“Just like any other human: a worthless shell.”
Piccolo Quotes
2 quotes from Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Read the character analysis and its source limits
Piccolo’s first confrontation with Raditz reveals a limit that measuring power cannot explain. After the visitor leaves, he admits that fear prevented him from moving. The licensed opening of Dragon Ball Z 2 then shows him responding to the larger threat by taking Gohan away to train. He explains the boy’s potential as a resource needed against the coming Saiyans, regenerates his injured arm, refuses to wait for parental permission and threatens anyone who interferes. Those actions make protection inseparable from coercion in this early relationship. Preparing a child to survive does not give the child a choice about the preparation. Nor does Piccolo’s recovery prove that he can solve the crisis alone: his own argument depends on Gohan’s undeveloped strength. This introduction reads the licensed openings of Z Volumes 1 and 2, before the later training and sacrifices; it does not use those later outcomes to excuse what the pages show here.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Gohan, I won't let you die alone out there. 'Cause kid, you were the first person to ever show me what it means to have a friend.”
Note what he does not promise. Not that the boy will live, not that he will save him, only that the dying, if it happens, will not be done unaccompanied. That is a smaller offer than any hero in this franchise usually makes and a more honest one, given the situation in front of them. Then he gives the reason, and it is an admission of a deficit rather than a declaration of affection. He is not saying the child is dear to him; he is saying he did not previously know the category existed and has been taught it against his will by someone too young to have intended the lesson. The pairing also shows what he thinks the actual horror is. Death he can treat as an operational fact; being alone for it is the thing he refuses to allow, which is a strange priority for a character introduced as a solitary demon and a coherent one for the man who kidnapped this boy at four and was changed by him. The franchise's most reliable move is handing its cruelest characters a child and letting the child do the work.
About Piccolo
Lines credited to Piccolo that we have checked
- Real — dub only “You'll laugh at your fears when you find out who you really are”
- Unverified “Gohan, you were my first friend.”
Guides
Around Dragon Ball
More from Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z
Read Piccolo's story from the start
Explore Dragon Ball in book form. Check the listing for the edition, language and volumes included. The source beside each quote records where its wording was checked; it may differ from the wording in this edition.
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Worth keeping on the record precisely because of who says it and how completely he stops meaning it. This is the character's starting position — a demon king's reincarnation who regards humanity as disposable and says so without heat, as an assessment. The franchise then spends a decade dismantling it, not through argument but through proximity: he takes on a child, the child does not leave, and the position becomes untenable by attrition rather than by persuasion. Redemption arcs usually turn on a revelation. This one turns on exposure. Nobody ever refutes what he says here. He simply spends enough time around the shells to stop being able to hold the sentence.