memories on Snake Way (no.5)

R.I.P. Akira Toriyama

I’ll keep this Rent’s Due intro brief. If you’re new here, thanks for checking this out 🫶. Considering being a subscriber if you like deeply personal things about Dragon Ball Z and other stuff.

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How do you find the right way to say goodbye to someone who’s already passed on? I don’t think anyone gets to figure that out the way they want to, no matter how many perfect speeches and letters we rehearse inside our head. We may never know how to best convey what a person meant to us in the wake of their death, but we try to anyway, because in some strange way it almost feels necessary. Like our hearts share this inherent need to tell them, regardless of whether we actually knew them or not, that their life mattered to us and that we’re grateful for the memories they played a small part in making. Idk if I have much I can say about Akira Toriyama that hasn’t already been said by billions everywhere in the time of his passing, but there’s definitely some things I can say about the work he now leaves behind, and how it shaped me into the person I am today.

I’ll keep it real with you: About 98% of the Toriyama anecdotes I cherish with me are directly about Dragon Ball Z. Big shock Ik. The remaining 2% has to do more with admiring his impeccable art style like his cool tiny cars and finding the Billy & Mandy parody to be really funny. I’m no doctor, that’s just how my brain operates when I think about the influence his work left on me since elementary school.

I didn’t immediately get into reading or watching DBZ back then, but I obviously knew what it was from spending time in my older cousin’s cramped room and perusing through the occasional ads in my Wizard! magazines. My first memory of Dragon Ball involved my cousin leaving behind his copy of Dead Zone and World’s Strongest at my house, after he spent an afternoon with my feverish ass showing me Wrath of the Dragon, a movie that I thought was “pretty cool” despite not knowing what the fuck happened. That cover of Goku and the yellow dragon was sick, and I remember the fight being fun, but I don’t remember much else on account of me throwing up a lot and wanting to sleep. I did like what I saw, though, so I later called him to see if I could also borrow what I thought would be a short DVD collection of the show to get the full story. I remember the call kinda going like this:

“Didn’t I just give you the first two movies?”, he said.

To which my six y/o ass responded with:

“YeahbutIwantmoreandmymomwon’tletmebuythem.” (I had asthma)

The call ended around there, but sometime after what had to have been another obnoxious call with his little primo, there was a time where I snuck into his room while he working on a school project and finally had a glimpse of those uniquely-packaged orange and black DVDs. They were right in front of me to nab while he was painting Spartan busts or whatever, but when I looked at just *how* many discs where in those sets, I chickened out at the sheer length of content I suddenly had in my hands, and put them away.

Maybe it’s just me, but when you’re a kid it feels intimidating to see a stack of books or orange DVDs and basically be told that the story of Son Goku and friends is all there. All 291 episodes of power-scaling and Head-cha-la’ing. I just wasn’t used to that. I was more comfortable (and I guess more patient) with watching my cool action shit like Avatar once a week when it aired live, or risk missing it completely because I didn’t have a DVR. I would’ve enjoyed watching DBZ on say, a Toonami afternoon block or marathon like a ton of other kids, but I was either getting back home too late to catch it or probably too baby-brained to look online to see when it was actually going to air (I did have Miguzi to come home to, though, so it wasn’t all bad). Maybe I was too scared to change my routine, or that I actually had (have?) an attention disorder, but the Saiyan Saga just wasn’t in the cards for me yet, and for awhile after I’d forgotten about it. Until somewhere around 2014, when the newer version of Toonami began airing the filler-less Kai from the very beginning.

I believe that people sometimes like to dive into their hobbies as a way to escape the shitty parts of their life. For some it’s simple things as collecting or playing a sport, and for people like me it was watching a bunch of shows and movies old and new and getting inspired enough to write from it (the benefits of heavily exploiting the newly-bought family DVR). Hobbies can serve as an extension for escapism, and I desperately needed to feel that on November 2014. I felt alone and unhappy with who I was in life, and I felt like I couldn’t confide in the people I love because I didn’t trust them to understand what I was going through for some stupid reason. It sounds ridiculous for me to say as I type this, but that’s just what it felt like for 15 y/o me back then. My life lessons (good and bad) were taken from my widescreen, and in the new cool action shit I’d discover on my own time away from the world. I thought it was exciting and a little nostalgic to watch Kai in its new weekly run. At this point in my life I wasn’t intimated to binge-watch anything, but I was locked in on spending a late Saturday night seeing it alongside the other newish shows I’d just started watching (Attack on Titan, Hellsing Ultimate, Big O, Stand Alone Complex and Cowboy Bebop all at once? 2014 Toonami was a fucking goldmine).

In some weird way, watching those early episodes of Goku getting *killed* and doing silly shit in the afterlife while his son trained with a green guy this offscreen narrator told me was his greatest enemy, felt like I was living vicariously through my older cousin’s childhood. That feeling of surprise, watching what was a (very early) end to one story now open up into a much bigger and considerate one, with characters learning and growing beyond what they once were in both life and death. The emotional stakes seeing the Z-Fighters train for something they *know* they might die easily from, but still go hard in the hopes that they’ll help keep the world spinning another day. The sense of closure you get from following a guy like Vegeta (the fucking greatest of all time no questions asked), who came in as this red-headed selfish pompous ass, and came out understanding that there’s purpose in caring for others, and that it’s never too late to change your ways. It was things like that I remember my cousin teaching me as my elder of sorts, alongside the things I’d come to learn myself moving forward on my own path in life. The only regret I had watching DBZ was that I didn’t have a way to share it with him, as it had been years since I lost him to a bunch of personal life shit. I missed him dearly when I watched Kai, and I still do now. Despite having my own unique experience watching the show, I could see elements in him in the show’s characters, alongside traits that I plan to still hold onto forever.

I guess what I’m trying to say about Toriyama and his impact on me is that it gave me much more than I would ever think I’d gain from immersing in it. His worlds gave me new (irl) friends to open up to, easier ways of getting out of my shell with my family, and memories with people whose presence I miss every single day. I know it’s silly to think that an action show helped me learn more about myself and my life, but what else can I say? It also taught me that Mexican culture is some of the hypest shit ever, so there is that. And for at least half of *all that*, I have Akira Toriyama to thank. Cheers to you and your family, for the endless lessons that are felt by all. Maybe now I’ll finally watch Dead Zone and World’s Strongest.

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