Tien Deserves Better
- Thread starter Beerus
- Start date
(is it wrong I though @Beerus meant the hair and I instantly thought of SSJ pubes for Tien....yeah...it's wrong...)
I'll make Tenshinhan relevant again. I'll have him spar with this young lady 
It will be a battle of the eyes versus super bunny hearing.
Also, I just wanted a reason to use the smiley.
It will be a battle of the eyes versus super bunny hearing.Also, I just wanted a reason to use the smiley.
No doubt who wins that one! Tien's got three eyes, but he's still a guy. Two of them are going right to the jigglies and the third's not fast enough to keep up!I'll make Tenshinhan relevant again. I'll have him spar with this young lady
Also, I just wanted a reason to use the smiley.
I remember some videos on YouTube stating that Krillin was the strongest Human in DBZ, but that role is reserved for Tien. The reason I don't believe Tien should get super powerful is because he's a human.
The natural hierarchy for ceilings seems to be Human<Namekian<Half-Saiyan<Saiyan.
What justification could possibly put Tien on the level of beyond Super Saiyan?
The natural hierarchy for ceilings seems to be Human<Namekian<Half-Saiyan<Saiyan.
What justification could possibly put Tien on the level of beyond Super Saiyan?
He isn't 100% human though but rather a humanoid. That is beside the point though. I get saying humans shouldn't be able to obtain that much power but this is the DB universe so I think a human can be just as strong as a Saiyan. Maybe not the later extent of their strongest forms but certainly stronger than Super Saiyan. It just takes a lot longer, or at least should.
So this is like a two part thing now: 1 is whether humans can reach beyond SSJ; 2 is whether Tien should.
If we look at Roshi, he trained probably most of his natural life, and is hundreds of years old now with a power level IIRC somewhere between 100-300.
Yet the DB gang including humans managed to surpass him in a relatively very short time. You might say Yamcha and the like are extreme outliers, but something tells me if there was a prequel to Dragon Ball from Roshi's timeline, there wouldn't be (any) guys out there as strong as the early DBZ fighters.
There isn't really any logical consistency; Toriyama has to just keep vertical scaling the characters because that's how the plot goes. In that way, I suppose Tien could keep getting stronger and stronger.
If we self-contain it to just DBZ, I don't see why he would get that strong. Once you get to SSJ level IIRC, the power levels start to increase incredibly, from single digit million base form Goku to 100 million SSJ to billions.
I assume the Saiyan zenkai hack that sort of went away after the Namek saga kind of blends itself into the way post-namek saga Saiyans seems to get so much stronger even in their base forms compared to humans. Saiyans seem to get much more out of training than humans do later on in the series.
I don't know how Tien would get so strong then? Gravity training? I still don't believe he'd increase in strength the same way that the Saiyans would.
I would have to go over the whole DBZ again to see how much training the humans did post-namek saga. I recall training in other world, but remembered that wasn't canon. It does seem like they just stopped training, which is certainly going to stagnate their power.
Although if they believed that with training they could reach SSJ levels, then why would they stop? I always got the feeling that they realized their human limitations would either never take them to beyond SSJ levels or it would be so challenging and inefficient it would take beyond their entire lives.
This led me to believe there are sort of innate ceilings, where humans and Saiyans can be on the same levels at lower levels, but the Saiyan will scale much better and eventually rapidly outpace them. I also figured half-Saiyans start off their lives with more power than regular saiyans from some sort of hybrid benefit (e.g. young gohan) but have lower ceilings than full-blooded saiyans (e.g. a half-saiyan would never reach SSJ3-4 (not fused)). Maybe this is just my own subjective head canon logic, but that how I see it.
Roshi isn't someone good to use for basing power levels off of. He is like 400 years old and his power has always been lowered to contrast the growth of the other characters. In DBS, he showed that he was still one of the strongest fighters in the universe during the ToP. As did Tien and Krillin but Yamcha was not included. He has become the weakest of the four. I don't think Roshi's strength and ability was passed until Goku trained for Vegeta. I have no proof of this but I am basing this off of him reserving (lying about how strong he is) his power. I think this is where Goku learned it from.
Saiyans get stronger by means of fighting and taking damage. There is no way for Tien or any other human to catch up to their power level at this point unless Vegeta and Goku stopped training for a while. I don't expect Tien to ever be as strong as Goku or Vegeta (or Piccolo) but it would be nice for him to at least be close to Gohan's level. He stopped training for a long while and became weak.
Tien deserving better doesn't even mean that he needs to get stronger. It just means writing more scenarios where he can get time in the spotlight. Tien's best moment came when he was massively outclassed in power against Cell but had a suicidal technique that allowed him to be temporarily useful. Just incorporate stuff like that, or have more enemies that threaten Earth instead of just the one dominant ones that they tend to have so the weaker cast can have opponents to beat. I'd prefer stuff like the former, since just beating fodder can be meh, but there are other options than just leveling up Tien dramatically.
Wasn't Roshi already obviously outclassed already in Dragonball by the 2nd or 3rd martial arts tournament? I am going off of memory from the anime, so I am not sure how it went in the manga. King Piccolo was also too big a threat for direct combat from both Roshi and Mutaito, leading to the need for the containment wave. And King Piccolo was weaker than Goku in beginning of Z and was defeated by kid Goku after restoring his prime strength.
I haven't seen much of Super, I realize it's technically canon, but I think it's throwing what DBZ built out the window for fan service/money. I mean, didn't they make SS1 Trunks and his sword more powerful than the God Ki'd Goku/Vegeta, and have him learn the containment wave from a cell phone. So I feel they have been seen as separate things altogether, and imo Roshi should stay retired from fighting by this point.
That would be good for many of the rest of the characters too; it's why people liked the first few sagas of Z a lot when everyone was useful.
But since Tien and the rest have stopped training (presumably Tien is around the same strength as he was in Cell saga) and the disparity of power from the new threats is so large, I don't see how they could manage that without it being off-putting. The alternative, like you said, is fodder, which isn't ideal. This is the double-edged sword of dragonball's vertical scaling that other character have to fall behind unlike a lot of other series.
Yeah, they did surpass Roshi by the 3rd World Tournament in the manga. He forfeits the match against Tien and the second and admits that Tien would've won if they continued. And he doesn't enter the third one explicitly because he can't keep up with them anymore. He could've been lying I suppose, but I don't really see reason for him to in those situations, so I agree with you that he was outclassed by Dragon Ball.
So with Super, there are two different versions of canon. There's the anime canon and the manga canon. The former is the more prolific one, at least it's the ones the games have tended to take from if nothing else. However, if one has to be true canon, I'd go with the manga because it has more direct input from Toriyama whereas the anime has a bunch of different stuff added in by Toei.
All that stuff you mentioned during the Goku Black stuff, that's basically anime exclusive. And I agree it's dumb. I guess I don't to spoil stuff for people who haven't read the manga and might want to and see the differences for themselves.
So the Trunks Sword Slice on Zamasu still happens but rather than directly fighting like in the anime, it's done as a surprise attack from behind when his guard is down. As for the evil containment wave, Trunks never attempts that, it's Goku who does. And that only failed because Goku grabbed the wrong seal. Which is kind of dumb but you can't resolve the plot that easily, and it doesn't take anything away from the technique, just makes Goku seem a little too careless.
The manga is generally a lot more better with making things more logically consistent when it comes to powers and stuff. If you go to check out Super, I'd recommend just reading the manga instead.
Tien has never stopped training, I'm not sure where you get that idea from. His main character trait is that he's the devoted martial artist, it wouldn't make sense for him to just stop. You don't have to take my word for it though, Toriyama himself has said that Tien kept up with his training even after the events of the series, in addition to farming now it seems.
And it's worth noting, Tien does get his moment in the Buu Saga. He was shown having survived Buu's Human Extinction attack, and he gets a dramatic rescue of Hercules & Dende. It doesn't really amount to much and is basically a footnote in the arc but it's still a nice moment to at least involve in him in the plot. I appreciated it (admittedly in part because I had forgot it happened when I went to read the manga lol), and that's basically all I needed. Just throw him a bone every now and again, it doesn't have to have much meat on it.
Tien despite his training, was long outclassed by the threats of Dragon Ball (by King Piccolo he was basically worthless against any of the major antagonists in a battle), yet despite that throughout all of Z Toriyama found was to make him even momentarily useful for brief glimpses. That's the reason why I think Tien is a more appealing character than Yamcha or Krillin to get this treatment, at least for me. Yamcha didn't do anything but get his ass kicked in Dragon Ball after literally his first fight lol, and Tien even does more in the Buu saga than Krillin (disregarding anime filler at least). Actually, while Krillin gets a stronger arc in the Cell saga, in terms of actually fighting, Tien does more in that arc too.
