Poll of the Day > Was Gohan from DBZ supposed to represent Millennials? SPOILERS

(+) Yeah! (+)

In the Cell saga its assumed that Gohan is supposed to be the new master, the hero that everyone has been looking for, someone thats even stronger than Goku.

But then in the next saga (Buu saga), hes literally just a lazy teenager thats been neglecting his training in order to hang out with his high school gf and be the cool kid in school. He literally does nothing in this saga and cant come close to competing with Buu, Goku or even Vegeta to be honest

what a fucking waste. And what a fucking pointless character arc

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Nope
The cell saga and buu saga were both early 90s, and also written in Japan. If anything it might be a comment on Japanese late Gen X culture.

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But the Japanese culture has always been ahead of the US...

and even in the 90s we knew what Millennials were, we just didnt have a term for it yet...

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FrozenBananas posted...

and even in the 90s we knew what Millennials were

Did we?
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LinkPizza posted...

Did we?

sure, since Millennials birth years are early 80s - early 2000s

I saw adults complaining about the laziness of the generation as early as 1998-2000

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It's supposed to represent how being good at something isn't a good reason to give up being happy. It also shows that doing nothing with your potential makes you vulnerable.
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I believe toryama initially wanted him to replace goku but marketing and fans want goku and no one else
Citation needed and i cant remember where i heard this but you can really see it how the cell saga went

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Youre trying way to hard to find depth in freaking dragonball dude

FrozenBananas posted...

I saw adults complaining about the laziness of the generation as early as 1998-2000

Every generation complains about the next generations. It is literally seen throughout all recorded human history.

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TheSlinja posted...

I believe toryama initially wanted him to replace goku but marketing and fans want goku and no one else
Citation needed and i cant remember where i heard this but you can really see it how the cell saga went

This is all true. You can tell the original plan was to make Gohan the new defender of Earth but fans demanded Goku come back. And I think in the Buu saga he tried again to make Gohan the hero but halfway through that idea gets aborted due to fans and probably Shonen Jump telling him to keep Goku the main hero

Zikten posted...

This is all true. You can tell the original plan was to make Gohan the new defender of Earth but fans demanded Goku come back. And I think in the Buu saga he tried again to make Gohan the hero but halfway through that idea gets aborted due to fans and probably Shonen Jump telling him to keep Goku the main hero

what a dope he should have just told the story that he wanted to tell

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Yes, he's the most educated in his family.

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Zikten posted...

This is all true. You can tell the original plan was to make Gohan the new defender of Earth but fans demanded Goku come back. And I think in the Buu saga he tried again to make Gohan the hero but halfway through that idea gets aborted due to fans and probably Shonen Jump telling him to keep Goku the main hero

to be honest this explains a lot imo. Especially why I hated the Buu saga so much and why I stopped watching

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FrozenBananas posted...

sure, since Millennials birth years are early 80s - early 2000s

I saw adults complaining about the laziness of the generation as early as 1998-2000

But every adult complains about the next generation. I don't think there was really anything different about our generation that early. I mean, the last millennials were born about 96 or so. So I don't really think many people really knew what millennials were...
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Yeah. I watched a video or confirmed fan theories of Dragonball Z. That was one of them. About how Gohan was set to take the lead. And then, they decided to not go through with it...
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cant come close to competing with Buu, Goku or even Vegeta to be honest

Mystic Gohan >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> SSJ3 Goku

wat are you talking about

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Goten and Trunks are what makes Buu saga my favorite. They brought the OG Dragon Ball humor back and Goten was like kid Goku. Gotenks is still my favorite character. I love their attitude and the battle with Buu in the time chamber was just amazing.
What I'm pissed off about is the fact that Gotenks became useless in DB Super, despite the writer always teasing to have them make a comeback. It's even worse than Gohan after cell saga.
I guess TC should finish DB Super though if he wants more relevant Gohan again. He was extremely useful in the Tournament of Power arc.

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Mead posted...

what a dope he should have just told the story that he wanted to tell

That's not really how it works when someone else is publishing you.

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FrozenBananas posted...

hes literally just a lazy teenager thats been neglecting his training in order to hang out with his high school gf

Umm, he was focusing on his education.

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FrozenBananas posted...

But the Japanese culture has always been ahead of the US...

and even in the 90s we knew what Millennials were, we just didnt have a term for it yet...

Except until the term came out, there wasn't anything defining it and the early 90s was too early to claim broad trends because the oldest millennials under the most liberal definition of the term would have been in their pre-teens (the Cell saga started in 1993 and, from a cultural standpoint, those born prior to 1984 are sometimes viewed as xellennials, a transitional generation between gen x and gen y). And that's excluding the fact that millennials as a trend aren't necessarily an Asian thing at all. These trends were designed more about Western culture.

FrozenBananas posted...

I saw adults complaining about the laziness of the generation as early as 1998-2000

The Cell Saga had its manga volume come out in 1993, it presumably ran in a shonen magazine a year prior to that, and was planned probably a year or two before that (and having Gohan replace Goku was foreshadowed since the start of DBZ in 1989). Even if you ignore xellennials, the oldest millennial would have only been 10 or 11 when it was planned out.

Teen Gohan was also introduced in a volume in 1993 which, again, would have compiled something that ran earlier than that and would have needed to be planned prior to that.

LinkPizza posted...

Yeah. I watched a video or confirmed fan theories of Dragonball Z. That was one of them. About how Gohan was set to take the lead. And then, they decided to not go through with it...

That was kinda obvious from the get-go and unrelated to the millennials claim

FrozenBananas posted...

But then in the next saga (Buu saga), hes literally just a lazy teenager thats been neglecting his training in order to hang out with his high school gf and be the cool kid in school. He literally does nothing in this saga and cant come close to competing with Buu, Goku or even Vegeta to be honest

...because Goku had been dead since the end of the Cell saga, leaving Chichi -- who never wanted her son to take up fighting and wasn't a competent fighter herself -- in charge of his development. Chichi didn't want Gohan fighting and wanted him to live a normal life. Conversely, Goku mostly just trained and fought while he was dead. Vegeta has only ever just trained. As for Buu, his powers just allowed him to become absurdly strong because he could absorb other fighters.

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Zeus posted...

That was kinda obvious from the get-go and unrelated to the millennials claim

Well, yeah. Obviously. I wasnt talking about the millennials claim in that part. I was talking about the stuff TheSlinja and Zikten were talking about.
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Trust me, Akira Toriyama pretty much made DBZ with no plan and winged it to make close dead lines.

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Chi-Chi was a trained fighter, but ... she was human, and, IIRC, she stopped training after she had Gohan, so she never got up to the level of Krillin (... literally the strongest human in the world).

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I_Abibde posted...

Chi-Chi was a trained fighter, but ... she was human, and, IIRC, she stopped training after she had Gohan, so she never got up to the level of Krillin (... literally the strongest human in the world).

I wish she kept training. it would have been interesting to see her fight in Z. imagine if she went to Namek and the whole family fought Frieza together.

I_Abibde posted...

Chi-Chi was a trained fighter, but ... she was human, and, IIRC, she stopped training after she had Gohan, so she never got up to the level of Krillin (... literally the strongest human in the world).

She hadn't trained all seriously even before then. She wouldn't rate among the human fighters even in DB.

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