Nightmare Fuel / Dragon Ball Z: The History of Trunks

• No one can stop the Androids and they know it, so they treat their rampages like a game and only pretend to miss humans before coming back to finish them later.
  • During their rampage in Pepper City, after destroying the city and scattering the humans 17 steals a car and starts running down the survivors. Laughing his head off while he does it.
  • While 18 at least has some small capacity for mercy, seen when she spares the shopkeeper who compliments her and gives her clothes, 17 doesn't. He'll kill you in a heartbeat whether he gets anything out of it or not. For him it's pure compulsion.
  • Don't think 18 is always the lesser of evils though, because we see her beam and evaporate a harmless man crawling from the rubble from what appears almost a mile away. As if just to emphasize that there is no running or hiding from these monsters.
• In the manga, Gohan's final confrontation with the Androids comes with the revelation that they haven't even been trying in all their previous fights. The shock and horror on his face in the next panel says it all.
• After Gohan's death, we cut to 3 years later on where the world is somehow in even worse shape and Trunks is taking his first swing at the Androids. The implication is that for 3 years straight, they had free reign of the entire world because the only person who had even a small chance of stopping them knew he would die immediately if he went to fight them alone.
• Trunks' first attempt at taking on the two Androids goes so poorly that it ceases to be a fight after about 3 minutes. After expending all his energy during his initial attack, he's quickly put onto the backfoot. In the dub, the cyborgs proceed to hide among the rubble and taunt him by calling the area "the cemetery", specifying that it'll be his. Afterwards, like kids playing a very tense game of hide and seek, 17 and 18 chase him all over town on foot both managing to sneak up behind Trunks at different points, making it very clear that he won't be able to escape. It really makes it all the more satisfying when he came back to the timeline and finally managed to get the upper hand of ending them and their reign of terror for good the next time he encounters them.
  • During this skirmish, Trunks got a teeny tiny taste of what Gohan had been dealing with for 13 years. Fighting the Androids is a losing bet because on top of them being stronger and faster than you, they quite simply don't get tired. They never get tired. Trunks does and this is what initially screws him up and leads to the chase around the city. The fact that he's running instead of flying is already bad enough, but the cyborgs are literally a step ahead of him every time. Popping up around corners and appearing behind him without even a sound. Most horrifying of all is that even when the twins are standing still and letting Trunks hit them, they don't even flinch from his blows. Very rarely is a gap in power so apparent in the world of Dragon Ball that the villains stop fighting just so you can see how little a threat you pose to them.