I can only assume that the hot girlfriend(s if you wanna count the Garlic Jr. Filler arc) are kind of the universe's way of balancing out the karma that makes Krillin the ineffective chew toy for a good deal of the series. Although it is true enough that after Super Saiyans are introduced that the title of ineffective chew toy pretty much gets spread to everyone else forever.
That problem stretches much further back then the Super Saiyans - just look at how poorly everybody not called Goku did against Nappa. Hell, from day one they were hardly effective - Yajirobe, Chaozu, Yamcha and Tenshinhan only do anything notable in their first appearances and that doesn't last long. I'd even say Krillin has it best out of the humans, despite having by far the worst first appearance.
It's not really a problem of Dragonball alone - it's one of the staples of Shounen. The ranking is:
- Villain Of the current arc.
- Hero
- Rival
Everybody else is mostly there to show us how strong this new villain is compared to the last. Kind of a shame, since it makes the majority of the the characters in any given story pretty useless and a lot of fights predictable.
edited 3rd Jul '12 3:09:51 AM by eX
Heck, it's not limited to Shonen either. But I think Dragon Ball had it particularly bad when they had even the lowest mook villains ranking higher than the humans.
edited 3rd Jul '12 3:21:34 AM by Saiga
Nor am I disinterested in Inu Yasha, but Naraku is getting kind of boring.
This reminds me, I really need to see if my library catalogue has the volumes I haven't read.
Ah, the boring invincible villains. Spoiler for Shaman King: the series ends with Hao stronger and better than the next 6 characters combined.
FIRE! BECOME AS WATER!
edited 3rd Jul '12 8:04:12 AM by wanderlustwarrior
Overall Krillin did well. He got a Hot wife, magical hair and when he defeated that random guy in the tournament Goku said that he was the strongest man on earth without a hint of sarcasm. Which is technically true, him being really the only human character that actually stood against Freeza and that stuff.
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He stopped second form Cell from absorbing 18 for a good while with the Kikoro (spelling?). Of course, he died. And Cell still absorbed her.
I have no idea if we can talk about DBZ with spoilers off so... better safe than sorry, I guess.
edited 3rd Jul '12 10:48:03 PM by DarkConfidant

I hope 18 and Krillin are happy together. Krillin always getting punked, even/especially in ways that didn't happen in the original series, would get bothersome for me.