Awesome. I'll have to watch this when I get home from work. The videos Phelous puts out never fail to entertain. I adore his self-conscious meta humor and the clear enthusiasm he puts his reviews. It's good to see him tackling more Dragon Ball content after his look at Dragon Ball: The Path to Power.
Favorite Movies: Alien, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, The Thing, Evil Dead, The Land Before Time
Favorite Shows: Cardcaptor Sakura, Doctor Who, Wallace and Gromit, Wakfu, Yu Yu Hakusho
Favorite Manga: Fullmetal Alchemist, Hunter x Hunter, Dragon Ball
Augenis wrote:The power level view into the series has trained a significant portion of the fan base into real life stereotypical members of the Freeza empire, where each and every individual is reduced to a floating number above their heads and any sudden changes to said number are met with shock and confusion.
This was great. I couldn't stop laughing. It also made see the cargo robot joke TFS made. It went right over my head til now.
Why Dragon Ball Consistency in something such as power levels matter!
Spoiler:
Doctor. wrote:I've explained before, I'll just paraphrase myself.
Power levels establish tension and drama. People who care about them (well, people who care about them in a narrative) don't care about the big numbers or the fancy explosions. If you have character A who's so much above character B, who's the main character, you're gonna be left wondering how in the hell character B, the character we're supposed to care and root for, is going to escape the situation or overcome the odds. It makes us emotionally invested.
If character B doesn't escape the situation in a believable way that's consistent with previous events, then that emotional investment is gone. It was pointless tension, pointless drama made just to suck in the viewer. It has no critical value whatsoever. The audience is left believing that the author can just create whatever scenarios he wants and what happens to the characters is decided by whatever the author wants to happen, regardless of the events that happened in the story. Which, in fairness, is what happens, but the audience wants to be fooled. The audience wants to know that the world they're following has rules. That the world they're invested in isn't going to bend to external factors that are irrelevant to them.
An author can do whatever he wants with the characters, that's not false. But the author should also have the responsibility to make sure it fits in cohesively with the other events in the narrative he has created.