Drama [Medium: Success] — He's working really, really hard to spin this, but it's not easy.
Thinking about Toriyama tonight and kind of marvelling at how SAD I am. I mean, sure, I grew up watching DBZ pretty religiously, from the start of the series right through the Majin Buu arc. But I didn't stick with it after that. I've played a couple of Dragon Quests. Played Chrono Trigger but never finished it. I think the only one of his manga I've read was a One Piece one-shot he did two decades ago. And yet, reading the news, it felt like a hole being blown through my chest.
His work was foundational, and I mean that in the most reverent possible terms. Foundational, in that without him, so very little of what I love, so very little of what I love about what I love, would exist, at all, full stop. Foundational, in that his work was so vital and omnipresent that it became almost invisible, in the way that the rotation of the Earth is invisible.
And again, I wasn't a Dragon Ball superfan or anything like that. But you didn't NEED to be. I think part of why his death is hitting so hard is that it's making me stop and consider just how MUCH he did, how it's EVERYWHERE. How its essence has endured decades, undiluted by legions of copycats, lackluster adaptation, or rampant memeification. You could, with a straight face, compare his level of cultural influence to that of Shakespeare, and that dude NEVER could have made the Dragon Quest Slime.
I dunno, man. It's gutting. It really felt like he'd be around forever. Everything that dude touched seemed to gain a certain sense of timeless eternity. Characters, monsters, landscapes, vehicles, clothes, layouts. It just seemed to make sense that he'd be eternal himself.
Thinking about how Toei had to send letters to the Mexican government because whole entire cities were hosting free, public Dragon Ball Super watch parties.
Toei even went as far as trying to get the Japanese government involved, hoping to put pressure on what they thought was "inciting mass piracy." Some cities complied... but others didn't, leading to some truly massive events.
I mean, sure, when Seinfeld ended, they publicly broadcast the series finale in Times Square. It's estimated around 5,000 people stopped to watch that finale. According to Torrentfreak, over 10,000 people attended the Dragon Ball Super finale watch party in Ecuador alone, and it was only one of many such parties.
You just don't get that with anything else. Ever. This man stirred something in people that is truly rare.
Recently I've been approached by different news organisations to comment on deepfaked images and videos. In most cases they already know whether the thing is a fake or not, but they want to know why. It's been a pretty fascinating thing to be tasked with, honestly, and some of the examples completely caught me by surprise (warning: Daily Mail link). Many of us see faked images on a daily basis now, but there's not a lot of writing about how fakes are detected other than one-liner folk knowledge on places like Twitter. I thought I'd write a bit about how I approach the problem.
it is sort of remarkable, as someone who was not a dragonball diehard or a dragon quest person or a chrono person, how much Toriyama's passing has affected me; because even if i was never way deep into the associated properties, his style was so constitutive of how anime and manga were imagined at the US millennial moment of mainstreaming japanese pop culture, that it is almost like being reminded the law of gravity was just some guy, and people will come into the world learning about it and seeing its effects anywhere and everywhere, but not really feeling its pull in the way we once did