My biggest issue with people taking my line is that they generally don't quote it properly. You came pretty close, though,
The Monkey King. Far too often people combine my line with an in-character
DBZ Abridged bit of dialog ("Power Levels Are Bullshit"), and then go on their merry way to whine and complain about... I dunno, I guess me. Which is fine, I guess. Maybe that's a distinction without a difference. Whatever.
Yeah, what I actually said was:
VegettoEX-kun-sama-san wrote:The entire point of introducing them was to show how unreliable and meaningless they were.
(Not that it actually matters, but: they were looking for a great soundbite to use there and they pulled that line out of a longer piece that I provided... but it totally does stand alone and doesn't need its surrounding context, so whatever. All good here.)
And I stand by that assessment, for every obvious reason under the sun that was described in said video, has been described in countless fan discussions, etc.
And again, because citations are important,
here is what you're looking for: it's a quote from a two-part quick Q&A in the April and May 2014 issues of
Saikyo Jump (which, for what it's worth, were released about a year after the Goku vs. Superman video was made):
Akira Toriyama wrote:My number-one goal in coming up with it was because, if an opponent's strength could be seen as a number, it would be very easy for the readers to understand when I put it in the comic. However, I could foresee that it'd be an inconvenience for me down the line, because if you knew a concrete number, then you could tell who would win or lose, so with regards to Goku & co., I decided that [their power] would change due to "Ki" and couldn't be adequately measured.
And like
dbgtFO said, it's a good bit of "both" "explanations" here. Sure, the larger number is probably going to be the winner, so at the same time of development he gave it a "couldn't be adequately measured" explanation an "out" as to why they didn't hold much water in the long run.
PROTIP: If you aren't sure about the origin of a translation that you have kicking around in your mind, use the filters at the top of our "Translations" page to narrow things down (say, for example, clicking "Akira Toriyama" to get ONLY items where he is present). Furthermore, use your awesome Google kung-fu to find precise statements. I didn't remember this Q&A off the top of my head, either, but like you I remembered the "easy to understand" part, so I typed
site:kanzenshuu.com/translations understand and it was the third entry down, easy and obvious to see on the search results page.
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