Local Man Begins 20th Straight Year Of Pretending Not To Like Dragon Ball Z
It’s been 20 years since Larford Jutz first discovered the hugely popular anime series Dragon Ball Z, a show that he has hated ever since. Jutz, who contends that the show is “for idiot children,” has vowed to spend his February celebrating his “superior taste in anime” and “decrying the epic saga of Son Goku.”
We caught up with Jutz in line at EB Games, as he angrily – and, he assured us, ironically – collected his preorder for the Collector’s Edition of Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot. “I just don’t understand why the show is so popular,” he grumbled, as he asked the store attendant to double-bag the game so that “no one would see him carry it off.”
Jutz, who furiously watched the show every morning for the entire run of the original English language dub before eventually “checking it out in Japanese for some dumb reason,” proclaims that he “doesn’t care about the mythology around the legendary Super Saiyajin.” He argued that there was “nothing engaging” about “the culmination of Son’s planet-spanning conflict with Piccolo Daimou and his offspring, which sees his one-time rival return from the dead, discover his home planet, and eventually merge with a God so that he can effectively battle against an evolving monster created by an android whose own vendetta with Goku is cut-short when the artificial humans he created rebel against their creator.”
“I’m falling asleep just thinking about it,” he added.
Through tears Jutz attributed to “hayfever,” he reminded us that Dragon Ball Z was a “baby show,” and that he “wasn’t even moved when Goku’s rival from his home planet, the Saiyajin prince Vegeta, completed his decade-long arc of redemption by commiting suicide to protect his son–who he’d quietly bonded with years earlier after he travelled through time from an alternate dimension–from an ancient evil that he had recently sworn fealty to in an effort to become more powerful.”
“It’s not as cool as Cowboy Bebop,” Jutz sniffled angrily. “It’s just not.”
Jutz added, in an attempt to “conclude this pointless interview”, that it was “particularly dumb” when “Goku’s son Gohan achieves a previously unseen level of power after bearing witness to the sacrifice of a kindly android, but then fails to recognise that his kindness and passivity was a form of strength, giving into the worst impulses of his warrior race at a critical time so that his father is forced to sacrifice his life for a second time, only for the son to eventually rally against the evil being he’s been fighting after realising that his father’s confidence in him was not in his capacity for cruelty, or even in the latent abilities of his race, but was instead born from love and respect.”
Sitting in the food court, eating a plain white ham-and-cheese sandwich that he brought from home, Jutz sighed. “I’m going to have to rewatch the whole thing from the beginning again to remember all the other reasons it fucking sucks,” he said. “At least the opening song slaps.”
