Dragon Ball Z Abridged

Come on Rob its like you dont even remember my rants against the shadow dragons in the past

I like the point about restoring Shenron, that's new.

Thought it was just me! I had it in night vision and all of the font turned black. I turned off night vision and the forum went back to normal, then it turned black again when I turned back on night vision.

Edited by Guy01 on Sep 20th 2018 at 3:19:41 AM

Plausible, but the real reason 16 remained dead was because they didn't want to even bother with adding extending material for him and Toriyama just went "nah, he is truly dead and can't come back because he lacks a soul"

Hell, i bet 17 could have suffered a similar fate had it not been for that one cameo in the Buu saga. And of course, because his sister was still around as part of the main cast now.

Edited by fasoman1996 on Sep 20th 2018 at 7:24:33 AM

Death means something if the strongest hero around also dies...

Despite all the jokes about it, people should at least be aware of this fact by now...

They should've been aware of this fact long before now...

Now things are back to normal. Good, I was about to complain.

Like they need a reason to not write extending material if they dont feel like it.

I guess Toriyama was just done with 16. I can't really figure out what makes some characters worth keeping around and some not (especially when he barely seems to care about some of the ones he does keep around), but there you go.

16 got the boot. It's sad, but that's life.

I do remember them. You never brought up the Shenron thing though. That's why I'm like Damn! Can't go against that one...or it may be that I'm a jerk who is more willing to concede to Tobias than to you. Whichever you all prefer.

Edited by HandsomeRob on Sep 20th 2018 at 4:38:43 AM

And now this thread has disappeared from my watchlist even though I'm still following it.

Has that happened to anyone else? Are they doing some new maintenance or something?

I getting some of that as well. Mostly that the font colour of the text is changing and making it hard to read.

Not sure what the deal is though.

Dende's Shenron is created using the old Shenron's base, so there being continuity between the two versions is not that huge a leap.

Edited by Moth13 on Sep 20th 2018 at 6:51:43 AM

I've been getting random font color changes here and there.

I see this two ways:

• Most didn't watch Dragonball so undermining Kami's intent is irrelevant to them
• Being a really cool idea at the cost of being consistent with the earlier parts of the series doesn't invalidate how cool or acceptable the idea is to most people

EDIT: F-ck. Now I'm going off-topic.

Edited by Soble on Sep 20th 2018 at 4:09:15 AM

My glitch has to deal with the top bar,namely it not being in wide load...

and now its back to normal after I posted.

Going back on topic. How will Abridged!King Kai deal with the fact that Goku killed him and is now using him as supernatural cell phone?

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Sep 20th 2018 at 4:27:29 AM

It totally does. The shadow dragons concept is horrifically flawed, making it superficially cool at best and it just gets worse the more you look at it.

@Moth There's still the problem of trying to line up the dragons with wishes even though more than seven wishes were made, so they just ignore a whole bunch of them.

The Shadow Dragons as a concept also fail at basic logic. The idea behind it is that the Dragon Balls require a cooldown period between uses to dissipate all the negative energy that granting wishes stores up. Because Goku and his friends have used them so much over the years, they haven't been able to properly dissipate that negative energy.

Here's the thing.

The Dragon Balls already have a f*cking cooldown period. For one year after granting a wish, they enter a dormant state and turn into featureless spherical rocks.

If they needed a longer cooldown than just the one year, why wouldn't they stay dormant for that period of time? If they aren't going to be dormant for the required length of time to cool down, why even enter a dormant state in the first place?

If the Dragon Balls never had a cooldown period and you could literally just snatch them back up and have another wish granted five minutes after your last summoning, maybe the idea that they were being deprived of a proper cooldown period would make sense. But as it is, premising the concept on the idea of the Dragon Balls basically overheating makes no logical sense.

There's even already a precedent for the cooldown period being variable. In the Buu arc, Shenron only goes dormant for six months because they didn't use all of their wishes. There is zero logic in needing a cooldown on top of the already existing cooldown.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 20th 2018 at 7:10:18 AM

The cool down period length between use and negative energy being stored doesn't matter.

The Dragon Radar is what matters.

The Shadow Dragon arc also introduces a lot of weird bullshit with Positive and Negative energy. For some reason, making good and selfless wishes on the Dragon Balls builds up Negative energy within them, while evil and selfish wishes build up Positive energy, which is why Nouva Shenron is good, despite coming from an evil wish.

Except that Positive and Negative energy cancel each other out, so why would an evil wish still count as part of the built-up energy, and not just cancel out some of the Negative energy, giving the Dragon Balls more time?

Also, why would good wishes create evil energy, and bad wishes create good energy in the first place, aside from just having an excuse to have evil villains out of good wishes? They say that the Dragon Balls are being abused, but people are only making good wishes on it, so the good guys are being punished for being good! Turns out, you were supposed to be making evil and selfish wishes on the Dragon Balls, because that apparently makes good heroic Shadow Dragons!

The whole logic in that arc is so ass-backward, and for an arc supposedly centered around karma, the moral of the story seems to be the EXACT opposite of karma! Wish for good things and be a good person, fuck you, the Dragon Balls are now evil! Wish for bad stuff and be an evil person, suddenly the Shadow Dragons are goddamn good guys now!

The Shadow Dragons are one of those things that sound good in concept, but falls apart when you look closely at most of the things actually involved.

As such, actually executing the concept well would probably be pretty difficult, if not impossible, if for nothing else besides what Pushover said about punishing the good guys for actually doing good things, for some supposed lesson about responsibility.

You could probably find a way to make any other quibbles work, but that part just sort of ruins the whole thing.

Edited by LSBK on Sep 20th 2018 at 8:24:20 AM

I like the concept because having the Dragon Balls turned against the heroes for whatever reason & then having them taken away forever is pretty much the perfect way to end Dragon Ball.

This franchise is called "Dragon Ball" so it can't go on without its balls after all.

Edited by slimcoder on Sep 20th 2018 at 6:37:53 AM

Honestly if you wanted evil dragon balls, just have someone wish the dragon balls were evil. It's not hard.

That.

Ignoring the actual plot details and fiddly little bits of continuity and all that other bullshit, the Shadow Dragons are basically the best villains aesthetically and thematically.

Much more important.

Edited by unnoun on Sep 20th 2018 at 9:29:53 AM

It's freaking magic concentrated into a dragon that was born from a clay statue that was tethered to the lifespan/well-being of an alien overseer who split himself into good and evil halves so that the former could train to become the planet's next guardian, while the latter terrorized said planet for years unabated.

Kami devotes himself to guarding a planet, and has enough power to create a magical wish-granting dragon that can restore a planet and all of its inhabitants to life, but decides to not make the first part easier and just use that magical wish-granting dragon energy to better the average quality of life, instead focusing it into a single entity that people have to find and can only use once per year.

No part of Kami's job, or his plan for the balls, or the magic that constitutes their existence makes any sense, so why would an extension of that concept created for a spin-off series make any?

I repeat: marketable concept that sells toys and is accepted by the fanbase at large as being cool and visually/thematically appealing > internal consistency that only the hardest of fans take the time to nitpick about. Super is proof of that.

That wish would probably be beyond the power of the creator.

There's one easy way the shadow dragons would work: by being explicitly wrong. They're an unexpected design flaw, and when they start going on about justice the heroes just say 'Yeah no, you're full of shit' and fight them.

But then they don't represent the idea that many fans want them to.

@Unnoun It's not just the continuity. Thematically the shadow dragons premise is awful.

If there is one theme that the series actually stuck to, it's that the balls are a positive influence that bring hope. The shadow dragons are at complete odds with this theme.

We even have God talked out of his depressive 'I shouldn't have made the dragon balls' mindset.

Edited by Saiga on Sep 20th 2018 at 11:37:32 PM

I mean, a lot of these complaints about how they suck thematically too, though.

And I'd also say that "fiddly little bits of continuity and detail" lining up do make thematic events feel so much better; I hate this false dichotomy that they're somehow intrinsically opposed or not both important.

But I suppose that's just personal preference.

Edited by LSBK on Sep 20th 2018 at 8:35:29 AM