Indeed. I try my best to avoid this category.Mr Baggins wrote: Sun Dec 29, 2024 1:23 pm I think there are two different things going on here.
On the one hand, you've got a couple of people who will just base any and all of their criticism around how many plotholes they can dig up. That's pretty boring and pedantic if you ask me, but more importantly, because they spend their time with media actively seeking that stuff out, this results in sloppy analysis where most of their supposed "plotholes" are either not actually plotholes or just trivial shit. You can ask them to stop, and maybe suggest more meaningful ways to engage, but if that's how they prefer to consume stories there's not much anyone can do about it.
Daima sometimes feels like it's trying to be a blank slate, but it also can't ignore the impact of Super entirely. Continuity-wise, it seems to be in the same weird limbo as the Dragon Ball Super anime and manga in terms of how they coexisted with the same branding space but increasingly contradicted each other on a narrative level. However, I agree that all follow roughly the same "rules", which is more than can be said for GT.On the other hand, there's a fair amount of people who don't regularly engage with stories in this way but are genuinely confused about the seeming discrepancies between Daima and Super. For the kind of audience deeply invested in modern Dragon Ball content, it's a valid concern. While I can't say it bothers me personally as someone who'd rather judge these sequels on their own merits, I do find it interesting that some of Daima's lore, and even some of its characterization, distinctly feels like a different twist on some of the things that Super already explored. It's clear that Toriyama carefully combed over a lot of his old material (especially the Buu arc) in preparation for Daima, but it's hard to say what any of this means for the franchise yet.
Maybe the Super manga will have a Daima sequel arc that explains or band-aids some of that confusion, or maybe nothing will come of it and people will come to view Daima as another hard reboot. Who knows? If it's the latter, my take is somewhat in the vein of what Herms mentioned – Super and Daima would be more like different timelines in the same world, contrary to GT's case of just clearly being a separate setting altogether.
Ultimately, though, I don't think it's pragmatic to treat Daima as a separate in-universe continuity just yet. It actually references more than it differs from Super's worldbuilding, and many of the differences can be chalked up to a similar issue Super had with the production of different stories being out of order in the timeline. Thus far, I'd say I'm tentatively neutral.
IMO, and I've rambled on about this in Robo and KBABZ's trivia thread, some of the concepts used in Daima are so similar to those used in Super that, while they often aren't impossible to reconcile, they don't seem entirely congruous with each other. Like, the Demon Realm Dragon Balls and the Super Dragon Balls are clearly different things that could in theory coexist in the setting, but they share the same narrative role as larger precursors to the Dragon Balls from the original series. Similarly, it's entirely possible for Rymus and Zeno to coexist as they appear to fulfil separate roles as the Creator and the Destroyer, respectively, but Rymus is explicitly referred to as the supreme ruler so it feels suspect that Zeno isn't mentioned at all.
I personally believe it's an alternate timeline that heavily intersects with Super and remixes some of its ideas. But who knows, perhaps there's a reason the creators remain mum on the subject and the ending will tie everything up very naturally before leading into the events of Super. I'm still banking on Beerus and Whis making appearances, maybe in a post-credit scene. If all the multiversal Kaioshin from Anato to Agu can appear (though that could have been nothing more than an animator adlib), surely Toriyama's favourite sphinx cat and camp angel can as well.
EDIT: I thought this was also my first comment in this thread, but turns out it wasn't - I'm losing the plot, falling for the rage-bait, so help me.
She/Her 
