Toriyama: When To Listen, When To Ignore

Toriyama: When to listen, when to ignore

One of the things I’ve talked to lots of fellow writers about since entering the DBZ fandom is its author, Toriyama, and the world he’s built, and especially some of the bits of trivia that he’s given us over the years in various talks and lectures and what-have-yous over DBZ, and it’s gotten to the point where I think it’s just time to share this with the wider world. So here it goes, please read the whole thing:

Toriyama is a great manga-ka and world-builder - he’s given us one of he most unique versions of Earth in popular media, a world containing dinosaurs, humans, flying cars, animal people, shape-shifters, aliens, capsules, gods, demons, and magic. He’s given us some of the most beloved heroes and reviled villains in the history of manga, and he’s shaped the way shonen is done. He is a great man with a vivid imagination, and I will always be grateful to him for creating this magnificent world and these wonderful characters. He’s also facked up but good on numerous occasions with inconsistencies in drawing, plot holes you could fit planets into, forgotten characters, characterizations that have fans tearing to pieces the very characters that are supposed to be the good guys and rejecting the ships meant to be canon as toxic or unbelievable. He’s admitted on numerous occasions that he doesn’t remember a goodly portion of what this story he’s written contained, and he doesn’t seem to have been invested enough to go back and reread his own work to find out. He is a terrible writer, and if Dragon Ball were published today it would be torn to shreds by readers and critics, probably never gaining enough popularity to make it to Z. I believe this in my heart, the original Dragon Ball is not a strong enough manga to make it in today’s market if it was just coming onto the scene now, and it’s a much tighter story than Z. It’s fun, it’s cute, but it would likely have only a small fan base. So where does that leave us, the writers, who are struggling to figure out from the mire of manga, anime, games, interviews, and trivia what is canon, what is fanon, and what is to be taken seriously when we write? The answer is simple: it leaves us exactly where we want to be - in utter control. The story line of DBZ and the characterization of its cast are loose, like a net - there’s enough there to give us something to hold onto, but also plenty of room to fill in the details; how else can we get one person saying Goku’s a terrible father while another says he’s an awesome father and both these people having ample material to draw on from the manga, the most basic form of this fandom, to support their cases, let alone the anime?

Everything that does not happen in one of the core media sources - manga, anime, game - we are free to treat as unreliable, even if it comes directly from Toriyama himself. Is he the author? Yeah, but he also flat-our forgot Lunch and at one point said that female saiyans couldn’t go super saiyan because they couldn’t get angry enough after having written Bulma and Chichi for years. What then is canon out of these remaining three sources? What we decide, what we love, what we need for our stories to work. We don’t even have to keep our own personal canons consistent - we can change them from story to story, and why shouldn’t we? We’re so focused on going ‘what’s accurate’ that it’s like we’re forgetting that it doesn’t matter if we all agree. I’ve written for ships that I only enjoy casually, given advice for stories I’ll never read for one reason or another, seen art for ships I don’t really ship but damn is it good! Good enough that, for that one moment, while I was looking at that art, I shipped it. I shipped it so hard. Because the artist shipped it and they believed in the story they were drawing more than any other story. So screw what’s real and what’s not, what’s canon and what’s fanon - find the pieces you like, tell your story, however it is you choose to do so. Because it doesn’t matter what other people have decided is canon - if your belief is strong enough, they’ll believe too, even if it’s only for a moment.