(AfroGamers.com) There is a conversation the internet keeps having, and it never gets anywhere. Someone posts a Superman clip. Someone answers with a Kamehameha. Within an hour the replies are full of feats, multipliers, and grown men arguing about who wins a fight that will never happen. I have watched this play out since the old message board days, and I have watched it play out in a barbershop chair with a cape on my shoulders and a lineup on the way.
What nobody stops to ask is whether the comparison was ever fair to begin with. Why are we grading a Saiyan on a curve that was built for a reporter from Kansas?
That instinct is a very American one, and it runs deeper than most of us notice. Capes raised us. Comics handed over a moral template so early that it became invisible, the water we swim in. A hero has a city. A hero has a code. Somewhere behind him sits a tragedy that made him swear an oath, and that oath rides his shoulders like a wet coat for the rest of his life. Peter Parker learned it in an alley. Bruce learned it outside a theater. Clark learned it on a farm from two of the most decent people ever committed to paper. Every version of the lesson says the same thing, and we swallowed it whole: power is a debt, and you spend your life paying it down.
Now hold that template up against a country boy who fell out of the sky, cracked his skull on a rock, and spent his childhood catching fish barehanded in a mountain river.
Son Goku does not have a city. What he has is a mountain, a house, a wife who could probably beat most of us in a fight, and a radish patch. Nobody in West City is calling when a bank gets hit. There is no signal in the clouds, no cave, no watchtower. If a call did come, odds are he would arrive late and hungry. When Earth is quiet, this man trains, eats, naps, fishes, and bothers Piccolo. The notion that he stands watch over humanity is a story we told ourselves, because it was the only story we had on hand.
Go back and pay attention to what actually gets him out of bed. That first Budokai, nobody drafted him into it. Roshi mentions there are strong people out in the world and the kid basically signs himself up. Meets Krillin, wants to fight him. Meets Tien, wants to fight him. Piccolo shows up talking about world domination and cracking the sky open, and instead of dread, what you see on his face is that grin, the one that shows up right before he says something like this is gonna be fun. Nobody guarding a planet grins like that. Athletes grin like that. My uncle used to grin like that walking onto a court against somebody thirty pounds heavier than him. Whatever that feeling is, standing across from a person who might genuinely be better than you, this man has organized his entire existence around chasing it.
And look at where the story even comes from. Toriyama wasn’t sitting in an office trying to write our kind of comic. Dragon Ball started as a loose riff on Journey to the West, with a monkey tail and a talking pig, and the man was soaked in Hong Kong kung fu movies, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, that whole world where a martial artist is somebody’s student for years before anybody calls him a savior. So the bones of it are a training story. You find a teacher. You get your head knocked in. You climb somewhere terrible and do something stupid like carrying milk up a mountain, then you get your head knocked in again by somebody better. Tournaments are the spine of the whole genre, and that is not an accident. Fighting isn’t the thing this character does when danger arrives. It is what he is doing on a Tuesday with nothing on the calendar.
None of the evidence is subtle, either. This man let Vegeta walk. Vegeta, whose invasion had already left a city destroyed and Yamcha dead, gets to limp off into space because Goku is curious about what happens if the guy trains a little more. Frieza gets time to power up because Goku wants to defeat him at full strength. Cell gets handed a senzu bean, and in his mind he is being generous. Then, in the middle of a fight for the planet, he steps aside and puts his young son in the ring. There is reasoning behind it. Chi Chi was still not wrong to lose her mind over it.
Line those calls up in a Justice League briefing room and see how they land. Bruce would have him under a mountain by lunch. Those are not the decisions of a protector. They are the decisions of an athlete who cannot stand the thought of the game ending early.
By the Tournament of Power, nobody even has to squint anymore. He hears there are fighters out there in other universes, stronger than anything he has ever put hands on, and he goes to a god and asks for the smoke. Only afterward does the Grand Minister reveal that the losing universes will be erased. Entire universes are on the line, countless lives gone if it breaks wrong, and Goku still refuses to retreat from the challenge. He wants to know. Say what you want about that, it is the truest thing the character has ever done. The appetite makes the bet, then the discipline covers it, and once everybody walks away alive we go ahead and file the whole mess under heroism.
So no. Not Superman. Not the moral center of his world. Not a man carrying a burden.
Here is where people take the argument too far, though. Selfish is the wrong word. Cold is the wrong word. Few characters in the medium are kinder, and the kindness is not a performance and it is not a duty. He simply likes people. Loyalty comes out of him without explanation, and it never has to be earned twice. When somebody he loves gets hurt, the anger is real, and when he stands over an enemy who has crossed a line, the temperature in the room drops. Namek is the proof. Krillin dies, and you can see the grief sit in his chest for a beat before it comes out of him sideways, and Frieza spends the next several episodes learning what that costs. Even against Buu, Goku openly looks forward to the fight. Righteousness lives in the man. It just does not come from a creed. It comes from his gut.
That distinction is the whole ballgame, and honestly it gives us a better hero than the oath ever did. He is not out there paying down a promise he made to a corpse. Saving the planet just happens to land in the same square as the thing he loves doing and the thing he is best at in the universe, and the idea of Krillin or Gohan or Bulma dying while he stands there is not something his brain will even sit still for. No vow needed. It was never that complicated with him.
Our tradition does not really produce that. American heroes are haunted. They save you because they could not save someone else. Sit with it long enough and it turns a little grim, an entire mythology of men in costumes working through grief in public and calling it duty.
Goku is what happens when a story lets a fighter be a fighter and allows goodness to arrive as a byproduct instead of a mission statement. Nothing is being proven to a dead father. All he wants is to touch the ceiling, and every time he gets close, he finds out there isn’t one.
That has always struck me as the more radical idea. Not the man who protects because he must, but the man who grows because he wants to, and who protects because underneath all that power he is, at heart, decent. Monuments were never the point. A rematch was.
Put down the wrong ruler. Your Superman was never what he was trying to be. Getting stronger was the whole ambition, and Earth just happened to be standing where he was standing.
Staff Writer; Jay Baker
An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…
He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.