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duhragonball · 2 years ago

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Dragon Ball Super 066

“Sorry, folks, not even I can save this story.”

Last time, Goku tried to hit Zamasu with a Kamehameha, and he couldn’t win the beam struggle, and that made Goku mad! I mean really really mad! So he tried harder and it ended up going through Zamasu’s Holy Wrath Bomb or whatever it’s called.

And Zamasu survives the blast, but half his body turns into purple glop. Goku capitalizes by kicking him in the purple part. See, that’s smart. Hurt the guy and then work the injured body part.

Unfortunately, Goku’s arms have gone limp, I guess from the effort he put into the Kamehameha? So he’s gotta do this with just his feet now.

Then Zamasu twists his ankle, and that seems pretty bad. I mean, Goku still has one foot left, but what good could that do him--?

Oh. Well then.

I totally forgot that Goku used the Kaio-ken in this arc. I was beginning to wonder why he never used it, but now that he’s using it here, it seems more appropriate that he held off until now. The last time he tried stacking Kaio-ken on Super Saiyan Blue, it fucked him up pretty badly, so I can understand why he’d be reluctant to try again. But now, he’s down to one foot, and Zamasu is finally showing signs of vulnerability. Goku smells blood in the water, and he’s much more willing to take the risk now that he’s got an opening.

And this seems to fuck up Zamasu pretty badly. It doesn’t take the fight out of him, but he convulses and his body distorts, and then he screams for Divine Lighting to strike him, so I think he’s attacking his own body now.

This gives the good guys time to regroup, and Gowasu suggests that the fusion might have worked against Zamasu’s immortality. Remember, only one of the two Zamasu’s had an indestructible body, so when they combined together, that introduced a destructible, mortal body into the equation. I hadn’t considered it before, but this may be why Goku Black recruited another Zamasu to his cause in the first place. His plan depended on switching bodies with Goku, but while that made him more powerful, it also left him trapped in a body with a much shorter lifespan. Maybe fusing with the other Zamasu was always part of the plan, since their combined body would have the normal Kai longevity, like how the Elder Kai was after he fused with that old witch.

So Zamasu is still indestructible, but he isn’t recovering from injuries as quickly or as perfectly as he was before. And this might explain the last few offensive moves used against him. Trunks and Vegeta did that Father-Son Gallick Gun on him, and it seemed to have no effect, but then Goku followed through with a Kamehameha. So I think the Gallick Gun kind of softened him up for Goku’s attack, and then that softened him up even further for the Kaio-ken attack, and now the dam has burst. Zamasu is far from beaten, but his body is beginning to deterioriate from all this punishment he’s taking. If he was all-immortal, this would be no problem at all, and if he were all-mortal then he might be dead by now, but if he were all-mortal, then he would have been smart enough to avoid these hits instead of taking them head-on.

Wait, I just realized, this is why the dub keeps calling it an “invincible body” instead of an “immortal body”. Zamasu keeps railing against “mortals”, meaning non-deities. His body is “immortal” in the sense that he can’t die. This could be sort of confusing, because the gods in Dragon Ball all seem to have finite lifespans, so they can die, which means they are mortal, but they’re not mortal in the other sense of the term. This wasn’t an issue in Japanese, since they have two words for this, but Funimation had to swap out “immortality” for something else, and they ran with “invincibility”. Fair play.

So Gowasu speculates that it might be possible to defeat Zamasu in this half-immortal state, but only if they hit him with a lot of power all at once. And by that, Gowasu means more power than they’ve been able to muster so far. So Goku proposes fusion. Vegeta hates that idea, but he can’t argue with the reasoning. I like this shot of Trunks handing him a Potara earring and a senzu bean. It’d be funny if he screwed up and swallowed the earring while trying to put the bean on his ear. “Rassum frassum... gulp! Oh, dammit.”

While Vegeta gets ready, Goku takes this moment to ask Gowasu why their previous Potara fusion in the Buu Saga wore off. Back then, the Elder Kai claimed that Potara fusion was permanent, and we have empirical evidence of this. The Elder Kai himself is a fusion of a Kai and an old witch, and they’ve been bound together for thousands of years, maybe longer. And Kibitoshin stayed fused for a long time as well, only coming unglued when they used the Namekian Dragon Balls.

But Gowasu explains that this is because those fusions involved at least one Kai. When anyone else does it, the Potara only maintain the fusion for one hour. That still doesn’t track with what we see in the Buu Saga, since Vegito didn’t seem to be around that long, but we’ll come back to that.

So Vegito’s back in the game and he goes Super Saiyan Blue right off the bat. He lays into Zamasu and for the most part it’s quite satisfying. It’s just nice to see any version of Zamasu getting pressured at all.

The animation is a step up from recent episodes, which earned this one a lot of praise, although I’ve never been too impressed about it. I mean, it’s good animation, I’m not disputing this. It’s just that I’m much more concerned with good storytelling, and it feels like this entire arc was written in order to produce this Vegito Blue vs. Fused Zamasu fight, and I don’t feel like it was worth it. The previous 18 episodes that set up this moment were pretty bad, and I’m not sure they actually set any of this up.

Like, okay, in the Buu Saga, Goku introduced the idea of fusion as a way to stop Majin Buu, but he couldn’t do it himself, so it ended up being Gotenks’ job to win. Then Gotenks lost, and Gohan was able to step in, and then that fell through, so now there’s no choice, Goku has to fuse with Vegeta, but there’s still a lot of bad blood between them from before. But there’s no other way, and they do it, and then Vegito wrecks Buu’s shit for four glorious episodes.

Here, it really just comes down to “Hey, the bad guys used Potara fusion, so we should do it too.” You don’t need a long story arc to set that up, because the Potara are common knowledge now. In the Buu Saga, they were a plot device, a clever twist to reveal that there was a way for Goku and Vegeta to fuse after all. Also, Vegeta’s not nearly as bitter about the idea as he was in the Buu Saga. He and Goku are friends now, even if he doesn’t want to admit it, and he’s practical enough to see fusion as a sensible play here. It also helps that Goku never brings it up unless there’s no other alternative.

That’s the problem with bringing back old ideas and techniques. They’re still popular, sure. I love me some fusion. But the novelty has worn off, and the spontaneity you had in the Buu Saga is gone now. Fans knew fusion was coming the moment they saw Goku Blake’s earring, and they knew Emperor Pilaf rambling about nothing in particular wasn’t going to make it happen any sooner. So most of these 18 episodes had nothing to do with setting up this one.

Also, while I’m a big Vegito fan, maybe it was a mistake to have Goku and Vegeta be the ones to use fusion here. At least if it had been Vegeta and Trunks this time, we would have gotten a fresh take on an old classic. And it might have played better with the theme of this arc, where Trunks couldn’t beat the bad guys on his own, but in the end he finds that he has to do it without his father’s help. Just throwing that out there.

Because that’s kind of how this episode plays out. Trunks helps evacuate the survivors to that garage Bulma brought with her, and then Mai gives him the broken sword from the last episode. The kids picked it up and they wanted Mai to make sure she returned it. And this convinces Trunks that he has to handle this himself. He can’t rely on Goku and Vegeta any longer.

So he channels his power into the sword and makes an energy blade with it, I guess, and then he flies off to rejoin the fight.

Meanwhile, Vegito seems to be doing just fine. He blows away Zamasu with a Final Kamehameha, which is probably the attack Gowasu had in mind when they started this part of the fight...

... But Zamasu is still breathing, so he goes to attack again, but the fusion dissolves before Vegito can follow through. It hasn’t been anywhere close to an hour, but Gowasu suggests that this may be due to the intense energy Vegito was putting out. Oh, also that Kaio-ken stunt Goku pulled might have worked against them here. Just a thought.

Then Trunks jumps in and starts hitting him with his new energy sword deal, and this seems to hurt Zamasu a lot. More than anything Vegito did to him, actually.

And as he fights, the survivors who cheer for Trunks begin to glow white.

Not just them, but the other survivors around the world, including people who may not have even met Trunks. Okay, now I can see those people in the back more clearly. I guess Android 8 is standing guard over their shelter.

And Trunks sees the ki coming from all over the world and powering him up. It’s all the people giving him their power, like Goku’s Spirit Bomb, but no one consciously tried to make this happen. Trunks just rolls with it, and his aura turns blue, and his sword blade gets huge. He manages to stab Zamasu...

... And starts cutting him in half! Dick-first! Brutal!

KONO DIO DA! KONO DIO DAAAAAAAA!

So yeah, this is stupid as hell. Vegito shot this dipshit with a Final Kamehameha, and nothing happened. Then Trunks improvises this attack with a broken sword and vanilla Super Saiyan, and that does the trick? What the hell is going on here?

The idea seems to be that Trunks is doing a Spirit Bomb style attack. That’s fine, except for a couple of things. First, Trunks never learned the Spirit Bomb. I mean, maybe it’s not that hard for him to accomplish at this level. I mean, he figured out the Mafuba pretty quickly, so how much harder could a Spirit Bomb be? The bigger gripe here is that he wasn’t even trying to do this. It just sort of worked out on its own. And maybe that’s how the Spirit Bomb has always worked. Maybe it’s actually really easy to do, as long as everyone who donates energy is already aware of your cause. Goku’s problem was that hardly anyone knows who he is or what he’s up to. But in this world, literally everyone is rooting for Trunks.

But that brings me to my second objection. How many people are left in this world to donate energy for this? I mean, Black killed most of the population, which probably still hadn’t recovered from the Androids and Cell. We never get an estimate on that, and Zamasu seemed to be purposely taking his time about killing everyone, so maybe there’s several million people left, and I just don’t get it.

All I’m saying here is that it took the entire population of Earth to make a Spirit Bomb strong enough to kill Kid Buu. Trunks must be working with a much smaller pool of ki here, and yet he seems to have destroyed a much stronger opponent with it. This has always bugged me.

However, it could be that the only reason this worked at all was because of the damage Zamasu took earlier. The Gallick Gun, the Kamehameha, the Kaio-ken Blue kick, the Spirit Sword to the chest, the Final Kamehameha, all of those moves may have set up Zamasu so Trunks big move here could chop him in half. That’s the best explanation I can come up with, anyway.

And I could accept this, except that they spent so many episodes before this where big flashy moves never seemed to bother the fighters at all. Then again, that was when Black and Zamasu were still using two bodies, and they kept using double-team tactics to protect each other. So maybe it’s works after all. Still, it would be nice if they could have explained any of that during this episode. I mean, Gowasu’s just standing there with nothing to do. Have him comment on Zamasu’s power level as the fight progresses.

Anyway, we’ve just got on more episode to go before we’re done with this mess. Gimme strength.

#dragon ball #dragon ball super #2023dbapocryphaliveblog #goku #vegeta #trunks #mai #bulma #zamasu #yajirobe #android 8 #fuck the zamasu saga forever

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