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identity-is-just-a-myth · 15 hours ago

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Dragon Ball Z/Super: Comparing and contrasting Goku and Zamasu— two sides of the same coin? (Long post full of yapping!)

The Goku Black arc consistently portrays Black/Zamasu to be ideological parallels to Trunks for obvious reasons (Hope vs Despair, Selfishness vs Selflessness, he's the protagonist of this arc, etc.), but I think it's an interesting exercise to compare Zamasu's journey to Goku's. In my opinion, it really hammers in why Zamasu failed to reach enlightenment and fell from grace besides "mortals = stupid and barbaric" and plain old narcissism.

Everyone knows Goku's story by now, but I want to hone in on the part that I believe Zamasu's own parallels.

The beginning of Z features Goku gradually being introduced to entirely new realms of power and scale. He has to team up with the guy he worked his ass off to defeat 5 years ago just to barely defeat Raditz, a mid class Saiyan, sacrificing his own life in the process.

He is informed constantly by Vegeta that he is nothing but low-class scum, born at the bottom of the interplanetary Saiyan "totem pole", compared to Vegeta's own super-elite-royalty-goodness.

Then, by Namek, he manages to surpass Vegeta, and even trounces the emperor of the universe who subjugated the entire Saiyan race. After Namek, Goku grows so much that the conceptions of "class" that he was blindsided by quickly become faint memories, only brief blips in his life's work to always get stronger.

Not to be the strongest, or even to become "the strongest Saiyan who ever lived", simply to get stronger. Goku's goal is forever ongoing; he will never feel as if his duty is complete. If it ever was, he'd be restless and unsatisfied.

The key thread throughout the Saiyan and Frieza Sagas is that Goku never uses the labels ascribed to him or his opponents as anything more than momentary benchmarks in service of his overarching, everlasting goal to achieve more and more strength. He does not hear Vegeta's boasts about his status and go "okay, guess I'll be good enough once I can beat Vegeta in a 1 on 1, since I'll basically be a super elite!". He hears King Kai's fervent warnings about Frieza's terrible strength and gets curious rather than demotivated.

He doesn't use either of these as an excuse to run away or quit training.

In fact, Goku never uses anything as an excuse. He is not married to any sort of arbitrary benchmark of strength (that honor goes to Chi Chi), even in Super as he gains power that rivals Gods of Destruction.

To treat a level of strength, or a class (God of Destruction, Angel, Super Elite, Emperor of the Universe) as a stopping point for Goku or some sort of ultimate goal would imply that Goku's desire for strength has a defined end. But it doesn't, and so Goku doesn't put much stock into those things. He never loses sight of his goal, and he literally doesn't even stop training when he's dead.

As for Zamasu, the beginning of his journey is why I thought to juxtapose him with Goku in the first place. He shares a surprising similarity with early Z Goku, in that both were able to achieve greater statuses than their birth would afford them.

Zamasu started off as a normal Kai, the guardian of a universal quadrant (the North, same as King Kai). In terms of Dragon Ball's divine hierarchy, this is actually quite the low standing. It is the second lowest known class of Gods, only ranking above planetary deities like Kami and Dende. If a Core Person (Kai race) is born from a rare, special golden fruit, only then will they be qualified enough to train to be a Supreme Kai.

Zamasu is the only known canon example of a normal Kai being selected to become a Supreme Kai, and so his exceptional ascension up the divine hierarchy is a natural parallel to Goku's own defiance of his low-class nature and his comparatively low power level at birth.

Unlike Goku, however, Zamasu is absolutely obsessed with and bound by certain labels, which ultimately leads to his ideological downfall.

Firstly, we can see his fixation on the idea of godhood when he speaks to Gowasu.

When Gowasu simply tells him to temper himself and observe mortals, he immediately begins focusing on and belittling the gods' philosophy, almost outright saying "what the gods think does NOT align with justice". The way he phrases these sentences in both the dub and sub is key: he says "I thought you'd teach me justice, but...", which creates a juxtaposition between "divinity" and "REAL justice".

He even begins to doubt that a god could be considered a god if they did not align with his definition of justice.

Zamasu is young and inexperienced for a Kai (especially considering regular Kais have far shorter biological lifespans than Supreme Kais), so the reactions he displays in this scene suggest that he had a very romanticized, linear view of both godhood and justice. When Gowasu's statement suggests to Zamasu that he can't reconcile the two, it basically calls out all that Zamasu currently stands for, and he doesn't take it well.

Gowasu ends the discussion by challenging Zamasu's narrowminded belief that gods are "absolute" and perfect, but by then the two are already unable to get through to one another.

If you look at the other gods in Dragon Ball, you'll see what Gowasu means here. For example, Beerus is lazy, temperamental, and childish; none of the other gods really like him. Elder Kai is a lecher. Champa is rather undignified and just as temperamental as Beerus.

Where Goku seeks strength, Zamasu seeks virtue. Yet, unlike Goku, Zamasu has an arbitrary benchmark at where his objective stops: the abstract concept of "godhood".

When Zamasu reaches that endpoint and finds that it's not all it's cracked up to be, he constantly contorts his definition of divinity to match it— or rather, to match himself— rather than accepting that being a god is not equivalent to having a "perfect" sense of justice, or being "perfect" in general. He commits barbaric, brutal, bloodthirsty, and wanton acts, all in the name of "divine justice", despite those things being less becoming of gods and more becoming of mortals.

The dilemma extends to the very end of the arc, where in the dub Corrupted Merged Zamasu says to Vegetto: "If one can't control a world, one can't be called a god of it", instantly justifying his hypocrisy, his sadism, his violence, and his arrogance instead of looking inward and asking himself what it meant to be a god.

Like Gowasu said, Zamasu was "obsessed with the contradictions of gods and mortals", and as Trunks said, "it isn't about gods or mortals". Zamasu was so enamored with the idea and label of godhood, yet did not question whether or not his values, the values of his future counterpart, or the values of the other gods aligned with it. And how could he have questioned it if he didn't truly know what godhood meant himself— if he just used the idea as a synonym for what he believed?

Where Goku saw arbitrary labels as inconsequential to his overarching quest, Zamasu saw his life be entirely dictated by them. Zamasu allowed himself to be entrenched in the god-mortal dichotomy, whereas Goku's nature would never allow him to lose his big-picture goal like that.

When Goku's reality is challenged, whether by the introduction of some groundless measure of value (power level, Saiyan class) or by a vastly stronger opponent, he doesn't flinch. He doesn't stop. He doesn't make excuses. His overall goal doesn't change.

When Zamasu's reality was challenged, he broke and became everything he hated. He bent and twisted the rules of what he considered "just", and shattered the natural divine order by doing away with all Gods of Destruction. His goal, by then, was unrecognizable compared to his previous goal to be a benevolent Supreme Kai.

Where Goku's triumphs led him to continue being diligent and humble, Zamasu's own led him to be stagnant and arrogant. Even though Zamasu was proactive and cunning, he was stagnant in the sense that none of what he did made him more moral or virtuous, or gave him a greater understanding of the universe, even though those were the things he originally sought when studying under Gowasu.

All he did was further embed himself (literally, with Future Zamasu) within his own radical beliefs; he never progressed towards his original goal because he replaced it with "I am THE God, no more gods are needed, I will exterminate all mortals personally". His arrogance and inability to see gods as flawed beings made him lose the plot.

Goku continued working hard and getting stronger after vanquishing Frieza, whereas Zamasu's entitlement made him become a complete shell of himself.

Goku saw his growth from low-class warrior to Legendary Super Saiyan to be a testament to everything he stood for; the desire to protect and avenge his friends, his inherited Saiyan pride from Vegeta, and most importantly, his neverending journey to get stronger. Zamasu saw his ascension from North Kai to Supreme Kai as an excuse. A stopping point. An "okay, I've reached the pinnacle of the virtue I seek", refusing to accept that there was more beyond the arbitrary value and moral standing he placed on the role of a god, refusing to think mortals could ever possibly learn, and refusing to think gods could ever need to learn.

Zamasu is a dark reflection of Goku— Son Goku is everything that Zamasu is not. Zamasu is the opposite of many reasons that Goku is such a distinct and unique character, and that makes both of them all the more compelling.

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identity-is-just-a-myth · 18 hours ago

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What if they actually merged and were lowkey annoying (in a cute way✨️)

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identity-is-just-a-myth · 18 hours ago

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i havent watched dragon ball in years but the mohawk alien elves are my favorite kind of guy. especially with little pearl earrings. i want to collect them all in a little harem.