Gohan the Pacifist - Yes or No

I wouldn’t say Gohan ever looked like he enjoyed fighting like Goku did in Dragon Ball. All the arcs we saw him in before Cell had him fight because he had no choice to or not wanting to be a burden to the others. Whereas with Goku we see signs of him enjoying a tough fight with a smirk or telling his opponent he was having a good time. For Gohan it was always a desire to protect others. When he fought Nappa it was tonmake up for not attacking him earlier then to get revenge for Piccolo. When they fought Vegeta it was to help his dad and later he got a speech to believe in himself. On Namek it was to help Dende and Krillin for a lot of it. He always trained and fought for someone else and Goku I think missed that because he assumed Gohan did it out of love.

With Cell it wasn’t just Gohan suddenly became a pacifist, but also the realization that his dad threw him in deep end and expected him to rage on command, which was also a bad plan. Gohan raged out when others got hurt or died but never really when he was in personal danger. Goku failed to realize this when he came up with his plan. Gohan unable to get unleash his rage boost and up against Cell who he was fighting before he told Cell what Goku’s plan was and incidentally kind of also voiced his dislike for fighting, which makes sense because in the last four years of his life he has seen friends dying, genocide, and his father choosing the spirit of competition over his personal safety when Goku gave Cell a senzu bean.

I think there could have been a better way to handed Gohan hates fighting plot sure, but there is also enough there that Cell fight made sense. There seems to be this misconception that Gohan didn’t bother fighting and only got mad once 16 died when Gohan’s rage boost was always more for watching others get hurt before and he had never trained to harness his anger as a weapon, which Goku should have done so he could have used it on command when the time came because as we saw it was a very unreliable weapon since Goku was just counting on Cell pushing Gohan too far. Gohan did fight against Cell even before he went SS2, but again trying to beat on Gohan to bring the anger out wasn’t how his rage boost worked in the past. Cell attacking the others was the right way to do it. Gohan was getting angier as the onslaught went on, but it was a slow burn that 16’s death was the last straw. Before then Gohan even crowd and begged Cell to stop mostlys because he said he was trying to get mad and do what he wanted but he couldn’t do it on command, which again is fear because Gohan never bothered to train to harness his anger.

There were a lot of factors going on with Cell. Gohan spelling out that he hated fighting and trying to talk Cell down is a weird strategy and I doubt Toriyama put much thought into it beyond when he was drawing the chapters during the Cell Games, but he did always intend for Gohan to be motivated to protect people rather than a genuine love for fighting which can be seen even in Gohan’s earliest appearances. Goku not realizing his son didn’t like fighting also works because Goku never realized how Gohan’s anger worked, which let him misjudge how to handle Cell which shows Goku messed up as a parent. Cell expecting Gohan to get mad enough to harness his hidden power wasn’t something Gohan could do at the time. Cell creating the Cell Juniors to attack the gang was the right method, but sadly without properly training to harness his anger just made Gohan mostly powerless against Cell during the fight before he went SS2. Trying to talk Cell down made sense since the kid realized from their fight that Cell was superior to normal level and couldn’t reach his hidden power on his own yet as oppose to Gohan simply refusing to get mad. Like Jim said there was probably some fear of what type of damage Gohan could do if he flew into another blind rage with the level he was at now. Even Gohan’s anger finally manifested it was a tranquil fury were he could think and use his lower careful as oppose to the brief yet blind fury we would normally see. Now had Goku told Gohan his plans and spent the last 9 days with Gohan to try to harness his anger things probably would have gone down differently in the fight and Gohan could have gone SS2 on command, but Goku played coy and figured the spontaneous approach was best. We saw the results.

Toriyama often develops his characters in inconsistent ways. Vegeta was originally a very shrewd individual who didn’t give a flying fig about what he had to do to win, which is very different from the later pride-obsessed “I won’t accept help even if it destroys the universe” fool people remember him being. Something similar happens with Gohan. I’ve never liked Pacifist Gohan. When I say "Pacifist Gohan" I mean Gohan as defined by Piccolo and 16's speeches at the Cell Games, a Gohan who hates fighting and hurting. I don't like this partly because it’s a shonen where the good guys are regularly going up against pure-evil beings (there are even ways to confirm it!) which need to be killed, and partly it’s because it’s inconsistent with his earlier characterization. Gohan wasn't a fighter in the same way Goku was, or even the way the human Z-Fighters were, but pre-Cell Games there was nothing to indicate he disliked fighting.

Namek Saga Gohan has always been the definitive Gohan personality to me. He had his moments of fear but on the whole he didn’t screw around and had the moxie of a dachshund: he would never back down from a fight that needed to be fought. This's a guy who would've mashed Guldo to a pulp if he hadn't gotten paralyzed and--after a moment of hesitation--fully committed to potentially beating his "dad" to death when Ginyu swapped with Goku. So I don’t really understand why he’d hesitate against Cell, a creature who’d blasted a hole through Piccolo, nearly killed Tien, had eaten thousands of people and was going to blow up the planet if he wasn’t stopped.

I could imagine Gohan thinking he wasn’t strong enough to beat Cell, but the Pacifist Gohan development was a weird call by Toriyama. You can tell Toriyama didn’t really think it through or was super committed to it because this pacifist angle never shows up again--he swaps it out for Gohan being a slacker/posing loser in the Buu saga onward.

Your opinion may vary, but if you asked me to sum up Gohan, I would say:
-- He likes being a hero; he enjoys validation and is eager to please. (Unlike Goku, who couldn’t care less what people think.) He doesn’t seek for glory but I think he finds satisfaction looking back on, say, Namek saga and knowing he played a role there.
-- He’s a social person. (Unlike Goku, who is okay training by himself.)
-- He gets no enjoyment from fighting; he fights only when necessary and (except when drunk on power) gets it over with as soon as possible. (Unlike Goku, who doesn’t need to be explained.) Where do you think Future Trunks learned his no-nonsense attitude from?
-- He is a proactive doer of good. (Unlike Goku, who is happy to just train and train and train.) This is shown in Namek saga when he rescued Dende. I think DBM tapped into this when they had Gohan figure out how to help Bra.
-- He’s probably the most contemplative Z-Fighter. (Unlike Goku, who lives in the moment.)
-- He’s the only Saiyan and possibly Z-Fighter who I would really call principled. While Goku caused a lot of people to become better (Yamcha, Tien, Vegeta) it was more a side-effect of Goku beating them and having a “I don’t want to kill you because I want to fight you again” mindset. Gohan seems to have opinions on right and wrong, and not only did Piccolo become a good guy solely because of Gohan, but Gohan was also the only Z-Fighter who considered reasoning with Fat Buu (at least before Supreme Kai shot it down), which in hindsight probably would’ve worked, based on what happened with Mr. Satan.

So as much as I liked how TFS’s Android 16 called Gohan a coward, I don’t think that’s consistent with pre-Cell Games Gohan. Pacifist Gohan is certainly a unique trait but from a consistency standpoint I don't like it. To be perfectly frank I bet the only reason DBM has Gohan be a scholar post-EoZ is because Toriyama did it and they don't want to contradict the original manga. All these years later I still think Future Gohan is the most accurate evolution of the character Toriyama wrote up until the Cell Games: understanding that the safety of the earth is too important for him to get sloppy, and having no hesitations about fighting if it's needed.