Synopsis: Goku's friends and the announcer are horrified as he's impaled by Piccolo's surprise attack and falls back onto the ground where the ring once stood. Goku tries to get back to his feet, but his body is immediately wracked with pain, as he bleed profusely from both his wound and his mouth. As Goku's friends scream, Piccolo gets back to his feet, walking over to Goku. He praises Goku's durability, and says that Goku did quite the number on him, but in the end, it's Piccolo who wins this day – the death of the Great Demon King Piccolo will be avenged. As Piccolo begins to stomp on Goku's wound, Tenshinhan, Yamcha, and Kuririn all try to rush in to help. Piccolo swings his arm and unleashes an energy attack, creating a large trench just in front of the fighters. As they realize that he still has power left in reserve, Piccolo tells them to wait their turn to die. Getting back onto his feet at last, Goku tells Piccolo that he missed all of his vital organs. The pair exchange blows briefly, both ending up winded very quickly, but it's clearly Goku who's the worst off in his condition. Piccolo tells Goku that he can tell he's losing steam now, and catches him hard with an elbow strike. Leaping into the air as Goku falls to the ground, Piccolo slams both of his knees into Goku's legs, breaking them. As Goku screams in pain, his friends are horrified, but Piccolo doesn't stop there - he notes that while Goku only has one arm left he can use (the blast wound incapacitating the other one already), the original King Piccolo left Goku with one arm as well, and was defeated because of it. Firing a blast from a fingertip, Piccolo scalds Goku's other arm, leaving him without a moveable limb, in an act that Yamcha calls torture. Piccolo tells Goku that he'll take this final blast head on now that he can't move, and says that he's been waiting for this moment for so long. As Piccolo rises into the air, Kuririn shouts that Goku's really going to be killed this time. Kami tells Tenshinhan to act quickly and kill him as that will kill Piccolo as well, and Tenshinhan starts to agree once Kami reminds him that Shenlong can bring him back afterwards. Before he can however, Goku speaks up and says he's still going to win this match on his own. Everyone objects, but before anything more can be done, Piccolo fires a blast heading straight towards Goku. Review: Goku went from seemingly certain victory to seemingly certain defeat in the span of a panel. If the fight before this hadn't already been a spectacle unlike any we'd seen before it, this might not have worked as well as it did, but with everything leading up to it, it really heightens the tension in an unbelievable way. This is especially true when you remember that this is still a Tenkaichi Budokai match despite all odds (Toriyama seems to make it a special point to show that Goku and Piccolo are still on the ground where the ring would be if it hadn't been destroyed). Despite how strong he's always been, despite how strong he's become now, Goku does seem to have something of a curse when it comes to fighting at the Tenkaichi Budokai. Two times now he's made it to the final round and ended up losing on some sort of technicality. As shocking as it might seem given everything else going on with this fight, there actually feels like a good chance that Goku could ACTUALLY lose this thing...and that's incredibly hard to do and not have it feel forced, but through the simple act of having been through all of this before, Toriyama manages to make it work. This effect is further heightened by the fact that we've never seen Goku quite as injured as he becomes here either. We've seen him pretty beaten up before, especially against the likes of Taopaipai and the previous Demon King Piccolo, but here he's actually injured in a way that seems like certain death. Even with Piccolo having missed all of his organs – you know, SOMEHOW – he's still got a huge gaping hole in his body, and he's going to bleed out if something's not done quickly. Despite the best efforts of his friends however, Goku and Piccolo both firmly assert that this fight is between them and them alone for the time being. While Goku's argument for this is entirely verbal, Piccolo's however shows that he still has some power left in reserve even after everything he just did, and that's just insane. At the point both characters are at now, it's hard to believe that Tenshinhan and Kuririn were both able to fight with them as well as they did before, frankly. Piccolo's cruelty feels more palpable here than it ever has before either, as he viciously attacks both Goku's wound – the anime in particular has a great shot of him JABBING HIS ELBOW INTO IT, Jeebus Piccolo, calm down! - as well as taking away any means he has left to fight back. It's a nice callback that leaving Goku with one limb was the ultimate cause of his predecessor's defeat, and this new Piccolo will be damned if he's going to make that same mistake. Going back to Goku's refusal of his friend's help, it shows that even now he still thinks of this as a tournament match, which we've already discussed as a somewhat crazy thing to be thinking at this point. This time around however, there's a narrative reason beyond that. When Kami asks Tenshinhan to kill him, there's no denying that that would have brought things to a halt then and there. Goku probably wouldn't be declared the victor of the fight (and even if he was, I doubt he'd be happy about it), but the threat of Piccolo would be over, and his wounds could be attended to. The storyline really could be wrapped up then and there...but would that at all be entertaining? I highly doubt anyone would honestly say yes. Compared to the last time Kami and the other characters tried to join in on the fight, this is the one that bodes the least well for anything good coming out of it. The previous times, we could have still had some kind of entertaining fight come out of everyone deciding to fight together against Piccolo. It would have been different than what we got, and I personally have a hard time thinking that it would be better really – but we can't say for sure that it wouldn't have been. It could have been just as entertaining, in a different way. With this however, it would have just brought the fight to a crashing halt. It would have been jarring in every way, and completely unfulfilling to witness. This is a sort of double-edged sword that I've seen come up in a lot of fan discussions in regards to the series. 'The characters should have done this and they would have won easier' or 'the characters should have done that and then this wouldn't have happened' – there's no end to debates of that sort in the fandom. Sometimes, the debates raise good, valid points, and show where the logic of the characters doesn't make any sense, or just where they make a morally ambiguous or just plain stupid choice. Other times however, they're a narrative fallacy honestly, because if the story had taken the course that they suggest, the story itself wouldn't have been nearly as entertaining. I'll talk about this quite a bit more in regards to later arcs as we come to them, but this felt like a logical place to bring it up for the first time, because I think this moment fits to a degree. Yes, the logical thing to do would be for Tenshinhan to kill Kami, but if the story would suffer for it, then the logical thing would actually be the wrong thing to do – fiction is not reality, and what would be a bad choice in real life, where real lives are concerned, is not always the right narrative choice for entertainment. That's just my opinion on the matter however, and I'm sure other people's mileage will vary, especially in regards to different moments we'll come across as the story goes on. As things stand now however, it truly looks like Goku has no way to come back from this. Is he doomed to come second place in the Tenkaichi Budokai for a third time in the row, and is it weird that he's more preoccupied about that than what his loss will mean for the fate of the world? Until next time! Favorite Panel: Next Time: The End of the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai...!
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About the AuthorAspiring author and big anime/manga fan, just trying to do my best in the world. For more details, go to About Me. Archives
September 2022
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