Gohan Quotes

Just before this he called the fight meaningless, and Cell laughed that he sounded just like his father. Cell has the family wrong. When Goku called a fight meaningless, on Namek, it was because a beaten Frieza was no longer worth fighting; Gohan means it before a blow is struck, and he is the only member of the household who does not want to be in the ring. He was first thrown into combat at four, when Piccolo took him away to train for a year, and the Saiyan arc, Namek and the androids all arrived while other people planned his future around his strength. Here he says plainly what he wants, and he says it to the enemy, because his father has just volunteered him. The line is soft, and its softness is the whole character: a gifted fighter who experiences his gift as an obligation. What follows is the franchise's grimmest joke about that. Once he is pushed past the point where he can refuse, he does not merely fight; he enjoys it.

Five episodes earlier this boy told Cell he had no desire to kill him. Now his father is shouting at him to finish Cell before he can regenerate, and Gohan declines because he would rather watch. The line commits him to the most expensive delay in the franchise. Cell, cornered, decides to blow himself up and take the Earth with him, and Goku teleports him away and dies in the blast. The cost is not only Goku. The same power that let Gohan outclass Cell produced the cruelty that cost his father's life, and the series never lets him have one without the other. When the story resumes seven years later he is a high school student who fights crime in a costume under a made-up name, and that distance reads differently once this moment is held in view: a boy who learned, at eleven, what he became the last time he let himself enjoy a fight.