Synopsis: Goku and Kuririn return to Roshi's island with the mysterious girl they rescued in tow. When they arrive however, the old man is nowhere to be found. Kuririn suggests that maybe he's “indisposed”, which Goku loudly figures out must mean he's taking a poop before going off to get him. Kuririn apologizes for Goku's rude behavior, but the girl really just wants to know what they've brought her here for. Kuririn says that it's just three guys here so they really just want some female company while they train, and the girl says that should work out fine as she needed somewhere to hide from the people after her anyway. Kuririn asks what that was all about anyway, the deal with the fake police, but the girl insists that they were real police.
In the house, Goku loudly asks Roshi if he's done pooping yet, angering the old man. He tells Goku that whoever they brought this time better be the real deal, and Goku assures him that Kuririn seems to like her so she should be fine. Back outside, Kuririn asks the girl whey the police would be chasing her, and she says judging by all the money in her bag, she must have robbed a bank or something again. Kuririn is doubtful, thinking she must be pulling his leg, but she insists that it's really true. While Roshi peers at her from inside the house, she quickly explains that whenever she sneezes, she changes personalities. The discussion is interrupted by Roshi's joyous yell, as he quickly runs outside to join Kuririn and the girl. He officially accepts both boys as his pupils for succeeding in bringing him the kind of girl he likes, and welcomes the girl, who introduces herself as Lunch, to his home. Lunch explains that she was saved by Roshi's grandchildren, and Roshi is proud but tries to claim they're his little brothers, an assertion he immediately has to pretend was a joke when nobody buys it. Roshi tells Lunch exactly who he is and what he'll be teaching the boys, and she gets excited to know why they're already so strong, though Goku says they haven't been taught anything yet. Roshi offers for Lunch to stay with them and even join them in training on occasion, at least enough to stay fit. Lunch isn't sure at first, but at Kuririn's encouragement about how great the master is and how rarely he makes such an offer, she agrees. Roshi praises Kuririn as his kind of student, and gives Lunch a box with a “uniform” in it. When she starts to change right there in front of them, Kuririn excitedly comments on it, prompting her to realize she really should go inside to change, and Roshi to take back the accolades he'd just given the boy. Lunch soon returns outside, now wearing frilly lingerie, to question if Roshi perhaps go the boxes mixed up, but Roshi assures her that it's the traditional uniform of the Kame school – if it wasn't, why else would he and the boys now be wearing frilly lingerie as well? Roshi is eager to get the training underway now, but a fly begins zooming around his face and annoying him. He waves it away, and it flies by Lunch's nose, causing her to sneeze – to everyone's surprise, her hair turns blonde and her face becomes much more stern. She questions where she is and figures out that they must have brought her there, so she pulls out a machine gun and begins firing on all three of them. Luckily, Lunch sneezes again almost immediately and returns to her former self. Seeing the gun in her hand, she apologizes but says she did warn them about her sneezes after all. She hopes she didn't do anything too bad, and Roshi assures her it's fine, even while he and the boys have bullet holes in them. Review: Something I neglected to mention last chapter that you may have noticed, is that Lunch is able to ride the kinto'un without any problems. It's believable enough for her darker-haired, kind form, but it does raise a whole lot of questions about the true nature of her other form...speaking of, let's talk about Lunch now. Lunch is, frankly, the closest Dragon Ball comes to having a character that exists purely as window dressing. She's here to be cute, she's here to provide her one gag, and that's really about it. That's all she'll do over the course of this story arc, and that's all she'll continue to do over the course of the series, right up until she mysteriously just stops showing up at all. Toriyama does make some attempt to liven her up as a character I think, but I'll save talk about that for when it happens, and it really doesn't matter in the long run anyway as it clearly doesn't work in the end. Another part of the problem is how her introduction and the introduction of her sneezes is handled. In the last chapter, we started off following the light-haired Lunch being chased by cops only for her to end up sneezing and changing to her other form. As a result, the gag's already spoiled. I'd be willing to bet even little kids when this first came out already figured out what happened there, though I suppose there's a chance they dismissed it as being too silly to be what really happened. Let's give it that benefit of the doubt for a moment. Even with that, moving into this chapter, we have Lunch flat out state what sneezing does to her...and nothing. Nobody reacts. Kuririn objected to her saying she'd stolen the money, but due to Roshi's interruption, there is no reaction to her explanation about her sneezes. That's the second time now that we've had the punchline spoiled for us without us really getting any pay off from it. So by the time we get to the third time, where we see for sure that what she's saying is true, it already feels tired. This character and her gimmick have already been tired out in their very first chapters, purely because of how they're introduced. And it's a shame, because with some slight changes, this could have been so much better. If we hadn't seen her sneeze in the previous chapter, if we'd only seen the cops chasing a light-haired woman only to cut back to them catching a dark-haired woman in the same clothes, that would have preserved some element of surprise. That alone would have alleviated most of the damage, but if we wanted to go even further, just have her explanation about sneezing get cut off by Roshi's jubilation so that we don't actually hear the whole explanation. Anything to reserve some of the surprise for the moment it's actually needed. That's not to say Lunch isn't fun when she's first introduced, but...well, actually, I guess it sort of is. Her sneezing gimmick is funny, and it's certainly unique, but when that's all that can really be said for it, that's not much. It's little wonder that she eventually fades into relative obscurity in the franchise. For now though, she does bring two things to the table at this exact moment in the story if nothing else. Firstly, her gimmick is at least something different from the usual pee and sex jokes that we've already got plenty of. Secondly, she manages to make Roshi's perversions at least a little bit more palatable, at least in my opinion. I've spoken before about being a fan of pervy humor and how there's also a right way and a wrong way to do it. For me, doing it the right way can come in two varieties. Either the female character in question has to be given some agency in the fan-service, whether that's her intentionally showing off for some reason, or it being fan-service that feels logical to it's location and timing rather than something forced, so long as the woman retains some measure of control of the situation, it's less objectionable in my eyes. So far, most of what we've had in regards to fan-service in this series has been a mixed bag on that front. The introduction of Lunch brings with it the second way perverted comedy can work – make the pervert the butt of the joke. Make it extremely obvious that, when their perversions go way, way too far, it's a bad thing, and they receive some sort of punishment, verbally or physically, to show that. In this case, Roshi tricks Lunch into wearing lingerie after leering at her already, but ends up getting shot repeatedly by a machine gun for his lechery. That's funnier to me than the sorts of gags we had before, and it keeps the character of Roshi from being quite as abrasive as he was before and could have been moving forward. Toriyama may have had this same line of thought, because it becomes increasingly frequent moving forward for Roshi to get smacked around as a result of his perversion. This is all just my own personal opinion though, and as a straight man, I may not be the best positioned to accurately judge how this sort of fan-service and perverted humor might affect others. All I can say is that for me, this makes a world of difference. Phew. For not really offering a lot to the series overall, Lunch actually did give me a lot more to talk about for the time being than I thought. That's a good thing because beyond that really, there's not a lot else to talk about with this chapter other than how it finally transitions Goku and Kuririn to full students of Muten Roshi's, so that the training can finally get started for real...next chapter. Until next time! Favorite Panel:
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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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