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The story
A casual thread on 5ch’s Nandemo Jikkyo G board speculating about what settings and plot twists Dragon Ball would have if it were written as a manga today took off. Users floated idea after idea — giving Frieza and Vegeta deep “tragic backstories,” making female characters top-tier fighters, or reappraising GT — while also swapping anecdotes about how Akira Toriyama kept drawing his own way regardless of his editors’ notes. By the end, though, someone pointed out that most of the ideas raised sounded less like 2020s manga and more like shonen manga from the 2000s and 2010s, turning the thread’s whole premise of what counts as a “modern manga” into the actual point of debate.
What people said
You Yutori-generation guys think about One Piece all day, don't you ("Yutori generation" = Japan's "relaxed education" cohort, roughly today's late-20s/30s-somethings)
If it were made today, they'd probably do a full-blown Vegeta backstory arc or really dig into Piccolo's inner torment
Both Vegeta's and Piccolo's parents kind of brought it on themselves though — and honestly neither of them seems to care much about it anyway
You mean like the Cell Juniors or the Saibamen?
A lot of hit manga wrap up quickly these days, so it might've just ended right after the fight with Ma Junior
There actually was a scene where Master Roshi and Krillin, both around power level 200, take real damage from dozens of machine-gun rounds
Top-tier heroines aren't rare anymore, so Bulma getting buffed into a powerhouse feels totally plausible — Chi-Chi joining the fighting for real too
Goku: "Did I do something amazing again?" (riffing on the overused "did I do it again?" catchphrase from overpowered-protagonist anime)
I don't really follow Super, but hearing that makes it sound like Dragon Ball's actually caught up with modern manga
I don't think GT can be redeemed at this point — it just feels like contrarians forcing themselves to praise it
Same, I'd love a faithful remake of all 42 volumes with top-tier production quality
They already tried that — Path to Power, a big-budget remake movie clearly meant to launch a franchise — and it flopped. No Dragon Ball movies came out for 17 years after that, until Battle of Gods, so a remake's probably off the table now
Toriyama actually did listen to his editors sometimes (like how the final boss kept changing during the Androids arc) — if an editor told him "let's add more trendy elements," he might've gone along with it
Captain Tsubasa having full conversations mid-soccer-match is just as crazy
No, he wouldn't have. He was fine changing the Androids stuff, but he hated drawing that kind of human drama — his editor Torishima told him to add romance too, and he flat-out refused every time
Oh yeah, that's true — which is exactly why we're left free to imagine how Krillin and Android 18 actually got together
Knowing Toriyama's personality, I don't think he was the type to care at all about getting flamed online. Even today, Oda's still running One Piece without paying the slightest attention to the internet's "valuable" opinions
With Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, and all these gory manga flooding modern Jump, wouldn't it actually make more sense for that kind of thing to be emphasized even more? Do you even understand what modern manga is like?
That's got a real 1994 vibe to it
Back when Dragon Ball was running, even when female characters could fight, they were only ever strong enough to mop up mooks. These days it's totally normal for the strongest character to be a woman
Yeah, they'd probably explain it like Nen from Hunter x Hunter
Pretty much everything Re: #1 listed sounds less like "if it were a modern manga" and more like "if it were a 2000s-2010s manga" — that's literally the era when stuff like "Character X has a tragic past…" started becoming a meme
Background and Discussion Points
The very idea that “Character X would get a tragic backstory today” traces back to a device that became a meme in 2000s-2010s shonen manga — tacking an intense, harrowing life story onto a hard-luck character. Dragon Ball at the time barely did any of that; Frieza’s and Vegeta’s backgrounds were only ever sketched in lightly within the main story. The thread also floated ideas like female characters becoming top-tier fighters, calls to reappraise GT, and anecdotes about how Akira Toriyama rarely followed his editors’ notes (such as requests to include romance). But as one poster pointed out near the end, most of the proposed ideas actually run counter to the grim, graphic sensibilities of 2020s series like Chainsaw Man or Jujutsu Kaisen, and instead resemble shonen manga patterns from the 2000s and 2010s. In other words, what makes this thread interesting is the irony that while arguing about “modern manga,” the posters’ own sense of what’s current turned out to be a bit stuck in the past.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “What Dragon Ball’s setting and story would look like if it were a “modern manga” lol.”
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