Power Levels: Dragon Ball, How Akira Toriyama Makes it Work

    An interesting aspect of battle shonen is this tangible idea of someone's strength. You tend to see lines such as, "I can feel an immense amount of strength coming from this guy" or "The aura he is emitting is intense". 

    Authors tend to give their characters a way to see this strength, like "Ki" in Dragon Ball. Usually, this is done so the viewer has a sense of whether a character is average or truly powerful. This is the idea of power levels, and today ill be discussing how Akira Toriyama uses them excellently in his series Dragon Ball. 

Spoilers For Dragon Ball

Power Levels In Dragon Ball

    To be clear, power levels have sort of become a blanket term in recent years for most anime and manga as things that determine a character strength, for instance, bounties in One Piece, or any slew of ranking systems in other series. But ill be looking at actual power levels from Dragon Ball. 

    In Dragon Ball, we are introduced to the idea of "Ki" which is what allows Goku and others to do their techniques, like the titular Kamehameha wave. Ki is the embodiment of a character's strength, if they have a lot they can do super powerful moves. 

    However we never really had a way to gauge it other than characters pointing out they feel they have a large amount of Ki, but the audience never got to see it. This changes once we get to the Saiyan Saga, where we learn about the scouters. 

Scouters are a device that the Freeza forces use to determine the strength of a lifeform. 

    An important encounter we see is between the characters Raditz, Goku, and Piccolo. At the start of the battle, Raditz uses the scouter to determine each of their power levels and sees that Goku's and Piccolo's are relatively small. This leads to his downfall, as he is stronger than both of them, but he doesn't realize that they can manipulate their Ki or power levels. Goku and Piccolo triumph, but at the cost of Goku's life. 

Flawed On Purpose

    I think Akira Toriyama was very purposely making the scouters and power levels a flawed system. They try to arbitrarily assign people power levels, that doesn't take into account a number of things that can influence a battle. Like, someone sacrificing themself to beat you, or the anger of seeing your friend die. 

    Other series will have these systems, like the magic knight ranks in Black Clover, that tell us as the audience this character is strong. The character will lose a fight, where the main character comes in and defeats the person who beat them, but we're still told the person who lost is still stronger than the main character. Even though we are never really given a reason as to why they are strong, or why the main character still has a lower rank than them. 

    Dragon Ball solves this problem by essentially pointing out its flaws through the characters. We see in the Freeza Saga scouters breaking because they can't read the power levels of the main characters. Even when they don't break they can hide their Ki up until the fight starts so there really is no point using them in the first place. 

    Not only does the scouter stunt the growth of the fighters, but we see Vegeta become stronger once he stops relying on the scouter so much. But in general, when an author writes a system that determines strength. As they tend to undermine all the groundwork they set up in order to make the main character look cooler. That's why once the Freeza Saga ended, we stopped seeing the scouters because it wasn't meant to measure strength but to subvert both our and the characters' expectations. 

Take-Aways

• Don't box your characters into a set "strength" level 
• Power levels tend to be one dimensional, pretty much only being there to show how strong a character is compared to others, so they are hard to set up

That's all I have of today, have a great day!