#it's real simple: is dolltaki in dragon ball super?

[duhragonball]

For the Dragonball numbered asklist, four and ten?

I got 10 in another ask, so I'm gonna save that one for later, just in case this one runs long.

4. Who is your least favorite character?

Dolltaki. No contest.

I'll see people talk about their least favorite characters, or characters they hate, and sometimes I question their reasoning. They'll be like:

"I love Dragon Ball, but gosh, I sure do hate Vegeta, because he's too overrated!"

or

"'Sup, guys, I'm a dudebro and I think DBZ is hella rad, but I hate that soycuck Yamcha, because he loses all the time!"

or

"Yes, I do love Dragon Ball, or Doragonboru as it was originally known. However, I am quite dismayed by Seru, or Cell, because it is well understood that Toriyama-sensei wanted to end the series after Frieza, and the Androids saga saw a marked decline in the comic overtones that made the story such a huge success."

or

"I enjoy Dragon Ball, but? Goku? Is stupid? Please get him out of the story uwu."

First of all, I don't get these kinds of people. I'm not trying to be a gatekeeper here, but this is like saying you love salad but hate lettuce. And sure, maybe it's possible to thread that needle, but maybe it's more likely that you need to rethink your position. You don't have to like Vegeta, and a lot of fans don't, but I don't think he's going away any time soon. Disliking the major characters is sort of like those people who think ketchup is too spicy, because they don't realize they're allergic to tomatoes. I rag on Frieza a lot, sure, but I can't deny the guy's appeal, and it's a lot of fun to watch him get beat up. If you're a Vegeta-hater that enjoys watching him lose, then great, you're going to get a lot out of this franchise. But if you resent Vegeta for taking up screentime that should be devoted to Launch, then I think you need to consider that this may not be for you.

Second of all, the people who pick major characters as their least favorite probably aren't looking hard enough. Dragon Ball GT, for example, is a treasury of shit-tier characters. If your top five list of worst DB characters doesn't include some GT guys, then you must have never watched GT, and I can absolutely understand that decision.

I've never seen full-throated support of Dragon Ball GT. People will argue over whether OG Dragon Ball is better than Z, but you never see anyone seriously suggesting that GT is better than both of them. At most, people will say "I'm a GT apologist, so..." or "Sure it has its flaws, but I kind of liked..." GT is always getting damned with faint praise. The big line I always see is that it had "some good ideas, but they were poorly executed."

Here's the idea behind Dolltaki: He looks like the skinny grey version of Majin Buu with a dumb toupee, and he turns people into dolls so he can feed them to a robot that somehow transmits energy to another robot, who feeds that energy to a slightly better villain. When he turns Pan into a doll, he loses all perspective, and becomes obsessed with dressing her doll-form up in different outfits. His boss orders him to feed Pan-doll to the robot, but he refuses to do it, because that's how infatuated he is with a doll he made of a nine-year-old girl.

The thing is, GT only ran for 64 episodes. Dolltaki was in five of them. And during that run, he was presented as the main antagonist. Sure, he was working for Dr. Myuu, but that conflict doesn't get set up until the next arc. Dolltaki is like a General White or Zarbon kind of figure. Except White and Zarbon are pretty cool for the limited time they're in the story. Dolltaki looks and acts and carries himself like a total dipshit, and he's the main boss of his run, so it just makes Goku and Trunks look like dipshits for having so much trouble with him.

I haven't even gotten into how creepy Dolltaki is. Like, what were they thinking with this guy? I guess he's supposed to be a parody of nerdy collectors who get way too into their Sailor Moon figurines, but how does that translate into a Dragon Ball villain? Also, when you depict a character like that and show long lingering scenes of him sweet talking a doll and getting excited about taking off its clothes, that starts to say a lot more about your show than whatever the character was supposed to be satirizing.

So maybe someone on the GT production staff had a weird fetish. That's a terrible reason to create a character like Dolltaki, but the alternative might be worse: There is no reason, they just slapped all this together to meet their deadlines, never once considering how much it sucked. A lot of GT feels that way to me, so maybe this Dolltaki is no different.

But man oh man does Dolltaki suck. He's cringy, and I don't mean that in a post-ironic way. Once upon a time, the word "cringe" actually meant something, and it was reserved for things like writing an entire professional resume in My-Little-Pony-speak, or comparing fandom discourse to real-world atrocities. Dolltaki is that kind of cringe. He serves no narrative purpose, except to make the line from the Para Para Brothers to Dr. Myuu more convoluted. So all the time he spends creeping on an immobilized Pan is just offensive drivel. It's the worst kind of filler, the kind that makes you regret watching he show in the first place. And that's why Dolltaki is my least favorite character.

But sure, Bulma is kind of pushy and obnoxious sometimes, so I can see why some people would pick her as their least favorite. 🙄

#ask duhragonball #dragon ball #dragon ball gt #really sucks #dolltaki #son pan #people used to be like 'oh dragon ball super is so bad it's even worse than gt' #the fuck it is #it's real simple: is dolltaki in dragon ball super? #no? #then dragon ball super is better than gt qed