[Insert "It's over 9000" joke here]

[fitia]

Been feeling bored and uninspired re: media lately, so today I decided that my mental stimulation should come from revisiting Dragon Ball Z, a childhood favourite. I haven't actually read the manga in its entirety (I read the original Dragon Ball series two years ago, though, and had fun with it!), and since I've basically watched several different versions of the anime already, I thought, why not go straight to the original source!

Just breezed through the first 49 chapters and finished the entirety of the Saiyan Arc! This manga is incredibly fast-paced, which is definitely at odds with my memories of sitting through hours and hours of powering up and obviously re-used shots in concession to the budget (Freeza's infamous multi-episode-long "5 minutes"...) It does make the fights more engaging and the overall reading experience more pleasant, but at the expense of genuine gravity to the events depicted, as well as emotional resonance.

Some examples of this that come to mind are:

• Piccolo's redemption arc and his growing affection for Gohan felt like a checklist of moments in sequence needed to pull it off rather than a believably sentimental progression. I feel like letting some moments linger (like when Gohan tells him that he thinks he isn't that bad, or, hell, Piccolo's sacrifice itself) might've helped! Give them time to breathe! The story's always in a sprint towards the next interesting or exciting thing, and it really kills its affective power.
• Bulma learning about Yamcha's possibly permanent death was... honestly framed in a more comedic than serious way. I skimmed through anime episodes to check if I hadn't misremembered it treating it with a lot more gravity, and I definitely didn't! If you saw the manga panels of her reaction out of context you'd be forgiven for thinking she was whining like a spoiled child over something insignificant, lol.

Though I do think this is largely due to Toriyama having been more at home when it comes to humour, rather than actual emotional depth in his characters. The closest he got in the original Dragon Ball, as far as I remember, was with Tenshinhan's story, and while he had a moving arc I found it pretty simple on the whole: rival character realizes the heroes' side is more virtuous than the side he learned from, and makes a switch. It might've been more interesting than what it was if DB had a more complex and reasoned idea of "good" and "evil".


Other thing I was thinking throughout this arc is that Vegeta really is a funny character, for how inconsistent he is as a consequence of Dragon Ball as a whole being inconsistent, the world and its logic shifting constantly to fit the needs of the plot. You can tell the guy's written to be the final big bad in this arc, seeing as that he's constantly harping on about being the strongest in the universe even though this is disproved in the very next arc in a way that he should definitely know, and decades later we get told that he's also met the god of the universe in person. But if we can ignore that little detail, it's a fun game to try and piece together all these inconsistencies in a way that makes sense: for example, I'm trying to figure out what Vegeta's personal relationship to the Saiyan race even is, seeing as that:

• he's constantly calling Goku a traitor to their kind, and believes it justifies torturing and killing him over
• he also doesn't have any real regard for the actual saiyans still left alive, since he didn't revive Raditz, killed Nappa, and obviously thought Goku and Gohan were less than dirt (though what's interesting is that Raditz expected Vegeta and Nappa to revive him, and Nappa was shocked that Vegeta would kill him, which shows that he's particularly ruthless in a way that they're not*)
• he apparently doesn't care that Freeza blew up his entire planet, because I don't remember him having much of a reaction when Dodoria told him
• he cried while insisting that Goku beat Freeza in order to avenge their race, and seems to hold a lot of pride in the legend of the Super Saiyan

Like seriously, what's going on with this guy. He makes no sense. But I'm sure I can figure out a way to make him make sense somehow.

(He also happens to have been one the first characters I could consider a blorbo, so it was kind of natural that I'd gravitate towards him again, lol)

Anyways! I've been having fun, I missed this cast a lot. I'm honestly having a lot more fun than when I read Dragon Ball a while back, because while DBZ is much more of a sausage fest, it also means that there's a lot less of the uncomfortable sexual harassment jokes from the early series. Not that misogyny is absent, like... battle shounen, y'know? But it's more tolerable.



* or maybe not: Raditz was also 100% willing to kill Goku, after all