Goku vs. Jiren: why does Goku trusting Frieza matter?

It's easy to get caught up in the sizzle and the visual presentation of the Goku vs. Jiren fight in Dragon Ball Super, the anime that began airing in 2015. Aesthetically, it looks like nothing we'd seen before, with vibrant, bright colors and a level of power and speed that hadn't been explored much in Dragon Ball before. But beneath the surface, I think the series was sending a much deeper message through these two characters, their ideals and their motivations.

In a way, it's similar to Goku and Vegeta: two characters who met as rivals because they had different philosophies on life. The battle between Goku and Jiren mirrors that, but in a different way. I believe there's a real message here that Toriyama and the creators behind Super were trying to tell us about these two characters, and about life overall. This look back was written before episode 131 aired on March 25, 2018, drawing on what the series had shown and on a then recent interview with the Dragon Ball Super staff.

Goku and Jiren want the same thing for different reasons

Goku vs. Jiren is a battle not just between two very powerful mortals, but between different philosophies on life. Both have similar ideals when it comes to combat. They both want to get stronger. And when you scrape beneath the surface, their backstories are not entirely that different.

What's different is the way those backstories shaped them as men. No matter how you feel about Dragon Ball Super, that's an interesting plot point to put in. Could the execution have been better? Yes, obviously it could have. But it's still an interesting idea.

Jiren's strength is built on the fear of loss

Jiren wants to be stronger because of what happened when he was a child. He found his parents dead at the hands of a mysterious assailant. He went on to join forces with a martial artist to become stronger, and yet he also saw his own friends betray him and die in front of him.

So Jiren's entire motivation to get stronger is based on fear: the fear of loss, and the fear of the pain that comes from that loss. That's what drove him to become as strong as he is, and it's a stark contrast to Goku.

Go back and look at what happened when Toppo got eliminated, and how disappointed Jiren was in him. Jiren's philosophy is that he can't count on anybody, because everyone he's been able to count on in his life has let him down, whether by circumstance or on purpose. That makes the character interesting to me. Even though he's part of a team, the Pride Troopers, he's very much a loner. He feels alone, like nobody can understand him and nobody can be counted on. They count on him a lot, but he doesn't care about that.

Goku has always turned his enemies into friends

Goku, from the very beginning of Dragon Ball, has been a character who makes friends of his enemies. It started with Yamcha, his rival, and Krillin, and runs all the way through to Piccolo Jr., Tien Shinhan and, of course, Vegeta, the big one. Most of Goku's friends started out as either rivals or enemies.

You could even add Beerus from Dragon Ball Super to that list. He's gone from being Goku's rival to something like Goku's cheerleader. Goku, meanwhile, wants to get stronger because he's a pure martial artist. He wants to test his body against the strongest in the universe, whether mortals or gods, so when Jiren first appeared, it was another chance for Goku to test his limits.

Goku is not the loner people think he is

The difference between the two is that Goku is not as much of a loner as people believe. He has always needed to count on his friends, and vice versa, in the ultimate battles he faced. When Frieza killed Krillin on Planet Namek, that was the motivation that pushed Goku to break his limits. His friends triggered his anger, and the same thing happened in Dragon Ball when Krillin died the first time, at the hands of Tambourine.

Look at how the series progressed after that. Goku saw potential in his son and pushed him. Whether that was a good, logical decision as a parent is a discussion for another time, but it wasn't all about Goku at that point. At the end of Dragon Ball Z, it took millions of people donating energy to the Genki Dama to kill Majin Buu. Goku couldn't have done that on his own.

"Everyone counts on him, and he counts on everyone." The more recent episodes of Dragon Ball Super covered this in detail: Universe 7 counts on Goku, and Goku counts on them for support. That has happened several times in the series. Yes, Goku has been selfish, but you can't say he doesn't care about his friends, because he obviously does.

Dragon Ball Super's producer and director on Jiren's fear

More insight came from an interview with Dragon Ball Super producer Satoru Takami and series director Ryota Nakamura about Jiren, and it shaped where I thought the story was going. In the interview, it's stated plainly that Jiren is not evil, which we all knew. He's a superhero. But, as the interview puts it, Jiren carries a lot of baggage. He doesn't live his life based on malice, but he does live it based on fear, and that fear is what motivates him to become more powerful.

People don't like to address that, because you think of somebody like Jiren as fearless. But it's not that he's afraid of an opponent. "He's afraid of being alone." He's afraid of feeling the way he felt when his parents died. It's a bit like Batman, and the comparisons have been made. Nakamura went on to talk about how Goku and Jiren have different philosophical views on the world and on how they treat their friends.

Android 17's line to Jiren and the real-world side of trauma

To me, that's where the line came from when Android 17 told Jiren that he sees people as things. Jiren doesn't really see his friends as friends. He doesn't get too close to the Pride Troopers, because again, it's that fear of loss.

This is something people in the real world struggle with. If you're traumatized by something when you're younger, you can become a loner or an introvert. I know many people relate to this. I have friends who go through it, and I've gone through it myself, so it's real stuff. They're real emotions that Jiren is feeling.

Why Goku trusting Frieza looked like the key to the Tournament of Power

All of this, to my mind, had everything to do with how the Tournament of Power would end. Trusting people has been a character trait of Goku's from day one, and he trusted Frieza to help. Universe 7 was in a pinch, and all of his friends asked why he was doing this with Frieza. They called it a big mistake and a bad move. Goku was the one who said to bring him in, that he'd take care of it if something bad happened, but that they needed him.

Goku put aside his decade-long rivalry with Frieza, a man who killed so many innocent people, including Goku's family, his mother and father, much like what happened to Jiren. Goku put that aside for the betterment of the universe. "Jiren would never have done that."

My theory was that Goku trusting Frieza, the man who killed his family and his best friend, with all the history between them, might end up being the key to winning the tournament. If it did, I didn't think Goku had planned it that way. It would have been circumstance. And when all was said and done, I thought Jiren may learn a valuable lesson about people counting on you, and you counting on them, for support and for love. As always with Goku, whenever he meets somebody new, he changes them, and to me Jiren was no different.