Despite having some bad criticisms from the fans when it began, the series had some positive ones later on, probably because people who hated stopped watching or the ones who watched were casual fans who were like « yeah well what can you do about it duuuude?!? » or hardcore fans who jumped on the bandwangon because some of their Youtubers who criticized the show at the start suddenly stopped and told them to support it (because of their sponsors/views) and hyped it every single week for the past three years in order to get their check.
The truth is, knowing it's really bad in many aspects, they will probably use the remote control and will state afterwards that even if they reviewed it for about three years now « They were not fans » and will say that it wasn't that good, they will highlight the issues of the series only when it will be finished because they couldn't afford to do such thing when it was airing. I mean, nobody would take the risk to lose so much subs or sponsors. Dragon Ball Super IS without the shadow of a doubt, one of the worst anime series ever for various reasons and people who see the series as a guilty pleasure are actually admitting that too in a way. It's one of the most inconsistent mess from a writing, directing perspective I've ever seen and I'm not even speaking about its art or its animation which are much weaker than GT's at times, especially when it comes to consistency. And yet, thanks to the Youtubers (and mainly their sponsors) and websites and hardcore DB clickbaiters fans it was one of the most hyped show I have ever seen.
This series managed to mix all of the wrong aspects of mangas/animes today and became a generic show using multiple forms of fanservice during its run, due to its success it wouldn't be surprising for other shows to try and replicate some of its formula, meaning that Super is a bad omen for what is to come for the manga/anime world in general. The only reason that makes people care more about Super than GT is because Toriyama's name is mentionned. Toriyama also worked on GT and on a few movies back then when it comes to chara-design and so on, the main difference here is that he's just developing basic ideas for the franchise. He already did this for filler arcs from the Z series back then. Super takes place after the Buu saga, the beginning is another take on the movies Battle of Gods (That Watanabe wrote) and Fukkatsu no F.
You have to understand that from a market point of view in order to not repeat the disaster that Dragon Ball GT was for the fans, Toei had to use Toriyama's name at some extent. No matter how involved he truly is... For the fans Dragon Ball Super is the canon sequel to Dragon Ball but it's more complicated than that. I don't think « canon » is a synonym for « quality » and the truth is people said the BOG and Fukkatsu movies were canon before Super became a part of the franchise. The story literally has 2 or 3 takes per arc. The basic story remains the same but many things changed when you're comparing the movies to the anime series or to the manga, Dragon Ball Super is an original anime but the fact is even if the manga is done for promotional purposes only, both have access to Toriyama's original plot points. Weirdly enough, both the anime and the manga share more similarities with what people might call "fanfictions". Canon is a stupid concept to use in that specific case and even if it wasn't, it's not a shield which can cover the flaws of the actual series.
The changes when it comes to the chara-design, which was made to look more childish (round faces, less muscles, shiny colours, geometrical approach), always bothered me from an artistic point of view. One of Dragon Ball Super's producers talked about the anime and its animation issues in the first few arcs at Barcelone on the 29th of October with its chara-designer Yamamuro. They said the critiques were too excessive, that the problems were just about a few scenes but after blaming the fans they finally did acknowledge, without realizing, that some of the animators who worked on Dragon Ball Super were newbies...which was more than surprising. Using beginners for such a big franchise is more than problematic for obvious reasons, it tells us a lot when it comes to the production issues.
Toei's problems when it comes to their animations is quite known : There was the Sailor Moon Crystal polemic, World Trigger being too static, the end of Toriko decreasing from an animation point of view, some of Saint Seiya's spin-offs being poorly drawned and each fanbase more or less complained about the animation of these shows every single time. When it comes to Dragon Ball the fanbase is divided on that topic, recently it became even more complicated to speak about the overall quality of the series without people losing their minds and defending the show as hard as they could, like if it was the holy grail, when Super actually does have a lot of bad animations or bad, sketchy and not well detailed, drawings in its show... especially at the start. Other fanbases admitted it and called a spade a spade in due time and each time it was most likely a consensus which says a lot about the degree of denial of the DB fandom. (Compare the quality of Super to other long-running animes, like the last few arcs of Bleach, Hunter x Hunter 2011 and so on)
The timeline chosen in order to tell Dragon Ball Super's story is more than confusing. When it comes to Dragon Ball, the main characters are known to surpass themselves, with that being said the story taking place after the Buu saga and before Uub arrives is tricky (Uub arrives 10 years after the Buu saga). Obviously there are more chances that things won't add up, like Trunks and Goten's appearances. We could probably say that Goten ages like his father but at one point Trunks would have to look like the teenager version of Future Trunks. Also, Pan is 4 years old at the end of Z which means that as soon as she is born, the story should take place 5-6 years after the Buu saga but the fact is Goku and Bulma state that they didn't see each other for 5 years. (Interesting that Bulma complained about it and said « Only 5 years ago » in volume 42, chapter 324) Uub's introduction afterwards, in the context of Super, makes little sense.
Speaking of which, Vegeta clearly didn't know who Goku's referring to (Uub) at the end of the manga and yet in Dragon Ball Super (Episode 30 I think) Goku tells Piccolo, Gohan and Vegeta that he wanted Buu to be reincarnated just before the Champa tournament when Piccolo was training Gohan after the Fukkatsu no F arc. It's just a few exemples here, there are way more problems than that when it comes to continuity, I covered them all arc by arc a while ago but it'd be too long to do it again here. I managed to make a top 10 of the biggest issues I had with GT, but from what I can remember when it came down to Super I had like 10/20 of them per arc (it included all of the plotholes).
BOG the first arc of the show is closer to Neko Majin Z (Toriyama's parody of his own series) than Dragon Ball Z and that's an issue. The comedic tone for the story makes the stakes here seem non-existant compared to what we've seen in the previous sagas... Beerus is not an antagonist so to speak meaning the danger seems non existant through the first two arcs, Pilaf and his gang kinda set the tone here but are irrelevant to the story as a whole to me, why are they reintroduced here? Trunks and Maï's pairing is in such bad taste and that's a giant euphemism since he is a little boy while she is close to being 50 years old or something despite having a little girl body. No higher-ups took issue with that... obviously...Dragon Ball becoming more and more mature (as a story) through the years made sense, from my point of view trying to use the old gags and so on is a huge step back mainly because like I just said, if not correctly handled, the comedy side will tend to diminish the importance of the stakes and that's what happened. Even the musics, for the most part, couldn't quite recreate the dramatical effect from the Z franchise, the first soundtracks were average and were mainly there to highlight the comedic effects and only started to improve in the fourth arc.
Our main characters don't have any kind of positive developement, Vegeta goes from a sort of comic-relief to his old character from the Cell saga. Goku's recent character developement and portrayal has been terrible, it's like a giant step back. Adding to that the heavy-handed humor using his stupidity as a plot convenience, it just makes the whole show suffer a bit more. One will say that at this point it won't make much of a difference. But it's painful to see such a famous and important character having some kind of unexplained degenerative brain disorder. It made a lot of fans hate his guts and rightfully so.
Aside from that there is no new evolution per say, Super pretends that it took a lot for Gohan to comeback and fight when... he actually... always did that in the manga... Each time the planet was threatened he fought, he did not train during 7 years because he thought the peace would remain, and I think that's a part that Toei misunderstood because he did admitt he should have trained and said he will keep training in the manga (after seeing how strong Goten truly is) and followed the group in order to fight Buu without thinking twice. Same with the Androids and Cell back then. Him studying (like he always did) is not a reason for him to not care at all about the earth, his character never was like that to begin with... so there is no reason for me to see his treatment as an evolution or as an actual development when it's not.
Other than that none of the characters really had any kind of character development, in the sense that they are just poorly "rebooting" the developments we already witnessed in the original work. They all had power-ups outta nowhere tho. Android 17 surpassing Vegeto in 6 years after training in a forest with squirrels and so on. The funniest part of the whole show : Kame Sennin/Muten Roshi surpassing Chiaotzu, who always trained, and Yamcha (who is just a "meme" now)... just...because... He somehow managed to skip the Saiyajin, the Android sagas' power levels so that he could be on par with the Z-team with no explanation whatsoever and fight the strongest beings in the universes. It could easily be argued that he may even have higher feats than the likes of Gotenks, Tien and the list goes on.
Maybe the fact that he tried to "sexually assault and rape" Puar during a serious arc in episode 91 (no I'm not making that up ffs, I truly wish I was) helped him out so that he could multiply his power a few trillions of times out of the blue? Who knows, it's Dragon Ball Super after all. Nobody cares about logic, stories, consistency...look at the powers of the gifted Saiyajins from universe 6, they managed to master SSJ1 and SSJ2 and another unknown level (Berserker, a ripoff of Broly's legendary form) in one single day. What about Krillin or Android 18 being able to fight gods after some minimal training also? What about Freezer surpassing the likes of Buuhan or Super Vegeto in 4 months only while he never thought about training that long in Z before coming back to earth and being squashed by Future Trunks...how dumb is he then? Also, 7 new transformations or so : Red, Blue, Berserker, Hikari, Omen, Ultra Instinct, Rose etc being introduced in ONE SHOW (and some are still unexplained to this day)...What about the Future Trunks timeline being erased forcing him and Maï to go to another timeline where...there are already another Future Trunks and another Maï? But that's all ok because Toriyama's name is on it? Give me a break...
What a freaking mess.
Even when it comes to the show's story, to me there is not much that stands out aside from 1 arc or 2 which still had glaring issues. Having multiple universes was a way for Toei to create new strong opponents without justifying their power levels (when they should have) and to reuse the exact same stories, plot points and structures, like the "Other World Tournament" where they got the Kaioken SSJ idea for instance. Ironically, the only "original" concepts in that "bouillabaisse" of a show, were clearly borrowed from fanfictions like Dragon Ball Multiverse and Dragon Ball AF. But honestly, what was the show's moral? What did it tell us? Dragon Ball, Z and GT all had morals to their journeys...what was Super's since fanservice is not a moral nor a message to me. So what was the message there? Was Dragon Ball Super really « needed »? I don't really think it was and the series itself proved it in many ways.
Sequels or reboots tend to undermine the overall vision of a work and purge them culturally and intellectually, particularly by monopolizing its title. In my opinion that's unfortunately what Dragon Ball Super did to the original work and its aura. It was a trainwreck and an insult to us fans.
Dragon Ball is Dead, All hail Dragon Ball.
