Wednesday, March 28, 2018

After-Thoughts Rant: Dragon Ball and the Absence of Feats

Okay, so this is going to be a bit more of a passionate topic than I normally do but a lot of people tend to hold up Dragon Ball and specifically Z as a great place to get feats for things like a Death Battle or a versus match. However, Dragon Ball is very much a featless series.

This actually perplexes me quite a bit. There are series like Bleach which are described as featless due to being mostly statements and while I do see the rationale behind that what I don't understand is how people say that and then go on to say that Dragon Ball has a great number of feats in the same breath. In reality, the vast majority of the feats we see are essentially the same but are described by the characters as stronger than previous feats. Let me give you some examples.

Back in Dragon Ball Goku fought against Tien and was able to nullify the Solar Flare with Roshi's glasses. This action led a large number of the power scaling community to say Goku is faster than light. However, later in the same series Goku is taught by Kami and Popo to be able to dodge lightning. If you don't know, which I'm going to assume you don't because many people tend to fall for the misconception, lightning is nowhere near the speed of light. If you look at the actual rate that lightning travels, it ranges around 30-70 miles per second. Light, by comparison, travels at 186,282 miles per second, which puts lightning at less than 1% the speed of light. If Goku was capable of dodging light, even if he could only do so once, that sheer speed difference would mean that he'd be consistently capable of dodging lightning, and here we see the opposite.

In the Namek Arc, when Frieza transforms into his second stage, he destroys the land that he, Gohan, Krillin, and Vegeta were standing on. That show of power was so great that it scared the latter three into almost crapping their pants. However, Nappa does the exact same thing in the Saiyan Arc. In fact, Nappa's display may be even more significant because he incinerates an entire city, which not only covered more land area than what Frieza destroyed but also incinerated the buildings above, which would give an additional layer of volume.

In the Buu Arc, Kid Buu summons his super vanishing ball which intimidates the hell out of Goku and Vegeta for being large and powerful enough to destroy 10 total earths. It scared them so much that they had to abandon ship using Instant Teleportation. However, if the rest of the series leading up to that point is to be believed, that feat could've easily been matched by Cell, who was stated to be able to destroy a Solar System, and Frieza who destroyed Planet Vegeta, a planet comparable to Earth in his first form, which is roughly .4 percent of his overall power, completely covering the ten times gap by the time max is achieved.

Dragon Ball characters, when relaying power output, rely far more on statements than one might initially realize. Characters in Dragon Ball and especially Z, GT, and Super, have a tendency toward hyperbole, where what they say a feat amounts to doesn't logically match up with what's actually happening.

Going back to Cell and his Solar Kamehameha example, Cell says the attack can destroy a Solar System but what ends up happening doesn't line up with that. You see, when a force gets large enough, it gets to the point where it can destroy things at close proximity that aren't in its direct path. You see this a lot with explosions, like grenades or rockets, where the explosion will kill anything that it comes point blank with but it will also kill or severely damage anything within a certain distance of it.

Using this and the sheer amount of mass within the solar system which is  1.9 million yottagrams, and for an explosion, the average ground zero covers about 1/96th of the total blast radius. Meaning that a blast strong enough to destroy the entire solar system would destroy 331 times the total of the Earth's mass just at ground zero. If Cell was really strong enough to do that his Kamehameha clash with Gohan by itself would've destroyed the planet, no qualifiers necessary.

A similar issue happens later in Z with Vegito's fight against Super Buuhan and later again during Goku's battle with Beerus toward the beginning of Super. Specifically Buuhan ends up releasing enough energy that Vegito describes would destroy the entire universe, and granted that's not entirely it, he was referring more to Buu opening up a dimensional rift that would destroy the universe but the point stands, Vegito had no reason to assume that's what was going to happen and he'd have no way of knowing anyway since he has no experience with Universes actually being destroyed. Meanwhile in Super, Goku and Beerus clash with enough force that is stated to almost destroy the universe but again the same issue with proximity occurs. They were in Earth's Orbit so it wasn't exactly as close as Cell's Solar Beam, but the universe is WAAAY larger than a solar system so even without any extra calculations it's safe to say that Earth would have been destroyed during the clash if that were the case.

A lot of people have it in their heads that Goku is now strong enough to destroy multiple universes because of the battle against Beerus combined with Super Saiyan Blue, Kaioken, and Ultra Instinct. However, this is a completely asinine way of thinking. If Goku were strong enough to do that then him just fighting, like against Frieza, or Hit, or Jiren would destroy everything around them. Nothing would survive or remain intact, durability isn't even a factor at that level.

People tend to believe that Dragon Ball characters are super strong because of what the characters in the actual show say rather than what they do. Compare this to Fist of the North Star, where Kenshiro cuts a skyscraper with his hand at the base, it falls on top of him, and he just walks through it as it's falling on him without even reacting to it. This is a feat because Kenshiro actually does this. In One Piece, Luffy in his 4th Gear is capable of moving in the air by hitting the air so hard that Newton's 3rd Law of Motion keeps him airborne. That is a feat because he actually does it. Goku, however, is said to be strong enough to destroy Universes, but we don't actually see him do it nor do we even see any evidence that he could and was simply choosing not to. If he had come as close as the series would like you to believe, so many parts of the Dragon Ball universe would need to be returned to normal by the dragon balls because of how far reaching that kind of feat is.

Of course the rebuttal is that we see them do these things in some media or another. The problem with this line of thinking, though, is that a lot of the instances where this might happen are non-canon and thus take place in spaces where the main canon may contradict it. Cell may destroy the Solar System in one of the video games but the actual canon contradicts this source. Beerus and Whis may survive the destruction of a universe in Xenoverse but again there's nothing in the canon that backs up this display.

Just because a non-canon source shows something happening doesn't mean it equates to actual canon ability. Also, as an aside, if someone tells you that a non-canon source is accepted as canon by Akira Toriyama, request to see their source because 99% of the time when people say that, they only do so because they know you won't question it.

Now credit where credit is due, Dragon Ball isn't the only series that has this problem. In YuYu Hakusho, S Class Demons are accepted within the community as being planet busters despite nothing in the series supporting that claim, not even statements. Koenma never says that S Class Demons can destroy the earth, just that one making it to Earth would result in utter chaos.

Many believe Saitama from One Punch Man has unlimited physical power despite sources saying that he struggled against Boros, who clearly does not have unlimited power. If he struggled against Boros, that says that Saitama doesn't have unlimited power, or that he doesn't have unlimited access to that power.

Even without statements people who watch the series will sometimes be prone to massive high-balls and occasionally complete falsification. However, there are two major differences between most other series and Dragon Ball. The first major difference is that other series are not propagating the lies themselves. Often times, when someone says Ichigo from Bleach is universal, or that S Rank demons in YuYu Hakusho are planetary, often times they do this because they misinterpret what's being presented to them, either they think something was said that wasn't or they misunderstand the nature and magnitude of what's being presented to them. Dragon Ball, however, propagates the high balls themselves by using the characters in the series to lie about what's actually happening.

The other major difference is that other series are not completely reliant on power scaling. When you get a series like YuYu Hakusho, Hunter X Hunter, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, or One Piece, those series do have powerful feats but they back them up with unique applications so that "Just hitting them harder" isn't the catch all solution to pretty much every fight. We do have characters that are stronger than others, sometimes by absurd degrees. Meruem in Hunter X Hunter is more powerful than any other fighter we've seen in the series thus far, though we will have to see what Ging is capable of. Golden Experience Requiem has unlimited stat values. And logia devil fruits users are almost completely impervious to damage, or were for a while.

However, generally, if you didn't have enough strength to overcome your opponent, these series allowed you to be clever in your method of dealing with them so you didn't have to be super powerful. In Dragon Ball, characters get so much stronger than each other, that if you're not strong enough to damage your opponent right out of the gate, you're screwed. Because in Dragon Ball, for some stupid reason, strength, speed, durability, and stamina are all rolled up in to the catch all stat known as Battle Power, or Power Levels.

The only thing differentiating everybody's ability to win is their number. No unique abilities, no outstanding feats, characters win because their number is bigger than the other one's. That's my rant, have a nice one.

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