Annotated 49-41
Best’s original lead-in to the fourth panel said “Five times the power, five times the risk…” I no longer remember what “risk” he was supposed to be taking with this maneuver…risk of losing himself by splitting his identity into five people, maybe?
I think I was trying to answer why he didn’t do this all the time. It’s hard to fully explain the maneuvers that our heroes start pulling here, and I couldn’t tell you whether they’re things that they’ll be capable of doing after this fight. Perhaps they really have unlocked some higher level of understanding, or perhaps they’re just exploiting their connection to HR’s world and the way it makes the bounds of their reality a little more porous. It won’t matter, not to the amount of story we’ve got left to tell.
(It’s also unclear whether WAV is really back as his own personality or Best has just acknowledged WAV as part of him. He did remember being WAV after transforming back into Best, though the reverse was not true… In any case, we didn’t have time to get into it.)
FB: “Keep those old character design specs, just in case– don’t think we’ll need them again, but you never know.”
“…five times the risk”
I would have taken this to mean that if one of him died, all of him died.
Solid theory!
It’s a small thing, but I really like the facial expression on Byron in this one.
Dragon Ball’s Tien Shinhan has the abilty of splitting himself into four or five independent individuals, but I remember he once stated that doing so also splitted his power by four, so each of his four selves had 25% or 20% of his normal strength. Maybe this is something similar?
Alternatively, perhaps each separate Best is not an independent individual, and in that case, Best has to split his mind into 4 simultaneous tasks (which is very daunting, but not impossible)
It’s really kind of sad how ultimately useless multiform (and a variety of other really neat tricks) became in Dragon Ball after power levels and beam struggles became the standard way of alerting the audience to “shit is serious now”.