The Tangled Web
Why do I mention all these guys? Because the similarities and parallels between them are pretty apparent – except for Raditz (and it’s debatable in a formal sense whether Raditz really has his own story or whether his story is a prologue to the Vegeta story), all the major villains fall into one of two camps – rivals who become allies or truly evil dudes who are offered a second chance but refuse it and are killed anyway (Buu, fittingly for the last bad guy in the series, does both).
And each saga follows the same general pattern:
- There is some sort of advance tidings of the arrival of the villain or sense that something is wrong while the heroes continue training and doing hero things.
- Villain shows up (this can sometimes take a while) and does something really bad to make it clear he is a villain.
- Heroes try to fight the villains but can’t beat them for some reason.
- Some heroes try to buy time as others go on a quest for what they need to defeat the villain (which often involves doing push-ups).
- There are a series of escalating battles between various heroic characters and various either henchmen or less powerful verisons of the villain. During this time, characters often go through bodily transformations.
- Major characters start to die in combat.
- The hero comes back to save the day, but fails.
- There’s a scary place in which it seems all is lost and the last few survivors try to hang on.
- The good guys win.
- Barbecue!
(Alternatively, you can just watch this classic video from way back in the day – I love the Napster reference at the end)
All these steps can repeat, the story can cycle back on itself at any time (like when Cell shows up and the role of the androids in the story becomes a lot different) and the saga kind of “resets.”
The stories get very repetitive – a lot of scenes get replayed in different ways across the sagas, with new characters stepping into the roles of old characters and various long-held assumptions being challenged and either bearing out or not. But because of repetition, the sweeping, huge story arcs really feel like they take time. That you are seeing the chronicle of people (or kung fu aliens, I guess) going through the challenges and crises of their lives. You expect them to age, you expect there to be consequences to people’s actions (and there are, sort of), and you don’t expect everything to reset at the end of every episode. This is a world that is moving only in one direction – into the future.
This is different from Sex and the City relationships, where you tend only to see scenes if they represent something new, or, say, Sopranos story arcs, where it is often not clear who is the villain or why at any given moment, because events blend into each other as life grinds on for Tony and crew, and the passage of time becomes a bit more ambiguous. It feels a bit more like a show like Six Feet Under, which has a repetitive framing device, but it’s not quite the same. It’s also not the same as the repetition in a sit-com, because of the cycles that stack within each other – the connections and repetitions aren’t just across individual episodes, they sometimes recur with years in between.
Time, Why You Punish Me?
So, what does this all mean? First, it means that repetition is important to “feeling” the progression of time, and if you want to give people a sense that meaningful changes are happening over time in your story (like growing up or having kids or dying), you probably want to build a superstructure into your story that includes that bouncy ball.
Second, recurrence matters more than measurement. Dragon Ball only rarely comes out and says how much time has passed between two events, but it never has that unmoored sense that the passage of time has been ambiguous. Just saying “three years later” isn’t going to be nearly as effective in communicating the passage of three years than the repetition of a key element with some evidence that about three years have passed.
Third, what recurs matters. Phenomena that inspire calendars tend also to inspire reverence. The things that recur are important. In a piece as heavily thematic as Dragon Ball, this means you should look to the things that repeat as clues into what matters to the story. In Dragon Ball, actions tend to recur, but the agency for those actions tends to pass around to various characters, and eventually from parents to children. This sets up and reinforces a metaphysics and a worldview in which the individual isn’t that important – things change, but the world goes on.
Fourth, what changes matters. In any endeavor, whenever one thing is held stable and something else is changed, not only are both those things important, but the distinction between them is important. The list of saga villains is a key example of this – they all share a number of qualities (the most notable being megalomania, sadism, and a lack of concern for the survival or welfare of other living things, as well as connections to the “legacy” of the heroes – there are lots of relationships involving previous generations, the past, and actions taken in the past – these aren’t just random people showing up wanting to fight). However, their differences are what define the story.
The Vegeta saga is about social class — about the assumptions we make about people based on their birth and upbringing versus their character and industry. The Frieza saga is about change — the difference between the established power of the hegemony that maintains dominance and always wins, versus the dynamic power of experience that tries and fails and tries and fails. The Cell saga is about genetic relationships versus family relationships and in what ways people can be said to have come from the same body, and what that means. These things can all be seen in the differences between the villains.
And fifth, it doesn’t come free. Dragon Ball is frequently criticized for being too repetitive and time-consuming – this is mostly because the TV show was trying to keep pace with the comic book (which is, by the way, tons better than the TV show), and the recent Dragonball Z Kai, which I have not yet seen, purports to fix this problem – but I doubt it can be fixed entirely. When you take out repetitions and steamline plots, the sense of time can drop away, removing a fundamental element of human experience. As is evidenced by many plastic-looking dramas where people never seem to experience what an actual week’s worth of days is like can show, this isn’t quite the same as when you can feel the time pass as events roll on, and the bouncing ball keeps tapping against the concrete wall of the imaginary cell.
Or Cell, as it were.
Any thoughts on the passage of time with this new year just starting to power up? What does time mean to you, and how do you measure it? Sound off in the comments?
Awesome to see another of these posts!
When you talk about this kind of storytelling having a price, it made me think of console RPGs. They’re nothing if not repetitive. But if they weren’t repetitive, they might in fact be nothing. The charm of that kind of game is often said to lie in watching your character turn into a fearsome badass. Maybe the extreme monotony of the gameplay is necessary for this transformation to feel like biological/psychological “growth” rather than the simple adding up of numbers that it is?
“Maybe the extreme monotony of the gameplay is necessary for this transformation to feel like biological/psychological “growth” rather than the simple adding up of numbers that it is?”
I wouldn’t say “extreme monotony” is necessary, but I think the repetition is definitely necessary. When you think of all the RPGs where you fight “monster” and then later fight “different color of same monster which is stronger” it definitely seems to work that way. If it were always a new monster, it wouldn’t feel like time had passed.
When I saw the title, I assumed this would be about why five minutes on Namek lasts two weeks. Great article as usual and I’m so glad to see both of this site’s resident Anime brains make a return within the same week!
Ha! Yeah, I could write a whole article about the destruction of Namek. The pacing of those episodes is one of the strangest and most agonizing things to have happened on television, and probably most of where DBZ gets its bad reputation.
I always assumed that Frieza just…miscalculated. I mean, he’s a despot who rules through his physical strength. What does he know about cosmology? Unless the implication is that he’s destroyed so many planets that he has some intuition about how long it takes…
The way repetition can show growth and foster emotion between the audience and the work is exactly why Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is so brilliant.
Cool! Proust is a big blind spot for me. I think I’ve brough my copy of _Swann’s Way_ on ten different train trips, but haven’t ever really dug into it. It’s overdue.
If you’re a Proust enthusiast, any translation recommendations?
I’d just like to point out that in the Venn Diagram of “Places where Dragonball Z is discussed” and “Places where Proust is discussed,” the intersection of the two is almost entirely occupied by this article and its comments.
Im so glad Dragon Ball is on OTI. I over thought the powerlevels as a high school kid. Meticulously trying to figure out how much of an energy boost a super sayian gets vs. a super sayian ultra. How is that if a Saiyan gets a 50x boost in power by going super, they can last so long in a fight while normal against an opponent they are equal to as a Super Saiyan.
And one thing I did find out in my own OTI experience was how badly Toriyama messed up in his numerical power ups in the freeza saga. or example, Vegeta was some where between 25,000 and 45,000 when he faced Racoom, but after his power up from healing, he could stand up to Freeza who’s PL was 530,000. Thats a 10 fold increase in power for one ass whooping. By giving Freeza so high a number, he kinda ruined his own DBZ logic in his power ups.
The power levels stop being really consistent around where Piccolo fights Raditz (that is, shortly after they are introduced). Piccolo reveals how you can use your energy in controlled bursts, which lets you fight at a power level higher than what shows up on scouters.
From this point on, I didn’t really see the scouter numbers as definitive. But that’s okay, since it’s a major plot point of the Frieza saga that relying on the scouter numbers is almost always a terrible mistake.
And fenzel I was trying to think of WHY he would even create them in the 1st place. My conclusion is to prove a point. I think he wanted to show that Bad Guys were stagnant, incapable of becoming stronger in means other than completely transforming their bodies while all the good guys grow stronger from training and spiritual growth. Reminds me somewhat of that TMNT article about transformation.
Bingo. The scouters are there for the hubris factor. The elite judge the common people as incapable of rivaling them, which justifies their awful behavior, but turns out to get them in the end, because it is both wrong and unwise.
Even though power levels become massively inflated with the Frieza saga, I still feel they had some sort of significance, apart from showing the bad guys’ dependency on the fixed numbers they get from scouters.
When Raditz appears and we discover that the average human being’s power level is around 5, while Krillin’s and Master Roshi’s are in the hundreds, it gives a sense of all the progress they’ve made since the beginning of the story.
However, the need to precisely measure power levels disappears when Goku becomes a Super Saiyan and completely tips the scale. After that, the characters go back to feeling the power of an approaching enemy. The horrified looks on their faces say at least as much as the scouters ever did.
Finally, thank you someone did notice..
I have no idea what Dragonball is, but I would like to comment on sex and the city… I was watching an episode last week and the girls were at the diner having breakfast, dressed to the nines of course. After breakfast Carrie was going to go buy shoes for their trip to LA that day, and the next scene the girls are arriving poolside at their hotel with the sun high in the sky. Estimate this was at latest a 3pm arrival after a 6 hour flight (and 3 hours back in time zones) so they left NYC at noon. Now anyone in NYC knows those women would have to have left for the airport by 10am for that noon flight. Carrie would have needed approx 1.5 hours to go shoe shopping and get back home to get her bags that puts her leaving the diner at 8:30am. (Saks doesn’t actually open until 10am on weekend so here’s another fault). Continuing on, giving them an hour to eat and socialize puts them arriving at the diner at 7:30am/ leaving their houses around 7:15am. Now for me to personally have been fully dressed, hair blown out and styled, makeup on to the extent they had, I would have needed 1-1.5 hours to get ready. That means according to the “timing” in this episode, they were all up at 6am for this day, whicH I find highly unrealistic considering they are out partying every night at clubs until 2-3am.
And of course, while Samantha, Carrie and Miranda arrive in LA, Charlotte is still finishing her cup of coffee back in the diner in NYC. So that raises the topic of shows that not only have inappropriate passages of time, but have varrying passages of time for each character in the same episode!
I’d also like to point out that the Rugrats are still in diapers and Maggie Simpson still doesn’t know how to walk.
I love this comment!
I love these articles about Dragon Ball and I wanted to say thank you for re-kindling my love of the show. I started watching DBZ during the Namek/Frieza saga when they were airing on Cartoon Network and watched till the end of the Buu saga but once that ended I was done with the show and kind of forgot about it. After you posted this article I went back and read the others and remembered how much I loved the show. I bought the DBZ: Dragon Box One from Amazon and I watched 10 straight episodes last night. I plan on getting the rest of them as well.