More DB questions. A couple are asking about Watsonian explanations for things, I hope that's OK. Gonna try to ask fewer questions.
-How did the Namekians almost get wiped out by a drought of all things? They have Dragonballs! They could just wish for water!
-So, the Hercule bits of the Cell Saga require basically handwaving a lot of DB Classic, since itâs absurd that a Budokai Champion wouldnât know who any of these people are, or about Ki attacks, etc. etc. But then in the Early part of the Buu Saga, they keep bringing it up! How is THAT supposed to work?
-I cannot articulate why, but it bugs me that despite it being established that it required Kami doingâŚsomething to Goku to keep his tail from growing back and this never being repeated, Vegetaâs tail never grows back, Gohanâs tail doesnât grow back a second time, Trunks and Goten and the Universe 6 Saiyans havenât got them at all, etc. Am I nuts?
-So, hey if someone had told Goku about the whole oozaru thing, surely he wouldâve been able to figure out how to control it, yeah? I mean itâs implied that all three of the PTO Saiyans could do it, and if dimbulbs like Radtiz and Nappa could figure it outâŚ
-Is it just me, or does Bulmaâs mom keep trying to flirt with Goku?
-I call bullshit on the opening of the Tournament of Power. I can buy Frieza and Vegeta to ignore the âwe win through teamworkâ plan in favor of individual glory, but not Goku. Am I wrong?
-So, uh, I can see the Butterfly Effect via Cell and Trunks arrival causing Gero to do different things, but how does it result in 17 and 18 having completely different personalities?
IIRC, it was more than a drought. Namek was wracked by cataclysmic climate change, resulting in violent storms, unruly weather patterns, and yes, a drought. This is the reason for why Namek has such a boring landscape; The planet is just a few steps removed from an utterly lifeless barren rock, largely thanks to the work of SaichĹrĹ's offspring.
Namek, when we see it, is essentially in the process of being re-terraformed back to the ecosystem it once held.
As for why they couldn't fix the climate crisis with the Dragon Balls, there are two possibilities that come to mind.
One is that fixing a fractured ecosystem may have been too advanced for Porunga, similar to the way reverting 17 and 18 to full unmodified humans was too advanced for Shenron.
The other is that they may simply have lost the Dragon Balls in the chaos.
The Namekians keep the Dragon Balls separated in different villages across their planet, with those who seek the balls having to undertake a pilgrimage to seek approval from each village's leader. Obviously, for a disaster of this scale, such a wish would not be difficult to approve.
But if even one of those villages happened to be swallowed by an earthquake or ripped apart by a tornado and their Dragon Ball was lost? Goodbye, Porunga.
The 24th Tenkaichi Budokai didn't take place until after the Cell Games. Mr. Satan was considered the world martial arts champion going into the Cell Games, but not because of that tournament. At the time of the Cell Games, the Tenkaichi Budokai was a defunct old tournament that had been cancelled for over a decade.
Add on however many more years between the Cell Games and the 24th, so probably a good 12 to 15 years between Goku and Piccolo's fateful battle and the day Mr. Satan and his rival Jewel met in the ring for the final match of the 24th Tenkaichi Budokai.
By the time the 24th took place, Mr. Satan had already established himself as the hero who defeated Cell, and he had "revealed" that all the flying and laser stuff in the Cell Games battles were tool-assisted tricks. For people who only have a passing knowledge of past Tenkaichi Budokais, it's not hard to believe that the flying and laser shows there were the same kind of thing. Especially if the Earth's hero is saying it.
Some people who were present at the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd all those years ago may not buy into Mr. Satan's rhetoric.
But that's a scant minority.
The Dragon Ball public is generally not very well informed about things that happen. In fact, to date, all anyone even knows about Piccolo Day is that a mysterious young boy showed up, killed Piccolo, and then vanished into the aether never to be heard from again.
The Tenkaichi Budokai is the most public demonstration of the protagonists' abilities, and it's an obscure martial arts tournament from over a decade ago with a ~$2,000-$2,500 cash prize (the exchange rate for 500,000 yen in 1984 dollars).
Even among the crowd, the Venn Diagram of people who were invested in a hobby 12-15 years ago and people who are invested in it today is usually not a circle. You might have some diehards in the audience, but you'll also have a lot of people who are showing up to their very first martial arts tournament just to see Mr. Satan in action, or going "Sure, why not?" because it sounds neat.
No, that bugs me too. It's clear that after a certain point, Toriyama just didn't want to deal with the Ĺzaru anymore. So everyone lost their tails and the tails were never spoken of again.
Probably, yes. If he understood the Ĺzaru and put in the effort, it's likely that Goku could master that form in ways that put Raditz, Nappa, and even Vegeta to shame.
Even Gohan demonstrates some level of conscious awareness of himself in that form.
And if five-year-old Gohan could learn to direct his Ĺzaru fury to productive ends, one can only imagine the wonders Goku could have done had he been given the chance to truly train and master this part of himself.
TeamFourStar has a joke about Bulma's parents being swingers, and it might surprise you to know that this might be canon.
It's possible that they're both just giving Bulma shit for going out Dragon Ball hunting and coming back with a desert hobo. But they might also be entirely sincere.
There are many issues with Dragon Ball Super's characterization of Goku. So, so many.
In general, the Android arc is the jankiest of anything Toriyama ever wrote. It's full of weird narrative gaps and thinks that don't make sense. When Cell killed Trunks and took his Time Machine, Trunks was planning to go back in time and tell everyone that he defeated the Androids. So why was his machine set for one year prior to his first meeting with them?
But this, I think, we can credit more to the passage of time than to being a plot hole. The 17 and 18 of Trunks's timeline are not the same people as the 17 and 18 of the present. They are those people after 17 years of indulging themselves in unstoppable mayhem and slaughter. They are a 17 and 18 whose hands are drenched in blood and who've had time to really settle with the idea that this is what they want for themselves.
The 17 and 18 of the Android arc are a 17 and 18 who are still figuring out who they are and what to do with themselves. Left to their own devices, their tremendous power and lack of moral guidance would probably pull them down that same road. And after killing Goku, two decades of slaughtering cities and blowing things up for fun would forge them into the same kinds of people as their Future selves.
But in their youth, before they settled into their ways, they got the opportunity to take a different path, and so never became that version of themselves.
