Recently I’ve watched over 100 episodes of Bleach. I did a lot of skipping mind you and a lot of fast forwarding, but over four days I went through about 100 episodes. From the end of the “Arrancar” arc somewhere around 140 all the way to 220. I skipped past the previous 20 episodes to kind of refresh myself. So I think it’s time again to give a good lesson about anime and where a lot of things come from.

In Dragonball Z you have every anime “trope” out there. Ranging from Moe to Henshin. Here is a quick list:

• Moe: A lot of the females range from Tsundere to midly submissive.
• Henshin: The great Saiya-man arc.
• Robots: There were mechs and there were androids.
• Burning Passion: 50 episodes of powering up.
• Impossible to Fight Enemies: yeah, Freiza and Buu are two good starts.
• Henchmen of varying difficulty levels: mmhmm
• Everyone getting split up and fighting different enemies: Why does this still happen?
• Anime Hair: Everyone in it.
• Bishies: Yeah
• Blade Reflections: Yep.
• Blood: lots of it
• Circle of Friendships: YEAHHH
• Death is Meaningless: Yep
• Defeat Means Friendships: mmmhmm
• Afros: YEAH
• I AM YOUR OPPONENT: YEAH
• Invisible to Normals: why why why why do I have to keep typing yeah in some entertaining way?
• Katanas: a few
• Hopping on Roofs: yeah
• Rescuing people: yeah
• School Episodes: yeah YES YES YES YES
• I even think there was a hot spring episode or something
• The trope from TV Tropes where it’s called “Vegeta and Kakarot” or basically two rivals who are beyond rivals like Sasuke and Naruto or Yusuke and Kuwabara or Ichigo and Uryuu and blah blah blah.
• They go into freaking space.
• Time Travel

There are episodes involving schools, episodes in space, dimensional travel, tournaments, superheroes, flying cars, technology, magical healing powers, time travel, and the list keeps going on and on.

Anime can always be traced back to DBZ in some way. There isn’t an anime series out there that has some kind of DBZ in it. DBZ may be lambasted for being stupidly long and too mainstream, but it’s the father of a lot of modern anime. Remember though that DBZ wasn’t first in any respects, it just stole every idea in the book and jammed them together. It’s a good representation of anime though.