The manga's
very accelerated pacing makes it obvious just how thrown-together this arc is. Toyotaro has basically no time for character development, foreshadowing, or extended combat, so what you're getting is raw plot, one rapid bullet point after another. And it's not very good. (More about this in a sec.)
The manga's wins over the anime are now very few, but they ARE interesting.
-- Vegeta saving himself from falling by using an energy sword was cool. (Constructs made of
ki...where have I seen that before?)
-- U11 gets some nice moments of teamwork, with the literal redshirts working together to successfully overpower Kale.
-- Vegeta gets a nice moment saving Cabba.
-- Toyotaro's description of a Legendary Super Saiyan is basically identical to DBM's.
-- Caulifla stealing the Potara beforehand is a tiny bit of desperately-needed characterization, since so far she's been a straightforward one-note Saiyan--"I LIKE TO FIGHT!" Adding in a little kleptomania makes her a bit more distinguishable. (Fun fact: in the DBZ fanfic I'm working on, one of the Saiyan characters has his Saiyan desire for battle replaced by a desire to steal and prank; stealing the Potara earrings because they look valuable is very much something he would do.) It also gives a bit of characterization for other characters, too: Champa, figuring he has nothing to lose at this point, risks angering the Omni-King by having Kale use a tool.
-- -- Can I just say, I expected way more bending-rules-by-convincing-Zeno-it's-cool than we got in the ToP?
-- Anime ToP was utterly dominated by U7, which had more eliminations than every other universe combined. In the manga it's more evenly divided, and I think Kale has the record for most eliminations.
-- If Gohan takes out Kefla (and I don't think he will), then it'll be the one moment of glory he's had since killing Cell.
***
These posts always start out small and get enormous...Anyway, let's talk about pacing and characterization. Now, Dragon Ball has
never been stellar writing or super complex, yet some arcs were more character-driven than others, which meant that--to whatever extent they could--they worked. For example, let's compare a bit of the Cell saga to the ToP.
CELL SAGA
-- Cell eats 17
-- Tien can't stop Cell but tries
-- Krillin can kill 18 but chooses not to
-- Vegeta can kill Cell but Cell persuades him not to
-- Trunks tries to stop Vegeta
-- Trunks tries to protect 18, then tries to kill Cell while he's transforming
After Cell becomes semi-perfect, there is not a single interesting fight until Goku at the Cell Games: it's just curbstomp after curbstomp. Yet much of what happens is highly character-driven, and crucial moments occur outside of combat situations, which rarely happens in DB. It's the payoff on all the characterization that's happened earlier in the saga, since everyone acts like themselves. In hindsight, everything seems kind of inevitable, in a good way. Most importantly,
everything that happens is closely connected. One character's actions have an immediate impact on everyone else's.
Compare with this latest manga chapter:
ToP SAGA
-- Kale eliminates U4.
-- U3 combines into a big monster.
-- Kale eliminates U3 within a page.
-- Kale eliminates U2.
-- Kale eliminates U10.
-- Kale eliminates her teammates.
-- Kale fights U11 and loses.
-- Kale and Caulifla merge into Kefla and win.
-- Gohan is now going to fight Kefla for some reason.
Yes, there are a few character moments in there--the last U10 guy being brave, Cabba saving Kale, Caulifla stealing the earrings--but unlike the Cell saga, these moments don't seem to flow naturally. Some make sense with previous characterization, like Vegeta rescuing Cabba, but they still all just seem to be a bunch of random things happening in succession; there is no real
narrative, no sense of direction, no feeling of inevitability. Everything is isolated from everything else. Lots of characters are just standing around until the plot needs them. (For example: where is Jiren? What is the rest of U7 doing? There's no one left to fight!)
Now, I can guess what Toyotaro was trying to do here: he has to get rid of four universes in a hurry, so why not have them be the Worf Effect for Kale at the same time? It'd definitely hype her up if she's killed four
entire universes, right? However, this doesn't really work because
we never got to see any of these people fight, and for many of them never even saw them before their elimination. The effect is that our brain
recognizes "We're supposed to take this threat seriously," but we don't actually
care, since we have had zero time to get to know any of these people. Kale eliminating four universes has all the emotional impact of the First Order frying the five planets of the New Republic in
The Force Awakens. (As in, none.)
Let us compare Kale in this chapter with DBM Broly. DBM Broly literally exists just to job to Vegito. That is his sole function. However, even if you have no clue who Broly is or what his powers are, the story still does a decent enough job of building him up as a credible challenge for Vegito to overcome. The first time you see him, he's sleeping; the reader asks, "But what if he wakes up?" Our heroes, Goku and Vegeta, are afraid of him. Vegito, who is combined from Goku and Vegeta, sees him as the biggest threat in the tournament (after Buu.) The other characters of DBM get enough screentime so that when Broly goes on his rampage, their reactions to him help us gauge his power. We also see that Vegito really has to work to beat him. Thus, even though Broly is ultimately just a jobber, there is meaning to his defeat.
Kale, however, has no meaning. We did not see U3 fight, so why should we care when they make a big Hatchiyak monster? The Nameks' elimination are the most jarring to me: their literal first appearance is right before Kale eliminates them, so any feeling of "Oh crap, she's attacking her teammates" is utterly meaningless. This "have a character effortlessly beat an unimportant character" bugs me, because it's the fight scene equivalent of a fart joke: you couldn't think of anything better, so you just relied on a stock trope to fill the gap and hope nobody cares. Zero creativity, zero meaning. (Also, MAJOR fail to Toyotaro to have two Nameks and not have Piccolo even fight them.) In fact, the only part of this entire manga ToP that I
have cared about, Vegeta vs. Toppo, has occurred ALMOST ENTIRELY OFFSCREEN.
All this is the writing of a man who is either utterly out of his depth, or is being anaconda-constricted by his superiors into making a half-baked story. I seriously hope it's the latter, since the manga ToP has been so consistently lackluster that it can't really be overlooked anymore. The ToP's massive scope means that, with Toyotaro's limited amount of screentime, it would've been wiser to go
narrower and
deeper with the story (such as, I don't know, only follow one universe's perspective?) than to try and go as
broad as the anime, since the result is a pitifully shallow saga. With zero time for characterization or buildup, everything that happens is just a random sequence of disjointed events. It's Toyotaro ticking checkboxes off a plotline that was already done before and--as overall poor as the anime ToP was--was already done better.
I suppose the writing lessons are this:
--
One page (or in the Namek's case, one panel)
before someone's death/defeat is not the time to try to characterize them. If you want payoff, you have to work for and earn it.
--
We care about what happens when we care about the characters; we tend to care about the characters when we know they care about what's happening. Very few people in the ToP give a crap about anything that's going on.
-- --
Stories tend to work better when characters have motivations. Motivations create arcs. Arcs create tension, development, and payoff.
--
Going bigger isn't the solution; going deeper is. Kale killing off 4 universes worth of people we don't know (going bigger) is not as meaningful as Kale killing off one person you do know (going deeper).
-- --
If you're going to have a character job, make them credible first.-- --
Connect the action. It's okay to have multiple plotlines going, but the audience expects them to be relevant to each other at some point. (Often, the more significantly, the better.) If they don't, you should've just written two separate stories.
EDIT: Hey, but at least Kefla's cute, huh?