Absolutely no one likes to talk about politics. Well, maybe some people, but with the way technology and media has advanced since the late 20th century more and more people are looking for escapes from reality. Which would include politics. The gaming and anime communities especially rely on their mediums for entertainment when times get tough. For instance, many gamers credit Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ success to the fact that it was released just as the 2020 pandemic began and people were forced to stay at home to avoid spreading COVID. With nothing else to really do and nowhere to go, people started buying it by the thousands, and the game came out of 2020 with a whopping 31.8 million copies sold. Even people who had never played video games before started picking up the hobby as a result of the pandemic. Anime also started getting more popular as streaming websites like Netflix started featuring more of them in their original shows. Shows like The Seven Deadly Sins and Castlevania got whole new seasons released during that year, and newer shows like Beastars and Blood of Zeus were introduced.

So it’s no surprise that when a game or anime consists of a rather controversial, politicized topic that people start getting upset. That, or whenever people on the internet start analyzing the material in relation to a controversial topic are fans up in arms about how games and anime get politicized. In fact, many fans end up making the mistake of believing that anime and games are always exclusive from reality. One common series that’s brought up in debates on how entertainment shouldn’t be involved with politics is DragonBall, and the people claiming that the series has nothing to do with political viewpoints are sorely mistaken. Especially since one of the most famous villains, Frieza, is a known imperialist who colonizes other planets to grow his empire and committed genocide against an entire race of alien people. Yeah, nothing political there whatsoever. Totally.

In all seriousness, Frieza was definitely one of the more terrifying villains when DragonBall Z—the sequel to Akira Toriyama’s original show DragonBall—was first aired on TV. After all, he was the one who had destroyed the home of the show’s protagonist, Goku, and was the one person the almighty Prince Vegeta, a previous villain turned anti-hero, feared the most. Well, when DragonBall Super was released, we learn that Vegeta fears a few other people, but at the time of Z’s production Frieza was the only one. This enemy also had the ability to change forms that made him grow even stronger than before with each transformation. As funny as the line “This isn’t even my final form!” is, it also showed just how powerful Frieza was able to become compared to our heroes in the show. He was truly not to be taken likely.

So why is it that someone like Frieza was able to bypass all the hardcore fans of anime who prefer less politics in their shows? Especially considering just how popular the show is as well as the villain himself?

For one, DragonBall is a much older series, one that initially started as a Shōnen Jump manga in 1984 before becoming an anime in 1986. Z was first released as a separate series from DragonBall in 1989 and continued until its end in 1996. It was during this time that many current fans started watching it, so one logical viewpoint is that the show isn’t considered politic because of people’s association of it with their childhood. As children, they might’ve had a harder time picking up the subtle messages relating to genocide, military action, colonization, and a few others. However, many fans have also rewatched the series multiple times. So they likely still had a chance to view it through the perspective of adulthood. Yet, they still somehow seem to forget these themes.

The next explanation is a slightly more obvious one: they’re distracted by the action.

It’s no secret that DragonBall is a show about violence and fighting. The main character’s whole personality is centered around his love of battle and training, and many other characters in the series share that sentiment with him. It doesn’t help that there are numerous fight scenes even in the span of a single episode. Sometimes the show will pan between two different fights that are happening at the same time, and it makes quite the spectacle of it too from the flashy exchange of ki blasts to the fast-paced, traditional fisticuffs shared between the characters. That’s not even including the power ups characters will use in the middle of a fight.

If you’ve ever interacted with the DragonBall community, you’d know that it isn’t mostly the lore or themes of the show’s story that fans place their focus on. Rather, it’s all about the fighting. Every new episode, fans would speculate how a fight would turn out, if there would be a brawl at all, and just exactly who would the brawl involve. During the production of Super, fans were completely crazy on the idea of power ups as well, from wondering if Vegeta would ever go Super Saiyan God like Goku did to guessing if Goku’s Ultra Instinct form would help him win the tournament at the end of the anime.

Now whether or not Toriyama made this intentional is another story. Often, artists will take real, complicated issues and involve them in their work. When it came to making Frieza, Toriyama clearly wanted to paint him as an obvious bad guy. His backstory as the destroyer of Goku and Vegeta’s home planet was just the tip of the iceberg. During the 20+ years since the genocide against the Saiyan race, Frieza continued to conquer other planets and use them to expand upon his empire and army. We see this as Vegeta and his ex-partners, Nappa and Raditz, head over to Earth where Goku is to conquer it in Frieza’s name and hopefully enlist Goku into the army with them in DBZ’s first arc, the Saiyan Saga. However, that doesn’t go as planned, and the show eventually builds its way up to the main bad guy of the first half of the show. That bad guy being Frieza.

However, it’s a little less clear what Toriyama’s intentions were in regards to how people should react to the themes surrounding Frieza and the story of the Saiyans. With all the fighting that’s involved, it’s hard to tell if Toriyama wanted people to focus more on Frieza as a stand-in for the sickening realities of imperialism, warfare, and colonization, or if being an authoritarian dictator that kills people whenever he wants was just a random part of his character made to make it obvious he was a villain.

Which brings us back to the question: why is it that a villain as well-known as Frieza, who’s entire character is reflected in ideologies existing in real life, is so easily forgotten as something political in an otherwise non-political show? The answer comes easily when one understands the way the series is formulated. The show isn’t exactly meant to be focused around questions like “is murdering people different from you bad?”, because the answer to those questions are obvious. That answer usually being “yes”. Yes, it’s bad to wipe out an entire race of people just because it benefits you. Yes, it’s bad to force those remaining from the population you just slaughtered into working for you and helping you continue your conquest of the world. Yes, it’s bad to kill anyone who disagrees with your obviously evil methods or even stands up to you for committing such atrocities. That is what makes Frieza an obvious villain. One doesn’t need to closely analyze what he’s done to understand how it reflects real-life consequences to colonization and authoritarian governments, and it’s because of how obvious it is that people don’t really consider DBZ political. It becomes easily glossed over and falls into the background.

Does this mean shows similar to DragonBall need to realign their focus when it comes to writing the story? No. Of course not. Every artist is free to create how they desire. The issue isn’t that Toriyama made an anime that thinks more about the fighting than it does the story. The issue is that fans often forget that very few works of art can be exclusive from real life. Life imitates art, and art imitates life. That is a fact many creative entities know and acknowledge. Even the tiniest nod to real issues can make a piece of media technically political. Many people easily make connections to capitalism in Animal Crossing: New Horizons because of Tom Nook, and how you essentially are given a house for free in the game without the need for a credit score, paying interest, and other things associated with purchasing a home. All you have to do is pay back the loan every time you upgrade your house, and you’re allowed to do that at your own pace. So often times the references are there. It is usually the fault of the audience for not recognizing it, whether it’d be done intentionally or not. Their own biases cloud the way they view the material. Someone who isn’t interested in politics is less likely to recognize or even acknowledge the nods to authoritarianism Frieza lays out than someone who actively participates in political discussions.

That isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with this viewpoint either. One is allowed to enjoy their mediums of entertainment as they see fit. However, if your argument against politics in anime and video games is that something like DBZ isn’t political, you might want to step back a bit and actually take a good look at the show, because Frieza isn’t the only example of how politics are incorporated into DBZ’s characters either. Vegeta constantly goes on about how he’s automatically better than Goku because he was born a prince while the Earth-raised Saiyan was born to lower-class parents, so socioeconomic class discrimination is a thing in the show’s universe as well. In fact, within Frieza’s army, power levels are a way to justify class discrimination. Someone born with a lower power level is considered lesser, weaker, and not as important while someone with a higher power level is more likely to have a title or powerful position like Emperor Frieza or Prince Vegeta. Which is why the fact that Goku and his Earthling friends are able to change their power levels at will is so shocking to these characters. Their perception of classes is fixated, in which one’s fate and status are set in stone from the moment you’re born. Another character, Broly, was exiled from Planet Vegeta—the planet Frieza destroyed—because he was much stronger than both the prince and the king despite being born to third-class warriors, and the king refused to have a mere commoner be stronger than his own son. So he sent Broly away to another planet as an infant hoping he, a defenseless baby, would be killed.

In short, even the more popular anime shows have some politics incorporated into their stories. One just has to see it and admit that it’s there.