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duhragonball · 3 years

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Chi-Chi

I think I’m gonna wrap these up today so I can get back to work on my fanfic. For the record, I got Buu, Frieza, Jolyne Kujo, Father Pucci, and Jobin Higashikata left to go, and then I’m done.

But I hate to call it here, because this has been fun. Maybe I’ll bring this back some time.

Give me a character and I will answer:

Why I like them: I started watching DBZ back in the fall of 1998, and I didn’t get very serious about it until 2000. Chi-Chi didn’t have a very big role in the Saiyans or Frieza arcs, and I wasn’t making a point of watching every episode, so it took a while for her character to be fully revealed. Starting out, she was basically popping in every so often to remind us that she wanted Gohan to study. She stood up to Garlic’s henchmen in Movie 1, but didn’t really get a chance to do anything. In the Garlic Junior Saga, it’s stated that Chi-Chi is the strongest woman in the world, which sounds pretty impressive as long as you don’t think too hard about how many women are on the show.

I don’t think I really understood Chi-Chi well until I got to the part where Goten spars with Gohan, and he reveals that Chi-Chi had been training him while Gohan was studying. That was where it became clear to me that she only emphasized book-learnin’ over ass-whoopin’ because she knew Goku had that side of things covered. With Goten, Chi-Chi had to be both mother and father to him, and she didn’t shirk from that.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Chi-Chi’s a great supporting character. She maintains a presence in the story whether she’s on-screen or not, and you learn about her gradually through these short appearances. And when she does show up, it’s just a treat to see. She’s always got something to say, and she’s cute and she can beat your ass. What’s not to like?

Why I don’t: Yeah right. Look, the biggest gripe people have with Chi-Chi is that she makes her son do homework, which is dumb. She explains this a number of times: There’s more to life than fighting, and she wants that for her son. And Gohan’s not exactly worse off for her style of parenting.

I think the disconnect here is that people watch this show and they want to see Goku and Gohan screw around and go on adventures, and they feel like Chi-Chi is here to kill their buzz. I guess it’d be like watching a football game, and every so often some guy wanders out onto the field and scolds everyone for playing football. But that guy would be right, because football is dangerous, yo. Everybody keeps telling Chi-Chi that the only hope for the world involves her little boy getting his ass kicked by aliens, and she’s like “no, that’s bullshit,” and she’s absolutely right. She’s a saint for tolerating it as much as she does, but I think a lot of fans refuse to look at it from her point of view. They just want the fighting.

I remember Lanipator observing that he used to hate Mr. Satan when he was younger, but the older he got, the more and more he appreciated the character. I can’t relate to that, because I was old enough to drink when I started watching this show, so for me, there is no “when I was a kid” perspective on Dragon Ball. I thought Mr. Satan was awesome from the start, and I never had much of a problem with Chi-Chi either.

They did tend to overexpose both characters in the anime, cutting to them when they needed a filler moment to pad out an episode or five. So maybe that’s got something to do with it. But that’s not the fault of the characters. But yeah, if I was watching the Cell Games at age 10 I’d probably get really sick of them constantly cutting to Mr. Satan or Chi-Chi for analysis.

Favorite episode (scene if movie): It’s probably hard to top the one where she fought Goku. That was one of the last Chi-Chi moments I got to see, because I didn’t get caught up on OG Dragon Ball until 2004. It’s an excellent use of the character and her lengthy absence from the show. By the time she reappears, no one recognizes her, and she’s upset about being forgotten.

Favorite season/movie: I think I’d have to go with the Buu Saga, on the grounds that she got more time to shine, mainly due to so many other characters being unavailable. It was a real roller coaster ride for her too. Her husband’s dead and she’s raising two kids on her own, then he comes back, then he leaves again, and maybe Gohan’s dead too, and now Goten has to fight, and then she’s dead, and then they’re all back together in the end. Wild.

Favorite line: In the Cell Games Saga, there’s a TV show where Mr. Satan drags three buses onto the set, cuts a scathing promo on Cell, and then punches one of the buses to put an exclamation point on the whole thing. Wait, I take it back, I’m pretty sure 10yo me would have loved Mr. Satan.

Anyway the live audience is marking the fuck out for Mr. Satan, but at Kame House Yamcha and Krillin are unimpressed, because they punch holes in like fifty buses every morning as a warm-up. But in the dub of that episode, Roshi remarks that Mr. Satan’s theatrics are “sad”, and Chi-Chi goes “It sure is. Somebody could have used that bus.” Classic, total classic.

Favorite outfit: It’s hard to pick, honestly. I like the Buu Saga yellow, but I prefer the way her hair looked in the Saiyans Saga. And that outfit she wore near the end of DBZ was pretty great too.

OTP: Goku. come on.

Brotp: I think Bulma sort of stepped into that role after Trunks was born, but Chi-Chi seems like a loner to me. She basically rolled in, got Goku to marry her, and then retreated deep into the mountains to interact with as few people as possible. I need me a freak like that.

Head Canon: I think she’s genuinely proud of Goku and the boys being so great at super-karate-laser wars. She doesn’t talk about it much, because there’s plenty of other people to congratulate them on that sort of thing, and I think they sort of look to her for as someone who grounds their family.

To put it another way, I don’t think Goku wants Chi-Chi to talk a lot about the androids or the Saiyans or whatever. I think he wants someone to bother him with household matters and chores and ordinary stuff. And Gohan and Goten just want a regular mom to balance out their alien monomyth dad. And she plays that role well, because that’s who she is. But she’s still proud of them for saving the world and so forth.

Unpopular opinion: Chi-Chi was right.

Look, how was Gohan going to make a life for himself as a fighter, in a world where Goku and Vegeta have that market cornered?

Where’s he live? In a big-ass mansion. Why? Because he married a rich man’s daughter. Where’d he meet her? In the school Chi-Chi made him go to. How’d he get in to said school? He aced their entrance exams. How’d he do that? Chi-Chi made him study.

What does Goku do all day when he isn’t training? He drives a tractor? Why? Because his wife has a thing for farmer aesthetics. Why does he just do whatever his wife tells him? Because he didn’t study.

A wish: I wish all the Chi-Chi haters would stay out of my soup, because it’s salty enough as it is. (Heyoooo!)

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen: I’ve been seeing Manalorian spoilers lately, and I don’t want to give anything away, but it seems like every time something happens on Mando, all the chuds come out of the woodwork to complain about Episode VIII and/or IX. They’re like “thank you, Disney, for giving us the [Star Wars thing] that Disney refused to give us.”

My fear is that Star Wars has become balkanized into this thing where people praise half of it as fixing or undoing the damage caused by the other half. Used to be, people would either like the Ewoks or hate them, but they couldn’t ignore the fact that they were there. Now it’s like any movie that doesn’t feature Ewoks is done to cater to the anti-Ewok crowd, and any movie that does is solely for the purpose of keeping the pro-Ewok side engaged.

My point is that I worry that this will happen to all media franchises, and Dragon Ball Q will feature a Chi-Chi that gets turned into a hateful she-hag to satisfy the haters, and then Ultra Dragon Ball Deluxe will feature a more nuanced version of Chi-Chi as a make-good, thereby pissing off the haters. And they’ll go back and forth trying to please everyone while the character ends up becoming an incomprehensible mess from it.

5 words to best describe them: Adorable tiger mom/bus advocate.

My nickname for them: Cheech.

#ask duhragonball #dragon ball #chi chi #Anonymous

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duhragonball · 3 years

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Launch?

Give me a character and I will answer:

Why I like them: I think the main appeal to the character is that she doesn’t take any shit from anybody. The blue version of Launch is pretty passive, but she also knows that anyone who messes with her for too long is going to have to deal with the blonde version.

To go a little deeper, I think there’s an enigmatic quality to Launch that draws people in. We have no idea why she changes hair and personality when she sneezes, and we don’t know where she came from or what she was up to when she dropped out of the Dragon Ball story. This sort of ties into something I’ve always maintained about the Vegebul ship: the main fascination lies in how much we don’t know. The audience is left wanting answers, and has no choice but to invent those answers for themselves.

I decided to look for information on sneezing in Japanese culture, just to see if I could find some insight into the character. I had a hunch that there must be some figure of speech about a volatile person changing moods as often as they sneeze, or something like that. What I found instead was the superstition about a sneeze meaning that someone must be talking about you. I didn’t think this had anything to do with Launch, but then I found out the superstition goes a little deeper. If you sneeze once, then someone must be saying something nice about you, but if you sneeze twice, then someone’s saying something bad about you.

So that might be what Launch is based upon. When she sneezes, someone must be saying something nice about her, and she becomes nice in turn. But on the next sneeze, she turns bad, just as someone must be saying bad things about her. Really, though, she turns the whole superstition on its ear, because of all people, no one’s ever talking about her while she sneezes. They’re always watching her with breathless anticipation.

Anyway, I think it’s her lack of a coherent character arc that intrigues people. You can sort of piece something together, but nearly all of her appearances in the anime are filler scenes, so it’s almost a guarantee that you’ll be putting more thought into it than the writers. That scene where she’s working in a food truck could mean that she’s gotten her life in some kind of order, but with her, there’s really no telling.

Why I don’t: I find the lack of hard information about Launch frustrating at times. I feel like there’s some awesome throughline that I should be able to find that would define the character in some profound kind of way. Mark Waid could figure it out, I bet. I still need to read his run on Archie. He probably did some 4D-chess character study on Coach Kleats or something that would blow my mind. I’m sorry, this is supposed to be griping about Launch and instead I’m griping about how envious I am of Mark Waid. Uhhhh... I dunno, maybe she shouldn’t be stealing stuff all the time.

Favorite episode (scene if movie): I can’t think of anything better than the episode where she’s getting drunk over Tien’s death in the Saiyans Saga. It’s a great followup to their last encounter, where she wanted him to join her in robbing banks, and he wasn’t interested.

Death wasn’t that big a deal for TIen in the long run. He just ascended to the next plane and trained under King Kai, just like how he trained under Kami in the year leading up to the Saiyan invasion. But for Launch, it’s a big deal, because he’s finally gone somewhere she can’t follow. And at last, she begins to understand why Tien isn’t interested in stealing money.

And then... nothing. She shows up again at the end of the Kid Buu fight, giving zero indication as to what’s happened in between. What happened to her? You decide, because Mark Waid costs too much money to hire, and I sure got no clue.

Favorite season/movie: Probably the Tien Shinhan Saga by default, since her fascination with Tien is probably the biggest character development for her. And she figures into this weird glitch between the anime and the manga. See, the manga version of the 22nd Budokai is much shorter, so Launch never leaves the hospital after they take Yamcha there to deal with his broken leg. You don’t even see her until the final match, where she, Bulma, and Yamcha are listening to the play-by-play on the radio. But in the anime, the tournament is drawn out over a few days, and she watches all of Tien’s matches in person, and even attempts to murder Chiaotzu. So it’s a weird deal, which is perfect for Launch.

Favorite line: Probably the line where she explains what happens to her when she sneezes, since it’s the only concrete evidence that she’s aware of her double personalities. Blonde Launch sometimes goes “awww, no!” when she feels a sneeze coming on, but that could only mean that she hates sneezing, even without knowing what it means. But Blue Launch knows she has another self, which means the Blonde one must be aware of this as well.

Favorite outfit:

It gets no better than the black shirt and army surplus pants.

OTP: Tien. There’s so little we know about Launch, so I’m inclined to hang on for dear life to the one thing we do know, which is that she’s very interested in Tien.

Brotp: None. Launch is a very solitary character. She’s the wind.

Head Canon: Not really a headcanon, but a story idea that I couldn’t really work out, but I thought it might be interesting if Launch’s Launchness was like a physical condition that could be imparted upon other people. Like, Bulma gets it, and then she ends up alternating between robbing banks and standing around going “Oh my!” But I wasn’t sure I wanted to reduce the original Launch to that sort of explanation. “Oh, we know what causes this, and it’s something we can turn off.”

This may be why I struggle to come up with story ideas for Launch, because my impulse is to try to invent some neat and tidy explanation for Why She Is Like That, but doing such a thing would force me to choose one possibility and exclude any other, potentially better ideas.

Unpopular opinion: Toriyama forgot about her because there was really nowhere left to go with her at that point in the story. Once DBZ started, the story became less about Goku’s friends and more about Goku’s family, and Chi-Chi basically took Launch’s spot. She was introduced as a foil for Master Roshi, and then got a stint as Tien’s love interest, and then the series progressed to the point where Tien and Roshi were both afterthoughts, so of course Launch was going to become even more of an afterthought.

And this is okay, because this is what happens with supporting characters. Like I was saying, if she actually stuck around, and showed up in every “All-the-side-characters-watch-what’s-happening-on-TV” scene, I don’t think she’d be as interesting as she is with her long, mysterious disappearances.

A wish: I hope my next attempt to write Launch goes well.

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen: I don’t really have anything to put here.

5 words to best describe them: Enigma wrapped in a mystery.

My nickname for them: Ain’t got one.

#dragon ball #ask duhragonball #launch #lovelypurplefox

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