Brave Isn't Necessarily The Same As Fearless

It's not much of a surprise I wound up a Krillin fan. The extremely powerful characters are rarely my favorites. I tend to favor characters with more limited abilities, who supplement that with fast thinking or sheer willpower. Spider-Man, Hawkeye, Tim Drake as Robin. Krillin, relative to the other characters in his universe, is fairly similar. Never the fastest or strongest, but being clever and picking his spots can buy carry him a little further than you might expect. It's a bit like if all Spider-Man's fights were against Juggernaut or Firelord.

Of course, Peter Parker is the star of his story, so he gets to triumph. Krillin, as a supporting character, has to settle for hopefully surviving, and maybe getting a few good hits in. Possibly the beating he absorbs buys someone else much-needed time.

It could be worse. Even if he does frequently end up as the butt of a joke (or dead), at least he still gets to show up regularly. Sometimes he even gets storylines or entire episodes focused on him. There are some episodes of Dragon Ball Super that focused on the idea Krillin was dealing with emotional trauma from his history of being stuck fighting beings who are vastly more powerful than him. The beatings, the losses, the feeling of all his efforts being useless, the actual dying, the fear, was all wearing him down inside, making him lose heart. It wasn't a happy story, but he did ultimately face it and work to overcome it, which was nice. Compared to a Yamcha fan, I've got it OK.

He gets a lot of hate from certain segments of the fanbase, though. Mostly Vegeta fans it seems like, which, imagine the most dismissive, derisive sound you can, that's what I'm making right now. Vegeta has two settings on the show.

Setting 1: Bragging about his new power and talking shit to his opponent.
Setting 2: That opponent beating his ass.

Vegeta's the character for people who like Wolverine, but think he needs to lose a lot more fights. Like 90% of his fights.

I digress. One of the frequent charges against Krillin is he's a coward. He gets scared during the big fights. Because realizing you're up against an opponent who is not only a sadistic killer (which is most of their Big Bads), but is also several times stronger than you (maybe dozens, or even hundreds of times stronger), shouldn't provoke any kind of fear whatsoever. Why should he be scared about that? Sure, every other character on the show has gotten freaked out when realizing they're thoroughly outclassed at some point. Including Goku - who admitted to Krillin after the first time they faced Vegeta that it had scared him when he realized how much stronger his opponent was than him - and Vegeta, who only wet himself in terror like three times during the fight with Frieza. But Krillin is different because, I guess he gets played as more visibly, comically nervous.

So he gets scared. Being scared, by itself, isn't cowardice. Cowardice would be if the fear prevents him from taking any action. If, confronted with evil, someone out to kill his friends or all life on Earth, he ran away. That isn't the case. He fights for as long as he's able. It isn't always very long, true. Recoome took him out with one kick. Cell, in his perfect form, barely noticed him and nearly killed him with one kick. (He really needs to stop letting people kick him in the head.) But he is trying. Frieza nearly killed him once, and he came back swinging, drew Frieza into chasing him to give Gohan a chance to get healed up. Meanwhile, Krillin's trying his best on his own, buying time.

Now, there is the initial fight with Androids (actually cyborgs) 17 and 18. Vegeta has talked some shit, and has thus progressed to Setting 2, getting his ass beat. His time-traveling son tries to help him, gets his head kicked in, Piccolo and Tien jump in to no avail, and Krillin stands there watching in horror. Even acknowledging that if he had jumped in, it wouldn't have changed the outcome (a point Piccolo makes when Krillin apologizes), that was rough to watch as a Krillin fan for a long time, until I started thinking about it differently recently.

After the fighting is over, Krillin rushes up before they fly off. And he tries to reason with them. They plan to kill Goku, but that was their creator/tormentor's obsession, and they killed that guy. Why do they need to kill Goku, who never did anything to them? Couldn't they live in peace? They tell him no, they need a purpose, this is it and leave*.

Krillin didn't know what would happen when he did that. They hadn't killed any of his friends, but they sure beat the hell out of them. Vegeta has two broken arms by the end of that fight. Krillin knows, for a certainty, they can do the same to him, with ease. And he couldn't do a thing to stop them. If he tried to fight, it would end badly. If he tried to run, same thing. Still he approached them alone, and tried to argue for his friend's life, when fists clearly weren't going to work.

A lot things don't work out for him, and that can be rough to watch. But he keeps trying, and so I keep rooting for him.

* Not before 18 gives him a peck on the cheek, which sets off a whole chain of events that ends with those two happily married as an adorable couple, which I need to discuss in greater detail at a later date.