Yeah.... I don't have any expectation whatsoever that my level should make the cut and get into a video but I'm disappointed that it hasn't even been played by either of them to check it out and see if it's any good.
@max_cherry: They only wipe out species that have activated Gateways and are capable of interplanetary/interstellar travel, or that would gain that capability during the time of their purge (or soon after). We know this because the Prothean Javik knows what Asari, Turians, Humans, and Salarians are, so they clearly existed in primitive societies during the time of the Prothean Empire.
The Reapers purpose is not to eradicate the galaxy of all organic life. The Reapers purpose is to prevent organic life from advancing to a point where they are able to create synthetic life powerful enough to permanently wipe out all organic life and rule the galaxy (the irony is intentional). The point of their purges is to periodically set back organic life technologically so as to prolong its existence. Eradicating primitive organic life and microbiota doesn't make any sense in that context. Even if you assume that their goals have shifted to instead make their top priority procreation, the sooner organics develop the sooner the next harvest can occur. And hibernating in deep space is probably boring.
They don't jettison the idea in ME3. All Reapers have similar outer shells but the cores are always constructed in the image of the species from which they're created. You just don't see the core of any full-grown Reapers.
We don't know for sure that other universe's deities defend them from things like Freiza or Cell. We know for a fact that Universe 6 has a Frost going around terrorizing the universe while pretending to be a liberator in order to profit from his own destruction, that there is a need for a squad of (hideously underpowered) Saiyans to go around righting wrongs, and that they have been terrorized by a deadly assassin that has been around for thousands of years (Hit is basically like Uber Cell if Cell decided to just make money instead of blowing shit up). We see nothing at all of what's going on recently or historically in other universes. The only universe that is definitely protected from threats like Cell and Freiza by their deities is the universe that Jiren comes from because we see that their god of destruction has trained a squad of fighters to defend the universe.
I had actually forgotten about Daikaioh since everyone just accepts that he's been absorbed by Buu and leaves him there (and then in Super it seems like every other universe has a Kaioshin equivalent but no Grand Supreme Kai), but who the heck is Xemu? I haven't seen any being in DBS that outranks Zeno.
@maxxcanti: I would argue that claiming that there are people who claim their gender is "something ridiculous" is itself a bigoted stance to take. How many people exactly do you think claim their gender is something that you would deem worthy of ridicule?
@garwalk: I think the way that Kai streamlines the training beyond SSJ sub-plot makes it so that you should be able to pick it up on a first viewing without needing the benefit of hindsight to pick up the clues, but you have to be actually paying attention and thinking about what's going on. And again it's better if you don't already know about discrete "levels" of SSJ, which Jeff and Dan really fixated on, even expecting the show to outright name it as such in the moment.
After Trunks and Vegeta come out of the chamber, and while Gohan and Goku are around half-way through their time in the chamber, it seems pretty clear that they are all approximately the same strength and none of them have figured out how to get any stronger (the fact that Gohan is on par with everyone else perhaps isn't obvious until later). Trunks and Goku show that you can dump into strength at the cost of speed but that this is not effective for actual fighting.
Goku has the bright idea to train so that they eliminate the "overhead" (so to speak) of maintaining the transformation, so Gohan and Goku end up significantly stronger than Vegeta and Trunks, but as we see when Gohan powers up to fight Goku he is basically identically as strong as Goku. So while they've eliminated the apparently significant drag on power of maintaining SSJ form, they are still limited by the same ceiling that Vegeta and Trunks hit their first year in the chamber - they just got asymptotically closer to it.
Meanwhile Vegeta doesn't want to just get really close to the ceiling ("Full Power SSJ"), he wants to break through it. So he spends his second year doing other kinds of training to try and break through the ceiling, but is unsuccessful and ends up way weaker than Goku and Gohan even after all of this.
Then finally Gohan taps into whatever hidden power he has access to to break through the ceiling. The fact that he has gotten stronger at all should be enough to identify that something significant has happened, he broke through a log-jam that had been the focus of the last ~15 episodes. The only thing that I never really understood was why Gohan should have this power and not future Trunks, given that they're both Saiyan/Human halfbreeds, but I just chalked it up to Gohan being some kind of special "chosen one." What really doesn't make sense is how in ~16 years Gohan never figured out how to tap into the power in the future timeline. You would figure that literally everyone he loves dying would be enough to make him as mad as Android 16 dying, you know?
Like you said, from the moment Goku wakes up from his coma the whole focus of all the saiyans becomes getting stronger, and the way in which they all fail so consistently and symmetrically is something that I don't think should require multiple viewings to pick up.
Also I really think you guys are under-estimating the impact that the production quality of Kai is having on Jeff and Dan's enjoyment of this. There is no way they should go back to OG Dragon Ball. Yes there is a lot of the wacky fun stuff they enjoy from DBZKai, but the written dialogue and voice acting in the English dub are truly horrendous, like high school project radio play horrendous. The moments from OG Dragon Ball that they show in flashbacks in DBZKai are absolute highlights in terms of animation / art quality and they do not betray the truly, absolutely hideous voice acting. English dub production quality, and the skills of the various voice actors, came a long way between the original english runs of DB and DBZ and Kai.
I think that a priori knowledge of the existence of SSJ2 as a discrete transformation ruins the moment of Gohan's transformation for people more than anything you can specifically pin on any of the versions of the show. In a world where you don't know that "super saiyan level 2" specifically exists and you aren't on the lookout for a transformation as dramatic as that of base -> SSJ, it would be totally obvious, from his appearance, personality, and abilities, that Gohan is very different before and after he has his emotional moment and snaps.
It's only later in the Buu arc that they actually give the transformation an actual discrete name. In the context of the Cell saga, all the viewer should really know is that there appears to be an absolute limit on the power of a super saiyan (where "power" is some combination of your strength and speed), which all of the super saiyans fail to break through using conventional training, and Gohan breaks through this ceiling by tapping into the hidden reserve power that has been continually referenced and foreshadowed since the very first episode of Kai. While it is later defined as a discrete transformation when the creator decided to add another level of super saiyan, up until then it's mostly just treated as basically super saiyan but beyond the power ceiling that they had been previously constrained by.
It's one of the rare instances (maybe the only instance?) in Dragon Ball where knowledge of future events or (retconned) facts in the show can really ruin your appreciation of a moment by making you look for something that isn't there and/or overhyping a moment.
I like Super as a guilty pleasure but (a) it feels very different tonally from DBZ Kai in a way that I do not think would appeal to Jeff and Dan and (b) it's going to be, like, years before they get finished dubbing it into english and at a 5 episodes per week schedule they will very quickly catch up to the dub and then have to either randomly stop or keep going with subs. I doubt it will ever happen, I'll just be happy if they do Kai: The Final Chapters.
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