Manga/Dragon Ball

Didn't Yamcha save everyone from Oozaru Goku once?

Mark dies more then Kenny

Good idea but flawed execution sums up GT as a whole, not just the Shadow Dragons.

To be fair, Nouva Shenron and Ice Shenron were the best villains of that arc. Syn was just there to be a villain. It would've been better if Syn actually had a anti-Goku presence, not for the sake of evil, but just having absorbed the selfish aspects ever wish, and wanted to destroy humanity for their weakness and sins, blaming Goku for being the one to cause the world to solely rely on him for everything instead of encouraging the rest of the world to get stronger. It'd be a great antithesis to the flaws of Dragon Ball and make Goku's decision to leave with Shenron feel all the more impactful (even though that finale is still pretty good).

GT tried to do a thing where each Dragon embodied a different wish made on the Dragon Balls over the course of the series, but didn't really do a lot with it. I've always believed that the premise of the Shadow Dragons would work better if the Dragons were trying to repossess the wishes.

So, like, one Dragon's goal is to kill Goku, specifically. For the wish that brought him back to life to fight the Saiyans, Goku has to die.

Another Dragon wants to kill Bora, and the heroes have to protect him.

Another Dragon wants to exterminate the Namekians (and Vegeta). So there could be a plot about Vegeta going to New Namek to face that Dragon (and also his past, kinda).

Etc. etc.

And then, for comic relief, one Dragon just really wants those panties in Oolong's collection.

One Shadow Dragon per wish instead of per Dragon Ball, with the whole cast of heroes having to scatter to go throw down with them simultaneously.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 14th 2020 at 12:37:24 PM

Amusingly, that would mean there’s one dragon who wants to kill Goku, and another dragon who wants to kill everyone but Goku.

That does sound hilarious.

Considering the tone most of the dragons lean towards, that seems like it would work.

A big reason correlating the dragons to wishes doesn't work is there is no way you can slice it so that their are seven wishes to assign.

They used the Dragon Balls waaay more than that.

Bulma hosted a little contest with the DB's as the 1st place & later on wants to use em to modify her own height.

Its quite clear they are using the balls yearly for frivolous crap.

Edited by slimcoder on Feb 14th 2020 at 4:44:44 AM

Just handwave it with something like "oh there are only seven wishes worth of excess negative energy".

That's a pretty weak handwave. It kind of works if you go by the first seven wishes made in the series, but GT didn't even do that.

Does it need to be a strong handwave? I mean, the wishes not being in order is not exactly a story breaking problem.

I mean yeah, I'd prefer not to have weak excuses like that.

And if you're going to make it an important part of the dragon's motivations, it is kind of a story breaking problem to have there be no reason why they have the wishes they do. As it is it's just kind of an unnecessary detail because nothing is done with it, but if you then make it the focus of the story it's a problem.

I mean there's only seven dragon balls so there can be only seven wishes embodied. I think you're overestimating how many people will care that there aren't five dragons embodying "Bulma wishing to become slightly younger".

There's also the whole framing device of the arc, which is that idea that good wishes build up negative karma in the Dragon Balls, which is literally the exact opposite of how karma works. Additionally, evil wishes, like King Piccolo's wish to become young, produce good Shadow Dragons with positive karma. Logically, if people actually WERE abusing the Dragon Balls with evil wishes, the Shadow Dragons would be a team of superheroes. The only reason the Shadow Dragons are evil is because everyone kept making good, selfless wishes, which goes completely counter to the idea that they were abusing the Dragon Balls!

Even if karma worked in that way, where good wishes build up evil karma and vice-versa, wouldn't the positive karma built up from King Piccolo's wish have counter-acted and negated some of the negative karma being built up from the good wishes, instead of surviving to become a completely separate Shadow Dragon with a different moral alignment than all the rest? That seems to be what the fight against Omega Shenron implies, that positive karma cancels out negative karma. Logically, the way to stop this arc from happening should be to make enough stupid, frivolous wishes that it cancels out all the heroic, life-saving wishes, which is the exact opposite of the message it's trying to convey.

There's just so much about the premise of the Shadow Dragon arc that sounds "interesting" and "subversive" at first glance but completely falls apart into incoherent, inconsistent, nonsense when put under scrutiny.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Feb 14th 2020 at 6:22:36 AM

That's a bad example because we don't have an on-screen example of that and you deliberately picked the most asinine wish you could.

The fact that there have been major wishes on the balls on-screen that were pretty critical to the plot and not at all represented or addressed by the dragons would be notably weird.

I am aware that there are only 7 dragons because of the 7 balls, but that just means you can't assign wishes to them in anyway that is actually meaningful. So why do it?

So the Dragon that was Piccolo wishing for Youth would be trying to make Piccolo look like Kami again?

With the caveat that Piccolo was dead by then, because GT.

It's asinine but it's what would happen if we went with recency as the reason for picking them. Which is why we shouldn't.

You're operating under the premise that the wishes chosen would have to be chosen in some sort of meaningful pattern, but I don't see why that has to be the case. There's nothing wrong with "something something these wishes made the big negative energy". It's not a big deal!

I never said about using recency as a pattern (and don't think that'd be the most logical course to take,). Also, Bulma has never used the dragon balls that way in GT's continuity so that still wouldn't happen.

And no, I disagree that just picking out random wishes and having those be the ones that created dragons is good enough. It's stupid.

Edited by Saiga on Feb 15th 2020 at 2:00:33 AM

So...if the Dragon Balls don't exist, do the stones they took up just keep that stored up negative energy?

Earth's Dragon Balls were recreated twice, why would the balls keep the energy when they don't exist.

You did say the first seven wishes in the series, implying that doing them all in some sort of row would be a logical pattern, which I disagree with. I used the example of the last seven in order because I thought it fit better with "this negative energy broke the camel's back".

And we're talking about doing a rewrite. So that means using Super's events is not off the table. Slimcoder was just talking about Super's events in relation to this conversation earlier.

I guess we're just completely at odds. I just don't get why you think that matters.

That comment about the wishes in Super's movies didn't seem to be in reference to the negative energy thing. Just how often they're used.

The dragons just don't need to have anything to do with the wishes actually made, using the balls is bad...builds up bad stuff, that's all it really needed to be.

The dragons brought up the wishes when encountered, but only one of them actually cared in anyway and the wishes themselves didn't relate at all to what they were doing.

I'm definitely not considering Supper's events because it has nothing to do with the original GT premise and is a huge can of worms unto itself.

And yes, I mentioned the first seven wishes, because that makes some degree of sense (more so than the most recent ones, because FIFO makes more sense than LIFO because they've been building up energy longer and it's not like it would just go nowhere).

You brought up a hypothetical I didn't ever voice in order to discredit my argument, but your hypothetical argument was completely removed from anything I was talking about.