Why Did Dragonball Succeed With No Tension?

More often than not my ideas for blog posts come from a one-off statement made during a previous post, in this case it's my latest Arrow review where i made an off-handed comment about how Dragonball Z had no tension, which is true when you think about it. Dragonball Z is one of those rare shows that despite being filled with problems, issues, errors and mistakes, in fact so much to the point where if i went indepth on the series i would probably find more flaws than positives, i still love it, everyone still loves it, even hardcore anime fans at the very least respect it, and they're one of the whiniest fanbases out there. So even though there are plenty of problems out there that I could talk about, let's take just one of them out for a spin, in this case it would be how the show had no tension.

If you've never seen Dragonball Z, the premise for each story arc was fairly simple, there would be a bad guy who wants to destroy the world, that's it. So usually our heroes would be too weak to fight them, they'd go off and train, become stronger and eventually win. Except here's the big issue, death has no value in the show. Our heroes always have access to the Dragonballs that can grant any wish and after every battle they would wish all the damage done by the villain was undone, hell, they once wished an entire planet to be restored! All of this meaning like the villain never existed. Which means it didn't matter what peril our heroes were in or even if any of them died, they could always be brought back from the dead with ease, just ask Krillin, that guy died more times than Charlie Sheen performing stand up.

But it goes even further than that, lets say the Dragonballs couldn't be used, if the villain won and all life was destroyed...we've seen the afterlife! Heaven and Hell both exist and our characters have gone to them many times! Everytime they die they are sent to heaven, so even if the villain wins, they still got things pretty good, if anything they'd be better off letting everyone die because they're in freaking heaven! No more bad guys, no illness, no ageing, no worries, life would actually be better off that way. Thus, there is absolutely zero tension in Dragonball Z, because if the villain loses, everything goes back to normal and if the villain wins, everyone ends up happy, no problemo.

So...why wasn't this a problem? Why did a show with no tension and a repetitive formula somehow work? Well, the only answer i can think of is the characters. Even when stories and arcs would go by without anything in the world changing, most of the time you can guarantee the characters would change. Gohan would become more mature, Vegeta would be a little nicer, Piccolo becomes more human, Tien realises how useless he is, Goku would...go through no change, because he's an awful main character. So really the stories weren't all for nought, characters did go through change and that was enough to keep us coming back and watching, they gave us the bare minimum to not be a complete waste of time...seriously, why do we love this show so much? It's so bad.

-Danny