I’ve Been Steaming This Over In My Head For The Longest Time And Figured This Is The Best Place To

I’ve been steaming this over in my head for the longest time and figured this is the best place to just let it all out since I have no IRL Dragon Ball friends to rant to.

I love Frost. I love him in the manga AND the anime. However, I do not love what’s been done with his character in the anime specifically.

In the manga, yes, he still cheats, but it’s not because he’s a greedy pirate who starts and ends wars for any personal gain. He doesn’t even enjoy fighting.

When he’s outed as a cheater, he doesn’t give an evil smile or proudly announce what a terrible person he is. He simply tries to make an excuse, it fails, and he basically goes, “Well, shit… Eh, at least I’m not dead.”

He even openly admits he just wanted to end the tournament as quickly as possible, his god of destruction’s anger be damned.

And then Vegeta gets super mad and wants to kick Frost’s ass just for cheating in general, which makes the vegetable man look a lot more like an asshole than if he were to wanna kick the ass of a horrible pirate who’s been making profits from his own wars for years.

But ANYWAYS, my biggest gripe is how anime Frost was disappointingly just another evil icejin in the series. It would have been refreshing to see a morally gray member of Freeza’s race who wasn’t villainous, but he’d sooner resort to cheating than to fight fairly just to get it over with. That makes him more complex, makes the general moral dynamic around these characters less black and white.

Also, I’ve seen people calling anime Frost a “Freeza clone” and while I don’t agree with that totally, I do see where it comes from. And I really hate that I do. When I first saw Frost, I was really hoping that he wouldn’t just be “weaker, alternate universe Freeza”, and I did get my wish! In the manga. But for some reason, they seemed to just give up on Frost being his own character in the anime by making him evil too. Similar to Freeza but with slight differences in regards to appearance, power level, universe, and the use of poison needles.

I’m not a fan of how anime Frost was treated in the Tournament of Power either, but that’s another rant altogether.

To tie this up, I’m frustrated that anime Frost didn’t get the more complex and unique characterization he deserved. I wish he ended up being a character the viewers couldn’t get a good read on because of his shady but nonchalant stance on fighting. Reading the manga, he felt like a true neutral character or at least somewhere around that area. Seeing his anime counterpart just being straight up wicked, while entertaining to a point, made me feel wanting for more in the end.

I guess we’ll see what happens after the Tournament of Power in the anime, but I’m not getting my hopes up.