Dragon Ball Z Abridged

See, I really don't see the logic of an exhausted Piccolo being able to kill everyone else; like, if you factor in the power levels of the period, then Piccolo was only maybe 50% to 2 times stronger than the others. Him being exhausted at that point should have made the gap a lot lower beaten him and the humans, to the point that realistically, they could beat him by ganging up on him; hell, Kami at his best should have been able to wreck Piccolo's shit at that point.

Doubt it. Being weaker doesn't suddenly mean he can't kill them all. Vegeta was still stronger than everyone else even after being hit with a Spirit Bomb and draining his own Ki.

Except he failed to kill anyone with that Explosive Wave of his, including three people who he would usually be ten times stronger than, and Goku, who had every bone in his body pretty much crushed by that point.

Well, it doesn't matter if we say he should have been too weak to do anything if they jumped him.

When they tried, he fired off a huge blast that knocked Tien, Yamcha and Krillin back, showing that, yes, a half dead Piccolo was still so far above them that the three of them together stood no chance.

Which really, sounds like the power scaling problems from the Frieza Saga; I mean, once Vegeta lost his tail, even Gohan was able to tangle with him without dying in seconds, provided he was using a rage boost.

That's probably why they're saying it doesn't make any sense...

edited 31st May '17 9:30:29 PM by randomness4

Yeah, but that's Goku. He's not here to dominate. He's here to have fun, and to him, a good match where his opponent gets to really strut and feel like they had a close chance at winning is fun. He doesn't want quick fights. He wants good ones. So he sandbags just enough to make it seem fair.

This is not his job. It's his hobby. His passion. He's here to experience combat, not just excel at it. Goku might just be one of the best Blood Knights ever written, because even without being a perpetually angry antihero, you really do get a sense that he lives for this.

edited 31st May '17 9:35:05 PM by TobiasDrake

@Saiga

I disagree. No one ever doubted Goku was stronger than Krillin or thought Goku wouldn't make it to the finals. That still doesn't mean we can't have entertaining fights. Where you see Piccolo outclassing Krillin, others see one of Krillin's most inspiring moments and, indeed, pretty much the culmination of his character arc. Krillin knew he was outmatched but he tried his best When he saw that still wasn't enough, he was humble and sensible and conceded. Gone was the brash, arrogant little shit determined to win at all costs.

Dragon Ball is not a series hat is kind to side characters. People have to take what they can get. If Krillin or Yamcha can have awesome fights, I'll take that any day over their total uselessness in DBZ.

i hate Freeza but he's a good example of this overall mentality. He could have, from the start, killed everyone. Every fight with him should have been over in less than a second. But everyone got a turn to look awesome, at least for a little while.

Goku never stood a chance but that doesn't make this less awesome. Krillin never stood a chance against Piccolo Jr. but that doesn't make the fight less awesome. Same for Tien in the 23rd and all the other fights.

edited 31st May '17 9:54:26 PM by Nikkolas

I mean, you can enjoy the fights while still knowing what the outcome is going to be. That Goku and Piccolo were holding back a ton shouldn't really take away the enjoyment from the situation, since them being the final match was a given from the start.

None of this conflicts with what Saiga said.

Saiga: "Also, the DB tournaments really weren't good for the weaker characters. Any decent showing was inevitably revealed to be caused by their opponent holding back an arbitrary amount that just enabled the showing."

I've read similar things on Kanzenshuu, that all Goku's and co.'s holding back did was make Krillin or whoever look more pathetic. I vehemently disagree with that belief.

If it takes someone holding back to make the side characters look good, that's fine by me. It's the only way to make their existence worthwhile in this setting.

I can actually see Saiga's point. Sure, someone holding back can make them look good, but it'd be nice if the fight was good because they had a legitimate chance of winning rather than because the other dude was letting them win.

That being said, we get that in hindsight.

For me, the main appeal of tournament arcs is the ability to apply Let's You and Him Fight to various supporting characters as well as to challenge the hero by letting them challenge themselves against allied characters they might never have fought before.

For instance, it's hard to come up with a reason for The Hero and the Big Good to trade blows without compromising one of their statuses, but in a tournament? For anyone who's ever wondered just how well Hero Guy stacks up to General Badass, this is their chance to find out.

Similarly, while we can generally be assured that Hero Guy is probably more formidable than Sidekick Man and Ally Girl, a tournament gives us a chance to see who would win in a fight between those two.

But it generally works better when the powers aren't so disparate as they are in Dragon Ball. When it legitimately feels like anybody could win, even though we know The Hero ultimately will - or, at least, that he'll make it to the final and lose to the one guy that's supposed to be beefier than him.

Any round in which the winner wasn't pushed to their limit is a wasted opportunity for an interesting fight, but that can't be every round unless the characters are all in the same general ballpark.

edited 31st May '17 10:20:13 PM by TobiasDrake

Spoilers: Yusuke loses the final tournament in Yu Yu Hakusho and he wasn't even close to the strongest guy there.

This really made me angry back in the day. I'm unsure how I feel about it now. Maybe it was actually a brilliant move. (it be the only one for that arc. Yuck)

Also spoiler: Kid Muscle loses the last match of Ultimate Muscles to Kevin Mask. That'd be like Goku losing to Piccolo being the end of the Buu Saga.

That was one of the best fights in the series so I'm fine with it. I feel like maybe winning isn't important so much as putting that work in and giving their all.

edited 31st May '17 10:35:12 PM by Moth13

well, neither interpretation is wrong. It can be cool to see a weaker character give it their all despite being outclassed. Or it could be a waste of time because they're giving it their all while their opponent isn't even trying, and they still lose.

It's all how it's written. That said, fights in Dragon Ball that don't involve Goku are usually to illustrate the strength of the opponent that Goku will inevitably face. Krillin vs Piccolo isn't about the former's growth, but how strong the latter is.

This is why I feel fans tend to misinterpret certain scenes to hype up their favorite character. Tien and Cell is the prime example of this. But I feel it's more fans of these characters just being upset that they're essentially footnotes in the grand scheme of things and just cling to whatever they can.

edited 31st May '17 10:39:39 PM by BlackYakuzu94

The reason that the main fighter's strengths ruins the merit behind the secondaries is because the difference is made out to be so great that it becomes more of a question of "will the main guy hold back enough to let the secondary guy do good". Any achievements of the secondaries have less to do with their own merits and more to do with how delicately their opponents handled them. It's like a real world parent having a "fair" game against their toddler.

It doesn't matter how much the secondaries improve, because if they didn't get as far, their opponents would just hold back more. It's completely hollow.

If the amount that the primary fighters held back was less artbitrary, if there was a more concrete measuring stick to compare them to, then the secondaries' moments would have more weight.

For Kuririn vs Goku, that could have easily been written as Goku's full power. He still had a massive upperhand, but we'd at least see what Kuririn can do. Or, if Goku needs to hold back, have him deliberately hold back to Kuririn's level and let them fight evenly.

Instead, we have Goku sandbag and still appear hopelessly above Kuririn, who needs to use tricks to keep up with an artbitrary amount of effort on Goku's part.

Instead of portraying the main fighters as being super far ahead and THEN revealing that they were holding back, go one or the other. When you have both you take out two possible angles for the secondary characters to actually achieve something.

That's a recurring problem with Toriyama's fights actually. A character arbitrarily holds back a great deal, only to reveal greater power later.

While it's good for establishing how much stronger those characters are, it breaks the scale because you can't tell how much they're holding back. Additionally, it makes whomever they beat look even worse.

At least in the Saiyan/Namek arcs we get some battle powers that put the vaguer elements into some context. And later when characters are holding back it usually leaves them in a similiar ballpack, so you know the characters are holding back because they're only using just as much as they feel they need to at any given time.

Of course you start looking at the EU at large and there's no consistent trend as characters hold back because that's what is expected to happen.

edited 31st May '17 11:27:39 PM by Saiga

I look at it kind of like most of the big fights in One Punch Man. Saitama is hopelessly above everyone in the setting to an absolutely absurd degree, and it's established that he's still holding back tremendously, to the point that even when he says he's serious, he's still holding back. Doesn't make his fights with Genos, Boros, Garou, or Tatsumaki any less fucking spectacular. This is because Saitama's opponents are the ones that really shine in those fights.

In Dragon Ball, when a character is fighting someone they're completely outclassed by, the narrative focus of the fight inherently isn't on the stronger person's side. Goku is not the focus of Goku vs Krillin, nor is Piccolo the focus of Piccolo vs Krillin, Kami the focus of Yamcha vs Kami, Goku the focus of Goku vs Nam (for the first half), or Goku the focus of Goku vs Jeice and Burter. The weaker person in the fight is almost always the person we see the perspective of in the fight.

Think about it: the perspective only changes when the stronger person loses the advantage, even for a second. We shift to Goku's perspective when we think Krillin's winning by grabbing his tail, and we shift immediately back when Goku reveals that his tail is no longer a weakness. We shift to Piccolo's perspective when Krillin catches him off-guard by floating above the bounds. We shift to Kami's perspective when he internally complements Yamcha on his ingenuity with the Spirit Ball and apologizes for ko-ing him. We are on Nam's perspective almost the entire fight, until he gets the upper hand with the Heavenly Cross, when we shift to Goku figuring out how to beat this new move. When Goku is crushing the Ginyu Force effortlessly, we shift to Jeice and Burter's perspective as they talk to each other about how they can beat him and what their plan of attack should be.

Toriyama tends to write fights from the perspective of the underdog, even on a moment-by-moment basis.

edited 31st May '17 11:55:42 PM by PushoverMediaCritic

The focus may be on the underdog, but that's incidental to my point. In-universe, they don't do anything of merit.

It's why we have Informed Attribute and the like - the story can go to great pains to establish that Loser McFailure is awesome for only breaking 16 of his bones when he fought that gerbil, but he's still a loser.

And DB and OPM are spectacularly different series. I'd even dispute the idea that anyone shines versus Saitama - all the over-the-top action and posturing on their part just makes them look pathetic.

edited 1st Jun '17 12:26:02 AM by Saiga

Your perspective is unusual. Like, I have heard that kind of sentiment before, but it's definitely not the majority opinion.

What-if...fisticuffs?

Straight-up.

What's so unusual? The fact that we have the Informed Attribute tropes (and so many of them) shows a common trend of viewers noticing discrepancies between what the narrative is trying to present and the viewers' own interpretations of the scenes presented.

Informed Attribute is supposed to be when a character is said to be able to do certain things, but we never see them doing said things. Technically, Vegeta being able to destroy the Earth and Cell being able to destroy the solar system are informed attributes. I fail to see how it's really relevant to the conversation. Whether you think a character is cool or not is not an Informed Attribute.

On how it's unusual: most people who've seen it seem to think Krillin's fight with Piccolo is a great moment for Krillin, same with his fight against Goku. The vast majority of people also don't find Genos or Boros to be pathetic in their battles with Saitama, at least not until after they lose, because that's intentional.

I'm well aware of OPM and DB being drastically different series, I just brought it up as a good example of a show where weaker characters fight and lose to an overwhelmingly powerful character and they come out of it looking awesome afterwards, even if they lose horribly.

edited 1st Jun '17 12:41:30 AM by PushoverMediaCritic