Chapter Text
A few days ago, a reader left a comment: “The Glind clan is actually a lot like the Targaryen family from A Song of Ice and Fire.”
When you think about it, they really do share some striking parallels.
The Targaryens: dragon bloodline, masters of colossal dragons, near-godlike beings.
The Glind people: the universes’ top candidates for divine status, symbols of creation and guardianship.
The crucial difference is this—Targaryens, thanks to the birth of new dragons, are steadily reclaiming their former glory. The Glind people, however, are marching straight toward extinction because every single Glind Tree has withered and died.
The fate of the Glind people is actually even more tragic and heroic than that of the Targaryens. A setup combining “noble bloodline + inevitable decline” should, by its very nature, generate powerful character motivations and gut-wrenching dramatic tension.
The Glind Trees are the very root that gave birth to the Glind people—the “mother” of every last one of them.
And the Glind people themselves are the source of all Supreme Kais across the universes. When the trees die, the race dies with them. When the race dies, the wellspring of gods runs dry.
This is, quite literally, a tragedy on a cosmic scale.
In any normal narrative logic, a premise like this would be main-plot material—possibly even the central driving force of the entire story.
Yet in DAIMA, it’s reduced to mere background flavor. One moment the story tells us this is an existential crisis for an entire species; the next moment, that crisis weighs nothing at all in the characters’ hearts.
Viewers can’t help but ask:
How could Shin possibly not care?
How could Arinsu possibly not care?
How could Degesu possibly not care?
This isn’t over-reading the text. These questions flow straight out of the setting itself. It’s not that the audience is expecting too much—it’s that the setting itself is demanding answers.
I once thought that Akira Toriyama was a creator who was rather insensitive to tragedy. He would take settings that were perfectly suited for serious, epic storytelling, yet still handle them with his usual light-hearted, adventurous manga style. This naturally creates a huge sense of dissonance.
But when I thought about it again, I realized that wasn’t entirely accurate. After all, he once gave heavy tragic weight to the deaths of Krillin, Piccolo, and even Vegeta. So it’s not that he doesn’t know how to portray the gravity of death. Rather, he is deliberately ignoring and downplaying the seriousness of this particular matter—this is a conscious narrative technique.
Once I realized this, the phenomenon felt extremely familiar to me. He had already used exactly the same approach with Shin back in the Majin Buu saga. In DAIMA, he was simply repeating the same old trick again. If I have the time and opportunity later, I’ll talk more about the Buu saga in detail.
Some people always say that Toriyama’s style is all about light-hearted comedy. But if that’s the case, then setting up the complete withering of all the Glind Trees is basically shooting himself in the foot, isn’t it?
These aren’t ordinary trees, my friends. They are the source of the top-tier divine candidates for all the universes, and they directly involve major characters on both sides—the heroic Supreme Kai Shin and the villainous Arinsu.
To drop such a heavyweight bombshell and then have it exert almost no influence on the actual plot is simply baffling.
Let’s compare this to the Namek saga. The near-extinction of the Saiyan race was given real emotional weight through Vegeta’s resentment, pain, and even tears. The arc ultimately ended with Frieza’s defeat. That saga has long been praised as having god-tier structure. Not a single setting or character was wasted (not even the random frog that just passed by). Every element was tightly connected, steadily building toward the final climax. The architecture was nearly perfect.
Yet with the Glind Trees, we get… nothing at all. It feels like nothing more than some irrelevant encyclopedia entry.
Who caused the Glind Trees to wither and die?
We don’t know.
Why did they wither and die?
We don’t know.
Because there is no clear focus, no “perpetrator,” and no causal chain, this tragic setup has no way to turn into emotional fuel for the characters.
Compared to the Targaryens mentioned by the reader at the beginning, the decline of the Targaryens became the driving engine of the entire story. In contrast, the decline of the Glind people can only remain stuck in the background as a setting. That is what makes the whole situation feel so absurd.
I’m also quite puzzled: these three Glind people are essentially the final generation and blood siblings—how on earth did their relationship turn out so bad?
It’s fine if their relationship is poor. Shin becoming a Supreme Kai, his brother and sister staying behind in the Demon Realm, Degesu harboring deep hatred for Shin, and Arinsu doing whatever it takes to become the Great Demon King—this kind of relational tension is practically textbook-perfect dramatic structure.
Yet the story never explains any of it: What was Shin’s state of mind when he left? Why does Degesu hate him so much? How does Arinsu view Shin’s choice?
The audience only gets to see the result, but not the cause behind it.
From Arinsu’s perspective, the Glind people are facing extinction, yet those who became Supreme Kais are still devoting themselves to what she sees as lowly humans. Even her own younger brother Shin—or rather, Nahare—left the Demon Realm to become a Supreme Kai.
When she learned (since Degesu once said she knows everything, I’ll assume she knows about the Buu incident) that several members of their race were killed or absorbed by Buu, and that Shin himself nearly died due to the Saiyans’ internal fighting—wouldn’t she feel sorrow for her own kind? Wouldn’t she feel that her brother, who had ascended to godhood, was being desecrated by mere humans?
If she had these emotions and grievances, she and Shin could have sparked an incredibly intense and fiery confrontation. Yet there was nothing—nothing but a superficial conversation that felt like kids playing house.
Under the dire situation of facing racial extinction, the emotions between siblings should have been far more dramatic, intense, and emotionally charged. Arinsu should have been obsessively trying to pull Shin over to her side.
Because if the universes lose their Supreme Kais, they lose their highest authorities. The universes would drift toward abnormality and disorder. This would undoubtedly be a huge advantage for Arinsu’s ambition of making all universes submit to her. If she could win over her fellow Glind clansmen who became Supreme Kais, it would be a massive step toward victory. This kind of strategy actually makes sense—after all, her own clansmen are the ones she can predict and try to control. They should be the first ones she tries to recruit. Otherwise, once she really rules all the universes, what is she supposed to do with those relatives of hers?
Therefore, Arinsu had no reason to take the risk of creating new Majins. Doesn’t she know that several of her clansmen were killed by a Majin? Is she really not afraid that before she can even create a loyal and powerful Majin, she might end up getting herself killed first?
As for Degesu, his resentment toward Shin and Arinsu’s resentment toward Shin could be two very different kinds. Arinsu is arrogant and self-important, skilled at manipulating others; she would want Shin to submit to her.
Degesu, however, constantly mentions Shin’s exalted status. Even while watching him on a screen, he sneers at the image: “So high and mighty now that you’re a Supreme Kai.” And when they finally meet, he still mocks Shin for being so outstanding.
A person like Degesu is fundamentally driven by a sense of inferiority. His feelings toward his elder brother Shin are a complicated mix of admiration, jealousy, and the pain of being abandoned.
The more they poured out their inner emotions, the more they would force Shin to clearly articulate his own beliefs, his sense of responsibility, his thoughts, and how he could still stay true to his principles even as his race faced extinction. This would have been the perfect moment for Shin—as the current active Supreme Kai—to display the powerful core of his spirit right in front of his two siblings who had chosen the Demon Realm.
Just thinking about this kind of three-way tug-of-war already feels incredibly tense. I really wanted to see Shin genuinely struggle for once. The more he managed to break through that dark swamp, the more it would highlight just how steadfast and unwavering he was, and how truly noble his soul remained.
When the very last members of a race end up fractured and divided like this, it should normally come with enormous resentment and painful inner struggle.
Yet in the series, they behaved as coldly and distantly as distant relatives who hadn’t seen each other in years. It felt extremely unnatural and forced.
So why did Akira Toriyama simply drop the setting of all the Glind Trees withering away, only to never dig any deeper into it?
It wasn’t because those trees were unimportant. On the contrary, it was precisely because they were too important—their weight had already exceeded what Dragon Ball could handle—that he chose to treat the whole thing coldly and lightly.
Because once the story followed this setup, Shin would undoubtedly become the central character. The plot’s focus would revolve entirely around him, turning into a mythological tragedy filled with intense internal conflict as he struggled between his kin and his duty. That would completely change the tone of the entire story.
And what would become of Son Goku? He would be reduced to nothing more than a sidekick who tags along with Shin and only steps in to fight when needed. He would no longer be the driving force of the plot—and that is something a hot-blooded, protagonist-centered series like Dragon Ball simply cannot allow.
If the story had gone down this path, none of the Demon Realm settings prepared for Shin would have been wasted. It would have truly done justice to the subtitle “DAIMA”. But the result would have been a work very unlike the Dragon Ball series we know—definitely not the light-hearted, carefree, joke-filled outing style we actually got.