The Coyote Den

[Jabroniville]

Kurama is the guy who inspired me to look up Yu Yu Hakusho stuff. I was randomly looking it up as I was unfamiliar with it, but when I read Kurama's bio on Wikipedia I was like "WOW- that is... really, really different". His evil beginnings but what he's become thanks to his love for his "mother" was great stuff- clever and unique without being convoluted.

[CoyoteUnion]

Jiren (PL 17, 268 PP)



First Appearance: Dragon Ball Super ep. 79 (April 2017)
Role: Living Obstacle

Abilities (38 PP)
STR 20/5 STA 4 AGL 2 DEX 1 FGT 14/7
INT 0 AWA 0 PRE 0

Skills (11 PP)
Intimidation 8 (+8)
Ranged Combat [Ki Techniques] 13 (+14)

Advantages (10 PP)
Benefit 1 (Pride Trooper)
Cool (Intimidation)
Diehard
Fascinate (Intimidation)
Great Endurance
Power Attack
Startle
Takedown 2

Powers (194 PP)
Ki Flight: Flight 17 [34]

Passive Ki: Linked Enhanced Strength 15, Enhanced Fighting 7, Enhanced Dodge 12, Improved Initiative 6, Impervious (12 ranks) Protection 16 [90]

Ki Techniques (Array) [70]

• Power Impact: Burst Area 2 Blast 17 [68]

• Omegaheat Magnetron: Blast 20 [1]

• Invisible Eye Blast: Deflect 14 Limited (Self-Only) [1]

Offense
Overheat Magnetron +14 (+20 Ranged Damage, DC 35)
Supernova (+17 Burst Area 2 Damage, DC 32)
Throw +1 (DC 35)
Unarmed +14 (DC 35)

Defense (16 PP)
Dodge 14/2, Parry 14, Fortitude 12, Toughness 20, Will 8

Complications
Trust Issues: Thanks to his tRaGiC pAsT and insane strength, Jiren trusts no one to help him with anything.

The issue with my character builds is I've been building a ton of A-listers and that takes a long time, days per build. It's like doing an Iron Man build for people who maybe don't know who Iron Man is and doing several like that in a row. It's hard to get their characters across. So what if I built someone who didn't have one?

(p.s. Dragon Ball Super's anime and manga adapt the same arcs with different details, instead of the anime coming from the manga. This is anime Jiren, since I'm less familiar with the manga.)

The Tournament of Power
Jiren comes from Dragon Ball Super, the sequel to Z that came out in the mid-2010's (has it really been that long?). Unusually for a Dragon Ball arc, the Tournament of Power was hyped over a year in advance as a battle between the 12 universes Super introduced. The arc even got its own lead-in lasting more than six months as Goku recruited the best fighters for his team. Universe 7 (our heroes' home) already fought Universe 6's best in one-on-one matches, but the Tournament would involve 10 fighters from every single universe.

Of course, you can probably see the problem here. Even after it turned out the four most developed universes didn't have to participate, that still left 65 new fighters (six new universes and 5 new people from Universe 6) introduced in a single arc, not counting the gods sponsoring each team. I'd guess they introduced maybe 10 of them in that lead-in. Only a couple characters are remotely interesting and Jiren isn't one of them.

That's a problem, cause Jiren's the main villain.

The Hype
Jiren's hyped up during the lead-in as the strongest of Universe 11's Pride Troopers (another dancing posing sentai parody like the Ginyu Force) and the only mortal stronger than a God of Destruction. That's a Big Deal cause the God of Destruction Beerus has been this unstoppable hurdle all of Super. Every time Goku gets another power-up and he HAS to be stronger now the series is like "ackshually beerus stronger lmao" no matter how many retcons it takes. It's clear from the start that beating Jiren is a major goal. To bring the point home even the second-strongest Pride Trooper fights Goku evenly in an exhibition.

At first Jiren shows up just long enough to do some hype moment and disappear again. He scares a fighter with just a look and beats a Broly-style Legendary Super Saiyan with one blast. It doesn't make much sense since the Tournament has a time limit and he could probably beat 90% of the fighters in seconds, but the show's gotta tease us, okay?

Then Goku's latest opponent rolls to Jiren's feet. Jiren refuses to move. Up till now the Saiyans have been conserving their energy and have only shown flashes of real effort. Goku cycles through all his forms until full power finally moves him, and all the other fighters from every universe stop to watch. Their gods saw the exhibition and they know Goku's the only one with any chance against Jiren.

Why does that matter? Cause the Omni-Kings, the little kids/supreme gods of Dragon Ball Super who set up the Tournament, will destroy the losing universes. Did I forget to mention that?

It becomes just like the Frieza fight as we learn Goku's already stacking his Kaio-Ken x20 on top of Super Saiyan Blue and it's not enough, so he makes a Spirit Bomb (Super has a bad habit of ripping off scenes from Z to piggyback on their hype instead of creating its own, but that's another story). But while the Spirit Bomb almost killed Frieza back then, Jiren easily pushes it away. As Universe 7's failed energy explodes around Goku, he beomes something more.

The power to move without thinking's been foreshadowed for over 3 years of real time by now. Only the Gods of Destruction and their angelic attendants can do it and even Beerus isn't perfect at it. We also knew Goku would get another power-up for a long time, since Toriyama said he was saving white Super Saiyan hair for later. Now that he's had god ki for so long, absorbing the Spirit Bomb (which he'd done in movies before but not in canon) gave him enough power to break his limits and unlock this ability: Ultra Instinct. It's Dragon Ball's usual plot power-up but they've never been foreshadowed like this before, even Super Saiyan didn't get very much. At first his non-thinking movements are so fluid Jiren can't hit him. But even this only lets him compete for a little while before it runs out. Goku's new rival Hit from earlier in the show engages Jiren but jobs hard, and FRIEZA of all people has to save Goku, giving him his energy to repay his debt on Namek all those years ago. After all, someone has to fight Jiren and it's sure not gonna be him!

The Problem
Up till now Jiren's been pretty good. We're halfway through the tournament and we don't know his motives, but compare Yu Yu Hakusho's Toguro who had a similar role as Unbeatable Tournament Muscleman. We barely knew anything about his real motives until almost the end of the arc and we didn't get the full picture until AFTER his final battle! So it's not inherently bad we don't know that yet. And he's been INSANELY good as the unstoppable force we haven't had since Beerus over 5 years ago in real time. Now that we know the usual plot power-up isn't gonna work on him, how will Goku and friends beat him? His design's a little lame, just a musclebound gray alien, and his title's begging your inner 12-year-old to call him Jiren the Gay but it could still turn out alright.

The one real red flag is he hardly has any personality. I've told yall what Jiren's done but not what he said or thought and that's cause he's almost silent and we don't know what he thinks. Sometimes his own teammates will ask him questions out of combat and he'll ignore them.

With the two biggest threats (Hit and Goku) gone, Jiren meditates for no reason ("the others can handle it"), doesn't wake up for several episodes and stands around doing nothing for several more even when extremely strong fighters appear. By the time he gets off his butt only Universes 7 and 11 are left and with only two teammates he has no choice but to take at least one of the 5 remaining Z Fighters. Even then he only gets one episode of focus before it switches to his allies. When it cuts back to him, we are 85% of the way through this arc, over 90% if you count the lead-in. He's the main villain of an arc that's been hyped for over 2 years and the last main villain of Dragon Ball Super. He's spent most of his little time on-screen watching the scenery and we don't know his personality, his beliefs, or even any interesting TECHNIQUES. He doesn't plan on showing us, but this episode Android 17 literally asks him "is there more" and we get his backstory...

Bad Guy kills Jiren's parents. A martial arts master saves him. Jiren trains. Bad Guy comes back and kills master. Jiren wants revenge, the other students are afraid and abandon him. And Jiren became obsessed with his own strength and never trusted anyone again.

That's it. That's his ENTIRE backstory. In a genre where a main villain's backstory can take a whole episode or even multiple episodes, Jiren's is less than 2 minutes. I hear some fans literally burst out laughing.

The Final Battle
Now he has to fight Goku, Vegeta, Frieza and Android 17 (yes, he's here too). It's four on one but they're all heavily injured and he's mostly fresh cause he hasn't actually been DOING ANYTHING. First Vegeta tries to fight alone. In the past Vegeta always selfishly fought the main villain thinking he'd win and made things worse. But this is the opposite. He knows he has no chance here. But Goku does, and he needs as much time to regain his strength as Vegeta can buy him. Too tired to even go Super Saiyan he takes beating after beating from the Unbeatable Gray Blob until he finally goes down, but not before he gives Goku the last of his energy, and while it's not enough at first Goku unlocks Ultra Instinct once again. And I have to give Jiren credit here, cause while he may be a boring brick on his own his sheer power means characters have to do things they'd normally never do to win, and that means character moments like this. It's the best part of his character and he's going to keep doing it really well.

Jiren's seen Ultra Instinct twice (he used it a second time against someone else earlier) and he understands how to hit Goku... somehow. But Goku's used it THREE times and he fully understands it now, taking it from a purely defensive technique to both defense and offense. Jiren finally uses his full power and it's just the same with a red tint but who cares? The fight still looks AMAZING, better than Dragon Ball's ever looked. You could call it empty spectacle, but to be honest, when I saw this fight I hadn't seen Super in over six months. It was so breathtaking it re-hyped me on a show I walked out on ages ago. It even re-hypes Jiren, who finally gains scraps of a personality. It's a generic fighter personality but it's SOMETHING.

And after two episodes of nonstop action, Goku... loses. Just before he can land the final blow, Ultra Instinct finishes wrecking his body so bad he can't move anymore. There is one episode left in Super. No more power-ups, no more recovering stamina. Jiren doesn't want to win this way, but he has to save his universe. It's over. Then the previously-unconscious Frieza makes the save.

Android 17 is also still conscious, but Frieza rejects trust just like Jiren and tries to fight alone. But 17 doesn't, and once he starts helping the weakened Jiren stands no chance. Frieza stands over him, Death Beam aimed at his head, when his eliminated ally Toppo yells some sense into him, criticizing his untrusting nature and placing all Universe 11's faith in him. Jiren understands the pOwEr oF fRiEnDsHiP and gets back up, but so does Goku, just barely able to use Super Saiyan. With the very last of their strength Goku and Frieza of all people work together and sacrifice themselves to push Jiren, who now appreciates trust, out of bounds. Android 17 wins the Tournament of Power.

TL:DR; the fight was really, really good, one of the best in Dragon Ball. Jiren himself, not so much.

Build Notes
This build was extremely easy, since I already had the Cooler build to work from for "Strong Dragon Ball Character" and Jiren has NO named techniques as far as I remember (they always name random blasts in video games and supplements but I don't remember anything from the anime itself). His main attack's an Exploding Red Energy Beam, with an invisible eye blast for weaker foes and a force field for when he can't be bothered to do anything. Games/supplements say his red aura near the end is a transformation, but I don't buy it. As far as I'm concerned, if he's fighting above PL 15 or so his aura turns red. Besides that he just has the Standard DBZ Powers: super-strength, super-speed, flight and energy blasts.

I'll be honest, I don't really get how Deflect works, I just gave him the highest rank Hero Lab would get me and called it a day.

Jiren's force field is cosmetic, he mostly uses it when he's meditating and while it seems large enough to fit someone else inside he never actually does.

I hate to give this guy PL 17 but he sadly deserves it. He's a late-series Dragon Ball villain and he's the only DBZ villain no single hero ever surpassed. Of course by actual feats Gods of Destruction can destroy any universe they fight in because Dragon Ball, so Jiren probably can too. Also I'm pretty sure it's impossible to make a PL 17 character under cost if even THIS GUY'S over.

In a fight he punches, blasts and punches some more until you beat him. No subtlety. He's what non-DBZ fans think every DBZ character's like.

[Ares]

An ongoing joke over in DBZ Abridged was how completely disinterested the creators were with Jiren. Anytime they had a meeting and Jiren came up, someone would say something snarky, like yawning while saying how "interesting" Jiren was. Heck, the last episode of the series took a potshot at Jiren by having Cell say he was considering "Jiren" as a name, but then decided it was boring.

The whole Tournament of Power thing honestly feels like a good idea with a meh execution. Or something that would have worked better with actual established characters from other settings. It didn't help that poor Tenshinhan got shafted again.

[CoyoteUnion]

I heard someone say the Tournament was more like a sports game than an arc with stakes. The stakes (destroying every other universe) were SO high everyone knew this series didn't have the stones to go through with them. The real villains of the arc are the Omni-Kings who are willing to casually destroy universes, and the series briefly brings that up (it's especially interesting cause they're also Goku's friends) as part of a recurring theme of defying the gods who keep using their lives as game pieces. But Super cares too much about the status quo for that to ever actually happen either. And we only cared about a few (almost all pre-established) characters out of the 70 opponents.

[Jabroniville]

Jiren (PL 17, 268 PP)

First Appearance: Dragon Ball Super ep. 79 (April 2017)
Role: Living Obstacle

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!! ANOTHER COYOTE UNION BUILD!!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Better still- it's about a guy who is nothing but flawed as a character, meaning you get to bitch about him, and pointing out the flaws in things is as fun as pointing out the qualities.

This... whole thing reads very much like Toriyama's usual problems, which is that he writes by the seat of his pants and doesn't seem to think about stuff. Even worse, he seemed to be doing the opposite and planning ahead with teased things... then goes "LOL nope! Still didn't work!" with the last-second power-up (almost like he was aware of his own tropes and wanted to subvert them)... yet also forgets to develop his villain. Or maybe he was overly impressed by his own backstory for Jiren that he didn't realize how lame it was.

Even worse... the guy just looks plain. He's like someone took the Collection of Toriyama Design Tropes (the "Big Muscular Fighter" build just below Recoom's; the weird head-bumps I've seen him use before; Piccolo's face/head) and shaved off all the interesting bits, leaving this guy behind. He's begging for Toriyama's old editor to phone him up like "Are you f*cking kidding me? The boss is this plain loser? He should look way cooler, lol!" (translation: "F*cking change this or I'll refuse to publish this"). It's really kind of a shame most DBZ villains don't have unique powers after a point, but the funny "LOL his powers is that he stinks!" stuff kind of loses its place in a world of planet-destroying energy bursts. At least they beat him using tricky side-methods, FRIEZA being self-sacrificing and using the old "out of bounds" rule (which they honestly used a lot, now that I think about it).

I also love how a build of a character you dislike can create such a huge essay, lol. Granted, you had to describe the entire series, the plot behind it, etc.

I also don't really "Get" Deflect. It's basically Shittier Dodge unless you're using it to help others or as a means to get the cool Extras attached to it.

[Ares]

I've been reading a web-comic called Dragon Ball Multiverse that did a similar premise to the Tournament of Power, but had it so that we go alternate realities where certain characters win, thus allowing it to be a greatest hits of fighters from across Dragon Ball lore, along with a few unique originals, such as a Namekian who was a single fusion of his entire race, the daughter of a Vegitto that stayed fused, a universe where soldiers use power armor to fight rather than ki powers, and a Buu who has become basically a god.

The series takes some . . . liberties with certain concepts, and has the same power creep problem where you basically need to have some Sayian blood to fight a Sayian, and there's a few Mary Sue's in the mix. But it avoids a lot of issues of Super, such as Super Sayian God, Super Sayian God Super Sayian, Ultra Instinct and fighters we know won't amount to anything. So there's some pros and cons, but ultimately I'm way more invested in it than I've ever been in DB Super.

[CoyoteUnion]

This... whole thing reads very much like Toriyama's usual problems, which is that he writes by the seat of his pants and doesn't seem to think about stuff. Even worse, he seemed to be doing the opposite and planning ahead with teased things... then goes "LOL nope! Still didn't work!" with the last-second power-up (almost like he was aware of his own tropes and wanted to subvert them)... yet also forgets to develop his villain. Or maybe he was overly impressed by his own backstory for Jiren that he didn't realize how lame it was.

To be honest I don't think Toriyama's very involved in Super. He comes up with characters (maybe not even all of them) and basic plot outlines but that's it afaik. The anime and the manga adapt his ideas separately and get pretty different results. That's why Super has stuff like actual foreshadowing Toriyama would never have done. I hear the manga even switched Jiren's personality with Toppo's. So a lot of the blame's on the anime writers here.

And yall know by now I can't shut up once I get going To be fair Jiren's unfortunately a major character, since he's not just an arc villain but the last villain of a 100+ episode series of maybe the most famous anime of all time (at least in the West). There's Youtube videos with a million plus views about him.

@Ares I like Multiverse too! It's nice to hear something good about it cause its own fans have to be the most unappreciative fanbase I've ever seen. For the rest of you, Multiverse comes out one page at a time every couple days and you can comment on every page, and the fanbase has NO faith in the author whatsoever. Not saying Multiverse is perfect, I think it's a mixed bag, but they're constantly crapping on him.

...I say that but he's about to start another special, isn't he. Curse you Salagir!

[MarvelLion]

Glad to see you posting again!
Nice job with Jiren. I hope you post Hiei soon!