The Patreon Letter - 7th April, 2018 (Patreon)

This past week I found myself with a bit of extra time on my hands, and I decided it was time to actually watch some anime. Anyone who listens to The Great Gundam Project knows that we always open with an anime segment that started as a joke because neither me or Jackson watch anime regularly enough to have something to talk about each week. 

But I do try! I burnt out 2/3 of the way into Samurai Champloo, but I'm paying for this stupid VRV subscription so I figured I might as well watch something so I can talk about a show, even if it's to talk about how hard it is for me to enjoy anime. 

Which is how I found myself, over the course of the past week, watching the entire first arc of Dragon Ball Super. 

I have what is probably a pretty typical relationship with Dragon Ball for someone my age in the US. DBZ was one of my gateway anime experiences, and I'd run home from school as a kid to watch the DBZ/Sailor Moon block on Cartoon Network. I stuck with it through the endless repetitions of the start through to mid-way through the Frieza arc, waiting patiently for the day where new episodes would finally drop. By the time they did, I had gone from a kid wowed by this show to a teen with the internet who knew that somewhere down the road there was a whole other show after DBZ and Goku turned into a red ape-man and it was weird. 

I stuck with the show through most of its run. Watching it on TV meant sometimes you'd miss an episode or two, but a show like DBZ didn't really require you to see everything because it was, frankly, exhausting. There's jokes about Goku powering up for multiple episodes for a reason. In its original run, DBZ was both an incredible thing to witness as a kid and a quick lesson that anime could be an endless slog to stretch for time and fill episodes with nothing happening. In many ways, I feel like it forever skewed my opinion of anime.

Anyway, DBZ eventually aired in full in America, and I moved on. I tried to watch Dragon Ball once back in the day, but found its comedy offputting compared to the cool fights I remembered. Also it had a bunch of clumsy censorship fingerprints all over it. They literally badly pasted a leaf over naked Goku in episode 1. I was a teenager, and this Unpure Anime wouldn't stand. I never went in deeper. Teenagers are stupid.

I've had a decade and a half since then to get over myself, and kind of get over anime. I've read about half of Dragon Ball, and find it delightfully light cartoon fun. I've burnt out on a lot of anime. So when I loaded up VRV and saw Dragon Ball Super I thought to myself 'worst that could happen is I'll have a story for the podcast.' 

Instead, I'm here to tell you the Good News about Dragon Ball Super. 

You all probably know, because the show was incredibly well regarded online since it first started. But I cannot stress enough how much I was surprised to see all my old fight friends again, and how emotional it would make me to pick right back up from where they left off, happy and ridiculous and just getting through their lives. One of the things that has changed a lot between me as a teen and me in my thirties is I love nothing more than when nothing happens well, and Dragon Ball Super opens with multiple episodes of everyone just hanging out living their most extra lives without a care in the world. 

I didn't think I cared, but instead I care Way Too Much about seeing Goku plowing a field and Vegeta taking his family on vacation. Gohan gives Piccolo the wedding pictures he took with him and Videl! PICCOLO IS HIS REAL DAD AND HE LOVES HIM SO MUCH

Dragon Ball Super straddles a fine line, so far, between original Dragon Ball and DBZ by being a show about a bunch of fighters who could literally crack the planet in two but when they aren't doing that they're mostly just being bossed around by Bulma and eating mountains of food. And this is perhaps the perfect thing for a Dragon Ball show to aspire to be, blending the two series into something that can appeal to fans of both and manage to still feel fresh after 30 years of Goku's ridiculous kamehamehijinks. 

For me, it is a realization that I have been watching anime with a fatalism that I was mostly unaware of. I talk a lot about how anime culture really frustrates me, how I'm tired of shows about how hot teen girls are whether they're loli or magically eternal, how I'm exhausted by another show about the special boy who is bad at the very thing he aspires to most in life except maybe he's actually secretly really good at that one thing. Watching anime is like navigating a mine field of problematic horny and weird nationalism in 2018, waiting around for a show to tip its hand with some assault played as boys being boys or saying something really gross about other countries for a visual gag.

Perhaps it is my familiarity with the series, but Dragon Ball Super never really rings these alarms for me. Something about Toriyama's character designs reads as explicitly non-leering to me, especially since we're a long way from Bulma in a bunny costume (though even then that reads, to me, as cute more than horny in the way we perceive it in 2018). The show itself is non-threatening and upbeat. Sure the universe might be in peril, but almost the entire cast has died and been resurrected at this point. You know Goku will prevail, and everyone dead will either be brought back to life or just hang around dead. Death means very little to the world of Dragon Ball. 

Even the villains, such as they are, can only be so threatening. Watching Dragon Ball Super you realize how many of the characters who hang around used to be antagonists in some way or another. Yamcha, Tien, Piccolo, Vegeta, Android 18, Buu... even Pilaf is running around mostly being cute these days. If there's any capacity for someone to be turned good Dragon Ball will absolutely do it, putting all your favs together into one big dysfunctional family. I'll watch Mr Satan try to keep Buu happy all day, it's so nice to see the evil taffy man just being everyone's chill friend now that all the fighting is done. 

Even in the first arc, Beerus only seems to want to destroy the earth because it's expected of him. He'll get around to it, and he mostly wants to do it, but he's easily convinced to put it off and then to outright drop it. Whis isn't even here to destroy, and spends the entire first arc being explained what sushi is and deciding that it's delicious enough that the earth should probably stick around. Same, Whis. Biggest mood. It me. 

Either way, I don't need a crystal ball to know that they're going to come back and be chill with Goku & friends, even if Beerus will probably joke now and again about how he could destroy the earth and will get around to it some day. It doesn't matter. The inevitability of Dragon Ball Super is warmth and friendship and the building of family by comedy or love, and that's honestly something I didn't realize I needed so much of in my life right now?

It's really easy to get exhausted and cynical, to want to give up on myself and on the world at large, and Dragon Ball Super is a nice place to go where even an idiot like Goku knows that if you try hard enough and believe in yourself and your friends enough, everything will turn out all right in the end. Even if that's only true for him, and not for us, it's a mindset worth cultivating. I want to look at the destroyer of the planet and laugh about how exciting it is to have a challenge, knowing we have the capability to thwart that doom. I want to hang out with my friends and eat food and be our best selves. 

I'll watch more Dragon Ball Super soon, I'm sure, but even this first arc reminded me that the right show at the right time can mean a lot to me even if it's not saying a whole lot and is just an earnest, goofy good time. It reminded me that not every anime exists to sell booby lady figures, and that I can just sit down with a shonen show and enjoy it like I'm 13 again and don't have two decades of cynicism built up in me just waiting to be disappointed by the first shitty thing the show does. It's nice to be excited and delighted by something, even if it's trivial. Maybe especially if it's trivial. 

Until next time,

Em