2009-03-18, 01:14 PM
(This post was last modified: 2009-03-18, 01:18 PM by IllegallySane.)
Quantact Wrote:I haven't watched DBZ for a long time, and I played Chrono Trigger a long time ago.
The answer to all these questions is that humanity has a morbid fascination with evil and an unspoken wish to be able to do it. The answer to why is very long, but they are seen as "overmen," breaking society's rules, which makes them "cool" and "strong." More explicitly, there's a side to almost everyone that wishes to kill his enemies and trample the bonds society has over him. Ted Bundy, who raped and murdered a lot of women, got a lot of marriage proposals on death row. The character of Hannibal fascinates a lot of viewers of his movie, though the creator said the cahracter was meant to be distasteful, and the creator was horrified with the way the viewers came to see him. Bonnie and Clyde, who were robbers and murderers were regarded as a sort of folk heroes. During Hurricane Katrina, order broke down in New Orleans to be replaced by a dog-eat-dog caveman atmosphere. More ominously, in multiple societies complex factors change "normal" people into perpetrators of genocide. Look up Milgram Experiment or Stanford Prison Experiment for psychological test validation of that. When you're given orders by unethical leadership, when you are subjected to peer pressure to do unethical things, when you think you will be punished if you do not do unethical things or if you get rewards for doing unethical things -- and teh government itself is unethical, the enemies of the state are dehumanized, and then murdered. A variant on that explains every genocide in history. Of course nobody here thinks it could happen to them, but under the right circumstances it could. People have some differences between each other, but a lot of things are very similar, especially in teh basic functions of logic and emotion.
I think cheering for Vegeta or Magus (or any other bad guy) stems from all this stuff. I used to like the characters of Magus and Vegeta because they represented "redemption" from evil. In Magus's case this is borderline tenable, but Vegeta blew up a fuucking planet. I was a little kid fascinated by the big macho tough guy. Now I have enough confidence to realize that people like him should have bullets in their heads, and their corpses should be tossed in a ditch. I am sorry, but you cannot rehabilitate a Nazi concentration camp guard or a Khmer Rouge thug with a gun. Killing defenseless civilians defies teh laws of civilization; there's an appeal to breaking such rules... and often punishment. Very well deserved punishment.
Ok, you're REALLY looking into this too much. They're fictional characters. They're not meant to follow the rules so tightly. What difference does it make if Magus killed a country's worth of people and Vegeta killed a planet's worth? Am I now supposed to hate Darth Vader with a passion? Am I supposed to now want Hannibal Lecter hanged instead of imprisoned? Should I now be on a manhunt for the Joker? Should I have had the Riddler dead instead of having him help the police force using his brilliant mind?? They're fictional for a reason: they're meant to entertain people.
Spaz Wrote:I'm not surprised that a DBZ fan thought a 70 minute movie was too short. I mean, that's not even enough time for two characters to stop staring at each other. </cheap shot>
The only reason DBZ is stretched is because at the time the show was made they were forced to make new material because the manga was not completed at the time; i.e. the author was writing new chapters as the animators were simultaneously trying to make new episodes. Thus, forcing what should only be 5 minutes take up a whole episode.
The average DBZ movie is ~40-60 minutes, the longest being 71 minutes. I can bet you they still have more action and depth than this piece of crap that is a live action produced by FOX.