Hello, it’s been a good while since my last post.  I’ve been quite busy the last few months, but I’m finally more free now.  I am kinda writing this post at 3am on a thursday, so it’s not gonna be too long (dw I fell asleep by accident at 8:30pm and woke up like an hour ago so I did sleep).  But yeah, I’m gonna talk about Dragon Ball for a minute.

So I’ve never watched DB before, but ofc I’m familiar with it as an anime fan and have my respect for the influence it’s had on other anime and other media.  I also remember exactly where I was when I heard the news about Akira Toriyama-sensei’s death, genuinely such a legend, rest in piece.  So yeah, I started watching the original DB for the first time in January, and I just finished it up yesterday (or 2 days ago since it’s 3am I guess).  I gotta say, I really liked it a lot.

I’m really a big fan of all the allusions to other things like Frankenstein, the rabits making mochi on the moon, and ofc the greatest allusion of all, Journey to the West which is literally what DB is a parody of.  Btw, the reason why I started watching DB is bc I started reading the Journey to the West books in December.  I’ve always been a fan of Sun Wukong and I had this children’s book as a kid which featured a watered down version of Sun Wukong’s story that I loved, bc funny, mischievous monkey dude lmao.  But yeah, started to give the full thing a read, and I’m definitely enjoying it so far, it truly is a great work of literature.

Something else I find interesting are the names in DB.  Son Goku is ofc the Japanese reading for 孫悟空 (Sun Wukong).  Oolong, Puar (Pu’erh), and Jasmine are all tea names.  Chiaotzu is being the Japanese reading of the Chinese word Jiaozi (餃子) meaning dumpling.  And there’s plenty of other examples.  There’s so many examples like these names and the allusions in DB that I really enjoy and respect.  These types of details I’d definitely say makes Toriyama-sensei a true author.

The action was pretty cool, though I gotta say, I find it funny when they say things like “now the real battle begins” or “now we’re fighting for real” like 5 times in the same fight lmao.  Honestly, the action wasn’t really the selling point for me, but the adventure was.  Following Goku on his adventures exploring the world in his quest for the dragon balls was so fun.  There was a lot of great world building going on, and I enjoyed it a lot.  This is potentially a barrier for me though to get into the rest of the DB series though, bc from what I heard, the original DB is more light hearted and adventerous, but the other DBs are more focused on the action, which isn’t what interests me as much.

Upon completing the original DB, I decided that I will start watching DBZ out of curiousity of what comes next, but I’m likely going to skim through a lot of the drawn-out battles, and I’m probably going to be watching other anime alongside it, so it’s unlikely I’ll talk much about DBZ in the future.  As for what I’m going to watch alongside it, I’m planning on starting to watch The World God Only Knows sometime in the next week.  It seems like a really interesting anime, so looking forward to it.

Alright, that’ll be all for today.  Apologies for not posting in a while, but I’ll try to post a little more often now that I’m not as busy anymore. Bye