During the winter of 2018 I decided to watch an airing anime, that anime being Goblin Slayer. What does Goblin Slayer have to do with Dragon Ball, you ask? I'll get to that in a moment. As melodramatic as it may sound, Goblin Slayer essentially made me quit anime. It wasn't a lone effort, I had started many shows around this time that I also hated, like K-On, and shows that I found criminally boring, like Orange. I realized that at this point I wasn't even watching anime because I wanted to, I was simply watching anime to watch anime. This sort of dispassionate approach
...
to watching a show sapped all the enjoyment for the medium, and so I quit. For around a year and a half I didn't watch any anime, outside of a couple movies. But one thing kept nagging in the back of my head "I gotta finish Dragon Ball".
See, in that time where I was watching bland, uninteresting shows, I began to watch Dragon Ball as well, arguably the most famous anime of all time. I got through the second story arc, but because of how burnt out I was by the other things I had read, I took a break. A much longer break than I expected. But that nagging thought kept coming back into my head. I started Dragon Ball because I wanted to experience a show that had redefined the Shonen genre as a whole. But I also did it for very similar reasons that I started Goblin Slayer and those other shows, simply to watch anime.
It was in August of 2020 that I bought a game called Dragon Ball FighterZ, and I played it excessively with my friends, I still do. I had outrageous amounts of fun, and seeing all of the flashy combos and cool moves was always a joy. But I didn't understand the context of any of it. It was this that inspired me to watch Dragon Ball. A few weeks later and I had finished the show just before school started, and I went right into Dragon Ball Z. And then Super. And then GT, for better or worse. I watched the movies, even the terrible live action one, and I read the spin-off manga, I was well and truly obsessed. In the span of 3 months I had consumed nearly every piece of animated Dragon Ball media. But there was a marked difference between this and the anime watching I had done in 2018. I was truly in love with Dragon Ball, flaws and all. It helped that my friends were watching it at the same time, so I could crack jokes with them about the less than stellar parts and rave about the parts we loved. To this day we still reference the show daily, much to the chagrin of our friends who haven't watched it.
What, you may ask, is this story doing in a review of Dragon Ball? Well, it is to explain why I have such a high rating, a 10/10, for a show that is far from perfect. It is to explain that Dragon Ball reignited my passion not only for anime but for media as a whole, in that year and a half where I didn't watch anime, I didn't watch any shows really, but Dragon Ball inspired me to take the plunge and watch other shows I had been wanting to watch for ages, like Breaking Bad or Stranger Things. Dragon Ball is honestly tied for my favorite anime, alongside JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. And while yes I do have hazy nostalgia for the show, I would occasionally catch an episode or two when Kai was airing, and my friends in elementary school talked about it a lot, my main reason for loving the show is because of what it represents.
Anime fans as a whole, and I'm sorry if this offends you, are generally incredibly annoying. I have never seen a funny meme related to something like Sword Art Online or Goblin Slayer, but Dragon Ball has a community filled with hilarious people who love the show, and love to poke fun at it. There is nothing I hate more than Reddit anime fans, but Dragon Ball is so mainstream that it doesn't attract the sort of annoying people I so often see talking about other shows online. Dragon Ball is truly a positive experience.
This review isn't as much a review for the show itself, as while I could talk about it for hours, there's nothing I could say about it that hasn't been said before. Instead, I thought I'd recount my experience with the series, and explain why I love it so much. Dragon Ball is the last series I really planned on watching. I will likely catch up with One Piece, and perhaps watch a few shows here and there, but when it comes to watching shows so impulsively and being so involved with the anime fandom as a whole, I think this is a good place to hang up my hat. And while there's a certain melancholy I feel when thinking about that, I won't restrict myself, because if there's something I want to watch, I'll watch it. But not just for the sake of watching it, instead because I truly think I'll love it.
In closing, Yamcha could destroy your favorite anime character.
All (14)FriendsRSS Feeds |
Mar 23, 2021
Dragon Ball
(Anime)
add
During the winter of 2018 I decided to watch an airing anime, that anime being Goblin Slayer. What does Goblin Slayer have to do with Dragon Ball, you ask? I'll get to that in a moment. As melodramatic as it may sound, Goblin Slayer essentially made me quit anime. It wasn't a lone effort, I had started many shows around this time that I also hated, like K-On, and shows that I found criminally boring, like Orange. I realized that at this point I wasn't even watching anime because I wanted to, I was simply watching anime to watch anime. This sort of dispassionate approach
...
Feb 18, 2021
Steel Ball Run absolutely deserves the title of "Best JoJo Part". The other parts of JoJo have numerous flaws, and even though I love them to death I am more than willing to admit that Araki is not infallible. His manga is not usually thought out ahead of time, and often it's fairly obvious that he didn't have a conclusion in mind when he writes. Sometimes this works, and other times it doesn't work as well. But Steel Ball Run is such a tight narrative that, with such amazingly written characters and such an enthralling story that I'm not sure I can name any flaws.
...
Feb 17, 2021
Goblin Slayer
(Anime)
add
tw--- rape
Goblin Slayer was the first anime that I sat down and watched and truly hated. I honestly never had that experience before. Waiting week to week for this, I started to question why I watched it at all. But I kept up with it, just for the sake of fairness. And I have concluded that just because an anime is popular, that does not mean it's good. Twitter was alight with praise for Goblin Slayer's first episode came out, because it was an episode of anime that featured an explicit rape scene. This was supposedly to set the tone for the rest of the ... 
Feb 17, 2021
I wondered, for a while, why Devilman had never had a fully accurate adaptation. There was the original show, that essentially had nothing to do with the manga because it was produced early in the manga's run and had to make up its own material. The OVA was fairly accurate, but it stopped at the fight with Sirene. Crybaby hit many of the manga's beats, but ultimately updated many aspects and changed many others. And then I read Devilman, and I understood. Such a seminal work, one that inspired so many other, whose influence can still be felt to this day, is quite flawed. Devilman
...
|
