“Afterimage Technique (残像拳 - Zanzōken) is an ability to move so swiftly that an image of the user is left behind.” -Dragon Ball Wiki

Where to start with this? How to tackle something like Dragon Ball Z?

Do I have to start in 1996? Eleven years old and laying on the floor, eyes wide as Goku falls to the ground dead. What was this thing that mixed the tropes of space operas, martial arts epics, and superhero stories? What was this show, immediately gesturing towards a long history that I had no context for (beyond, of course, the fan art sent into publications like Electronic Gaming Monthly.)

Can I instead start at the lunch room table? Cracking voices. Arguments about who would in a fight. Dragon Ball Z wasn’t like anything little black boys like us had seen before. There was a budding Orientalism in us: An exoticization of these images and stories that weren’t from here. Magazine articles and school yard rumors connected DBZ to distant cultures: Journey to the West, Eastern Philosophy, martial arts. But, in our defense, we didn’t have cartoons showing where we were really from, either. Nothing with heroes that looked like us. So while Dragon Ball Z was hardly a black cartoon, it felt as cordoned away and distant from our white friends as it did from us. We were all outside, looking in at Goku.

Or, should I start instead in that little, claustrophobic anime shop, in the basement of that building in Chinatown? A tiny, glass-walled cubby in an underground mall. Packed floor to ceiling with VHS tapes featuring amateur translations of anime I’d never heard of. Plus figures and models and wall scrolls and and and… The whole room felt like it could fall over at any moment. It didn’t keep regular hours–it didn’t need to, the rumor was. That’s how good business was. I waited in line forever–open silk screen button ups and black tees. I felt a little ashamed that I was into the big anime that had gone mainstream. The dude who ran the place didn’t mind, of course. “These are the DBZ movies I have.” A gesture. I pointed at one and asked if that was the one with Trunks in it? It was.

Or should I move forward in time? Should I start at the strange excitement I had when I first read about the latest Dragon Ball game, Xenoverse? About the quiet smile I found at the prospect of creating my own characters and sending them through the DBZ timeline? I emitted a little, intrigued “Huh,” when I read that instead of simply repeating the same old stories, players would move through an altered timeline of the Dragon Ball universe, trying to track down a set of villains who were mucking up history.

Wait, instead, can I start instead in Freshman year of High School? 14 now. For our first assignment in English class, we were asked to write about an artist who meant a lot to us. You know where this is going: I chose Akira Toriyama, creator and character designer for Dragon Ball and its many offshoots. In the paper, I explained that when I was young I’d had a serious problem with anger, and that Dragon Ball Z had encouraged me to get into the martial arts: Karate and then Tae Kwon Do. And that wasn’t a lie, really… But mostly I wanted an excuse to type the words “Dragon Ball Z is important to me” on a piece of paper. I wanted to make it count for something.

No. Wait. Do I start with me in my dad’s car, legal pad in hand, scribbling out notes? Yeah. That’s where to start.

Dream Bout



I spent a lot of time growing up in and around malls, and that meant getting to know the folks who ran the nearby game stores. Folks like Wesley, an assistant manager at one of the multiple EB Games in the largest mall near me. Wes was great, not least of all because I could so easily see myself in him: Here’s a chubby black guy with glasses (like me!) who I could talk to about anime and RPGs and fighting games. And it was on some afternoon, with a modded PS1 sitting on the counter and a strange Dragon Ball game I’d never seen before, when Wes introduced me to the idea of importing games from Japan.

The first and only DBZ game that I’d played until then was Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout, a PS1 fighter filled with characters I didn’t recognize. DBGT was the follow up to DBZ, and I’d heard little about it and seen even less. Beyond the unfamiliarity, though, Final Bout just didn’t feel like Dragon Ball to me.

Fights in the DBZ anime were dynamic, with characters zipping across the sky, clashing for a moment, and then rolling away across a sprawling expanse. Punches and kicks were exchanged in a series rapid blows or crushing slams. DBZ’s fights could carry on forever since there was never anything as discrete as a life bar. And, because of the serialized nature of the show, even failure never really meant failure.

But Final Bout was a fighting game, and a fighting game needed to be cleaner, more mechanical than anime. So Final Bout had rounds and meters. Its fights couldn’t last more than a few minutes at most, and the stages were constrained. Dragon Ball games have struggled with these things for decades now, some doing better than others. But of the many I’ve played, none have captured the spirit of the show like the game Wes showed me that afternoon, Dragon Ball Z: Legends.

Legends was also a fighting game, so it too had meters and life bars. But the fields of play were the expansive wilds of the show, dotted with trees and rocks and mountains, all ready to be blasted apart. You moved across this land (and through the sky above it) relationally: Instead of flying up, or left, or right, you targeted an enemy and then decided to advance or retreat, leaving a glowing trail in the sky no matter which way you went. When combat finally unfolded, you’d throw a flurry of attacks with a single button press, and then knock your opponent away before giving chase. None of these attacks did damage, either. In Legends, landing a solid hit just shifted the “balance of power” until, finally, you push over the edge and release a special attack, taking a chunk out of your opponent’s health. It mirrored the predictable rhythms and garish ballet of the anime and I loved it the second I saw it.

A month later I had a modded PS1, and started importing games. Dragon Ball games. Fire Pro Wrestling games. Mecha games. I blew through the cash I made cleaning the racks in my dad’s store.

Two months later, I was in the car jotting down my idea on that yellow legal pad. So many of the games I loved had character creation: why not Dragon Ball Z? If I could make a masked Japanese wrestler and give him the Stone Cold Stunner, why couldn’t I just take Piccolo, the stern green alien, color him red and give him the special abilities of one of the show’s major antagonists? It was the sort of dream game that reveals how little teen-me knew about game development, but it also betrayed a deeper desire, and one that didn’t exist only for me. It was great to have this strange, new media: but I wanted to make it mine.

“Black Saiyan” by Shakira Rivers

Fear of a Black Super Saiyan



Wanting to put my mark on DBZ wasn’t only about race, but whatever else it was, it was also about race.

Blackness in DBZ was a troubled thing. Even 11 year old Austin, on that living room floor, felt uncomfortable when Mr. Popo was on the screen. And just last night, 29 year old Austin cringed when he read that Funimation, the company that dubs DBZ into English, added new dialog “like ‘Who blasted mah blast!?’ and 'Okay… let’s dance’ with a 'pimp’ or 'gangster’ accent,” to a character who had previously only been a visual stereotype.

It isn’t just these representational problems that make race an interesting lens critique Dragon Ball with. It’s also through the my adult understanding of racialization that I realize now that there may have been reasons that young Austin claimed Piccolo as his favorite character, besides his devastating special attacks and cool demeanor. Piccolo, the green man who starts the series with no knowledge of his birth planet, and then spends much of the first half of the series trying to work out his roots. The alien who, in an act of parental miscegenation, raises and trains Goku’s child—even instilling in him a sense of fashion that evoked a cartoonish adaptation of traditional Middle and South East Asian clothing.

The black fandom of DBZ (and other anime) spills out into broader culture, with a ream of implications. What should I make of the fact that, when I was searching for videos of Dragon Ball Xenoverse’s new character creation system, I found so many comments from black fans, excited to be able to make themselves in the game? I think the answer is found in another question: How should we understand the popular YouTube video “Super Saiyans are Real”?

In the video, a boy named Jalen recounts years of self-doubt: “How come I’m just a human being? I’m so worthless.” He explains his desire to be a Saiyan—the race of galactic super-warriors at the center of Dragon Ball Z. He wants to be stronger, better. And he knows the viewer does too. He assures us that “all of that is possible, and more. It’s all in here.” He points to his head. Jalen tells us that he believes he can be a Super Saiyan, and that this is the first time he’s “exposed” this side of him to the world. He reaches out and turns on the music from the show—it’s quiet, tinny over laptop speakers. Jalen shudders and shouts into the camera for two minutes, duplicating the sounds and intensity of those climactic transformations, shameless, alone, on his living room floor.

“Super Saiyans are Real” doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists against the comments on articles arguing that black people should only cosplay as characters that “make sense” for us; against a culture that says that black aggression is dangerous in a way that other (even structural) aggressions aren’t. “Super Saiyans are Real” even exists against its own future: After Jalen removed the video from YouTube, it circulated with the new “comedy” tag, and with titles like “Black Kid Goes Super Saiyan,” explicitly announcing what the real spectacle was. Many of these videos just include the shouting and screaming. Jalen’s lecture on self-confidence left on the cutting room floor.

Is it any wonder that we want to be Super Saiyans? The story goes that when pressed hard enough, Saiyans that are pure of heart gain the power to resist domination and oppression, to save those they love, and violently stop those who do wrong. It is about wielding power justly, but still wielding it. This is not only a black American desire, obviously—power fantasy narratives appeal globally, and to those with power, too. But it helps to explain this specific attraction: In a culture that has told us that our particular situation should never turn to violence, no matter how many of our bodies are on the ground, or how much tear gas is used in our neighborhoods, we feel limited by the demands made on our black bodies. Our wool hair and dark eyes. But a Super Saiyan’s hair stands straight up, and turns from black to bright blonde. Their eyes lighten to blue or green. Suddenly they can dish out damage with the same strength that their opposition can. Is there any wonder that those comments express excitement for the ability to play as a Black Saiyan in Dragon Ball Xenoverse?

I share their excitement. I’m counting the hours. Me, who writes cynically about the state of the industry. I cannot wait to feel like I’ve tilted Dragon Ball Z towards my vision of it, however slightly, however privately.

Final Flash



How to end this? Even now I’m panicked. Fifteen years later and I’m still just looking for an excuse to write “Dragon Ball Z is important to me.” I want to justify the attention I spent as a boy on this thing. Where to go from here? What to say to reach a state of ease?

Because there is more, so much more, in Dragon Ball Z. Even though it’s using well-worn stock borrowed from other genre works: androids and aliens, resurrection stories, time travel. It deploys these things in ways that could be given more attention.

Should I write about how Dragon Ball Z—a show where the eponymous “Dragon Balls” and a set of wish-granting dragons offer the mundane (money), the mystical (more life), and the absurd (underwear)—reminds us that conflicts will remain in a post scarcity world?

Or I could address the series’ obsession with body horror. I could think through how the bodies of each of the major antagonists changes in “unnatural” ways, shifting in shape and size. What to make of this “villainous” mode of self-modification, especially set against the heroic transformations of the heroes? Is the answer in the way the villains absorb the strength of others or reveal a power deceptively hidden, while the heroes work hard to access their inner depths? What is the implication there?

Or should I celebrate the way that Dragon Ball valorizes the dissolution of the self? How time and again, heroes are forced to join up—literally, physically join with their rivals to become a new flesh?

Or should I address the notion of genocide, what Foucault calls “the dream of modern power?” Should I zero in on these moments, when the whole world is at risk? When, in one translation, supporting character Krillin observes of one of the series’ major clashes that “They’re gonna change the shape of the whole planet.” Do I devote another two pages analyzing the shift in tone, as the notion of genocide moves from dramatic impossibility to the mundane and fixable?

Or do I talk about masculinity? Or the quiet, un-addressed issue of reproductive labor—the many women in Dragon Ball who were positioned as nags who just don’t understand their warrior boys, and whose work was diminished again and again?

My body wants to keep going, to keep the critical eye on. But I know I shouldn’t commit to giving them any more than a glimpse. I deserve to just let it lie. To just enjoy this thing. I’m a few months away from turning 30, and here I am writing an essay that started forming when I was half my age, if not earlier. I’ve addressed the bits I can’t help but address, but the rest can wait.

Not every desire, I realize now, must be immediately rendered productive (or public.) Some desires ought to just stand like little walls, 15 years high, waiting to be climbed.

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