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duhragonball · 1 year ago

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Super Dragon Ball Heroes 41-43

Ma’am, you must be new. That’s all they ever do around here.

We’ve finally reached the home stretch, which is the Supreme Kai of Time arc that begins in Episode 41. As far as I can tell, the arc continues through Episode 49, and still isn’t finished. I think episode 50 will go live in a few months, but it still hasn’t been scheduled, so my plan is to just cover up to 49 and maybe write an update later in the year.

Also, since I’ve only got one arc left, I’m going to treat myself and do this three episodes at a time, so we can go over this at a more leisurely pace.

We open with Chronoa, the Supreme Kai of Time, meeting with her predecessor, Aeos. I’m confused about how this works, since you would think Aeos would have died before Chronoa was appointed to take her place, but I guess we’ll learn more about this as we go. Anyway, Aeos disapproves of the way Chronoa has allowed so many alternate timelines to propogate, so she’s come out of retirement to confiscate the Scroll of Eternity. Chronoa vows to resist this, but Aeos has backup in the form of those guys in hooded uniforms, like Brown Goku from the last arc.

Soon after this, Goku is invited to a special competition called the Super Space-Time Tournament. Goku’s in like Flynn.

Goku arrives to find the usual suspects: Jiren, Hit, Piccolo, Gohan, Vegeta, and... Yamcha? He says the tournament promoter knows what’s up, and I agree. Good luck, Yamcha.

I had heard SDBH was doing a tournament, but didn’t understand how they could hope to do a tournament arc justice in this kind of format. Well, this one’s pretty quick. It’s 12 teams of 7, so that’s 84 fighters competing all at once, similar to the Tournament of Power, but the time limit for the first round is only 24 minutes. To advance, your team can either defeat every other team on the board, or you can capture one of three fairies that are fluttering around the battlefield.

So only three teams can advance, and the other 63 fighters will be eliminated, so I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about those guys. Suffice to say, there’s a Ginyu Force team, an all-Androids team, and so on.

There’s some decent matchups here, like Broly vs. Jiren, Goku vs. Xeno Goku, Trunks vs. Tapion, and Janemba vs. Kid Buu, but none of these get much time to shine, so it sort of doesn’t matter.

Oh, right, Hit vs. Hirudegarn. That’s pretty cool.

Also, Turles vs. Super Saiyan 3 Raditz? Neat.

It all looks really cool, except it gets cut short when Yamcha captures a fairy by luck, and his entire team gets teleported back to where they started from.

There’s a Time Patroller team, and they also caught a fairy, so that’s two teams who advance. The third is a team with Hearts, Cumber, Cooler, and Frieza, among others.

What about the others? Well their timelines were erased once they washed out of the tournament. One of Aeos’ guys explains that rule, and Trunks angrily attacks, demanding to retrieve the Scroll of Eternity for Chronoa. They fight for a while, until...

Aeos steps in and freezes time to halt their brawl. They were in the middle of shooting energy balls at each other, so she opens up portals to make them disappear. Aeos explains her position on how there’s too many timelines, and she intends to use the tournament to solve that problem.

So on to the second round. The surviving 21 fighters are divvied up and sent to four different battlegrounds. There, they must attempt to capture a fairy from one of Aeos’ hechmen, and deliver it to her in the center of the four areas. I think that’s the idea, anyway. Since there’s three teams and four fairies, I guess that means one team must score at least two fairies, which would make them the winner.

At the Namekian battleground, Aeos’ man disrobes to reveal he’s another Piccolo. Gohan and our Piccolo are the representatives for “our” team.

Curiously, three of their teammates are on this other battleground: Yamcha, Vegeta, and Hit. Their opponent is Vidro, who seems to be of the same species as Lagss from Hearts’ gang about 25 episodes back.

On the third battleground, Trunks continues his fight with the guy from before, and it soon becomes clear that he’s...

Future Gohan, from a timeline where he survived the Androids, but Trunks and Bulma did not. Somehow, Aeos recruited him and empowered him with the Dark Dragon Balls, and he’s resolved to never be weak or defeated again.

They do battle, and Trunks is dismayed to find that Gohan is very different from the man who taught him all those years ago.

So that leaves Goku and Jiren in the fourth battleground to face...

Well, whoever this guy is. You figure it out. I can’t be bothered.

#dragon ball #super dragon ball heroes #2023dbapocryphaliveblog #goku #supreme kai of time #aeos #trunks #vegeta #yamcha #jiren #hit #piccolo #gohan #vidro

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tokiro07 · 10 months ago

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I was talking to my buddy about an old post of mine where I said I want more Dragon Ball movie villains to come back and get either movies or small arcs dedicated to them and building up the non-Goku/Vegeta cast, and we came up with a few new ideas

Dr. Wheelo works as a recurring antagonist, as he can be a good excuse for multiple older concepts to be revisited. To start off, he enhances Tao Pai Pai to be a viable threat, giving Tien a good opponent with some personal significance. Yamcha may also be there to fight Wheelo himself, but it does seem like they're pushing Yamcha to just be a normal guy, so maybe not. Could also be a fun way to revisit Launch if we have a Tien-focused story

Androids 13, 12 and 11 are then brought back by Wheelo to fight 17, 18 and Gamma. When 13 goes Super Android by absorbing his teammates, Hedo finds a way for the good Androids to power up without absorbing each other. Wheelo has also upgraded himself since fighting Yamcha, giving Krillin an opponent for the arc

Bio-Broly is Wheelo's last creation, which would give Broly a reasonably strong enemy to fight without shoehorning him into any of the other villains' stories. It could also serve as a fun way to have DBS Broly fight an approximation of DBZ Broly, as he could reuse the old design with some tweaks

Tapion's return and training with Trunks causes a rift between him and Goten, which ultimately results in Trunks being too powerful for the two of them to perform Fusion anymore. After Trunks and Tapion defeat Hirudegarn with minimal help from Goten, Goten goes off on his own for a while to become a stronger fighter in his own right

Bojack then becomes an antagonist for Goten specifically, allowing for a more accurate recreation of Teen Gohan vs. Bojack now that Gohan has aged out of the part. Goten's new power differentiates him from Trunks significantly, and makes their fusion in the next arc they appear in more notable as it will combine their new disparate traits instead of just doubling up on Saiyan traits

Garlic Jr., similarly, becomes an antagonist for Pan to parallel how he was defeated by kid Gohan without the need to rescale him too much. However, if we don't want Pan to have a major win this early, we could have Pan fight his first form and then use his power-up to explore Gohan's Beast form and possibly get some insight into Orange Piccolo, since Garlic is inherently related to Piccolo's backstory

Lord Slug, then, further expands on whatever hints we get about Piccolo by having an Orange form of his own, perhaps a mastered or elevated version of it with more unique traits. Given that Piccolo is a merging of Warrior- and Dragon-clan Namekians, perhaps it could have two modes and we've only seen the Warrior-mode. Potentially more interesting, Piccolo could need to overcome Slug's Orange form by finding King Piccolo's soul in Hell and taking on his Demon-clan abilities, truly making him a mix of all forms of Namekian. This would also be a good time to give the Orange form a real name

Turles is still introduced as a Universe 6 Saiyan, interrupting Vegeta training Cabba (+Caulifla and Kale), but now that Ultra Ego has been introduced, Vegeta clearly outmatches Turles, so he uses it as an opportunity for Cabba and co. to grow. Cabba takes out form 1 and Kefla handles form 2, but form 3 is too much for them, so Vegeta steps in with Ultra Ego, giving him some much-needed shine

Cooler still fights Frieza and shows us how the Fifth Form can potentially be differentiated from the Golden and Black forms, but mostly just serves as a way to elaborate on what Black can do before having Frieza fight Goku and Vegeta again

Janemba fights Buu, as I said before, but this time instead of serving as a jumping-off point for Uub, he actually serves as a way for Buu and Mr. Satan to work off each other; Janemba is a very tricky opponent, and Buu isn't particularly intelligent, but Mr. Satan is surprisingly smart and a competent martial artist (for a non-ki using human), so Mr. Satan could be helping Buu to read Janemba's fighting style and give him an edge, proving that Mr. Satan isn't the burden to the rest of the cast that he thinks he is

Baby would serve as a culmination of all of the Saiyan's arcs specifically, with all of the special forms and abilities found by Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Goten, Trunks, Pan and Broly being put on full display against their natural enemy

The Shadow Dragons would serve a similar function, but for the cast as a whole.

Syn/Omega would probably be similar to his original incarnation, with Goku and Vegeta working together and ultimately being defeated by Goku using a Universal Spirit Bomb, but all of the other Dragons would be fought by the rest of the cast.

Haze, as the weakest, would probably be reserved for the human cast - Krillin, Tien, Yamcha, etc. His energy-draining abilities would definitely be a challenge for them, and would require that they be more inventive in how they beat him than other characters likely would be

Eis was created by a wish involving Buu, so I'd enjoy seeing Buu and Uub team up against him, possibly leading to the creation of Majuub

Nuova, along the same lines, was created by King Piccolo's wish, so putting him against Piccolo and Gohan would work really well

Rage, being electrical in nature, could be a fun enemy for the Androids

Oceanus doesn't really have an obvious thematic enemy, but since the fight against her originally was the only one to actually introduce new characters (Colm and his village), using them as a connection to Pan would be a good way to give her more involvement in the arc

Naturon, as one of the eviler Dragons, would be a good enemy for Goten and Trunks to fight since they fancy themselves heroes. His possession ability could also be used to force them to fight each other

Other characters, like villains introduced in Dragon Ball Heroes, could also be canonized and used as a way to show off the newly gained powers, but the ultimate villain would almost definitely be Frieza since he keeps getting stronger and stronger and we've already seen him forced to team up with Goku. I'm sure new characters will continue to be introduced too, like Moro and the Heeters, and none of this even considered how Granolah might contribute to the plot going forward, but my main goal here was to focus on classic characters. I do like Granolah, though, so I hope they find reasons to bring him back somewhere in there too. Maybe he'll be involved in the Baby arc since the Tuffles and Cerealians are both victims of the Saiyans, so there may be good reason to reintroduce him in that arc

I'm willing to bet that basically none of this will happen, and that Toriyama will want to focus more on the new and will continue not to worry about the extended cast, but in my world, Dragon Ball utilizes its existing cast as much as humanly possible

If I'm only right about one of these, I honestly hope it's Cooler

#dragon ball #dragon ball super

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canidaepotheosis · 5 months ago

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unfortunately for the lamestream media, ssj3 goku dragon fist vs hirudegarn japanese sub is still the coolest shit ever

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bluehairlaunch · 2 years ago

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Best 7 Dragon Ball Filler Villains

Honorable mentions are Nicky and just him. Smoke weed everyday

Garlic Sr.

I'd have liked to see this character, instead of his ripoff son. He's still kinda Piccolo tbh, but Kami having a rival is a fun idea, as it gives him more parallels with Goku.

Zaarco and Raiti

Fake Namek was fun, right? I thought it was fun as a kid. And Team four star is so old that they gave them Aqua teen Hunger Force voices. Like I had to look that shit up

Turles

Super does evil Goku worse than Tree of Might, but Turles is still basically Raditz without the Goku connection. He looks like sexy Goku and that's always unnerved me a little, but his movie is baller (for a Z movie) and I kinda like Raditz's generic villainy regardless

Cooler

Eh, same with Turles. He's sexier Frieza and yea that's all it takes sometimes.

King Moai of Arlia

Bug planet was another fun diversion. Villain vs. Villain, except this dude has no idea what he's up against, and Vegeta is feeling uncharacteristically coy.

Darkness

Look how cool this dude looks. He's the Legion of Doom's Fortress and he gets even scarier when he transforms into Roshi. In the comic, Goku is just given the Ultra Divine Water, but the anime makes him work for it. The only other eldritch Dragon Ball villain I know of is Hirudegarn, but in his second form he's just a really tall bug man, so Darkness is better ez

Paragus

Filler King

And no I'm not referring to the Super version, I mean OG Paragus, the evil scheming bastard that actually plans shit longterm unlike actually every other Saiyan. Super Paragus is good too, but he's more of a bitter old man than a villain. He never has real agency or a way of achieving his goals beyond triggering his son. Dbz Paragus just incidentally has a son that's the Legendary Super Saiyan. Everything else is all him, like he probably would've even succeeded if not for Broly being Broly

#dragon ball #dragon ball z #nicky db #nicky dbz #deadzone #garlic jr #garlic #darkness #paragus #turles #cooler

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treepan0 · 7 days ago

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for me the most amusing thing I know from a dragon ball game, is Baby Hirudegarn from fusions... because it implies that Hirudegarn got freed from Tapion's body in the pocket dimension the game takes place in, only to be immediately possessed by the tuffle parasite who likely doesn't even know what makes the situation so funny.

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active-hoper · 12 days ago

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Attaining Comfortability in My Own Skin: The Personal Significance of My Main Battle Team in DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO

Warning(s) for: topics pertaining to genocide and suicide, and spoilers.

Tapion - Shame

Tapion, a pale warrior with a red mohawk and sheathed sword on his back dressed primarily in orange and dark-colored attire, stands, playing his enchanted ocarina with a solemn yet troubled expression on his face, in the "City Ruins" map on the character selection screen.

Part of me believes that I deserve death day in and day out as a consequence of routinely succumbing to the feeling that I can cause, and have caused, no more good than harm. A boon for processing this struggle of mine is Tapion's inner tribulation being akin to it.

Faced with the eradication of their people, warriors Tapion and Minotia, Tapion's younger brother, had no choice but to have the split essence of Hirudegarn, an ancient evil that was rampaging across their home planet, be imprisoned within them using enchanted ocarinas after its weakened self was sliced in two with a horizontal slash. The costs of this decision were imprisonments of their own in enchanted music boxes that were sent into space, far away from their place of birth, and each other. Though tragic, such fates were welcomed by the two brothers for the purpose of keeping the genocidal supremacists responsible for Hirudegarn's return from reawakening it again. Unfortunately for them, their fates would not play out as intended.

Years later, the sole-remaining supremacist kills Minotia, freeing one deadly half of Hirudegarn, and manages to release Tapion with the help of DRAGON BALL's unsuspecting main characters on Earth, destroying his music box in the process. The evil within Tapion is then soon completely released and able to rejoin with its other half. As it threatens to eradicate yet another world's people at its full power, an exhausted Tapion can only watch while others who would fight to protect the Earth are beaten down. Eventually, he regains his energy and uses his enchanted ocarina to re-trap Hirudegarn. Knowing that he does not have much time before he loses any strength he has left, he urges the young incarnation of the third teammate in this piece, whom he came to see as a second younger brother, to kill him so as to spare the world and those around him from further harm.

Before a decision can be made, Hirudegarn ultimately breaks free again. But, the Earth's fighters find a way to defeat it, sparing Tapion from an early end. Tapion displays a positive demeanor as he departs from Earth's fighters after this battle's end, yet my resonance with him still lies with his pain, the pain that he experienced and caused, inadvertently or not. Reflecting on pains of those ilks in Tapion's and my life spawns overwhelming shame at having failed at being as good a person as initially desired. Within that shame, however, is also a call, a call to be stronger and more hopeful so that the pain I cause and the effects of the pain caused by others are mitigated in the future.

Bergamo - Acceptance

Bergamo, a blue and white wolf-like bipedal character wearing a red scarf, brown pants and boots, bandages on his arms, and a "Tetsuya Nomura" number of belts on his boots, waist, and arms, stands in the "Tournament of Power Arena" map on the character selection screen.

For a time, I wished to have a small, tight-knit group of friends with whom I could achieve greater feats. I had not fully understood why my yearning for that ended until familiarizing myself with the story of Bergamo, a survivor in a seemingly doomed universe who takes down anything and anyone standing in his way to keep him and his two younger brothers alive. His nature comes to a head when his small-scale selflessness and destructive desires contribute to the (temporary) erasure of his universe in a deadly tournament hosted by the kings of the omniverse to test if mortals can be better than they are presently.

Lacking the ability to see the value of those outside of his family and ambition, Bergamo loses himself in survival mode, something I am accustomed to due to abuse and the PTSD from that, both of which have made me feel that I must shy away from the facts I am gay, disabled, and a furry - the last of which playing as Bergamo helped me to accept - to protect myself.

Maybe admitting the existence of a connection to a character like him is the first major step I have taken toward accepting my identity, which I have mostly rejected up until this point. In doing so, it seems a slow-transforming wish to instead have a general sense of community as my individuality remains unaffected by bias and pressures to conform has finally been put into proper action.

Future Trunks - Righteous Perseverance

Future Trunks's Dragon Ball Super incarnation stands in the "City (Evening)" map in his Super Saiyan form on the character selection screen with blonde, spiky hair pointed cleanly in different directions as he wears a blue Capsule Corp.-branded jacket with a sheathed sword hung around his chest and back; slightly-ripped black pants, green-yellow boots with black toe caps, and a red bandana around his neck.

Future Trunks is an inspiration to me. He used to live in a timeline where many people on Earth were irreversibly killed in droves on one occasion and nearly completely annihilated on another at the hands of world and multiverse-ending threats, respectively. Despite this all, he continued to fight for his and their survival, as well as for the creation of a better life for everyone, and he continues to do so in a new timeline, even after his previous one was destroyed. All this is to say that a fighting spirit such as his is especially worth adopting in this day and age.

This leads me into how, at the time of this post's release, it appears that Donald Trump will become the forty-seventh President of the United States. I and many other individuals around the globe who are also not considered the norm will likely experience tougher lives because of this bigoted monster's re-election. His re-election carries the threats of continuations of the deadly precedents he has set with his hateful, vile rhetoric and delusional policies from his first term; as well as the empowerment of the selfish, ignorant following that he has cultivated. As you could have guessed, none of that is to say that things are over. There are and will always be chances to fight back together, to keep this world from meeting a grim fate, and to thrive, not merely survive.

#dragon ball #dragon ball z budokai tenkaichi #dragon ball sparking zero #tapion #shame #bergamo #furry #acceptance #future trunks #dragon ball super #righteousness #perseverance #us politics #video games

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op-dbz-ladies · 4 months ago

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That good to hear. I wonder if she used it when dealing with the hirudegarn.

The west supreme Kai actually had that taken care of. Bulma is currently trying to rebuild a time machine to get Tapion home. He’s just sitting with Trunks and Bra.

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multiversal-pig-outing · 6 months ago

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the fuse look for videl and hirudegarn properly have the tail, hiru legs and feet. But remove the purple pits have it more like the thing on his knees and elbows. The same with the arms except no replacing the purple just get rid all together. She has the wings and shoulder pads. The pads being smaller like the pads on the armor that chilled goons had. And smaller set of horns like hirudegarn. Her eyes and teeth more like hiruegarns.

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filmes-online-facil · 2 years ago

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Assistir Filme Dragon Ball Z: O Ataque do Dragão Online fácil

Assistir Filme Dragon Ball Z: O Ataque do Dragão Online Fácil é só aqui: https://filmesonlinefacil.com/filme/dragon-ball-z-o-ataque-do-dragao/

Dragon Ball Z: O Ataque do Dragão - Filmes Online Fácil

Hirudegarn é um dêmonio que foi criado pelos magos negros de uma galáxia muito distante. Criado a partir de uma estátua com esse nome, Hildegarn tem somente um objetivo: destruir todas as galáxias que existem. Para impedir seus objetivos, Tapion, Minoshia e seu pai lutaram bravamente para aprisionar o mostro. O vilão foi dividido em duas partes durante o aprisionamento cada parte foi selada em um oráculo.

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tj73467-blog · 1 year ago

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HIRUDEGARN: WRATH OF THE DRAGON MENACE

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#Youtube

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duhragonball · 2 years ago

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Dragon Ball GT 39

✨GT stands for Grotesque Trot✨

This is it, the final installment of the fight between SSJ4 Goku and Baby. Goku challenged Baby to fight “seriously”, which is pretty rich coming from a guy who’s been phoning it in for the last several episodes. Baby vows to eradicate Goku once and for all this time.

Then they start running down the length of a ravine, shooting ki blasts at each other like dummies. Stay classy, GT.

Baby’s attacks don’t seem to be working on Goku, and it’s starting to look like this “epic” conclusion is just another mismatch. Okay, so here’s why this fight sucks.

✨ “Good” “Ideas”, Poorly Executed✨

As far as I can tell, Toei’s plan for this fight was to have Goku get a new form and take on Baby as a Giant Ape. It sounds good on paper, but we’ve seen it before. Goku fought Vegeta as a Giant Ape in DBZ. It didn’t last very long, but that was probably by design. This Goku/Baby fight seems to be a pretty good illustration of why it’s not a good idea to do a long battle between a big monster and a teeny little human-sized fighter. In Dragon Ball, it usually boils down to the big monster lumbering around, brute forcing his way through the opponents’ attacks, and/or the little guy being an artful dodger until he manages to one-shot the beast or exploit his weak point.

The Goku/Baby fight tries to subvert this formula by having Goku and Baby just slug it out, as if Baby were a normal-sized opponent. And that’s not really out-of-bounds for a fantasy series like this, but it’s hard to visualize. GT really seems to struggle with having both characters in the same shot during a fight. I don’t know if that’s corner-cutting in the animation department, or a stylistic choice with the storyboarding, or what. All I do know is that it sucks. There was one part of the Goku/Rildo fight where they kept doing close-ups of the fighter’s faces as they dodged ki blasts, and it was really hard to follow the action. A better anime might be able to pull it off, but Dragon Ball GT has enough problems as it is. The fights ought to be the show’s saving grace, but instead it’s just one more problem to add to the list.

So you take that flawed approach to fight choreography, and then you apply it to a fight like this, where one guy is literally ten times bigger than the other, and it becomes almost impossible to make it into a five-episode epic. The closest comparison I can think of is DBZ Movie 13, where Goku fought Hirudegarn. Much of the action in that movie was Hirudegarn bullying the Z-Fighters with his superior size. Then Goku turns Super Saiyan 3 and the movie goes into sudden-death rules. Hirudegarn lands a few blows, but Goku takes them just to create an opening so he can land one big move that ends the whole fight. It works because it’s short. GT is trying to do Goku vs. Hirudegarn stretched out to ninety minutes, and it just does not work.

Check it out, here’s Baby getting desperate and using the “Renzoku Super Gallic Gun”. This guy has fired off more Gallic Guns in the last five eisodes than the real Vegeta ever has in his whole life.

When that doesn’t work, he sets up his “finishing strike!” And yes, it’s the Revenge Death Ball. This is like the fourth time he’s used this stupid attack, and it hasn’t succeeded in killing anyone.

This isn’t even the first time he’s used it on Super Saiyan 4 Goku. The last time he tried it, Goku didn’t even defend himself. He just let it hit him and it didn’t do anything at all! So why is Baby using it again? And why is Goku struggling with it this time? He’s supposed to be at full power, so if anything, Goku should be stronger than he was the last time he took one of these.

I guess you can argue that this Revenge Death Ball has more juice because this is the first time Baby’s done it as a Great Ape, but... no? I don’t think that’s how it works. Every other time, the idea was that Baby formed the RDB by gathering the collective hatred of his Tuffleized slaves. In theory, each RDB should be exactly the same, unless he Tuffleized more victims in the last hour and a half.

Also, wouldn’t Baby’s Tuffles be getting weaker each time he tries this. I’ve always assumed the move was inspired by the Spirit Bomb Goku used to kill Kid Buu, where the Earth’s population was exhausted after contributing so much energy to the attack. So you’d think at some point Baby would find the well had run dry.

When I watched this, I thought maybe that’s what they were setting up. The Kais have been preparing to use the Sacred Water to free Baby’s slaves, so it would have been kind of awesome to see Goku in a pinch, and Baby’s charging up a Revenge Death Ball to kill him, but then it fails because there aren’t enough Tuffles left to fuel the attack.

The answer, of course, is that Goku has to struggle to overcome this move, because it’s Baby’s final big attack, and it needs to seem effective in order to build suspense. Then Goku looks cooler when he finally muscles out of it. And that’s fine. That’s storytelling 101. The problem is that there’s no rhyme or reason to it. GT is literally having things happen in this story because they’re supposed to happen, not because they have any internal logic among the characters.

Like, okay, if you’re writing a story where a guy goes to the post office, you have to explain why he’s going to the post office. You may be writing it because the plan is to have him meet the love of his life, who runs a small mail-order business and constantly ships packages. He has to go to the post office, because the rest of the story won’t happen unless he bumps into the love interest while he’s there. And that’s fine, but your character doesn’t know he’s a character in a love story. He doesn’t know he’s going to meet his true love, which means he needs some other reason to go to the post office, a reason that would make sense to him. So you have to write in a line about how he’s going to buy stamps, or check his P.O. Box, or whatever.

This is why they have different techniques and power ups in Dragon Ball. You have these back-and-forth superhero battles, and there has to be a way for characters to gain or lose the upper hand. For the writer, it’s just a matter of shifting the balance of the fight to keep the reader engaged. But for the characters, they’re in a real fight, so it has to make sense within their fictional world. This is what draws the readers into your story. If you do it right, you make the fictional world feel kind of real, and the reader wants to be part of it while you tell your story.

Look at the original Goku/Vegeta battle. Goku uses the Kai-o-ken Times Three and beats up Vegeta. He gets furious, and responds with the Gallick Gun, threatening to destroy Goku at a distance, neutralizing the Kai-o-ken’s close-quarters advantage. Goku has to defend with a Kamehameha, but it’s not strong enough, so he uses the Kai-o-ken Times Four. But Vegeta survives, so he gets frustrated enough to resort to fighting as a Great Ape. Goku is too exhausted to fight back, so he uses a Solar Flare to blind Vegeta, and then tries to set up a Spirit Bomb.

You see how that works? It’s not just that there’s a variety of techniques being used. It certainly helps, but the important thing is that each technique shifts the balance of the battle. The next move is a response to the last one, and each step of the fight builds off of what happened before.

Compare this to the Goku/Baby fight. Revenge Death Ball, Kamehameha, Revenge Death Ball, Kamehameha, Revenge Death Ball, Kamehameha-- enough already!

Baby his Goku with an RBD early into the fight, and it didn’t do anything, not because of any in-story reason, but because the fight had just begun, and the writers wanted Goku to look badass. Later, Goku hit Baby flush with a 10x Kamehameha, and it didn’t seem to do anything... until the next episode. That delayed effect wasn’t a plot point; Toei just wanted to set up a cliffhanger. Baby and Goku knocked each other out, but that doesn’t matter, because they got an instant recharge from their allies, essentially resetting the whole battle. And now Baby’s finally starting to pressure Goku, not because he figured out a better strategy, but because the fight is almost over and Goku needs to look heroic before he turns the tables.

So of course, Goku powers his way out of the Revenge Death Ball, and Baby is astonished, even though this is the second time he’s seen Goku do this. Goku returns fire with (another) Kamehameha, and somehow this one puts Baby down for the count, even though the last dozen or so didn’t bother him much at all.

It finally looks like Baby is defeated, and the good guys realize that this means Vegeta will surely die. Trunks says it’s for the best, since Baby is too great a threat. But instead of killing Baby, Goku cuts off his tail, which causes Vegeta’s body to shrink back to humanoid size.

Wait, why? Vegeta didn’t have a tail to begin with. The whole point of Bulma’s machine was to use higher intensity Blutz radiation to compensate for the lack of the tail. I don’t even get why the tail grew back, so how does cutting it off make any difference?

Also, even if the tail is important, can’t Baby just make Vegeta’s body sprout a new tail? I’m not joking. Baby made that goofy armor, and the big lenses over his eyes. And Vegeta’s body’s been a lot taller while Baby’s been controlling it. If he can do all of those things, you’d think making a new tail would be easy.

Then we cut to inside Vegeta’s body? I guess? We already saw Uub in there before, and this looks nothing like it. It looks more like a microscope slide of a tissue sample. Maybe this is supposed to be metaphorical. Anyway, Baby is in trouble because his own body grew big to control Vegeta as a giant ape. But now that the Oozaru transformation is reversing, Vegeta’s body is shrinking, and Baby can’t fit anymore? What?

So Baby ejects himself from Vegeta’s body, but he looks to be about the size of a tennis ball while doing it. So how was he too big to fit in Vegeta’s body, then?

He returns to his humanoid appearance, which now looks as big and bulky as he did before he went ape, but with the same blue skin and Smurf Hat head he had when he debuted. Honestly, I like this look the best. It’s kind of a shame they only used it here, and in the opening credits of the show. The good guys try to stop him from getting away, but he uses a bright light from his eyes to distract them, kind of a Tuffle knockoff of the Solar Flare. Then he flies to a ship Bulma had standing by, and makes a run for it.

No Bulmas allowed, though. I’ll give Baby this much, he’s a classic heel.

✨Positivity Page✨

Let me pause here to talk about the one bright spot of this whole episode. Now that Baby is separated from Vegeta’s body, we finally get Vegeta back after all this time.

He wakes up in his son’s arms, wonders what just happened, and then he looks over at Goku...

And then he just gives him the most adorable smile ever. You half-expect Goku to smile back and say “Well, good morning, sleepyhead!” I don’t ship Kakavege, but I totally get it.

Back to business. Pan’s like “Grandpa! Baby’s getting away!” and Goku’s like “Oh no he ain’t!” Yeah, it turns out Goku was just letting Baby have some more rope.

First he waits until Baby’s ship is directly under the sun...

Then he fires another Kamehameha.

Baby’s like “How could this have possibly happened?!” Guy, did you forget that he knows that move? What the fuck? Anyway, good riddance, you Tuffle-lovin’, Machine Mutant creatin’, Doltaki hirin’ piece of shit.

Then Goku’s like “There, I shot him into the Sun,” and the others are like “Oh, I get it now! You let him fly off in his spaceship so you could shoot him into the sun!” Is it that complicated? I’m not sure Goku needed to go this far to kill Baby, but given how slippery Baby has been in the past, this was probably the safest way to go about it. Unless the Big Gete Star finds him...

Back at the Lookout, Goku has finally reverted to his normal form, and it turns out that he’s still stuck as a kid. For all Super Saiyan 4 can do, it looks like it can’t reverse the wish that trapped Goku in this child body. Pan is sorry that Chi-Chi didn’t get a chance to see it, but Goku assures her that he can use the transformation at will. This is kind of an awkward conversation, because Pan seems very invested in Goku using SSJ4 in front of Chi-Chi, and I know it’s just because Chi-Chi was so upset about Goku being stuck as a kid, but we’re all sort of dancing around the reason she was so upset about it, a reason Pan’s too young to know about.

Anyway, Goku has to choose his words carefully, but it’s pretty much confirmed that Chi-Chi is going to get a demonstration soon, and she’s gonna get an all-expenses-paid trip to Goku Town when things settle down. Not the Goku Town where you get beat up. I mean the softer side of Goku Town. After dark.

Yeaahhhh.

(They’re gonna have sex, is my point.)

With Baby taken care of, the good guys dispense the Sacred Water to purify the Tuffle-ized Earthlings. One thing I like is how the characters act like they’re being poisoned when this happens. Then they snap out of it and they’re fine.

Except for 18, who just no-sells it. 18 rules.

Happy Pride Month from Dragon Ball GT.

Everything seems to be wrapped up in a neat little package, except for one thing. A bunch of tremors start, even on the Lookout, which really doesn’t make sense. Popo says it’s because the Black Star Dragon Balls were never put in their proper place. Goku said they returned them to the Lookout in Episode 28, but Dende was evil when that happened, and he handed them over to Baby.

This part always used to confuse me, because I assumed that just returning the BS Dragon Balls to Earth was enough to reset the clock. And then Baby used them to make another wish in Episode 30, so I thought Episode 39 here must have taken place a full year later.

But no, that’s not how it works. Apparently, you have to bring the Balls back to the Lookout, where they can be stored in a specific place. And since Dende was too evil to care about that part, he just blew it off. So the clock was still running, and Pan estimates that they only have two more weeks before the Earth explodes. There simply isn’t time to gather the Black Star Dragon Balls again, so what will they do? Well, that’s a problem for next time.

✨Is this episode worse than “The Roaming Lake”?✨

You know, I would have thought that an episode like this could clear the Roaming Lake bar, but it doesn’t. Sure, it’s the finale of a major arc, but it feels so hollow, especially after all the repetition and stalling we’ve seen that led up to it. There’s a lot of nonsense in this episode, from Goku struggling with an attack he’s already shrugged off once before, to Baby’s confusing logistics for controlling Vegeta’s body.

Also, it’s extremely unsatisfying how they went to all the trouble of defeating Baby, only for this Black Star Dragon Ball issue to come back to haunt them. I mean, this part of the episode makes perfect sense, but it just points out how unfocused the whole series has been. They started with the mission to recover the Balls, then got sidetracked into doing this Baby conflict, and now they’re trying to clean up the loose ends, but it just feels very awkward. I’m pretty sure this is why most Dragon Ball arcs only have one bad guy who’s responsible for everything, and when you beat him everything gets solved all at once. And this could have been an interesting opportunity to play with that formula by having two concurrent crises, but Toei didn’t plan for any of this, they just sort of backed into it.

Anyway, “The Roaming Lake” didn’t end with Nam realizing that he still needs to fix his village’s plummeting literacy rates, so that means it’s a better episode than Baby’s swan song. The score is TRL - 39, GT - 0.

✨The Blade Braxton Memorial Haiku*✨

For sale: Baby shoes

Slightly Kamehameha’ed

Straight into the sun.

#dragon ball #dragon ball gt #really sucks #2023dbapocryphaliveblog #goku #baby #pan #trunks #goten #gohan #kibitoshin #dende #mr popo #marron #android 18 #vegeta #bulma #*haiku does not come with crown as illustrated

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