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duhragonball · 1 year

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Dragon Ball Super Manga ch. 21-26

Phew! We’re almost done with the Zamasu Saga.

Last time, we left off with Trunks holding off Goku Black and Zamasu so that Goku and Vegeta could escape in the Time Machine. This is somewhat similar to what Trunks did to save them in Episode 62 of the DBS anime. Except they never bothered to explain how Trunks survived against such hopeless odds. Instead, in Episode 63, he just wakes up in a Resistance Bunker. No one explains how he got away from Black and Zamasu. It’s bullshit.

In the manga version, he gets rescued by the Shin and Gowasu of the “main” timeline. In Trunks’ timeline, all of the Supreme Kais are dead, but the “main” timeline versions can still travel to this world using their Time Rings. They can also teleport to any planet they wish, including this reality’s version of the Sacred World of the Kais in Universe 7. It’s deserted now, but they still know where it is, and it provides refuge for the good guys while they wait for Goku and Vegeta to return.

But why do they even need to wait for Goku and Vegeta? They used the Time Machine, so why don’t they just set the return coordinates for a few seconds after they left? Goku asks this very question, and Bulma tells him that it can’t work that way. I won’t get into the details because later it turns out Bulma was mistaken about this, but in this scene, she tells them that they have to “sync up” with the other timeline. Spending one day here means that they have to return one day later in the other timeline as well.

Tell you what, let’s just jump ahead to the ending, where Emperor Pilaf of all people figures out Bulma’s error. Presumably Future Bulma, the one who actually invented the time machine, understood this, but Present Bulma is still learning as she goes.

Oh, before I get too far ahead of myself, check out this goofy rendition of Trunks’ sword. It looks too wide in a lot of scenes, but in this one it’s like Toyotaro is trying to make it looks stupid on purpose. Aren’t swords easy to draw? Also, why is Mai wrapping her fingers around the blade like that?

One more thing, I appreciate Goku Black in this scene declaring that he doesn’t want to destroy the entire planet. He could wipe out all mortals very efficiently if he just blew up the planets they were standing on, but he wants to keep all the planets in tact. This was heavily implied in the anime, but they never came out and said so, which always frustrated me.

Here’s a scene of Black and Zamasu’s hideout, and it works a lot better than it did in the anime, because this scene shows them discussing their plans instead of just sipping tea and congratulating themselves. Because of Gowasu and Shin’s little rescue earlier, they’re concerned that their plans have been exposed to the gods of the other timelines. They’re worried that Grand Zeno might even catch wind of this, so their best bet is to leave this Earth and move on to a new base of operations. But they still want to finish off the remaining Earthlings before they leave.

See, this is excellent storytelling. The way the information is presented, we learn additional things about their plan. They could have wiped out the Earthlings some time ago. It’s not even hard for them, which is why they’re gonna knock it out in one afternoon before they leave. But like I mentioned in the last post, they’ve been using this Earth as a training ground to get Goku Black powered up and to practice for the more difficult work of invading the other timelines.

It’s also important to show that they’re actually concerned about something going wrong. Their Zero Mortals Plan isn’t foolproof. The only reason they were able to kill all the gods in this reality is because they had the element of surprise on their side, and because of that business where killing a Supreme Kai kills the Destroyer God and deactivates his Angel for free. But now that Gowasu and Shin are onto them, it’ll be a lot harder to get the drop on the other gods from here on out. Black and Zamasu are still confident about their plan, but they’re clearly troubled by this development.

This was something that was sorely lacking in the anime version, where Black and Zamasu were constantly making those smug little grins the entire time. They never worried about anything until Zamasu nearly got trapped by the Mafuba near the end of the arc. And if the villain is never inconvenienced, it makes the story kind of dull. Think about how troubled King Piccolo was when his children were killed, or how frightened he got when he thought Goku’s Kamehameha stance might be a Mafuba. Or how annoyed Frieza would get when he lost the Dragon Balls. Anime Zamasu never gives you any of that.

Anyway, their final push to kill the remaining Earthlings forces Trunks’ group to take action. Gowasu refuses to stand by and wait for Goku and Vegeta. Instead, he goes alone to appeal to Goku Black’s better nature, except Black has already murdered two other versions of Gowasu, so he has no problem doing it again. And there’s a scene like this in the anime, but this time Black actually gets to stab him, and Gowasu falls off a building. It’s pretty cool because:

1) It actually looks like he’s dead, because Black’s attack seriously hurt him, unlike all the times he stabs people in the anime and they’re fine.

2) It gives some karmic payback to Gowasu for failing to recognize the problem with Zamasu before it got this bad.

Gowasu isn’t a bad person, but he made a very grave mistake, and it’s unsatisfying how he never suffers any direct consquences for it. I mean, two other versions of Gowasu get murdered, but that’s a little too clean for my tastes. Those dead Gowasu’s don’t have to live with it. This Gowasu, who gets stabbed but survives, has something painful to remember this by. It’s much more satisfying this way.

So when Gowasu gets hurt, Trunks, Shin, and Mai return to Earth to save him, and not long after that, Goku and Vegeta return to pick up where they left off. This time, Goku has learned the Mafuba Technique to deal with Zamasu, while Vegeta trained in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber to counter Goku Black.

Vegeta’s strategy this time is to fight in the Super Saiyan God form, which is weaker than Blue, so Goku Black doesn’t understand the point. But as Goku explains, Vegeta has learned to control his powers more precisely, switching from SSG to Blue at the very instant he attacks. This way he gets the best of both worlds. Super Saiyan God is easier to maintain and a little more agile, so Vegeta can defend himself in that form, and then he only uses Blue in very small doses, getting all the raw power while minimizing the strain on his body.

This is similar to something Goku did against Hit in the previous arc, but he only managed to do it once, at the very end of their fight. Vegeta’s mastered the trick to the point where he can do it repeatedly. Again, this is way better than the anime, where Vegeta didn’t do anything differently after training in the Chamber. It was understood that he would be stronger than before, but there was nothing more to it than that. One fight he lost to Black, and now he’s winning. I hate to sound like a broken record, but the manga is just styling all over the anime here.

I’m not even saying this “Switching Between God and Blue” trick is a cool idea. I seem to remember fans disliking this when these chapters were published. But the point here is that it is an idea. It’s something new Vegeta does that he couldn’t do before, and that’s the in-story reason why he’s winning this time. He doesn’t have to invent a new transformation every time he trains, but he has to come up with something to explain his improvement, and this works.

Meanwhile, Goku actually gets to do the Mafuba, so that’s another win for the manga. Also, the gag with the talisman works a lot better in this version. In the anime, Goku forgot the talisman altogether. Here, he remembered to bring it, but he picked up the wrong piece of paper. The joke is less about Goku screwing up and more about him looking at the talisman and seeing a coupon for “Club Tight & Scanty”.

So this leads up to the Zamasu/Goku Black fusion, which works a lot better here, because Vegeta is handily kicking Black’s ass. Goku may not be able to seal Zamasu away like he planned, but he can definitely keep Zamasu contained long enough for Vegeta to kill Goku Black, and Zamasu won’t be able to carry out his plan alone. The anime borked that up by having Goku Black still have the upper hand, so they really only fused because Zamasu was rattled about the Mafuba.

So Goku and Vegeta fuse, right? Well, not right away. They have the Potara at their disposal, but they don’t want to go through with it. Goku asks Vegeta, but as soon as Vegeta refuses, Goku’s more relieved than anything else. Then while Goku fights alone, Vegeta hears Gowasu explain that Merged Zamasu should unfuse within an hour. See, in the anime he said Potara fusion is permanent only when a Kai is involved. But in the manga, it’s only permanent when a Supreme Kai is involved, and Zamasu never officially achieved that rank. He’s just a usurper, so his fusion has a time limit too. That gets Vegeta’s attention, and so does Trunks when he says he wants to join in the fight because he doesn’t want Vegeta getting hurt over this, because his mom really wanted to go back in time and see him again before she died.

So all of that changes Vegeta’s mind about the fusion, and that’s how we get Vegito in this version. I like that, because Goku and Vegeta have shown a reluctance to fuse in the past, and it’s a lot cooler to have Vegeta motivated by sentimental reasons than just “The bad guy is really strong, so we just gotta.” I like fusion, don’t get me wrong, but they need to sell me on it a little first.

So Vegito starts off by blowing off Zamasu’s right arm, which sets up a nice little homage to Cell getting Final Flashed. I think this is one of those scenes where fans whine about Toyotaro “tracing”, which is dumb as hell, because it’s clearly a callback. Of course he’s gonna do stuff like this. He’s a Dragon Ball fan working on a Dragon Ball comic. Comic book artists do this all the time. There’s probably a few thousand different tributes to the cover of Action Comics #1.

Vegito comes apart pretty quickly, and Zamasu works the boys over with Kachin metal blocks and that portals trick Janemba does. I get the Katchin thing, because Toyotaro probably played Budokai 2 where the Supreme Kai would throw blocks at people, and he wanted to use that move here. The portals thing... I don’t know. He definitely needed to do a new power just to show off Merged Zamasu’s on a different level, and this works for that, but it feels a little out of left field. I’m not sure what he should have used instead though, so I won’t complain too much.

So from the sidelines, Gowasu and Shin watch Goku and Vegeta getting clobbered, and they wish that they could help. Once, when they were apprentice Supreme Kais like Zamasu, they had healing powers of their own, but they had to give that ability up once they assumed the role of Supreme Kai. Then Trunks remembers that he was an Assistant Supreme Kai in a manner of speaking. Back when his own Supreme Kai was training him to fight Babidi and Dabura, there was a ritual Shin did for him, one that he didn’t understand at the time. As it turns out, that ritual was to give him the powers of an Assistant Kai, which included healing powers. Trunks just didn’t know about it until now, which is... kind of goofy, but okay.

So he can heal the others, but it turns out he only has enough power to heal one or the other, so he’ll have to choose. At first, Trunks goes with Vegeta, but Vegeta refuses. While he was fused with Goku, he realized that Goku has the power to win this fight, so that’s who he wants Trunks to heal up.

This part isn’t exactly brilliant, but it sure beats what they did in the anime after Vegito came apart, which was just having Trunks chop Zamasu in half using ki from a handful of ordinary civilians. I mean, if we’re choosing between two different asspulls, I’ll take the asspull that makes a little more sense.

So Goku gets healed and fights alone, and Vegeta explains how Goku managed to perfect the Super Saiyan Blue form, allowing himself to use Blue for sustained periods of time. And that works because this is the first time we’ve really gotten to see Goku fight at this level, but if he had this mastered already, why was he so impressed with Vegeta’s deal where he switched between God and Blue? Because that sounds like a workaround that Goku had already made obsolete.

Goku even manages to use Hakai against Zamasu, but he pulls Mai in the path of the attack so Goku has to back off. Again, a little goofy, but I can like with it.

The main thing here is that Goku didn’t get to do much in the first two-thirds of the arc, and that’s by design. You bring him out at the end so he can show off all his cool powers and everyone talks about how strong he is. Which means you have to do a lot of scenes where Goku is on the sidelines, or absent altogether. And this is nothing new. We’ve seen it in a lot of classic Dragon Ball arcs in the past, but Toei wants to go against that idea and put Goku all over the place. Well, they got their way in GT and they got their way in the anime version of the Zamasu arc, and both of those things sucked. This manga Zamasu arc has some problems, but it’s a lot more sound from a structural standpoint.

Does it make sense for Goku to be able to fight Merged Zamasu alone? Not really, but he doesn’t have to beat him, he just has to hold out long enough for the fusion to wear off, and it does. But it’s all weird because it was two Zamasus.

And that’s when Trunks chops them in half. See, this works so much better because Merged Zamasu was already starting to come apart anyway, so this is just Trunks delivering a final blow instead of inventing some new power from nothing.

But it’s not the end just yet, because each half grows back, and then the Goku Black half gets up from being impaled. How did he become immortal?

Then both of them regenerate into their Merged Zamasu forms, so now we have two Merged Zamasus. Vegeta does a Final Flash variation called “Gamma Burst Flash”, and that rips them both apart, but then the pieces grow into even more Zamasus, so we have this Sorcerer’s Apprentice thing going on.

Retreat isn’t an option either, because the Zamasus reveal that they have their own time machine. Remember that ancient civilization in Universe 12 who invented a time machine? Well, the Destroyer God from U12 kept it, and Zamasu found it . So he can use that device to invade the other timelines. Wait, how would Zamasu know how to operate an alien time machine? I mean, he’s not stupid, but still. For all he knows, it’s not even functional anymore, and there’s no tech support in Universe 12 because he killed everyone in it.

So Goku and Vegeta try to hold off this Zamasu army while the others escape. They have no idea what good it’ll do, but it’s better than nothing. I like Vegeta’s like here when Goku asks him if he has a plan. “Go wild until you die. That’s all.”

I also like how Goku’s only regret is that if he has to go out in a hopeless battle like this, he’d rather do it in Super Saiyan mode. Luffa would be touched.

But then he remembers his button that he got from Grand Zeno, and things pretty much play out like they did in Episode 67 of the anime. The entire timeline is erased, and in the manga, we see the Time Ring that represents this timeline vanish along with it. That kind of bugged me in the anime version, where Gowasu looks at his box of rings one last time at the end of the arc and all the rings are still there.

On the other hand, should the Time Ring vanish? Zeno didn’t erase the timeline, just the multiverse it contained. Is that the same thing? The history of that reality still exists, right? Then again, maybe it doesn’t matter, since the Time Rings can’t go back to the past, and now this timeline only has a past. So even if the history of that timeline remains, the Time Ring that goes with it is useless, so it might as well self-destruct.

Except Whis still has that plan to go back to the timeline before Grand Zeno destroyed everything in it, nip Zamasu in the bud, and drop off Trunks and Mai to live out their lives. This will create a new alternate timeline, but the fact that Whis can do this at all suggests that the Time Ring for that reality still needed to exist. Ah well, this whole business is pretty dumb anyway.

My head canon for all of this is that Whis dropped off this version of Trunks and Mai in the timeline where Xeno Trunks lives, and sometimes he’ll come home from Time Patrol duty and say hello to his blue-haired duplicate, an older, more traumatized version of himself who lives with his wife in some cabin out in the middle of nowhere. Blunks sees his mom now and again, but he and Mai keep to themselves for the most part, as they can’t quite feel like they truly belong in this world. But they have each other, and that’s enough.

But I can never figure out the timeline logistics to make that provable. It probably isn’t worth the trouble.

Anyway, Pilaf keeps asking Future Mai what happened to the Pilaf and Shu of that timeline, and she seems to know the answer, but she can’t bring herself to tell him the truth. I was sort of hoping Future Mai wouldn’t even know who Pilaf was, since the anime never bothered to establish this, but the manga makes it clear that this is the same Mai who we saw in the first DB arc in 1984. So whatever.

The thing is, Pilaf’s all worried because he doesn’t know what unspeakable fate awaits him, but for all we know, Mai just doesn’t want to tell him he died. I mean, everyone died in that timeline. It’s just a question of who killed Pilaf and when it happened. Maybe something else happened to him before he got killed, and that’s what Mai doesn’t want to talk about, but even if he lived right up to the end, he still would have died in that one shed Goku Black blew up.

Like I said, this arc is pretty damn morbid, and it bothers me how casually Toriyama brought back this alternate timeline just to eradicate it completely. He could have just... not brought it back, and that would have been the same as destroying it, but instead it’s like he went out of his way to do this arc just to burn the whole thing to the ground and piss on the ashes.

And we never really know for sure that Whis succeeds in his plan to relocate Trunks and Mai. This feels very much like when someone says they took your pet dog to a farm where they can run and play all day long. Maybe Whis just killed them in secret to wrap up the last loose ends. Or maybe he made a good faith effort and it just didnt’t work the way he expected. Or maybe it worked just fine, but Trunks couldn’t handle it and flipped out. It’s not fun to think about.

But it’s over now, and I’m pleased to say the manga version is a lot better than the anime, although I guess that’s not saying a whole lot. Good night, and fuck the Zamasu Saga forever.

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