[Dragon Ball blog] Concerning Tien and Chiaotzu... · 9:00am May 9th, 2018
TL;DR version: Tien and Chiaotzu actually had personalities once upon a time.
Fanboy rambling below.
Like many DB/DBZ fans, I watched DBZ first, then backtracked and watched the original Dragonball later. It's been a very long time, and I don't actually remember much of ANYTHING past the middle of the Red Ribbon Army arc. I am presently binge-watching Dragon Ball and am up to the 22nd Tenka-ichi Budokai, which is the arc that first introduces Tenshinhan and Chiaotzu.
If you've watched DBZ at any point in your life, and not read the manga or watched Dragon Ball, you might have noticed one thing about Tien and Chiaotzu:
They don't really have any personality. They're just...kind of there.
I mean, think about it. In DBZ, Tien is the three-eyed guy and Chiaotzu blew himself up trying to take down Nappa.
And that's it. That's literally all they've got.
Rewatching Dragon Ball, I've come to a shocking realization:
Tien and Chiaotzu actually had personalities once!
The thing is...they had ROTTEN personalities.
When they were first introduced, Tien and Chiaotzu were villains. More to the point, they were miserable, sadistic, brutal assholes. Chiaotzu got his rocks off picking on Kuririn for no reason. Tien was an arrogant asshole who delighted in cruelty, going so far as to needlessly cripple Namu and end his tournament career forever just because he was friends with Goku.
That's who Tien and Chiaotzu were back in the old days. They were total fucking pricks. And that's the only time they actually had personalities. Once they stopped being pricks, they had nothing left, because that was literally their entire thing, being the two biggest DICKHOLES Goku had ever met up to that point.
That's, kinda sad.
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I know, right?
To be fair, there is a reason Team Four Star has a Krillin Powned count...^_^'
Yeah, Tien definitely deserved more screen time. His big moment in DBZ where he held off Semi-Perfect Cell while 16 and 18 escaped was pretty epic, but when you look back not only did Tien not stand a chance but it was kinda the last hurrah for human fighters in general for the franchise. They tried to change that in the Tournament of Power where the human members of universe 7 each got a chance to shine, but it kinda falls flat when all 3 human members were the first ones eliminated for their team.
That's a big problem with DB in general: if you ain't saiyan, you fall behind. Tried to mitigate it in the tournament of power, but the message doesn't come across with the humans being the first ones eliminated. At least Yoshi did pull his weight, and the androids did their shit, but Krilin and Tien didn't do much
That's Dragonball for ya. Characters are either Goku and Vegeta or they don't really matter. Its so sad...
That kind of goes for any of the human characters, Krillin is pretty much the only human who's still treated like a main character in Z. That's one of the things I liked about Super it at least tried to make the other human characters useful again.
It was because they’re both Chinese.
I am dead serious. That’s why Toriyama had no trouble giving them personalities when they were antagonists, but as soon as they’re not, he didn’t know what to do with them. It’s why Tien is the only fighter in the Tournament of Power who doesn’t get a “Toriyama Handjob.” It’s because of what they are.
It’s because they’re Chinese.
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It always seemed to me that it was just the opposing methodology of the Crane School vs the Turtle School. Both Tsuru sennin and Kame sennin trained under the same master, Mutaito. I'm not sure Tienshinhan or Chiaotzu's race ever came up in the Manga, at least I don't remember it ever coming up. I don't recall ever meeting another triclops.
At least Tien remained sort of relevant into DBZ. Poor Yamcha, one of the main characters of Dragon Ball, fell from the limelight hard at the beginning of DBZ. He's no longer a fighter, and Bulma's already on the outs with him. Then of course, he's the first of the Z-fighters to die defending Earth, and the only one not to die at the hands of Nappa, directly or indirectly. And from there, he's all but forgotten. It's the very reason TFS didn't do a "Yamcha Owned Count". Even Super wasn't kind to him, his moment of glory is in a filler episode about baseball.
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Um. Prior to DBZ, Kuririn was top-tier. He threw a world-famous wrestler the size of a mountain out of the ring by the dude's index finger. Literally all he could grab was the dude's finger but he threw him out of bounds. He also was the first fighter to pull off a teleport Kamehameha...AND IT WAS LITERALLY HIS FIRST KAMEHAMEHA. And that has nothing to do with Chiaotzu's heckling and bullying of Kuririn--they hadn't fought a single match yet. He was just mocking his appearance (despite both of them being exactly the same height and exactly as bald).
Sorry, but outside of the context of DBZ Abridged, which is parody, it annoys me when people treat Kuririn like a joke. It's one of my berserk buttons.
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The fact that the human fighters were there at all is a crowning moment of awesome for Super in general, because it's a reminder that these guys aren't background or joke characters. Just because they're on the low end of the spectrum by that point doesn't mean they're weak and useless. And at least Kuririn stayed relevant throughout DBZ. After Cell, Tenshinhan pretty much just went away.
None of which has anything to do with the point of this blog, by the way.
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Umm. Sorry, but did you not get the point of this? This blog had nothing to do with human fighters getting screwed over in Z. It's about two characters whose personalities disappeared into the ether after they did a heel-face turn.
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Except no? Nearly every core character has a personality, a personal history, a visible life, and some degree of relevance throughout. Kuririn married Juuhachigou, they had a daughter, and Kuririn got a job as a police officer. Yamucha zigzags in and out of his baseball career. Gohan's got his academics, Chichi goes back to helicopter-parenting Goten after being lax with him for the first six years of his life, Bulma's impossibly rich and impossibly clever, Roshi and Oolong have their...interests...and so forth and so on. All the characters who are beloved and intrinsic to the very essence of the series matter in some way forever, even if it doesn't involve the big god-tier fights. But Tien and Chiaotzu don't matter to anyone and have no personalities. Tien shows up and does a thing once in a while, then disappears, and he has no PERSONALITY when he does show up. Once he and Chiaotzu stopped being jerkass villains, they didn't have anything going for them and Toriyama just gave up on trying to give them real personalities.
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I did, it's just that I feel said fact about these two is an extension of my aforementioned statement, and they are the ones who got affected the most. I mean, the ONLY thing Tien has going for him over his fellow earthlings is having the greatest power level, but still falls short to be useful
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Tenshinhan has three-eyes: The presence of the third eye is taken from Chinese philosophy where a person’s third eye opens to the world when they attain enlightenment.
At the very least, Chiaotzu’s appearance is that of a vampire from Chinese folklore and is a distinct appearance from comparable demons that appear in Japanese folklore.
But if we wanted to be more generous, their lack of personalities comes from Toriyama losing interest in the characters and not knowing what to do with them/just needing someone to fill pages while Goku/Gohan was busy being the hero. Their status as central characters is the only reason he didn’t just forget about them the way he forgot about Launch.
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They did fare better than Launch though. Toriyama even forgot she existed
And Yamcha used to be a suave bandit type and kind of awesome
So they probably would've been better off when they had a personality.