Dragon Ball Quotes

Delivered by a lecherous old man in sunglasses who trains children by making them deliver milk, which is the register the original series actually operates in and which almost nobody remembers. Dragon Ball was a gag comedy. The training is a joke, the master is a pervert, the tournaments are slapstick, and the boy at the centre is feral rather than heroic. Everything people mean when they say Dragon Ball (the screaming, the transformations, the hour-long charge-ups) belongs to the sequel. Worth stating plainly on a quote site, because the lines that survive from this era read oddly next to Z's, and the reason is not that they are worse. They are from a different genre.

She is, in the original run, correct. The comedy of early Dragon Ball is built substantially on adult men behaving appallingly toward a teenage girl, played as farce, and the joke is frequently at her expense rather than theirs. Reading it now is uncomfortable in ways the show did not intend and the discomfort is worth naming rather than editing around. What is notable is that she is the only character who ever objects. Everyone else in the setting treats the behaviour as weather. She keeps pointing at it, is overruled every time by the format, and goes on to be the most consequential non-combatant in the entire franchise — which the sequel understood better than the original ever did.

An instruction not to expect to win, issued by a teacher to students about to enter a tournament, and it is the opposite of what every subsequent series in this franchise teaches. Compare it against what the sequel does with the same institution: tournaments become the mechanism by which characters ascend, and expecting to win is the correct attitude because the plot rewards it. Here the tournament is a measuring device. You enter to find out where you are, you lose, you train, you come back. That is a workable model of improvement and it is the one the franchise abandoned, which is why the early arcs still feel like a sport and the later ones feel like an escalation.

The joke is that he is enormously vain, and the series knows. He is a self-declared turtle hermit with a reputation he tends carefully, sunglasses he never removes, and a habit of announcing his own legend. So the line functions on two levels at once: sound instruction, and a man who cannot follow it. What makes it worth keeping rather than laughing off is that the distinction he draws is real and specific — arrogance is not the same as confidence, and the difference is whether it survives contact with a better opponent. He is vain about his past and clear-eyed about his present, which is why he stops competing at exactly the right moment. Most characters in this franchise never learn that.

Delivered as a joke at a birthday party, which is the most improbable sentence in this franchise's history if you remember where these two started. He arrived as a genocidal prince who killed several people she knew. She is now needling him about his social life in front of company. The series never dramatises the transition. There is no scene where she forgives him, no reckoning, no conversation about the body count, and the absence is the interesting part. It simply cuts forward and lets a domestic joke carry the entire weight of it. Whether that is a failure of nerve or the most realistic thing about them is a genuine argument, and the franchise offers no help.

A complaint about appearances, from the only person in the early series who behaves as though the ordinary world still exists. That is her actual function and it is easy to miss because it is played as vanity. Everyone else in this cast is a martial artist, a hermit or a shapeshifting animal, operating under rules the audience is asked to accept. She is the one who wants a bath, a mirror and a hotel, and her insistence on those things is what keeps the early adventure grounded in a recognisable world rather than floating off into pure fantasy. The franchise loses this the moment it goes to space, and it never gets it back.