Dragon Ball Super is the new GT

Warning: if you don’t watch Dragon Ball Z or Super, then this post will mean extraordinarily little to you.

Now with that out of the way, we can get to the meat of it. Let’s start with the basics… As silly as I know it sounds, Goku was an early kind of Christ figure to me as a small child. His ethics were profound, yet was an exceedingly simple man to understand. He believed in forgiveness, was a loving father, and being remarkably powerful, he protected the planet from evil.

A character like Goku only really makes sense when the stakes are high. Goku, being a martial artist who constantly wanted to test his own limits, came into many situations where his back was against the wall. Dragon Ball Z (really all the way up to Cell) also had Goku’s friends assisting him to manage some outrageous wins for the good guys.

Just the first saga with the Saiyan invasion had every one of “Earth’s Special Forces” pulling out all the stops against Vegeta and Nappa. Yamcha, Chiaotzu, Tien, and even the mighty Piccolo fell in battle. Furthermore, if it hadn’t been for Gohan, Krillin, and Yajirobe’s surprising act of bravery in slicing off Vegeta’s tail, victory would never have been achieved. Also, when it all comes down to a coward like Yajirobe, you know you’re cutting it close… The bottom line: people aside from just Goku pitched in and the weight and urgency of the battle was lost to no kid watching Toonami at the time.

Then you get to the Android Saga when a time traveler named Trunks warns everybody that their future just went full Terminator and they need to train like hell to stop it from happening. Not to mention, just the appearance of Trunks, this awesome new character, and how he killed Frieza by brutally chopping him into chunks with his sword and then proceeding to blow those same bits up, was literally the coolest thing I had yet seen on TV. Once again, these moments were filled with the question, “Are they actually going to win?” Or just as important, “Is someone going to die and not come back?”

Now… sigh… we get to Dragon Ball Super. I could honestly talk about DBZ all day and my favorite episodes (best one is Save the World, just saying), but that would defeat the purpose of this post. God in Heaven, where to even begin with this fan fiction? Well, let’s just start from the beginning I suppose. While I did enjoy the two new movies in the theater (Battle of Gods and Resurrection F) the problem is that Super literally just adapts HALF of its show into being just drawn-out filler of the films. It’s truly quite remarkable. With Dragon Ball Z you had filler like Garlic Jr. for an obvious reason: They were still drawing the manga! So, this is the first anime I’ve ever seen that has self-imposed filler because apparently the writers for this show are a bunch of asshat monkeys… and please don’t give me, “This was all from Akira Toriyama’s imagination.” It’s not. I don’t believe that for a second. It’s just like GT because it has Toriyama’s name attached to it but not much else. Maybe he did some character designs like Super Saiyan Blue, similarly to how he also did the sketch for Super Saiyan 4 in GT.

I could also rant and rave for days at how the animation and line work looks like garbage… but I’ll simply say that if you think the animation looks “modern” it’s only because they’re putting a CGI type sheen on everything. It’s not good, it just looks shiny. Compare that to just the one scene of Vegeta raging out and beating the crap out of Recoome… my God, the vivid frames of movement. It’s such a shame because back in the day Toei had great hand drawn shows. Even Sailor Moon had tons of detail.

Another gripe with Dragon Ball Super is that there’s no weight, there’s no gravity, there’s no urgency, and there’s no real threat. The only time when Super isn’t stealing from their own films, is when they decide to do the most boring and tiresome thing a shonen fighting anime can do in the year 2017… Have another tournament of course! I mean, really? Dragon Ball, Yu Yu Hakusho, G Gundam, and Hunter X Hunter have already done this to death. It’s a proverbial dead horse where even his ghost has been beaten to death. Are we genuinely still doing this Japan?

My final complaint is the worst one. They destroyed Future Trunks and his entire reason for existing. It’s the equivalent of dragging a beloved individual like Giordano Bruno through the streets and burning him and his ideals to the stake. Trunks had lost almost everything. The point for his continued heroism was that he still had people to protect. His mother and the remnants of humanity counted on him as a savior. Super might actually be worse than GT because it retconned one of my favorite characters and now his universe is literally an empty hole. Gee, thanks Toei. The saddest part of all is that the 20 out of 21 episode saga of “Goku Black” was actually really good. I mean it. It had urgency and dramatic storytelling… it was truthfully close to Dragon Ball Z. Then came episode 21. Oh Kami, what have you done? Trunks had decisively beaten the bad guy with a new type of Spirit Bomb attack, and everyone was celebrating… then it all just gets reversed with some kind of magic. I sure hope Trunks doesn’t have PTSD now.

I’m a huge fan of Dragon Ball Z. Sad as it may be, DBZ and the N64 basically formed the basis for my childhood. So, it’s with great and bitter disappointment that I must say Dragon Ball Super is not for the Toonami generation. If you like bullshit like One Piece, maybe you’ll find yourself at home. As for me, I’ll just keep watching Attack on Titan Season 2.