A Rant about UnrealEntGaming

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jamiljamtheman
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A Rant about UnrealEntGaming

Post by jamiljamtheman » Mon Dec 12, 2022 12:15 pm

For context, UnrealEntGaming is a Dragon Ball YouTube channel that uploads almost daily. While a variety of videos are released (including narration of new DBS manga chapters as they release), this post is focused on one thing: the channel’s own produced fan-manga usually released under the title “Beyond Dragon Ball Super”. I’m only focusing on this channels productions, not his narrations of other authors’ fan-work.

This is an interesting one for me because I’ve previously posted positively on this forum about this channel’s fan-manga content on YouTube. It’s true that I was invested in the “Angel Merno” story for some time—the original “Dragon Ball Super Kai” that UnrealEntGaming did not write, but just translated and narrated, is pretty great. When Unreal produced his own continuations of this story, it seemed promising at first.

However, these continuations are where I eventually ended up falling off and realizing I don’t like his style of content much. Over time it devolved into an over-long, repetitive story, and by the time the story was really moving somewhat-forward, the writing seemed to get worse.

Specifically, when it comes to the writing, we have to talk about the medium of these “manga”: YouTube. As you may know, YouTubers can make a living monetizing their content. One of the ways that creators’ success is measured by the platform seems to be the amount of time their content is watched. This is why many creators produce videos that are at least 10 minutes long.

I assume YouTube is UnrealEntGaming’s full-time career, and I can’t fault him for that; he puts in work and produces a lot of content about stuff he enjoys. Being able to contribute to the fandom via new fan-made stories and fan-manga is pretty cool. I also must point out that his upload schedule is quite frequent, with these kind of fan-chapters releasing much more frequently than Dragon Ball Super’s own chapters do.

However, the crux of what has begun to make his fan-manga awful, in my opinion, is the writing and presentation—all servicing the fact that these are YouTube videos made for a living. I will start with Merno: over time, he devolved into an overpowered, monologuing, one dimensional villain. Every chapter was the same: Merno gives a paragraphs-long speech about what he hates about mortals and the gods, the heroes give paragraphs-long responses, and occasionally they exchange blows. In between almost every attack, a lengthy monologue from either or each character usually follows. Why, you might ask, do characters monologue this much? My guess is that it’s just to make videos longer, with minimal difficult action to draw, because it’s a YouTube video that needs to make money.

The worst part of this is that I think the art is pretty good! It’s got an edgy kick to it and the original character designs are not bad if you’re into that sort of thing. I also think the concepts of the stories are pretty awesome, and make for great thumbnails. Right now, there is a story about Goku training to fight the “five strongest in the Multiverse” that the Grand Priest hinted at in DBS. Their designs are cool, everyone is overpowered, and I am almost interested to see where this saga goes.

Almost. Because every time I try to watch a video, to see if it’s gotten any better, it feels worse. Just dull and repetitive monologue after dull and repetitive monologue. What’s even worse is that sometimes the dialogue transparently includes Unreal’s own opinions about stuff—“Goku is too kind hearted, only Vegeta is ruthless enough to know that enemies need to be killed” and so on.

This upsets me so much. The content is almost promising, the art is decent, but the writing is so, so insufferable to me. I am disappointed.

Rant over :)