Sportskeeda's List of the Weakest Dragon Ball Villains Goku Faced Gets the Basics Wrong

A Sportskeeda list titled 10 weakest villains Goku has faced in Dragon Ball, ranked strongest to weakest and framed as embarrassingly weak, gets the basics wrong. It calls Krillin a villain, labels Nappa embarrassingly weak after he took out four main characters, and puts Tambourine below Mercenary Tao.

Over the years, a lot of you have told me how much you enjoy when I take apart these really terrible articles. I've done it with Screen Rant, We Got This Covered and CBR, and this time it's Sportskeeda. I don't recall exactly, but I think someone on Facebook sent this one to me. I do know who it was, but I might not be allowed to give their name out, so you know who you are.

Dragon Ball's Revival Brought a Wave of Low Effort Articles

When Dragon Ball Super started a few years ago, a lot of these websites wanted to make money from clicks because of how big Dragon Ball had gotten thanks to Super and the revival of the series. So they started writing these really terrible articles, and most of the time nobody proofreads them. All you have to do is type a certain number of words in a paragraph and add some pictures. That's why they all look the same. It's all Google analytics stuff, and that's all they care about.

The people who write these are either fake Dragon Ball fans, non fans or casual fans. There's nothing wrong with being a casual fan. I'm a casual fan of a lot of sports. I love the NBA, but I don't follow every game or every team. I'll catch some playoff games here and there, and I consider myself a casual football fan too. But in my opinion, if you're going to write an article about Dragon Ball for the internet, "at least do like 10 seconds of homework before you make an article." These guys never do, which is why I've debunked so many of these over the years.

The Article Missed That Gas and Granolah Are the Strongest Mortals

The article was published, or at least modified, on March 25, 2022. It talks about the arguably strongest mortal in the Dragon Ball franchise, which tells me the writer isn't reading the Granolah arc and hasn't kept up with the series. If he had, he would know that Gas and Granolah are the strongest mortals.

I'll give him a break on that. Maybe he never reads the manga and only follows the anime. Again, there's nothing wrong with being casual, and clearly a lot of these guys are. But being a casual fan can still come with some common sense. Here's why I think this list is a piece of hot trash.

Krillin Was Never a Villain

Number 10 is Krillin, and that's already headache inducing. The list is supposed to be the weakest villains Goku has faced, and Krillin has never been a villain. He never faced off against Goku with malicious intent. Yes, he was Goku's rival, because they were both students of Master Roshi, the Turtle Hermit. But to call him a villain makes no sense.

The article shows a clip of Goku and Krillin fighting, but if you look at that episode with context, you'd know it's part of a tournament fight. They were fighting as rivals and as friends, not as enemies. They were competitors. The article even admits that while not necessarily villainous, the two were at odds in the original Dragon Ball before becoming the friends they are today. If he's not villainous, why put him on a list of villains?

Nappa Took Out Four Main Characters

Number nine is Nappa. Since the list runs strongest to weakest, it puts Nappa below Krillin. But the Krillin from the original Dragon Ball who faced Goku was not stronger than Nappa. Even Krillin in Dragon Ball Z was arguably not stronger than Nappa when they first fought. Later on he surpassed him, we all know that, but not at that point.

What really bothers me is the embarrassingly weak label. Nappa showed up and killed four main characters: Chiaotzu sacrificed himself, then Tien Shinhan and Piccolo, which took Kami with him. We had not had a villain kill four main characters before Nappa. Obviously he's weak by Dragon Ball Super standards, or by Cell Saga or Buu Saga standards, but he wasn't weak when he first showed up. If you take out four main characters by yourself, that's not embarrassing. That's a pretty good accomplishment.

The writer is 24 years old. There's nothing wrong with being 24, but it means he's probably younger than the majority of the Toonami audience, so unless he was a really little kid at the time, he's not one of the people who saw it on Toonami. I doubt he can say he remembers it a certain way. If you're going to write an article, do some research.

Raditz and King Piccolo Weren't Weak When They Appeared

Number eight is Raditz, so by this logic Nappa is stronger than Raditz, which is fine. But I don't think Raditz was embarrassingly weak. Goku and Piccolo had to team up against him, even Gohan had to help, and Goku died in that fight sacrificing himself. These characters are only weak by modern standards. When they first appeared, they obviously weren't weak. "Dragon Ball has a growing power scale, always has, always will."

Then the list goes backwards in the timeline to King Piccolo. Placing him below Raditz is fair. But embarrassing? King Piccolo killed Chiaotzu and Master Roshi, and through his minions, Krillin was killed too by Tambourine. That's not embarrassingly weak.

Mercenary Tao Was a Respected Assassin, and Yamcha Was More Rival Than Villain

Next is Mercenary Tao. Placing him below King Piccolo is fair enough. But embarrassing? He beat Goku badly. He was the first guy in the entire Red Ribbon arc to really defeat Goku, to the point where Goku had to climb Korin Tower and get training before coming back to win the rematch. I wouldn't call that an embarrassment. He's a pretty respected assassin.

Number five is Yamcha. You could say Yamcha was a villain in the early parts of the series, but I don't like to say that. I consider him a rival, because he wasn't really a villainous guy. Yes, he was a bandit, but he wasn't an evil, malicious killer like Piccolo, Raditz and Nappa were.

Ranking Tambourine Below Yamcha, Tao and Krillin Makes No Sense

This is where things get really bad. Going backwards, the list puts Tambourine at number four, under Yamcha. So the writer thinks Tambourine is weaker than Yamcha? Maybe modern Yamcha, but not Yamcha back then. And Tambourine is also below Mercenary Tao. No offense to the guy who made this, it's not personal, but you should not be writing lists about Dragon Ball.

Tambourine is also below Krillin, even though he killed Krillin. The writer is talking about Krillin as a villain in the original Dragon Ball, and at no point in Dragon Ball, not Z, was Tambourine weaker than Krillin, except maybe at the very end after the time skip during the 23rd World Martial Arts Tournament. That's the only time.

What blows my mind is that I have friends with kids who are 10 or 11 years old who understand this series better than these 24 year old adults. When I was 14 or 15 getting into the show, I understood most of the scaling. It all made sense. I like getting into the deeper aspects of the series, but this is the simplest stuff. We know who's strong and who's not. Dragon Ball isn't advanced calculus.

General Blue, Bandages and Pilaf, Plus the Villains the List Ignores

Next is General Blue, then Bandages, meaning the mummy. We know the mummy is more powerful than General Blue, and Goku had more trouble with the mummy than he did with General Blue, so that's fine. Number one is Pilaf, which is obvious, because Pilaf doesn't really have any powers.

But where are all the Red Ribbon guys Goku went through? Where's Staff Officer Black, General White, Murasaki the ninja, Major Metallitron, Sergeant Metallic? Those guys are all weaker than most of the characters on this list, certainly weaker than Tambourine and Tao, and they're villains the writer is ignoring. And where's Devilman? You could argue he's one of the strongest characters in Dragon Ball history just because of that one move, the Devil Mite Beam. Where is he on this list?

One commenter on the article said whoever wrote it needs to read the manga again, that only Pilaf is embarrassingly weak, that these characters were powerful at the time they were in the story, and that Krillin isn't a villain and never was. I agree. You don't have to be a hardcore Dragon Ball historian to understand this.

A Formula Built for Cheap Clicks

When you read these articles, you can tell who's putting in effort and who isn't, and most of the time these writers don't do even a smidgen of research. It's like they look up the names of the arcs, see there's a General Blue arc, and go from there. These pieces are so poorly written, and they're done for cheap clicks.

They take no time to make. You type something up and grab pictures and clips to embed. There are entire classes on how to do a blog that teach you the formula: write a paragraph, add a picture, repeat. They put an ad in between every single bullet point just so the writer can get paid by Sportskeeda. So I have to ask whether anybody writing these articles actually follows Dragon Ball, because in my experience, the majority of them don't.

Which villain from Goku's early fights do you think deserves to be called the weakest?