LoganForkHands73 wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2024 8:09 pm
I can still feel the tension because Shin wasn't there, lol.
But he retroactively existed in the Universe, along with Beerus, Whis, Zeno, and all the rest.
So, when you go rewatch the Cell arc and arrive at the point where Super Perfect Cell says that he will end the universe, please keep in mind that there's a dozen people in U7 alone that can oneshot Super Perfect Cell.
DBS recontextualized and scaled back the "threat" factor of the original DBZ villains, an inevitability of power-creep.
Ironically, the same has happened to Zamasu. Zamasu has been hit hard by power-creep since 2017. That is why you have people wondering why Jiren/Toppo/Merus/Grand Priest did not do anything about Zamasu. I can easily rationalize how Zamasu could have dealt with those people in a way that doesn't involve simple power-scaling; but I also cannot deny that the ToP arc has opened up new questions about the FT arc, namely what all those 70 fighters were doing while Zamasu was genociding the mortals.
This is the inevitable fate of any long-running series and unchecked power-creep. As new arcs are created, older arcs are inevitably recontextualized and scaled back in terms of tension and stakes.
IMO, the "cleanness" is part of the subtle horror. When Zeno kills someone, it's instantaneous. The victim painlessly blinks out of existence like they never existed in the first place. Contrast that with Beerus's methods of destruction which are functionally similar but slower, messier and more painful for the recipients. It's easy to see why #17 would come to a fatalistic conclusion that if there's this all-powerful god who has the power to do erase life on a multiversal scale, on a whim, whenever he feels like it, is there even much point in resisting? Reducing that to Zeno just teleporting them away somewhere feels cheap.
There's some ambiguity to this.
In the ToP, the victims of the Zeno technique went out relatively painlessly, some were even talking and making jokes and smiling while it was happening (Cabba, Champa, the entire U2 team, Jiren, etc.).
But then you look at Infinite Zamasu, and he was pretty much screaming in agony throughout the entire process, not too differently from when Beerus erased the Apprentice Zamasu.
Anyway the bottom line is that "the erased people are not actually erased" is just a potential avenue to bring Zamasu back. It's not the only option, there are other ways. It's just an intelligent route, since it can also tie into Future Trunks and his entire timeline, as well as the 13-18 universes, since Zamasu wasn't the only one erased by Zeno.