly to the discord in the writing department.

Also, I think a lot the criticism around power-levels is more about how characters were able to get so strong, because I don't remember many A, B, C examples of power scaling. Could you provide 3 examples of that in the TOP?

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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by Cipher » Sat Mar 31, 2018 9:52 am

Kuwabara wrote:Or maybe only a very vocal minority of western fans care about any of this shit.
Or maybe a bit of reading around Japanese Twitter and boards would prove that that's absolutely not the case.

Who can say? It's a mystery.

Re: Thread: I have to imagine more production time would help, at least insofar as coordination, though Toei has always struggled a bit with Toriyama's character-writing and my ideal scenario, short of Toriyama doing the manga again, would be to have him more heavily involved in Toyotaro's manga, letting that move ahead to serve as material for Toei to adapt.

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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by ekrolo2 » Sat Mar 31, 2018 10:53 am

Remove everyone and I do mean absolutely everyone involved with writing Super on every level concievable. Toriyama, Toyotaro, the episode by episode script writers, they all don't need to leave so much as get kicked out of the offices under pain of kick to the nuts.
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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by RedHeat » Sat Mar 31, 2018 10:55 am

They should hire someone like Micheal Bay. He can bring a flair to the series that no one in Japan can ever hope to accomplish.
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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by Lord Beerus » Sat Mar 31, 2018 11:20 am

ekrolo2 wrote:Remove everyone and I do mean absolutely everyone involved with writing Super on every level concievable. Toriyama, Toyotaro, the episode by episode script writers, they all don't need to leave so much as get kicked out of the offices under pain of kick to the nuts.
C'mon, the writing in Super isn't THAT bad. :)

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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by Doctor. » Sat Mar 31, 2018 11:25 am

ekrolo2 wrote:Remove everyone and I do mean absolutely everyone involved with writing Super on every level concievable. Toriyama, Toyotaro, the episode by episode script writers, they all don't need to leave so much as get kicked out of the offices under pain of kick to the nuts.
Leave King Ryu because he's pretty decent.

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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by LightBing » Sat Mar 31, 2018 11:54 am

The first thing we have to ask is do they consider it a problem?

Because when a series sets up a plot point to blatantly contradict it on the first second of the following episode I doubt they do. At that point it isn't about bad writing, it's about not caring and disrespecting your viewers.

This is Dragon Ball I didn't sign up for stellar writing, which is why it pains me when they progressively started caring less until it become total anarchy.

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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by ekrolo2 » Sat Mar 31, 2018 11:55 am

Lord Beerus wrote:
ekrolo2 wrote:Remove everyone and I do mean absolutely everyone involved with writing Super on every level concievable. Toriyama, Toyotaro, the episode by episode script writers, they all don't need to leave so much as get kicked out of the offices under pain of kick to the nuts.
C'mon, the writing in Super isn't THAT bad. :)
As a classic from a bygone era once famously said:
Image
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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by Lord Beerus » Sat Mar 31, 2018 12:51 pm

ekrolo2 wrote:
Lord Beerus wrote:
ekrolo2 wrote:Remove everyone and I do mean absolutely everyone involved with writing Super on every level concievable. Toriyama, Toyotaro, the episode by episode script writers, they all don't need to leave so much as get kicked out of the offices under pain of kick to the nuts.
C'mon, the writing in Super isn't THAT bad. :)
As a classic from a bygone era once famously said:
[spoiler]Image[/spoiler]
Okay, there are some badly written episodes, there's no denying that. But there some decently written episodes, as well. In my opinion.

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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by Asura » Sat Mar 31, 2018 2:55 pm

JazzMazz wrote:
Asura wrote:The question should be more like "How can they" instead of "How will they", because lets be honest, after 131 episodes they never fixed it, or came close to fixing it.
There are too many cooks in the kitchen, episodes aren't completely coherent from one to the next sometimes, things happen because they look cool and not because they make sense, power scaling is BEYOND fucked, and I'm not talking about power levels like one of those people who just cares about the numbers, just some damn consistency and some basic logic would do wonders. If A beats B and B beats C, C should not be somehow beating A out of nowhere without any kind of power-up, and when the characters do get a power-up usually it comes from out of nowhere with no explanation or build-up.
I think a complete lack of a series composer throughout Super contributed greatly to the discord in the writing department.

Also, I think a lot the criticism around power-levels is more about how characters were able to get so strong, because I don't remember many A, B, C examples of power scaling. Could you provide 3 examples of that in the TOP?

Sure, so one of the most obvious ones is Berserker Kale vs SSB Goku in which she walks right through his Kamehameha without any damage. Later we see her jobbing to SSG Goku in her controlled form which I’m assuming is even more powerful than her berserker form? Even if it isn’t, obviously it still doesn’t make sense for her to be going from no damage against Blue to getting beaten by SSG.

Next is SSBKKx20 Goku vs Jiren, in which Goku gets absolutely slaughtered and humiliated. I don’t think Goku even got a single, clean hit in. But later we somehow have characters like 17 and Freeza getting hits in on Jiren (and I’m not referring to the finale where Jiren is weakened) where not even the damn assassin, Hit, could get in a surprise attack at the most opportune time, as Vados said, but 17 and Freeza has no trouble doing it, and like I said somehow did much better than SSBKKx20 Goku. Hell, even Vegeta does better than Goku did in his first fight with Jiren.

There’s also Caulifla vs Goku in which Caulifla somehow does better against SSJ2 Goku than she does against base Goku during their fight in 113.

These problems don’t just exist in the ToP though, the FT arc was also quite guilty of this. Trunks somehow does better against SSR Black in his SSJ2 form than Vegeta does in Blue. Goku somehow overpowers merged Zamasu (without Kaioken) where both Vegeta (who at this point should be stronger than Goku since he actually trained and Goku opted to instead learn the Mafuba) and Trunks at the same time failed. Trunks can somehow hold off both Zamasu and Black for an entire day in his new form whereas Goku and Vegeta got absolutely destroyed by them.

In the little Hit vs Goku mini-arc, Goku somehow beats Hit without even using kaioken (whereas x10 still failed to knock him out in time during the tournament) despite there being no significant changes in power from the time of the U6 arc to the FT arc to the mini-arc. (and I doubt off-screen training would literally make him over 10x stronger)

Anyway I could probably go on and on, but this stuff combined with the infamous stamina meme brought the writing in this arc down, and the writing down of Super as a whole. No real consistency or knowing where exactly certain character stand at times since how strong characters are seems to be constantly fluctuating.

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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by Doctor. » Sat Mar 31, 2018 3:16 pm

Asura wrote:Anyway I could probably go on and on, but this stuff combined with the infamous stamina meme brought the writing in this arc down, and the writing down of Super as a whole. No real consistency or knowing where exactly certain character stand at times since how strong characters are seems to be constantly fluctuating.
I think the worst part is the excuse that "T-The original series did this too! Toriyama never cared about powerlevels!" While it may be true that Toriyama doesn't pay as much attention to the scaling as the fans do, he certainly gave a shit about them, which is why the original series mostly makes sense (with some exceptions in the Boo arc when Toriyama was mostly tired) and you can clearly tell which character is stronger than which and where they stand in comparison to one another. You could tell how strong Piccolo was at a given time in the original series. You look at Super and you can make both the argument that he's about as strong as the Super Saiyan 2s or that he's weaker than even the base Saiyans. And this is true for the rest of the characters as well, where their strength fluctuates based on plot convenience.

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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by ekrolo2 » Sat Mar 31, 2018 3:18 pm

Lord Beerus wrote:
ekrolo2 wrote:
Lord Beerus wrote: C'mon, the writing in Super isn't THAT bad. :)
As a classic from a bygone era once famously said:
[spoiler]Image[/spoiler]
Okay, there are some badly written episodes, there's no denying that. But there some decently written episodes, as well. In my opinion.
There are but they're too few and far between. If Super either a) gave up on trying and just became a dumb slugfest ala Heroes or b) became a straight up slice of life show, I wouldn't care nearly as much as I do about the writing.
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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by PFM18 » Sat Mar 31, 2018 5:54 pm

Asura wrote:
JazzMazz wrote:
Asura wrote:The question should be more like "How can they" instead of "How will they", because lets be honest, after 131 episodes they never fixed it, or came close to fixing it.
There are too many cooks in the kitchen, episodes aren't completely coherent from one to the next sometimes, things happen because they look cool and not because they make sense, power scaling is BEYOND fucked, and I'm not talking about power levels like one of those people who just cares about the numbers, just some damn consistency and some basic logic would do wonders. If A beats B and B beats C, C should not be somehow beating A out of nowhere without any kind of power-up, and when the characters do get a power-up usually it comes from out of nowhere with no explanation or build-up.
I think a complete lack of a series composer throughout Super contributed greatly to the discord in the writing department.

Also, I think a lot the criticism around power-levels is more about how characters were able to get so strong, because I don't remember many A, B, C examples of power scaling. Could you provide 3 examples of that in the TOP?

Sure, so one of the most obvious ones is Berserker Kale vs SSB Goku in which she walks right through his Kamehameha without any damage. Later we see her jobbing to SSG Goku in her controlled form which I’m assuming is even more powerful than her berserker form? Even if it isn’t, obviously it still doesn’t make sense for her to be going from no damage against Blue to getting beaten by SSG.

Next is SSBKKx20 Goku vs Jiren, in which Goku gets absolutely slaughtered and humiliated. I don’t think Goku even got a single, clean hit in. But later we somehow have characters like 17 and Freeza getting hits in on Jiren (and I’m not referring to the finale where Jiren is weakened) where not even the damn assassin, Hit, could get in a surprise attack at the most opportune time, as Vados said, but 17 and Freeza has no trouble doing it, and like I said somehow did much better than SSBKKx20 Goku. Hell, even Vegeta does better than Goku did in his first fight with Jiren.

There’s also Caulifla vs Goku in which Caulifla somehow does better against SSJ2 Goku than she does against base Goku during their fight in 113.

These problems don’t just exist in the ToP though, the FT arc was also quite guilty of this. Trunks somehow does better against SSR Black in his SSJ2 form than Vegeta does in Blue. Goku somehow overpowers merged Zamasu (without Kaioken) where both Vegeta (who at this point should be stronger than Goku since he actually trained and Goku opted to instead learn the Mafuba) and Trunks at the same time failed. Trunks can somehow hold off both Zamasu and Black for an entire day in his new form whereas Goku and Vegeta got absolutely destroyed by them.

In the little Hit vs Goku mini-arc, Goku somehow beats Hit without even using kaioken (whereas x10 still failed to knock him out in time during the tournament) despite there being no significant changes in power from the time of the U6 arc to the FT arc to the mini-arc. (and I doubt off-screen training would literally make him over 10x stronger)

Anyway I could probably go on and on, but this stuff combined with the infamous stamina meme brought the writing in this arc down, and the writing down of Super as a whole. No real consistency or knowing where exactly certain character stand at times since how strong characters are seems to be constantly fluctuating.
I mean pretty much all the things you are saying can be easily explained. None of these are examples of poor power scaling. Kale walks through SSB goku's Kamehameha and then throws Goku around, but then you see Goku get up with absolutely no battle damage on him. Jiren comes by and One shots Kale and Goku isn't surprised or intimidated in any way and even challenges Jiren right after he one shot her. This is clearly the show showing us that Goku was holding back and the scene wasn't there to show Kale's power but to show an homage to the movies. People pointed out the fact when the episode aired that he was obviously holding back, must have underestimated how strong Kale was.

I have absolutely no Idea what you are talking about with Jiren being hurt by Freeza prior to the final episode. Freeza only did anything to Jiren during the final episode when he was weakened. 17 caught him off guard and damaged him slightly, really he more so took damage to his uniform. There was a brief scene when Jiren and 17 looked even which was definitely strange.

Yes, Vegeta did better than Goku in his first fight against Jiren but that was explained very explicitly. Vegeta gets angry at Jiren for holding back, saying that he was stronger and faster when he fought Goku.(When he would have wrecked SSBKK20 Goku.)

Goku doing better in base against Caulifla was also explained explicitly. He is initially winning because he has more experience and has adjusted to Caulifla faster than she adjusted to him, when she adjusts to Goku's fighting style he is forced to go SSJ2 to keep up. When he is in base it is even clearly stated that Goku is at a power disadvantage at that point.

Again, you appear to be misinterpreting things with Hit too. Goku was even or atleast a slight advantage against Hit with a normal SSB without Kaioken during the Universe 6 tournament. Kaioken was needed to match him because HIt had the time skip and kept increasing the time over and over with his "Pure Progress" and Kaioken was used to ....make Goku too fast for the time skip. If anything you should be mad that Goku was "too fast for time skip" rather than the power scaling because the power scaling makes perfect sense. That is how Goku again fights Hit without Kaioken after the Goku Black Arc, this time he adjusts to HIt's time skip techniques better and Hit appears to have "topped out" as far as improving his time skip goes.

I haven't seen the FT arc in a while so I won't address any of those, but literally none of the examples you said during the Tournament of Power are actual power scaling inconsistencies. This to me is a perfect example of people not understanding something immediately label it "bad writing"

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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by Kuwabara » Sat Mar 31, 2018 9:33 pm

Cipher wrote:Or maybe a bit of reading around Japanese Twitter and boards would prove that that's absolutely not the case.
Do Japanese fans complain about power scaling specifically? I would find that pretty interesting if so.
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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by Cipher » Sat Mar 31, 2018 9:50 pm

Kuwabara wrote:
Cipher wrote:Or maybe a bit of reading around Japanese Twitter and boards would prove that that's absolutely not the case.
Do Japanese fans complain about power scaling specifically? I would find that pretty interesting if so.
I haven’t seen that specifically, but character-based writing complaints, ones about the overuse of homages, etc., yes. I have no doubt some power-scaling complaints are also floating around 5ch, and now that I think of it, I have seen some things along those lines on YouTube. It’s just that most of my exposure comes from Twitter, which tends to gather older fans.

Regardless, the idea that Super is sloppily written is by no means unique to the English-language community.

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Re: How will they fix the writing problem that Super had?

Post by Whatever » Sun Apr 01, 2018 4:51 pm

Doctor. wrote:
Asura wrote:Anyway I could probably go on and on, but this stuff combined with the infamous stamina meme brought the writing in this arc down, and the writing down of Super as a whole. No real consistency or knowing where exactly certain character stand at times since how strong characters are seems to be constantly fluctuating.
I think the worst part is the excuse that "T-The original series did this too! Toriyama never cared about powerlevels!" While it may be true that Toriyama doesn't pay as much attention to the scaling as the fans do, he certainly gave a shit about them, which is why the original series mostly makes sense (with some exceptions in the Boo arc when Toriyama was mostly tired) and you can clearly tell which character is stronger than which and where they stand in comparison to one another. You could tell how strong Piccolo was at a given time in the original series. You look at Super and you can make both the argument that he's about as strong as the Super Saiyan 2s or that he's weaker than even the base Saiyans. And this is true for the rest of the characters as well, where their strength fluctuates based on plot convenience.
While i agree with the super thing,as far as toriyama goes that holds true only till the Cell saga.
In the Buu saga you could not tell how strong Piccolo he is(outside that he is weaker than the ssj2),heck before BOG(in which we learnt where base Goku stands)you could make a strong case for him being weaker than the base saiyans including the Gohan that was weaker than the cell games,the same goes for other characters like retconing Shin's strength from the tournament on the way to Babidi's ship and the famous whatever or not Gohan was ssj1 or ssj2 against Dabura.

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