Have you ever just sat down and thought about time?
It's a really weird thing if you take a second to look at it.
I mean, how the heck does it work?
Is it just another fabrication us humans created to make sense of things?
You'd be hard pressed to describe an event that happened without using some kind of declaration
based on the concept of time.
Especially in the English language, we're taught to pin point things directly, who,
what, where, WHEN, why and how.
It's interesting how language can change a person's perspective on the world.
In other languages, German for example, they have words like "Waldeinsamkeit."
It expresses something English simply has no words for.
This is an expression pertaining to the feeling of being lost and alone in the woods.
One side of it is pertaining to the emotion of loneliness, the other being one with nature.
Hmm..
NO I'M NOT HIGH!
I'm obviously talking about Trunks!
Yes Trunks!
A character from dragon ball z who is my favorite.
He may not exactly be the poster-boy of the series; that clearly belongs to goku and vegeta,
but he is one of the most interesting characters in the series.
Or is he TWO of the most interesting characters in the series?
Or is he one of the most interesting characters in the series and also an annoying spoiled
little punk?
I suppose that’s up to your opinion, but what I'm talking about is a character with
two lives, from two places, from two times.
To clear this up, (cause time is as confusing as morrissey's sexual preference of the day)
when the evil androids show up around episode 9-thousand-billion the DBZ timeline splits
in two.
In one timeline the androids destroy civilization as we know it, and in the other they are stopped
by the Z fighters.
This happens right around the time trunks is born.
Because of this, in one timeline trunks grows up in an awful android death hell; and in
the other he grows up in relative peace…
well until babidi shows up and resurrects buu and well you get the point.
same guy, two time lines, two lives.
The only reason this matters is evil android death hell trunks comes back in time to try
and save us from the inevitable chaos in which he grew up!
So “awful life” trunks is from 16 years in the future, and “peaceful life” trunks
exists in the standard present timeline.
Both versions we meet are unique, the one from the future as well as his counterpart
born between the cell games and the buu saga.
But wait, if these 2 people are the same person, wouldn't they be EXACTLY the same?
How can one guy be so clearly different?
How does this all work?
What is a personality anyway?
Are we shaped by the world around us, the people that raise us, and by our mentors who
teach us the path to critical thought and an open minded world view?
Or are we born as we are?
Our personalities written right into our genetic code, replicated within our DNA, something
akin to fate.
Time, space, conceptualization of language and culture, of events and their effects on
a person's psyche.
Conditioning and perspective, what is taught and what is simply intrinsic within us?
How do we make sense out of all of this???
Well let's take a look at this purple haired pretty boy and his...
other self to find out exactly what it all means, and hopefully through Trunk's trials
and tribulations we can discover what it means to be human and exactly how much power outside
influences have over molding us into who we are.
HIT IT.
Meet Trunks.
Future Trunks.
Like I said his life’s been pretty hard.
A boy on a mission to save goku from (get this) heart disease.
I mean, I guess it makes sense, have you seen him go super saiyan?
That's gotta cause some high blood pressure, plus, watch him eat!
There's a lotta calories in that there 200 plates of food!
Anyway, Trunks is the son of Vegeta and Bulma, a half saiyan, like gohan, but not a whiney
little turd like gohan.
No, trunks is pretty cool, and he wears a jacket that's too short for him, making him
even cooler, and he has a giant ass sword!
This young man is a strong, disciplined, and most importantly modest character.
He’s been through alot and was raised in a time and place most of us could hardly fathom.
Terror, destruction and death from an all powerful enemy plague his world, he knows
what the feeling of true fear is, and what it’s like to lose everything.
He may also have a little ptsd too, but we’ll get into that...
Trunks makes an entrance into the story like no other.
Goku had just become a super saiyan and defeated Frieza, literally the greatest achievement
of his entire life up to that point, as well as the coolest thing that'd happened in the
show so far.
Before Goku could get home from Namek (which is about one long ass boring season of working
out away) a rebuilt frieza and king cold show up on earth, but so does trunks.
He proceeds to go super saiyan and cut frieza into little pieces in about 2 seconds, then
blows king cold's heart right out of his chest!
Very bad ass.
At this point our hero here is a complete mystery to the z team, he's just a super crazy
strong dude who shows up out of nowhere to offer some help.
And a warning.
As we know, In future trunk's time the world is devastated.
what you didn’t know is all the z fighters are dead in that timeline!
thanks to the androids i mentioned earlier- who apparently make Frieza look like a little
baby!
Just watching Trunks retell his story you can see first-hand that this baddass booty
kicker has seen some shit.
The future’s certainly not a nice place to live, that's for sure.
By giving this warning Trunks hopes to save his own future by saving Goku, he assumes
that if Goku lives in this time, that he will still be alive in trunk's time.
That doesn’t go so well.
But for now let’s look at other Trunks, or idk, little Trunks?
Normal Trunks?
Whatever.
Long after this ordeal, present Trunks pops out of the baby oven in the standard timeline
and is raised in a world that's more or less peaceful.
by the time we meet him he's a young kid who was raised by a hardcore dad who's tried to
settle down with a super-rich mom.
This version of Trunks has had everything handed to him from the second he was born
and it kind of shows.
He's spoiled, and a little bit of a brat.
To be fair, he is young, but he's incredibly immature and over confidant.
Like his future self he's incredibly strong, but with strength like his and no imminent
threat he's grown to become cocky and reckless.
This little Trunks believes nothing (besides maybe his dad) could defeat him.
What a contrast, same person, different time.
Different worlds, different upbringings.
Almost, different personalities…
But why would the same person, be different, if they're the same person?
You may be wondering why I'd even be asking this question.
To a lot of people the concept of nature vs. Nurture is cut and dry.
Obviously HOW a person is brought up determines who they become right?
Or maybe you were thinking, "no obviously they're exactly the same you're only seeing
certain aspects of their personalities during the show, at the core trunks is trunks is
trunks!"
Well see that’s the issue isn't it.
Nobody really knows and honestly, it's hard to tell what is right, but let's look at something
we DO know.
Also, because this is confusing, and because we're dealing with the ineptitudes of the
English language this is future trunks, this is kid trunks.
Also whoever is editing this is gunna make a pants joke as I was saying that, cause that's
just funny.
So the reason we have 2 Trunks to begin with is because of time travel.
Or so we think.
Technically it can't be time travel, because a single timeline is STATIC you can’t change
it.
Period.
What happens is what happens and that's what happens no matter what.
If you were to travel back in time for real, and change something, it wouldn't really change,
it would still happen anyway because that’s the way it was before you left!
What happened with future trunks was interdimensional travel.
He came from one point in one timeline to another point in another timeline!
Two separate worlds!
It's like some superman DC shit up in here.
Earth one and earth two.
When Future Trunks comes back again in the next season it's because saving goku didn't
change his future, let's say, on earth one.
But in the world we know, earth two, things had changed cause goku is still alive.
Bear with me This is how we got young trunks and how he
was able to grow up with a different life.
Because young trunk's timeline was different.
However BIOLOGICALLY future and young trunks are genetically identical.
The absolute same person down to the last cell.
Well, at least at birth, those little things grow and die all the time!
But let's look at these two characters, or one character, AUGH I don’t even know anymore!
Future trunks is a badass dude.
Super strong, courageous, but also cautious.
He grew up without his father, and was instead primarily trained by Gohan, who is far more
cautious than maybe any of the other Z fighters, (besides maybe his own master, Piccolo.)
Future Trunks honestly seems to be a lot more like the older gohan we get to know later
in the series, even though he's biologically Vegeta's son.
Young Trunks is far more like Vegeta who trained and raised him in the non-dystopian timeline.
This shows in particular by his confidence and total lack of fear.
On the flip side, future trunks has a deep fear inside him, something we don't see from
any of the other Z fighters, he's seen the absolute worst that could happen.
The ultimate bad ending of the game of life and he's desperate to find a way out of that.
But is that enough to REALLY change who someone fundamentally is?
Because there is no gauge to calculate someone's personality, (at least no good one) and because
time travel hasn't been achieved yet the only real studies done on the concept of Nature
vs. Nurture have been on identical twins.
A common misconception of identical twins is that they are genetically identical, this
is actually not true.
Sure, they're close but there can be hundreds of differences across their DNA.
The reason for this is at conception your mother and father’s funky junk gives you
a genome, or a set of specific genetic instructions from combining their chromosomes.
Generally a person holds two copies of every gene, but there are places within the genome
that are exceptions to that rule.
Here, even identical twins have been shown to have different numbers of gene copies,
creating “copy number variants” These can be benign or totally invisible differences,
but they could also lead to different hair or eye color, or even susceptibility to things
like cancer.
Future Trunks and his counterpart would be identical, exactly the same though right?
Wrong!
According to a paper released by the university of michigan and the watson research center
in NY, The two would actually have different fingerprints at the very least!
Depending on what Bulma did during her pregnancy and where each Trunks rested in the baby baker
would create unique differences in the prints!
Regardless, many of these tests were conducted on identical twins who were separated at birth.
These are the closest things to exact human DNA replicants, so they’ll have to do for
now.
Moving on, the twins in these studies lived totally different lives.
What they found was often startling.
Many sets of twins who had never met each other had identical IQ, similar tastes in
food, even smoked the same brand of cigarettes!
Their happiness levels were similar and even their dental health was almost exactly the
same!
The similarities continue down the list, drove the same type of car
vacationed at the same beach in Florida.
both suffered from tension headaches They even stand the same way where fraternal
twins do not These findings point heavily towards the way
nature and genetics can really have an influence on who you are!
So maybe these two are the same after all, but what about things like the trauma future
trunks went through, or the great upbringing young trunks had with his dad?
What about how much like Gohan future trunks is, or how much like vegeta young trunks is,
what's the deal with that?
Mental trauma is a devastating experience to go through and can result in a number of
issues.
Watching everyone you love die like trunks did in particular can cause some devastating
effects, or create long term psychological health problems and emotional behaviors.
That being said, did you know mental trauma can actually physically affect your brain?
It all comes down to memory, how it's stored, where it's stored and how it's accessed.
A lot of people liken memory to a big filing cabinet that you pull a sheet of paper out
of that says something like 9th birthday I peed my pants" but that’s far from reality.
Memory is actually a culmination of sensory stimuli that are retrieved from a network
of areas in the brain.
Everything from sight and smell to feel and emotional response make up an entire memory.
What we're specifically looking at here is long term memory, or the stuff you remember
forever.
The areas in your brain heavily associated with this is your hippocampus and frontal
cortex.
These decide whether or not something is worth remembering.
Once something is worth remembering they separate that memory into bits and pieces around the
rest of your brain.
Remember, remembering is a process, not just something that happens.
Anyway.
Memory is formed by perception, which is how you look at all things, including senses,
and what it all means to you.
Some people are really thick skinned, or have a different outlook on life which can prevent
trauma specifically because seeing a bunch of people blown up doesn't bother them.
Other people might melt in a drooling puddle, where others may have some ptsd that they
can eventually overcome.
But one thing is for sure, mental trauma, if uncorrected or untreated can actually give
you brain damage!
That hippocampus I was talking about is a pretty sensitive fellow, and if you stress
him out he's likely to break down and start making some glucocorticoids.
Which are adrenal hormones.
These chemicals are triggered by a “fight or flight” response to stimulate.
Ever gotten spooked, had a jump scare?
That instant panic is caused by these hormones, it’s a safety mechanism in your body meant
to keep you alive.
But glucocorticoids are also toxic when overproduced, they’re only meant for emergencies.
Ever been scared so bad you were left shaking, not sure if you were going to cry or not?
That’s basically constantly happening to a brain that’s suffered incredible trauma.
These adrenal hormones can actually cause physical neurological damage to your brain!
Patients with severe ptsd have been discovered to have significantly smaller and hypoactive
prefrontal cortices, which deal with emotional responses like fear, and this may make things
like intrusive thoughts more common.
But why all this brain stuff?
Well because we don’t know what the heck a personality is!
But let me ask you this, if you didn’t have any memories would you still be you?
Everything that you like or the people you love, everything you know just gone, could
you still say you were the same person?
Let me know in the comments below, I think that’s a pretty good question!
Really what I'm saying is, future Trunks’ brain is different than young Trunks’ brain.
So they must be different people.
They've lived through different lives, they were mentored by different people, and took
on different personalities because of it.
If you remember our Story You Never Knew on “everything” we mentioned how everyone
is connected, and how everyone and everything you come in contact with makes you who you
are.
It’s important to relate this idea to trunks when thinking about the people he was around
during his separate upbringings.
Future trunks with mild mannered, intelligent and meek gohan, the other with stubborn, aggressive,
angry and hard ass vegeta.
Not only were these two mentors they were the strongest personalities for trunks in
both timelines, personalities both versions of this character took on through osmosis,
through propinquity, because of the amount of time the individuals spent with each other.
Though at the same time genetically both trunks are as close to identical as possible.
Almost every strand of DNA in their bodies is exactly the same!
Since we have no scientific study to look towards to help us understand timeline variants
and its effect on genomic structure, we have to assume future and present trunks are as
close as possible to genetic copies.
They both show intelligence, physical strength, the same physical traits all around.
So the real question is, what makes a person a person, or maybe better yet, what makes
you you?
Is it what you like or what you wear?
Or is it the other stuff, your DNA, your cells, your unique little brain?
Or was it the way you were raised, or who raised you or the things you were taught?
When it comes down to the endless debate over nature vs. Nurture there is actually no answer.
Like scientifically there is actually no winner to the argument.
Because it's both.
Genetics, physicality, thought process, experiences, teachings, these things absolutely make you
who you are.
The way you were raised, the life that you lived and how you lived it; and the teachers
that you had along the way absolute make you who you are.
Just like future trunks and gohan, and little trunks and vegeta.
But there's other influences too!
Cultural influences, influences from the media, I could go on and on, but what do you think?
Have I convinced you that nature vs nurture is a bunch of crap?
What do you think is right?
Let me know down below in the comments!
I want to cover even more about trunks in the future and dragon ball in general, so
if you liked this video give it a thumbs up to let us know and be sure to have more soon,
until then, toodles!