Top Gun

Eh, it gives me one less week to inexorably fall behind on, so I'm all for it.

I like how they're proudly advertising the fact that they use shitty rice filler.

But here's the thing: the vast majority of the time, the fights really aren't all that cool. I know it's a tired gag by this point, but before Kai happened, there were literally entire episodes mostly dedicated to Goku or someone else standing around and grunting heavily as they tried to power up. (How Sean Schlemmel has a shred of a voice left by this point I will never know.) The choreography is certainly nothing to write home about, and there's next to no creativity: the vast majority of your typical DBZ fight involves a character throwing rapid-barrage punches and kicks at someone who's blocking them, or alternately doing the same with energy blasts, punctuated by the occasional flight through a cliff in some remote wasteland. There's next to no thinking outside the box, none of the crazy strategies that other shounen use so effectively. At least FOTNS has the fundamental amusement of perfectly-delayed head gibs. DBZ has...aneurysms? (Now I mean that's not to say that moments like Goku's first Super Saiyan transformation aren't extremely iconic. But they're so few and far between that they can't hold up the combat on their own.)

Well yeah, there's no denying what people are there for, but the problem is that the series itself tries to play up these big dramatic moments but only succeeds in falling flat on his face. Like, even taking the parody out of the picture, Abridged is a far better-written show than the original work it's spoofing.

I really like the numerous times that the rest of the cast has been broken up over someone dying, even "permanently"...and then the shot cuts to them 30 seconds later chilling happily in the afterlife still talking to everyone via King Kai. Because gravitas!

Christ, mochi.

"That...was for...m'dick."

The fact that the Dragon Balls exist in the first place makes any sense of tension or high stakes in DBZ laughable at best, because the whole audience already knows that anything bad that happens will inevitably get wished away. And that last one is what really gets me the most. I didn't get far enough into the original Dragon Ball to meet Launch, but the fact that Toriyama has flat-out said "hahaha whoops I forgot she was a thing!" is just fucking pathetic. Contrast that with someone like Oda, who on multiple occasions has pulled minor throw-away characters from hundreds of chapters prior, made them integral parts of the current arc (complete with requisite tragic backstories), and made the reader give a damn about them., all seemingly effortlessly. I've felt since I first started watching it that OP is what happens when you take DBZ and give it an actual plot.

See those are the sorts of shows that make the least sense to binge to me. If there's a series I'm watching with intricate plotting or really good pacing or devastating cliffhangers, I need some time to chew on each individual episode and speculate on what's coming next. Some of my fondest memories of watching [as] were when shows would leave off on "oh WHAT THE HELL" moments, like in the penultimate episodes of FMA 2003 or Eureka 7, and I'd spend what seemed like every spare moment of the rest of the week thinking about where the story could possibly go. The instant gratification of automatically-queuing seasons just totally destroys that sense of anticipation. It also totally murders the collective cultural aspect of watching: everyone's doing it at their own pace, so if you want to talk about the show to someone, you have no reasonable expectation as to how much of it they've seen so far.

You need a goddamn hobby. And I'd feel far more sympathetic towards DBZ if Toriyama showed even the remotest shred of writing ability. I'll at least give him the credit of inventing the modern long-form shounen, but by this point at least a dozen other authors have taken that mold and created far more satisfying products. When you step back and take an honest look at it, DBZ barely has what one could consider a plot. I thought it was stupid when I was 13, enough so that it almost single-handedly turned me off of anime for years, and this Toonami run has done little to avail me of that opinion. Granted, it does have those occasional classic moments that scratch that middle-school "zomg this is awesome!!!" itch, but dear lord it is just dumber than an entire pile of bricks. The sad part is that I think the original Dragon Ball is absolutely charming and fun, well-deserving of its classic status, but the moment Toriyama tried piling apocalyptic stakes onto a universe setup that quite frankly doesn't allow for them, the whole thing just collapsed. At this point the only reason it maintains so much cultural relevance is that it was Babby's First Animu for a whole bunch of people, the majority of whom never looked all that far beyond it.

Binge-anything is fucking stupid. I have absolutely no understanding of how someone can stare passively at a screen for hours at a time watching the same goddamn show.

Of course it's real. The cover pages for the past couple of years have been Oda drawing whatever crazy shit the fans request him to do. He did a gender-swapped Straw Hats doodle ages ago...Brook just had a question mark next to him/her.

Ahoy, mateys.

Honestly I loved the tilt controls, because it finally captured the "DAMMIT IF I TWIST THE CONTROLLER I'LL TURN FASTER!" technique I used all the way back in Super Mario Kart.

Ages and Seasons were my first Zelda games. Kicked ass.

iRacing.

A face of disgust because you didn't buy real beer?

lol, Beats

I contnue to be amazed that the world has not collectively gotten over DBZ yet.

It's a marathon night, nobody will be watching anyway, so who gives a shit what they stick there?

As a point of comparison, the entire premise of Toriko was a simple career choice by a single character in Hunter x Hunter. And oh lord, those One Piece and DBZ crossovers were painful. The OP/DBZ one might have been decently fun if Toriko hadn't been awkwardly inserted in there like the world's biggest third wheel.

I think we have a winner.

To be fair, pretty much everyone.