Non-thread-worthy discussions

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ZeroNeonix
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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by ZeroNeonix » Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:41 am

Good luck trying to figure that out. Goku was on par with Fat Buu when they fought, but later claimed he held back because he wanted one of the kids to save the day. Then he felt hopeless against Super Buu, but was able to square up against Kid Buu, who was much stronger than Fat Buu.

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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by MasenkoHA » Thu Dec 08, 2022 10:05 am

ZeroNeonix wrote: Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:41 am Good luck trying to figure that out. Goku was on par with Fat Buu when they fought, but later claimed he held back because he wanted one of the kids to save the day. Then he felt hopeless against Super Buu, but was able to square up against Kid Buu, who was much stronger than Fat Buu.
I don't see what the confusion is. Super Buu especially after aborbing Gohan and Piccolo and the Saiyan Little League was a lot stronger than Goku and Kid Buu. Goku said he was deliberately holding back when he fought Fat Buu and we saw him able to fight toe to toe with Kid Buu. All that means
is Super Buu>Super Saiyan 3 Goku=Kid Buu>Fat Buu

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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by Grimlock » Thu Dec 08, 2022 11:31 am

Yuji wrote: Thu Dec 08, 2022 6:42 amBut multipliers in the series have arguably been fluid. It seems like they're not set and can vary depending on how much training you do for a certain form. For example, for me the SS multiplier increased from x50 to x100 when mastered, which explains the discrepancy between SS Vegeta and SS Cabba despite Vegeta claiming they were equal in base form.
Why didn't Goku say anything about that? If one of the reasons to master Super Saiyan is to increase its power, you would think Goku (and the guidebooks) would have mentioned that along with the other benefits it would bring. And what about Super Saiyan 2's and Super Saiyan 3's multipliers, are they the same or did they change too?

The Vegeta-Cabba situation could have been a hint, but I highly doubt Cabba should be at Vegeta's level to begin with so it's really difficult.
Yuji wrote: Thu Dec 08, 2022 6:42 amUltimate Piccolo probably had the same x1000-1500 multiplier as Boo arc Gohan owing to having just unlocked the form, but Gohan's probably increased far beyond that point by now.
That's quite different from what I have in mind, I would put Gohan's Ultimate somewhere between x500 to x600 and, considering Piccolo's potential is not as great as Gohan's, Piccolo's Ultimate somewhere between x200 to x300 (x400 at best).

Also, that's uh... Interesting. I would assume Super Saiyan 4's multiplier to be around x800 and you are putting Ultimate at x1000... In fact, this just gives me more to think about. People are obsessed with "Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan vs Super Saiyan 4", but before that we should be comparing the latter with Ultimate. Which one do you think has the higher multiplier, Super Saiyan 4 or Ultimate?

I don't know if "potential" itself is something that can change and no idea if my Super Saiyan 4's multiplier is just too low...
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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by Koitsukai » Thu Dec 08, 2022 11:39 am

Is there any difference, design-wise, between Piccolo, Piccolo-Nail, and Kamiccolo?

I do see some difference compared to early Z Piccolo, but probably is due to artstyle evolution. But does Piccolo become taller, bulkier, less Piccolo Daimaoh-like when it comes to his face? or he only gets nicer?

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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by Yuji » Thu Dec 08, 2022 11:50 am

Grimlock wrote: Thu Dec 08, 2022 11:31 am
Yuji wrote: Thu Dec 08, 2022 6:42 amBut multipliers in the series have arguably been fluid. It seems like they're not set and can vary depending on how much training you do for a certain form. For example, for me the SS multiplier increased from x50 to x100 when mastered, which explains the discrepancy between SS Vegeta and SS Cabba despite Vegeta claiming they were equal in base form.
Why didn't Goku say anything about that? If one of the reasons to master Super Saiyan is to increase its power, you would think Goku (and the guidebooks) would have mentioned that along with the other benefits it would bring. And what about Super Saiyan 2's and Super Saiyan 3's multipliers, are they the same or did they change too?

The Vegeta-Cabba situation could have been a hint, but I highly doubt Cabba should be at Vegeta's level to begin with so it's really difficult.
Yuji wrote: Thu Dec 08, 2022 6:42 amUltimate Piccolo probably had the same x1000-1500 multiplier as Boo arc Gohan owing to having just unlocked the form, but Gohan's probably increased far beyond that point by now.
That's quite different from what I have in mind, I would put Gohan's Ultimate somewhere between x500 to x600 and, considering Piccolo's potential is not as great as Gohan's, Piccolo's Ultimate somewhere between x200 to x300 (x400 at best).

Also, that's uh... Interesting. I would assume Super Saiyan 4's multiplier to be around x800 and you are putting Ultimate at x1000... In fact, this just gives me more to think about. People are obsessed with "Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan vs Super Saiyan 4", but before that we should be comparing the latter with Ultimate. Which one do you think has the higher multiplier, Super Saiyan 4 or Ultimate?

I don't know if "potential" itself is something that can change and no idea if my Super Saiyan 4's multiplier is just too low...
I kinda fucked up the math :P

So what I wanted to say was something like:

Goku: 1
- SS: 100
- SS3: 800

SS Gotenks: 800
- SS3: 6.400

Gohan: 1
- Ultimate: 7.000

So a 7000x boost actually, in the Boo arc. :lol: I guess you can reduce it if you consider SS3 Goku stronger than SS Gotenks, which is definitely valid.

As for the SS multipliers, I think any form can have its multipliers change. We saw SS2 Trunks in the manga trouble SS3 Goku. We see characters mastering specific forms to increase their strength. Gohan's forms were on par with Goku and Vegeta's but in Ultimate he jumps from stronger than SS3 all the way to SSG/SSB. Super definitely has a lot of wonky stuff that plays into this theory, but the seeds of it are in the Cell arc with the SS mastery.

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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by Grimlock » Thu Dec 08, 2022 12:47 pm

Yuji wrote: Thu Dec 08, 2022 11:50 amWe saw SS2 Trunks in the manga trouble SS3 Goku.
What I saw was Trunks activating a sort of power-up. On top of Super Saiyan 2, Trunks did something else which, naturally, hasn't been explained yet. It wasn't his regular Super Saiyan 2.

Seeing here, there's also Whis saying Trunks "had the upper hand" and Trunks himself saying he kept training. Again they're pushing the power level of these characters to Goku and Vegeta level without making it believable. What kind of training has Trunks been doing for the past eleven years? What did he have access to? We did see that, at some point, he trained with Kaioshin of East and the sword. But can we really say he gained a considerable amount of power from that considering how things played out? (The same question goes to Gohan).
Yuji wrote: Thu Dec 08, 2022 11:50 amWe see characters mastering specific forms to increase their strength.
Yes, but that wasn't the case with Super Saiyan specifically, that wasn't one of the reasons Goku wanted to master it.
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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by Koitsukai » Thu Dec 08, 2022 1:13 pm

We do have that interview of Toriyama saying the endgoal -or something that could be strived for- for SS is to muster the power of all the other forms in just SS1, or something like that, I couldn't find it to re-read it again.
It seems to be what Trunks in the FT arc and Vegeta in the same arc, and BoG, managed to do, but with SS2.

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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by ABED » Thu Dec 08, 2022 6:51 pm

Trying to turn battle powers into math problems misses the point. This is a story we're talking about, not a RPG. Stories don't have to be "logical" to be good.
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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by Desassina » Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:41 pm

You can still translate a few concepts into math formulas without numbers using symbols in a logical manner. We have concepts of color, time and gravity, not thanks to data analysis, but logic and reasoning driving those experiments, which helped to quantify them. How often do you see mathematicians and physicists try to model reality and only then check with experimental data? In Dragon Ball, I have once tried to explain Gohan's transformations like this:
Gohan's power = max(base * transformation, ultimate) / base
It reads like "Gohan's max power is either transformation or his ultimate state. If the former, then he's either got a new one or he didn't train with Ultimate, otherwise the latter manifests itself over base." I wrote this back in Battle of Gods and Resurrection of F. I'm surprised to find out that Gohan Beast does not contradict it. We're studying an object that is subject to change in an arbitrary fashion though. This to say that our interpretation of Dragon Ball does not supercede future developments.

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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by ABED » Thu Dec 08, 2022 8:27 pm

It's fiction. It doesn't need to be driven by logic. There is no logical reason why an infiltration unit like The Terminator would have the appearance of a 6' Austrian bodybuilder. His purpose to blend in. Yet, we go along with it because the story is engrossing, and Arnold has presence.

Boiling down made up concepts like power levels to math is a fools errand. Stories are about emotion, not logic.
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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by Desassina » Thu Dec 08, 2022 8:48 pm

Emotions are the ingredients of a good story, but logic is the recipe of a good delivery, because having thoughts is not the same thing as doing something with thought. The purpose of the latter is to trigger the former on the audience.

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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by ABED » Thu Dec 08, 2022 10:27 pm

Emotions are why tell stories. We tell them to emotionally connect to each other. Logic is flexible. It's a means to an end, not the end. Making the math work out in DB won't make the story better. Again, why does the Terminator look like a bodybuilder? It makes no logical sense because the logic doesn't matter. Audiences don't care about that sort of thing. And only nerds (I don't mean it as a pejorative) care about the math of made-up concepts that are inherently illogical.

There's nothing more I can add to the topic so I'm tapping out.
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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by Desassina » Fri Dec 09, 2022 6:01 am

No offense taken with nerd, but I don't think that people organizing their thoughts with math is what defines them as such, because writing long posts over the internet would be equally nerd-y. It just so happens that a math formula with symbols for numbers is more compact, and it's always from the perspective of the consumer after the products are released. In no way should they supercede how the author decides to continue his work, and people are to blame when they fight for their theories to hold without adapting them, and the result is a shot at the quality of Dragon Ball's writing.

Again, I must stress that I'm not talking about battle powers, just the concepts behind Dragon Ball in compact form. Instead of making a confusing and long post about time travel, you can organize your thoughts with charts that require some graphic design tools, when some math and computer science concepts help explain it, like recursion and iteration, which have their visual equivalents. I know that I have used them before, but so has Toyotaro in the manga, because it's a visual aid that prevents it from being an abstract concept to people that want Dragon Ball to be as prosaic as their lack of effort to understand it.

Also, if you have ever felt emotional about a movie or some other piece of entertainment, know that it was tailored to trigger those emotions on you at the expense of their hard labour (and sometimes suffering), which is different than how some directors run their filming process to make it fun for their participants. An artist who feels very strongly about his art might not communicate it well because he did not think it through but people will take that he's very emotional without connecting to him. Educated minds (prosumers for example) might feel differently about a piece of entertainment if they know about the process, and judge how it was delivered from the perspective of a consumer, only professionally and in ways that can shape how producers run their business.

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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by Noah » Wed Dec 21, 2022 11:29 pm

ABED wrote: Thu Dec 08, 2022 6:51 pm Trying to turn battle powers into math problems misses the point. This is a story we're talking about, not a RPG. Stories don't have to be "logical" to be good.
Is not about making math problems and formulas, I could say more but I believe Doctor. summed this subject better:
Doctor. wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2017 7:55 pm 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.
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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by ATA » Thu Dec 22, 2022 4:39 am

Why didn't they just wish for the Black star balls back on Earth?

Is Nappa mom secretly alive? He said "My mom DOES have an outie how does he(Gohan) know)".
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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by ABED » Thu Dec 22, 2022 7:30 am

Noah wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 11:29 pm
ABED wrote: Thu Dec 08, 2022 6:51 pm Trying to turn battle powers into math problems misses the point. This is a story we're talking about, not a RPG. Stories don't have to be "logical" to be good.
Is not about making math problems and formulas, I could say more but I believe Doctor. summed this subject better:
Doctor. wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2017 7:55 pm 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.
Noah, I've been around fandoms long enough that yes, power levels are primarily about math. Nerds like concrete numbers. The talk in this thread alone about multipliers is evidence of my point. All the things you mentioned about tension and drama were there long before Raditz arrived. When we're dealing with fantasy worlds and mystical martial arts, what people find believable differs for each of us.

The dramatic point of power levels in DB was used to show Raditz relying too heavily on hard numbers without a deeper understanding of ki which ultimately costs him his life. It's a concept that's established and immediately undercut. The tension doesn't come from the numbers, it comes from moments like him kneeing Goku in the gut, defeating him in one shot.

With that being said, I realize we're in the Non-thread worthy discussions and there have been enough posts about this subject that it undercuts that idea, so I bid farewell.
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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by Plague-Memories » Thu Dec 22, 2022 5:32 pm

Apologies if there's already a thread on this. I just bought the 3 volumes of the Viz Full Color Saiyan Arc. What's the general consensus on these? Good printings or not? Any overly noticeable censorship?

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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by Grimlock » Sat Dec 24, 2022 7:53 am

Every time we get a new material, we just have to wonder what happened to the characters in the Trunks timeline. So this time, Dragon Ball Super Super Hero.

What do you think happened to Hedo? He was nine years old when the androids first appeared, so most likely he didn't get doctorate when he was fourteen. The movie says by the time was an adolescent he already had a... "distinctive personality", so one can only imagine he would have created the zombies or the Gammas to defeat the androids.

I can't actually think what could have happened to him (other than the cheap "the androids killed him" used for pretty much everybody else) and why he wouldn't do something at some point. Do you have any idea (can be for other characters from the movie as well)?
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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by FoolsGil » Sun Dec 25, 2022 3:04 pm

Happy Holidays!

So I just today found out about Dragon Garrow Lee's Bonus Reincarnated as Yamcha chapter. found out on a vegebul twitter account, I initially thought it was some fan manga, since 1) Even on Viz, there were only 3 chapters, all with wide time jumps and 2) Isekai'd Yamcha went back on what he said in Chapter 2, about letting Vegeta live, and letting Bulma go for the sake of the story.

So, surprised, I got ahold of the bonus chapter and read it. I suppose Isekai'd Yamcha jumping Vegeta in a last ditch effort, and getting smashed in not even a full page makes sense, though considering how super into Dragonball he is, (and it IS an Isekai story, with all the power fulfillment wishes the genre brings) I was surprised Isekai'd Yamcha didn't know Kaioken, make the fight last a bit longer before it's all revealed Vegeta can go further beyond and end the fight by the third page.

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Re: Non-thread-worthy discussions

Post by Xeogran » Sun Dec 25, 2022 5:51 pm

Grimlock wrote: Sat Dec 24, 2022 7:53 am What do you think happened to Hedo? He was nine years old when the androids first appeared, so most likely he didn't get doctorate when he was fourteen. The movie says by the time was an adolescent he already had a... "distinctive personality", so one can only imagine he would have created the zombies or the Gammas to defeat the androids.
Interesting question.

Maybe he never grew to become that smart because of the world being afraid of Androids. You know, with society collapsing it means you have less chance to focus on what you want.

Witnessing the Androids' destructive nature on TV could have scared his young self from constructing anything dangerous, unlike his present timeline version.

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