#trumai

Trunks: She wouldn't even kiss me.

Sleeping Princess Mai🌹👑

I had enough of this.

Part I: About to be a problem

Shonen has a recurring problem with girls. Most series are built around training arcs, power ceilings, and tournament pacing: girls get written as motivators, mascots, or prizes rather than peer competitors. When romance shows up first and personhood second, it always feels glued on. When you write a person first and let romance (maybe) arrive later, it lands.

Look at Naruto for a quick lens. Sakura starts witty and promising, but gets pulled into orbit around Sasuke: there’s growth, but ship gravity dominates. Hinata is framed through a crush. Temari, by contrast, arrives as a competent character who moves plots: later Temari/Shikamaru works precisely because it grows out of parity and respect, not rescue.

DBZ was never trying to be a romance in the first place. Toriyama wrote momentum: danger → fight → aftermath. Relationships happen as fallout of arcs, not as the engine that drives them. That’s a big part of why Z holds up, the story doesn’t force courtship beats. It lets character change create them or not.

The classic DB pairs land because they were people first, romance later. Bulma and Vegeta work because Bulma’s competence, resources, and social gravity push Vegeta into human stakes: home, family, responsibility, while his pride pushes back on her control. Both bend and the change is reciprocal, not one-sided babysitting. Chi-Chi and Goku read as a clash of values, not damsel dynamics: early Chi-Chi is a fighter, and their conflict (domestic stability vs endless training) plays like character logic, not melodrama garnish. Videl and Gohan (my personal fav) begin as rival/friend: she calls him out, investigates him, forces honesty in the Great Saiyaman arc. Respect precedes intimacy: teamwork precedes romance. Even 18 and Krillin (while the chemistry is…. debatable) make sense on paper: 18 is written as a threat, then 16 refracts her humanity, and then Krillin’s choice not to kill her is a moral leverage, and post-Z he relies on her strength. So their relationship becomes partnership and not protector script.

DBZ’s female bench, honestly, is thin but telling. Bulma (brains, plot-driver) and 18 (fighter) are the consistent standouts. Videl starts perfect but then gets domesticated. Chi-Chi begins as a fighter, then gets boxed into “mom mode.” Pan in GT is no comment, feels like Super is an apology letter. So there’s no peer-age girl alongside Kid Trunks/Kid Goten and it becomes the net effect: the series proves it can write women who matter, but it rarely places them inside the day-to-day peer cohort where growth actually happens.

That missing peer is where the future problems start. When Kid Goten and Kid Trunks arrive, there’s no same-age girl in their core circle. That absence bakes in a boys-club loop (pranks, fusion, hijinks) with no internal counter-vector. Story-wise, that means fewer organic chances to challenge gendered assumptions inside the team, fewer varied matchups and training philosophies, and a pipeline where everything funnels into “two boys fuse” instead of “three peers solve differently.” Later installments inherit a structural vacancy and end up patching instead of building.

A girl in the trio would’ve fixed a lot, and it wouldn’t have required a single ship (and if it would IT WOULD WORK). Parity by default: a same-age half-Saiyan girl (Goten’s sister/Goku’s daughter if we are talking Trunks romance and Trunk's sister/Vegeta's daughter if we are talking Goten, although I disagree that Goten needs an equal in strength, because he is respectful to girls per se) gives the trio equal narrative mass. She wins some fights, loses others, just like the boys. The playground line “you’re a girl, you’re weaker” gets settled on the mat. Rotating leadership emerges naturally: sometimes her plan carries, sometimes theirs does, and a ledger of respect accumulates.

No damsel scripting from the outset also matters. Rescues become reciprocal and costly: the identity is “teammate,” not “cargo.” The team identity shifts to “three different ways to beat a problem,” not “two protectors plus a protected.” In-world modeling writes itself: there are goals and flaws independent of the boys. She gets wins without them and fails without them. That’s how you build a real arc. And canon even nudges this point later when Trunks sighs about “wanting a brother to train with” when Bra is born — it would’ve short-circuited that assumption from childhood. 18 already existed as proof that strength isn’t gendered: the missing piece was daily, peer-level proof inside the kids’ cohort.

Z still works, even with that gap, because Toriyama didn’t plan for Super. Z closes with futures left open. Trunks’ adulthood isn’t prescribed, which lets readers imagine rather than watch a retrofit. GT, for all its flaws, understands the value of leaving space, and the openness works because relationships weren’t shoehorned in to “complete” characters.

Bottom line: shonen tends to underwrite girls when it writes romance first and people second. DBZ mostly avoided that trap by not doing romance at all and when it did, it let parity and leverage drive it. The real missed opportunity wasn’t a ship. It was the absence of a same-age girl alongside Kid Goten and Kid Trunks. If she’d been there, parity, rivalry, and respect would’ve been normalized early, and later stories wouldn’t be patching a hole that never needed to exist.

Part II: THE problem 

The Trunks × Mai problem isn’t just the “age discourse” thing (although, don’t get me wrong, it’s creepy first and stupid second) — it’s the craft of the characters. Mai is an OG gag antagonist: Pilaf-gang henchwoman, in and out for shits and giggles. That’s her brand. In Battle of Gods, the de-aging works because it’s a Toriyama joke "they wished wrong again" king of thing. Super then literalizes the gag and quietly promotes Mai to plot-critical heroine without rebuilding her as a character. That’s where the wheels come off.

The setup implied a joke payoff: kid-crush Trunks vs. “surprise, that’s OG Mai actually in her 60s” is a classic Toriyama rug-pull, but then it turns... weird.

A huge chunk of DBZ/Super viewers never touched OG Dragon Ball. “Mai” isn’t a beloved deep cut: she’s a stranger suddenly treated like a lead. The show asks us to care because the script says she’s important, not because scenes prove she’s irreplaceable. If you can swap her with a random resistance OC in the future or a random school friend in the present timeline and nothing breaks, that’s a prop.

Future timeline. Mai more or less appears from nowhere and gets slotted as linchpin of tragedy/romance. Depending on which version you hold, we get contradictions — “met as adults” in the anime (they never explained where she came from) and they met as babies in the manga (???? where was she in the Z arc). Why the hell should I care for a character that is just... there. It was given to us like oh by the way: there's an apocalypse (again the repetition of these arcs... don't get me started on Super arcs in general, I have a lot of things to say) and Mai is here with Trunks, they are close, see how cute they are. And the worst thing is, they do this exclusively because of the plot that Mai was de-aged in the present timeline. This romance line is trying to feed to us the idea that Trunks and Mai are destined to be with each other. And it's the idea that kid Trunks gets as well — oh, so we are together in the Future, so we should be together too. It feels cheap — they showed her twice in the previous arcs: as a joke first, and then as a blushing girl second — and then shoved the idea to the viewers that oh yeah, this is happening now. It's fast-paced and absolutely stupid. I cannot remember a single thing about Mai (and this tells, because I am usually pretty good at remembering good characters), only that she serves a purpose to be saved, again and again and again. A good way to write characters indeed.

Don't get me wrong, Mai has her moments in the Black Saga, I don't hate her future version per se. But I just wished we actually got to see more of them to care, and I really wished that their “couple” (which again I could enjoy their chemistry AS FRIENDS) wasn't a forced plot device to move the romance forward for their present counterparts.

BUT

The present timeline is where it gets weirder. The text leans into a forced Bulma/Vegeta 2.0 silhouette: tech girl + fists boy. Except Trunks is Bulma’s son and Capsule heir and making him tech-illiterate just to justify a Bulma-shaped partner is mischaracterization for a ship. It doesn't make any sense, in Z he is good with tech, hell, his future-self operates a time machine. Meanwhile Mai isn’t written with Bulma’s spine, she isn't written as a character point blank. So we get a shape: Trunks simps, Mai toggles between stoic operator and damsel set piece because the writers can’t decide what she’s for because she morphs as the plot demands. She could work as an addition, as a friend — make her reveal that she used to be old, it could show an interesting dynamic, an older anchor to the chaotic duo of Goten and Trunks, a woman trapped into a girl's body. The oh god I just want some peace and quiet trope. It could still be a gag, but don't make her sole purpose a romance. Don't give her romance point blank and especially not with a 16 yo. She has some nice character shots here and there — during the android shenanigans she acts like an adult and it's nice, but then the next thing you know Trunks is simping over her (which if you ask me is OOC) and she needs saving.

About the age thing: yes, it’s weird as fuck. Lines like “you’re the only Trunks I have” or “I’ll wait until you grow into him (Future Trunks)” land with hard dissonance, almost groomer-coded.

Even if you bracket the de-aging unease (fantasy has immortals/vampires), the text’s handling of time/memory/identity is very VERY muddled.

There's this nature vs nurture thing going on I really don't like.

We’re told “her mind de-aged too,” then watch her slip into old-woman cadence and Bulma literally calls it out. If Mai retains adult memories and life experience, doesn't that make her, like.... AN ADULT? If she retains adult memories, life history, and habits, that’s psychological continuity and the core of adulthood. She talks like an old woman, references adult context, and makes adult decisions. That’s not a blank-slate teenager. That’s an adult in a younger body.

Nature (body/biochemistry): her body is younger.

Nurture (memory/socialization): her mindset was shaped by decades of living. If those memories are intact, her worldview, ethics, and strategies are adult-coded.

You can’t claim “mind de-aged” and then let her speak, plan, and recall like a 40–60-year-old. Either she lost that scaffolding (and needs to relearn life), or she didn’t (and remains adult).

If she keeps adult memory/experience then treat her as an adult in a teen body. That makes the “waiting for you to grow into Future Trunks” lines creepy and narratively incoherent. If she loses adult memory/experience then she’s effectively a new person. Then the plot can’t lean on her adult aura. You don’t get both.

(Also: how did Bulma not clock that this is Mai? This can't be real.)

Super wants the cute de-aged gag and the gravitas of a seasoned partner: the result is a character who reads contradictory from scene to scene and that incoherence bleeds straight into the romance.

Chemistry is a craft problem, not a vibes debate. On page, chemistry = friction + leverage + shared decisions that alter outcomes. With Mai, we mostly get tell-don’t-show. She receives stakes more than she shapes them. Scenes reward Trunks for saving, not for changing. That traps him in Prince-Charming/Protector mode and keeps her framed as cargo when the story needs a push, then as quippy operator when it needs a mask. Hat-swapping is not an arc spine.

Zoom out and you see the structural corner: Super is paying for the kid-era miss. DBZ never seeded a same-age girl in the Goten/Trunks cohort, so when the franchise later wanted a ship for a fan-favorite, the bench was empty. And don’t even get me started on Goten who got side-lined. Hell, even a new compelling original character would fit into it, make it interesting. Instead we get a Videl/Gohan secret identity treatment, but then Trunks leaves Mai out of the Saiyaman story, which doesn't make any sense too. But I see what they are trying to do here and screenshot it: there is going to be a reveal to Mai that oh the super-hero was Trunks all along, her saviour, and then she's going to fall in love. Ugh.

I will die on this hill: Trunks needs an equal (strength or wit OR IDEALY BOTH). He needs a partner for a reality check. I will keep talking about the missed opportunity of having a same age Son girl, it’s scandalous! Give the boy a Saiyan girl, dammit! I loved his character in Z: he was a cocky and spoiled bastard. Where is that character? You telling me Trunks who fought Buu is the same Trunks who is simping and scared of ghosts? Toyotaro dropped his IQ by two hundred and for what? For a ship with Mai? This is not Trunks, this is Slippers.

So instead of building a new main-cast girl with parity (strength or wit), or leaving Trunks unpaired like End of Z/GT wisely did, the show promoted a legacy gag and hoped nostalgia would carry it. It didn’t. Importance by decree isn’t the same as importance earned on the board.

Trunks/Mai reads like what it is: a retrofit and a cosplay of Bulma/Vegeta shape without the engine that made it sing: parity, leverage and reciprocal transformation. And a cosplay of Videl/Gohan super-hero story line.

And don’t get me wrong — I like Mai in OG Dragon Ball, hell I don't have anything against her in the Future timeline. If only Toyotaro didn't make her a romance interest to Trunks or any teens in the story, if only she just stayed a friend, weird and old, it would slap. The potential that we could've had, the internal existential dread of being a kid again, chef's kiss. But why, for the love of the gods, did she need to be grafted onto the main present story like this and as a romance interest for a teen? It’s lazy writing at its peak: recycling an old character for the sake of a romance checkbox.

Thank you listening to my TED talk, I really needed to get that out of my system. I’ve been in this godforsaken fandom for 18 years, I had a lot to say.

“…and if you don’t hand over the Dragon Balls…I’ll SHOOT HIM!!!”