Akira Toriyama died recently. He created Dragon Ball, the highly influential manga serialized from 1984-1995 and adapted into several anime series on TV, which is where I first encountered the franchise around the age of 11.
I feel a little bit silly writing about anime, I guess perhaps because I perceive its core audience as being very spiritually and philosophically removed from my imagined audience of virtuous, wise, sexy thinkers and creatives, climbing mountains while they read Marcus Aurelius or something.
However, the reality is that for me—and likely for many of my male audience of millennials—Dragon Ball was an important and influential mythology that impacted me at such an early and pivotal phase of my growth, that it is forever etched into my soul, forever forms a large chunk of the mythical grammar with which I came to narratively, artistically, and aesthetically interact with the world.
At least in the modern era, everyone has their sacred media: the first band you really fell in love with, the first movie or television show, the first novel, the first philosopher or writer or thinker. These 'archemedia' we encounter during our formative years serve as the foundations, the axioms upon which we formulate an aesthetic palate, upon which we judge other music, movies, comics, paintings, clothes, and social scenes.
We don’t always choose these things—I didn’t choose that my dad listened to the Beach Boys all the time, or that my eight-year-old best friend happened to have the Ninja Turtles movie on VHS at his house which we watched repeatedly—but they become a part of us regardless. Humans crave rich symbolic artifacts and as children we readily plug those artifacts into our psychic structure, and proceed to carry them around with us forever, like spiritual tattoos.
Dragon Ball is one of my spiritual tattoos.
What made it so entrancing as a pre-teen male? Something about a lifestyle in which there is nothing but training, fighting, and being heroic. Something about the theme that becoming agentic and powerful only requires that you be disciplined and work hard. Something about the ability to call up latent energy and power within yourself, simply by digging deep and searching your soul. Little boys love that shit.
Every weekday, after school, my young crew of six or seven guys would figure out whose house we could go to to watch about 15 minutes of the hero, Goku, training real hard, somehow becoming even more powerful than he was before, and then battling an evil alien bent on destroying the Earth. Some episodes, Goku would literally just 'charge up' his powers for 15 minutes straight and nothing else would happen.
It was all so ridiculous and over-the-top, but it didn’t matter. We were exploring the archetypal core of prepubescent masculinity, dancing with the fantasy of growing strong, protecting those we love, and transmuting a dangerous chaos into a peaceful realm of habitable order. A drive so pure; unclouded by the mundane realities and discoloring moral complexities that would seep into our hearts as we grew older.
I lost interest in Dragon Ball about the same time I started talking to girls, started taking sports more seriously, started taking academics more seriously, started taking everything more seriously. Perhaps Dragon Ball found a home in me during my last gasp of childhood, where my innocence and wonder held space for untrammeled play in the imaginal realm.
Regardless, its spiky-haired solar-punk mythology carved lasting grooves into my own projective palate. Whether or not I knew it, Goku sprinted beside me as I fought to win my first cross-country race. He winks at me now, as I sit here training myself to be more disciplined with my writing.
The power and influence of myth in our lives knows no bounds. Thank you for yours, Akira Toriyama.
Rest in peace.