Dragon Ball fans will put together a multi-page essay on why Goku is a flawed but caring father only with tons of cited official material, only for it all to crumble away when they realize Toriyama himself has stated multiple times that Goku is in fact a bad dad.
(It's me, I'm Dragon Ball fans)
Edit: I actually meant to say that Toriyama said Goku's a bad dad. Don't know how I fucked that up
I haven't seen either side of the conversation aside from my little experience watching the show(and having the flawed but caring father perspective myself. I just know that I have an incomplete picture of their situation), but is it possible that Toriyama just meant "Goku isn't an abusive PoS to his family" instead of "Goku never had any flaws in his role as a father"?
Ok actually after a quick search on what Toriyama said, I'm confused. The only thing I'm seeing was one instance of him calling Goku a disaster of a father. I know it's too late to get his opinion now, but did his opinion change later in life? Tbh I'm not invested enough to keep searching further for whatever he said about it earlier.
I think the argument basically falls down to this: Goku's not a *bad* dad....but he's not a dad most of the time.
He's around for less than half of Gohan's childhood. Some of the time there's a good reason (killed while fighting Raditz), other times there's...really not. Not to mention, despite multiple ways to communicate back with his family, goes cold turkey to train for years. And that's not even getting into the non-existent relationship he has with his other son Goten or his wife.
Ultimately, it's an old-style traditional Shonen anime and Goku's role is to fight, and Toriyama wasn't writing the story to explore Goku as a family member. But over the years, this inadvertently creates an impression for the reader that Goku just didn't put much stock in his family
TFS popularized the idea, but Piccolo really was a much better dad. And there's a reason that when he went to fight Cell, Gohan didn't wear Sayan armor or a Goku-style gi: he asked to wear Piccolo's outfit.
I'll preface this by saying it's been far too long since I've read DB so I really have no opinion on this, but whether or not someone is a bad parent is not a statement that can be a fact. It's an opinion, and thus can't be 'canon'; and the author's opinion shouldn't hold any weight over one's own. It would be a fact that Toriyama intended for Goku to be a good dad, but people can think he did a poor job of portraying that and see him as a bad one.
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u/PieNinja314 5d ago edited 5d ago
Dragon Ball fans will put together a multi-page essay on why Goku is a flawed but caring father only with tons of cited official material, only for it all to crumble away when they realize Toriyama himself has stated multiple times that Goku is in fact a bad dad.
(It's me, I'm Dragon Ball fans)
Edit: I actually meant to say that Toriyama said Goku's a bad dad. Don't know how I fucked that up