How Dragon Ball Showed Me How To Read (and Think)

I started school pretty late compared to other kids. Most usually started in kindergarten. Some even started in pre-k. Hell, I’ve even heard of kids starting in the first grade, like my sister. But then there comes me, starting in second grade. Yeah, I wasn’t exactly the best at school. I wasn’t as helpless as you’d think, since I knew how to read from computers since I was a toddler. But as far as writing went? I’d rather type. So my most notable early literary experience wasn’t a book. Far from it, actually. 

Now, I was not a reader growing up. Obviously things have changed nowadays, but back then trying to get me to bother reading was rather difficult. After all, going from basically every day being free time to school 5 days a week was something my little child brain couldn’t even fathom. Now I’m no studious scholar, but even I don’t dread school as much as I did before. It was really hard for me at the time, especially since by second grade everyone was getting through the academic issues of school and moving onto caring about social issues. But while I wasn’t able to read particularly well and couldn’t write at all, I did have one thing over these kids: the Internet.

I’ve been browsing the Internet since I was very young, and of course I find entertaining stuff fast. YouTube was still the media giant it was even in 2012 and I eventually ended up finding out about the existence of anime. And manga, too. My first exposure to anime was Dragon Ball Z, this cool series about a guy named Goku fighting threats to him and his friends from Earth, other planets, and other universes. Needless to say I was genuinely addicted. To the point where I tried to read the manga myself. This was about the same time I was going to school, though at the start of the year there was no way I’d be able to read it. Getting through 20 page “Level A” books (which were the lowest reading level books usually only for pre-k and kindergarten students) was moderately difficult.

So I just kept trying. Everyday I’d keep trying to read it. Most of my family wasn’t very sympathetic to me. My great aunt and grandma just wanted me to read “normal” books and said that anime and manga were a waste of time. However my dad was a bit more receptive to me. He introduced me to subtitles on the TV, which I didn’t even know about. Thus, I could watch the Dragon Ball Z anime with subtitles which honestly was way more effective than brute forcing myself to understand the manga. It was actually much easier to understand, since the characters were speaking at the same time as I was reading. 

It’s kind of alarming how effective it was. At the time I feel like it influenced my own storytelling and writing at the time too. Whenever we had anything creative in class, somehow Dragon Ball would find a way to be involved in my school work. 

In specific, I think when I finally finished the series, fillers and all, it was my most notable literary experience. Because after all the time I spent reading the subtitles and watching the series, I gained the ability to not just see what I’m seeing and reading, but actually comprehend it. I found out my favorite character was Future Trunks, as unlike other Saiyans who suffered from overconfidence, Trunks handled threats as soon as he could. And he did it with style, being a swordsman and having a unique design compared to the other characters. My favorite “arc,” or section from the story, was the “Cell Saga,” as I was a big fan of the central villains, and everyone loves Gohan’s first Super Saiyan 2 transformation. Even things I didn’t like, like how I always found Chi-chi frustrating or why didn’t anyone listen to Bulma’s plan to use the Dragon Balls to stop the androids.

And I feel like that’s the most important thing I got out of the series. It showed me what reading was all about, and that it wasn’t so bad after all. After all, it’s like being told a story, except you get to pick the voice and reading speed. Even if the process was boring, the payoff at the end being a good story was something I could get behind. Eventually, I got into reading more manga and books in general. Over the years, I’ve actually read a lot more books. Fahrenheit 451, Into The Wild, and Lord of the Flies are some of my favorites. So I guess I have Dragon Ball to thank for getting me down the literary rabbit hole.

For years I was always ashamed of how I started off in school, since anime and manga just isn’t really held to the same esteem as other media. So whenever people talked about their early days in school I usually always ended up making some kind of excuse or different story. Most people’s most important literary experiences often tend to be more conventional books, so in a way I thought mine being a somewhat silly anime was embarrassing, especially when it came to telling teachers. But as a college student with many more years of life experience, I look back at my literary past in a better light now. Other people’s experiences were definitely good books. But for me? It was all Dragon Ball Z.