I had a whole lot of fun with this week’s Why It Works article, as it fell into one of my favorite categories of criticism: thorough explorations of seemingly trivial cinematic moments. In this case, the inescapable “it’s over 9000” meme from Dragon Ball Z, a meme whose resonance and enduring nature seems to me to be a natural result of how it articulates the dramatic recalibration from the original Dragon Ball to the more self-serious Z. But enough explaining the article, let’s just get to it!
What Does It Truly Mean to Be “Over 9000?”
This is a fun topic! As a mechanic power levels are obviously very silly. They barely hold up as a concept, and if anything they just serve to make the ridiculous power creep of the series that much more obvious.
But I have to admit, I do kind of like their use in early DBZ! The main reason is that only bad guys use them. During the infamous Over 9000 conversation, and throughout the series, Goku and his friends don’t have any real grasp of what those numbers are or what they’re meant to measure. And in fact the numbers are wrong more often than not, because the heroes conveniently have a power that defies that kind of quantification. A pretty heroic characteristic!
The good guys can assess their enemies’ strength by ‘feeling’ it, but the bad guys are too imperialistic and unenlightened to have cultivated that sense. They’re out of touch with their feelings, and so this tool that turns a person’s potential into a number, that they believe to be a huge asset, becomes a crutch when all of their scouters get destroyed. They’re bullies and cowards, and they crumple before the real thing, caught in a trap without the tools and armies they’ve come to depend on. As a kid watching, I found it pretty satisfying to see a guy who’s used to pushing people around get his comeuppance with a “not so tough without your scouter, are you?”
The end result is that Namek is a pretty fun strategic romp, with a bunch of overpowered bad guys playing a frustrated game of hide and seek with a few scrappy good guys whose only real advantages are feeling danger coming and sneaking around. Ironically, of all the Dragon Ball arcs, it’s the one that relies the least on direct power comparisons.
Wow I haven’t written that much about DBZ since middle school!
This one had me scratching my head through the whole read, since the points it was making seemed to be predicated–rather explicitly–on the previous Raditz arc (and all the previous setup and calibration for the scouter numbers) just… not existing.
Reading stuff like:
“imagine if one martial artist asked another how skilled he was, and his opponent responded ’12’ with no further comment or explanation”
or
“And so, right at the beginning of this transition from a story that didn’t take itself seriously to a story that takes itself pretty darn seriously, Vegeta and Nappa arrive with scanners designed to bridge that gap, informing us that power levels exist now”
Except… their arrival didn’t inform us of that. We had already known power levels existed for some time before Vegeta and Nappa show up. In fact, the previous arc had a bunch of extra explanation and context setting up for this moment, including a whole progression showing us the power level of random humans, the power level of then-Goku and then-Piccolo, which is pretty clearly there to calibrate our expectations so that we have a relative framework for what going over 9000 means compared to that. Precisely so that it isn’t just a random “12” thrown in there “with no further comment or explanation”.
Like, I’m not even saying that power levels weren’t on the ham-fisted side… but when an article plays up just how bad and jarring their introduction was to make a point (yet erases all the setup in the previous arc to make it not so jarring as that) it still doesn’t really feel like the show is being given a fair shake. Rather, it feels like you’re artificially stacking the deck against DBZ for the sake of “beating on it” to make a point.
The power levels may not have been the most elegant choice… but Toriyama at least gave them much more of a setup than the impression a reader would get from just reading how this article portrays his writing.