Dragon Ball Super theory: why did Zeno erase six universes?

When Dragon Ball Super, the anime series that began in 2015, revealed that there were originally 18 universes and that the Omni King, Zeno, destroyed six of them at some point in the distant past, it became one of the biggest talking points in the fandom. It is still an unsolved mystery. My theory is that a rebellion against Zeno's throne may have caused it, and I think an ancient Makaioshin, an evil god of creation, could have been behind it.

The questions have come up constantly since Dragon Ball Super ended. What happened to these universes? Why did Zeno destroy them? And when Android 17 made his wish to restore the universes at the end of the series, were Universes 13 through 18 secretly brought back too? I want to explore one possible scenario: either there was a rebellion against Zeno, or these universes became so polluted with evil that he felt he had to wipe them from existence to cleanse the multiverse.

Zeno sits at the top of the Dragon Ball god hierarchy

What we know is that the Omni King is the highest figure in the god hierarchy. I've raised the possibility before that there could be an even higher god, but what we know for certain is that the Omni King sits on the throne of the multiverse.

The idea of rebelling against a god has been explored in Lord of the Rings, and the Bible describes a rebellion against God. It has also been explored in Dragon Ball itself, where the quest for power drives many characters on both the good side and the bad side. Men who are powerful always want more power, and those with power are always afraid to lose it.

Dragon Ball has a long history of characters reaching for godly power

The pattern goes all the way back to the Red Ribbon Army wanting world domination, and to King Piccolo wanting to become the king of the world. Go a step further and there's Garlic Jr. and his father Garlic, who in the lore behind the first Dragon Ball Z movie rebelled against Kami, the god of Earth, many centuries ago.

Dragon Ball Super picks the idea up too. There are several moments where Frieza talks about wanting the Omni King's power, and about wanting more power once he became more familiar with the higher gods beyond Beerus. In the original Dragon Ball manga, the battle against Majin Buu had a similar shape, because the warlocks Bibidi and Babidi used Buu as their main weapon to conquer the world of the Supreme Kais. The same goes for Moro, who wants absolute godly power from the realm of the gods.

The extra material in Dragon Ball Heroes adds more. There, the Demon Realm rebels against Chronoa, the Supreme Kai of Time, and that conflict is still being fought in the Dragon Ball Heroes games and manga. Before anyone points out that Heroes is not canon, I'm using it as an illustration that there is precedent for these interstellar cosmic wars among the gods.

Zeno is childlike, but he seems to have good intentions

When you examine Zeno, you realize fast that he's different from many other kings and emperors, not just in Dragon Ball but in all fiction and even fact. He's very childlike, in a way a child, despite being alive for hundreds or maybe even thousands of years. He's also supremely powerful.

He also seems righteous in a way. He may not have a deep understanding of good and evil, but he seems to understand right and wrong to a degree. He formed a bond with Goku at first out of respect for Goku as a fighter and his own need to be entertained. As the series progressed, it felt much more like there was a real kinship between the two.

On two separate occasions, Zeno has shown he has good intentions and doesn't appear to be evil. The first was when Zamasu tried to become one with the universe, polluting it and reshaping it in his own image. Zeno stepped in and cleansed the entire future timeline, wiping the slate clean and erasing Zamasu along with the universe he had merged with. Zeno had no choice but to destroy everything because Zamasu's power had gone too far. I've argued before that Zeno's power seems to be rivaled by the Super Dragon Balls, yet here he destroyed a being made immortal by those same Super Dragon Balls, so the rules seem a little unclear when it comes to who truly has more power.

The second came at the end of the Tournament of Power arc, when we learned Zeno had been hoping the winning universe would make the right wish and bring back the other universes, or else he would be very angry and wipe everybody out. So Zeno might be quick on the trigger, but he tries to find the good in mortals. He also commits acts where innocent people are destroyed for the greater message. That mirrors many mythological gods: if one person in a village angers a god, the god may wipe away the entire village, innocents included. That seems to be how Zeno is.

Why I think something major happened to Universes 13 through 18

Whis has implied that Zeno destroyed those universes out of anger. There were originally 18 universes, and Zeno wiped away six and never brought them back. It is not specified when this happened. We don't know whether it was hundreds or thousands of years before the Dragon Ball timeline, only that it happened. The question is why.

Is it really out of the realm of possibility that there was a universal rebellion against Zeno for his throne? Frieza and others desire great power, so it would make sense that a rebellion may have been caused by some evil character who was selfish and wanted absolute power. That character may have polluted the other universes to the point where Zeno decided he had to wipe them all away.

It seems to me this had to have been some grand event, not just those universes being disrespectful to the Omni King, for him to wipe them out entirely and never bring them back. "Zeno can make you disappear in the blink of an eye, why would he destroy entire universes?" To me, it sounds like something major happened, some form of rebellion, or these universes became so evil and so filled with sin, for lack of a better term, that Zeno felt he had to do what he did.

A Makaioshin could have led the rebellion against Zeno

Who could have been behind it? Some would say the Demon Realm. Some would say some kind of evil, polluted god like Zamasu who got selfish. The entity I think may have caused this rebellion could have been an ancient Makaioshin. Many of us have come to the conclusion that Toriyama dropped this idea, but at one point he discussed how there were evil versions of the Kaioshin called the Makaioshin. These are not gods of destruction or angels. They are the inverse of a god of creation: an evil god of creation who creates havoc, misery and mischief.

At the time of writing, we had yet to see a Makaioshin in Dragon Ball, and there isn't much from Toriyama's stories to reference. From my perspective, though, it makes the most sense that this rebellion was caused by a Makaioshin. Since a Makaioshin is a god, it would have had enough knowledge of Zeno, the Grand Minister and the entire god hierarchy to cause a rebellion, possibly alongside other gods. In the Bible, Lucifer, the most beautiful angel, rebelled against God and became the devil, which is the primary interpretation of that story. That idea doesn't seem too far fetched here. There were plenty of theories while Dragon Ball Super was airing that the angels and the Grand Priest were secretly evil, but this makes even more sense to me because the Makaioshin are inherently evil.

Toriyama never said how strong the Makaioshin are physically. We don't know if they're on the level of the regular Kaioshin or above them, like the gods of destruction. It's almost a dropped concept, as if Toriyama came up with Beerus as the counter to the Kaioshin instead, except that the Makaioshin are evil while Beerus isn't really evil despite being a destroyer.

If the Makaioshin aren't as strong as the angels or the gods of destruction, then possibly their plan was to turn other gods or other Makaioshin against Zeno and rely on strength in numbers. That was never going to work, because Zeno can wipe you out in the blink of an eye, and that's exactly what he did. Possibly these Makaioshin became so arrogant that they didn't understand his true power. They had no idea they were at his mercy no matter what, and so they lost and were wiped from existence. Obviously this is just a theory, something I was thinking about late at night that I think could possibly explain what happened.

The twin universe pairs suggest the multiverse was reshaped

That leaves its own mysteries. Where are the Makaioshin? Will Toriyama ever introduce them? And if the rebellion happened, are they the reason Universes 13 through 18 were destroyed?

It may not have stopped at destruction. Zeno, or at least we assume it was Zeno, would have had to reform the entire multiverse. The twin universes are counted only from the original 12, so Universe 6 pairs with 7 and Universe 1 with 12. With 18 universes, Universe 1 would have been linked with 18, Universe 2 with 17, and so on. So the bond between the universes had to have been broken and reshaped into the way it stands now.