Forum - Tackling How We Deal With Statements Conflicting With Visuals

This was a thread that needed to be discussed for a while and the recent thread gave me further reason to start this discussion.

The current way we handle skill for verses needs some changes, though it's quite complex, so let me try as best as I can to word this.

There are many times in series where I will see characters be noted by another character to be a combat genius or such for reasons that don't make much sense. Yes we are going to use Dragon Ball for this example.

This statement here from Piccolo insinuates that Vegeta is a great warrior and his skill surpasses Goku for a gamble that realistically only worked because Gero is a hyper paranoid individual (and Vegeta didn't know that part) and in most other cases would've gotten him killed because of how people would've seen pass the bait. Also that he's a great tactician because he let himself be drained of most of his energy to confirm if they can absorb energy, which is... frankly a stupid battle strategy, by that point you just want to avoid them absorbing energy at all and on top of that he saw them doing it to Goku.

But the narrative is trying to say Vegeta is a skilled tactician here for this, but this frankly is just not intelligent battle awareness at all.

There's also Vegeta in the same arc using the most basic bait techniques which has him and the Z fighters get called out for over-relying on sensing ki, this is even worse for Vegeta's case since he only just learned about ki sensing an arc ago.

You also have things like Ultra Instinct in Dragon Ball being considered the peak of martial arts when the act of attacking instinctively without putting thought into it is something you naturally build up as a warrior over the years. And by over the years, a lot of people get an automatic rhytm after about 2-3 years, so this is something that's just naturally ingrained into you and Goku has been training for about 30+ years.

These are not obviously to knock on Dragon Ball's skill but instead to call to question how it is very clear Toriyama was not very aware of martial arts beyond the physical actions of it; we directly see that the main style Goku uses, the turtle hermit style, is a style that does not incorporate any real fighting techniques has a heavy reliance on durability, stamina, muscles and speed, along with agility. Yet people use as a skill feat Master Roshi defeating someone that's a 40 Dan Black Belt in Kenpo, when his style is specifically made to be as long as he's stronger then the opponent, they cannot harm him with techniques.

So in cases like this, the question is: How the hell do we tackle this? Cause it's clear when unorthodox styles or styles that have any form of durability negation comes against them, they usually struggle greatly and their solution is almost always to just get strongerer and fasterer and this is treated as skill for them.

This doesn't exist alone in Dragon Ball mind you, I just use it as it's one of the primary examples of this conundrum. I can easily label this too for the "Potential Man" issue where someone will have dozens of statements hyping them up and then their actual on screen results don't match the statements at all.

If you want an example outside of these, the infamous Superman using Super Math scene, where he got the math problem completely wrong but in-universe he was treated as the smartest man for that.

While I would love the simple "accept what the author says" there still is a level of confliction with these where the author is in actuality saying two completely different things with characters.