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duhragonball · 4 years ago

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Chi-Chi

I think I’m gonna wrap these up today so I can get back to work on my fanfic. For the record, I got Buu, Frieza, Jolyne Kujo, Father Pucci, and Jobin Higashikata left to go, and then I’m done.

But I hate to call it here, because this has been fun. Maybe I’ll bring this back some time.

Give me a character and I will answer:

Why I like them: I started watching DBZ back in the fall of 1998, and I didn’t get very serious about it until 2000. Chi-Chi didn’t have a very big role in the Saiyans or Frieza arcs, and I wasn’t making a point of watching every episode, so it took a while for her character to be fully revealed. Starting out, she was basically popping in every so often to remind us that she wanted Gohan to study. She stood up to Garlic’s henchmen in Movie 1, but didn’t really get a chance to do anything. In the Garlic Junior Saga, it’s stated that Chi-Chi is the strongest woman in the world, which sounds pretty impressive as long as you don’t think too hard about how many women are on the show.

I don’t think I really understood Chi-Chi well until I got to the part where Goten spars with Gohan, and he reveals that Chi-Chi had been training him while Gohan was studying. That was where it became clear to me that she only emphasized book-learnin’ over ass-whoopin’ because she knew Goku had that side of things covered. With Goten, Chi-Chi had to be both mother and father to him, and she didn’t shirk from that.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Chi-Chi’s a great supporting character. She maintains a presence in the story whether she’s on-screen or not, and you learn about her gradually through these short appearances. And when she does show up, it’s just a treat to see. She’s always got something to say, and she’s cute and she can beat your ass. What’s not to like?

Why I don’t: Yeah right. Look, the biggest gripe people have with Chi-Chi is that she makes her son do homework, which is dumb. She explains this a number of times: There’s more to life than fighting, and she wants that for her son. And Gohan’s not exactly worse off for her style of parenting.

I think the disconnect here is that people watch this show and they want to see Goku and Gohan screw around and go on adventures, and they feel like Chi-Chi is here to kill their buzz. I guess it’d be like watching a football game, and every so often some guy wanders out onto the field and scolds everyone for playing football. But that guy would be right, because football is dangerous, yo. Everybody keeps telling Chi-Chi that the only hope for the world involves her little boy getting his ass kicked by aliens, and she’s like “no, that’s bullshit,” and she’s absolutely right. She’s a saint for tolerating it as much as she does, but I think a lot of fans refuse to look at it from her point of view. They just want the fighting.

I remember Lanipator observing that he used to hate Mr. Satan when he was younger, but the older he got, the more and more he appreciated the character. I can’t relate to that, because I was old enough to drink when I started watching this show, so for me, there is no “when I was a kid” perspective on Dragon Ball. I thought Mr. Satan was awesome from the start, and I never had much of a problem with Chi-Chi either.

They did tend to overexpose both characters in the anime, cutting to them when they needed a filler moment to pad out an episode or five. So maybe that’s got something to do with it. But that’s not the fault of the characters. But yeah, if I was watching the Cell Games at age 10 I’d probably get really sick of them constantly cutting to Mr. Satan or Chi-Chi for analysis.

Favorite episode (scene if movie): It’s probably hard to top the one where she fought Goku. That was one of the last Chi-Chi moments I got to see, because I didn’t get caught up on OG Dragon Ball until 2004. It’s an excellent use of the character and her lengthy absence from the show. By the time she reappears, no one recognizes her, and she’s upset about being forgotten.

Favorite season/movie: I think I’d have to go with the Buu Saga, on the grounds that she got more time to shine, mainly due to so many other characters being unavailable. It was a real roller coaster ride for her too. Her husband’s dead and she’s raising two kids on her own, then he comes back, then he leaves again, and maybe Gohan’s dead too, and now Goten has to fight, and then she’s dead, and then they’re all back together in the end. Wild.

Favorite line: In the Cell Games Saga, there’s a TV show where Mr. Satan drags three buses onto the set, cuts a scathing promo on Cell, and then punches one of the buses to put an exclamation point on the whole thing. Wait, I take it back, I’m pretty sure 10yo me would have loved Mr. Satan.

Anyway the live audience is marking the fuck out for Mr. Satan, but at Kame House Yamcha and Krillin are unimpressed, because they punch holes in like fifty buses every morning as a warm-up. But in the dub of that episode, Roshi remarks that Mr. Satan’s theatrics are “sad”, and Chi-Chi goes “It sure is. Somebody could have used that bus.” Classic, total classic.

Favorite outfit: It’s hard to pick, honestly. I like the Buu Saga yellow, but I prefer the way her hair looked in the Saiyans Saga. And that outfit she wore near the end of DBZ was pretty great too.

OTP: Goku. come on.

Brotp: I think Bulma sort of stepped into that role after Trunks was born, but Chi-Chi seems like a loner to me. She basically rolled in, got Goku to marry her, and then retreated deep into the mountains to interact with as few people as possible. I need me a freak like that.

Head Canon: I think she’s genuinely proud of Goku and the boys being so great at super-karate-laser wars. She doesn’t talk about it much, because there’s plenty of other people to congratulate them on that sort of thing, and I think they sort of look to her for as someone who grounds their family.

To put it another way, I don’t think Goku wants Chi-Chi to talk a lot about the androids or the Saiyans or whatever. I think he wants someone to bother him with household matters and chores and ordinary stuff. And Gohan and Goten just want a regular mom to balance out their alien monomyth dad. And she plays that role well, because that’s who she is. But she’s still proud of them for saving the world and so forth.

Unpopular opinion: Chi-Chi was right.

Look, how was Gohan going to make a life for himself as a fighter, in a world where Goku and Vegeta have that market cornered?

Where’s he live? In a big-ass mansion. Why? Because he married a rich man’s daughter. Where’d he meet her? In the school Chi-Chi made him go to. How’d he get in to said school? He aced their entrance exams. How’d he do that? Chi-Chi made him study.

What does Goku do all day when he isn’t training? He drives a tractor? Why? Because his wife has a thing for farmer aesthetics. Why does he just do whatever his wife tells him? Because he didn’t study.

A wish: I wish all the Chi-Chi haters would stay out of my soup, because it’s salty enough as it is. (Heyoooo!)

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen: I’ve been seeing Manalorian spoilers lately, and I don’t want to give anything away, but it seems like every time something happens on Mando, all the chuds come out of the woodwork to complain about Episode VIII and/or IX. They’re like “thank you, Disney, for giving us the [Star Wars thing] that Disney refused to give us.”

My fear is that Star Wars has become balkanized into this thing where people praise half of it as fixing or undoing the damage caused by the other half. Used to be, people would either like the Ewoks or hate them, but they couldn’t ignore the fact that they were there. Now it’s like any movie that doesn’t feature Ewoks is done to cater to the anti-Ewok crowd, and any movie that does is solely for the purpose of keeping the pro-Ewok side engaged.

My point is that I worry that this will happen to all media franchises, and Dragon Ball Q will feature a Chi-Chi that gets turned into a hateful she-hag to satisfy the haters, and then Ultra Dragon Ball Deluxe will feature a more nuanced version of Chi-Chi as a make-good, thereby pissing off the haters. And they’ll go back and forth trying to please everyone while the character ends up becoming an incomprehensible mess from it.

5 words to best describe them: Adorable tiger mom/bus advocate.

My nickname for them: Cheech.

#ask duhragonball #dragon ball #chi chi #Anonymous

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duhragonball · 7 years ago

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Hey, Mike, first time, long time. What do you think of Cooler’s Revenge?

I wrote a thing in December of 2015 where I ranked all the DBZ movies, and I’m pretty sure Movie 5 was about midway on the list.

But lately, I’ve been rethinking that, because I’ll go on YouTube and look up the part where Goku turns Super Saiyan, heals a bird, then Kamehamehas Cooler into the sun. I really dig the song they played on the American dub as Cooler realizes he’s doomed. It’s “Revelation” by American Pearl, and when I found out it was on iTunes I bought it and put it on my Luffa playlist.

So I started to wonder what I thought was wrong with the movie, and it really comes down to a couple of trifling things:

1) It always irked me that Goku seemed unable or unwilling to transform, like he needed Cooler to provoke him the way Frieza did.

2) Cooler’s a pretty blatant retread of Frieza, and it’s a little ridiculous that he was co-ruling the universe all along and was never mentioned before.

I went back and looked up the release date on the movie, and it was June 20, 1991. As it turns out, the manga was still wrapping up the Goku/Frieza battle around that time, which explains a lot of the continuity issues in the movie. Hypothetically, it’s set after Goku returned to Earth, by which time he’d learned to control his Super Saiyan form, but no one at Toei knew about that when they made the movie. They just assumed Goku would beat Frieza and escape Namek somehow, and I guess they figured Krillin would get wished back since they put him in the movie.

That’s why no one mentions Trunks or Mecha Frieza or King Cold or the Androids, because none of that had happened yet in the comics. It’s probably also why Vegeta, Tien, and Yamcha aren’t in the movie, because Toei may not have known for sure that those characters were going to be on Earth.

In that perspective, Movie 5 is kind of noteworthy. I always thought Cooler was an extension of the idea of King Cold, but it’s apparently the other way around. Maybe Toei wanted to do Frieza’s dad for the movie, and Toriyama already had plans. Either way, Cooler is the first villain to face Goku after the Frieza saga, so it’s not too surprising that Toei wasn’t clear on whether Goku could control his transformation or not.

As for Cooler being a derivative concept, I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing for him, since he sort of embraces it in a way that other movie villains can’t. Turles is a lot like Vegeta, Lord Slug is a lot like Piccolo, but Cooler actually has a relationship with Frieza. He’s not just here to imitate things that Frieza did, he’s here to avenge Frieza’s defeat. It’s a nice touch, since it gives Cooler a much stronger background and motivation without dragging out the movie. The previous movie villains were just assholes, but Cooler’s mad because he didn’t like how events in the main story played out. And he’s conflicted. He never really liked Frieza, but he wants to avenge him anyway.

As for the movie itself, it’s got a nice plot structure, with Goku getting ambushed early, forcing Gohan and Krillin to fetch senzu beans to heal him before the bad guys can finish him off. It’s a good change of pace, since a lot of the other movies just sort of have Goku and the bad guy run into each other and start fighting. It also helps cover Cooler’s credibility as a threat. I doubt anyone gave Cooler much of a chance against Goku, considering how he dominated Frieza.

Mostly, though, I like the ending. I want to make some sort of Game of Thrones joke, but I can’t quite figure out how to put it together. All I know is there’s a little bird who didn’t do anything wrong, and Cooler keeps bragging about how he decides who lives or dies. I want to photoshop a beret and a Santa beard on him, but I don’t know how.

Anyway, Goku heals and protects the bird, because he’s more than just a beefcake, and then he no-sells a punch to the ribs and goes “Why won’t you wake up?! You’re hurting innocent people! What have they done to you?” Then he tells Cooler he “can’t let him take his unhappiness out on others any longer.” This is the dub by the way. Funimation haters can whine about the script turning Goku into a western-style superhero, but that’s a load of bull. Goku’s always been about this sort of thing. He’s not going to beat up Cooler for the sport of it, or because he’s consumed with rage. He’s going to punish Cooler because he’s a threat to innocent life. Schemmel’s lines reflect that panel from the comic where Goku thought he’d killed Frieza. He doesn’t *want* to crush these fools, but they leave him no choice.

And Cooler tries to spout all this strong-over-the-weak edgelord crap, and Goku’s like “Fine! We’ll play by *your* rules, Cooler!” and beats the crap out of him. I love that stuff. All these bad guys love their might-makes-right nonsense and then someone mightier comes along and eats their lunch. That’s what Super Saiyans are all about. You think you’re bad? Think again. Cooler tries that Supernova move that everyone spams in Xenoverse 2, but Goku just muscles it up and sends it back to him with interest.

As he falls into the sun, Cooler *finally* realizes he messed with the wrong dude, and then he remembers that this only happened because he allowed Goku to escape the destruction of planet Vegeta, repeating the same error that killed Frieza. It’s really good stuff. Again, you don’t really get that with Lord Slug or Super 13. When those guys lose, they just squeal and explode. Cooler’s defeat is complete, because his final thought is that he was foolish to oppose Goku in the first place.

So, I don’t know, maybe I should revise my movie rankings, but it is a pretty fun movie, regardless of how it compares to the others.

#dragon ball #ask duhragonball #movie 5 #cooler #is this not simpler?

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