Dragon Ball Daima calls back the franchise’s first true villain and could solve a mystery from the great series

Warning: Spoilers for episode 3 of Dragon Ball DaimaDragon Ball Daima visited the Demon Realm for the first time, and some of its inhabitants may look a little familiar to longtime fans of the franchise. This similarity may not be a coincidence, however, and may suggest an answer to some long-standing questions about Dragon Ballfirst major villain, King Piccolo. While many fans may only remember King Piccolo’s most famous son, Piccolo Jr., the series’ first Namekian actually had a pittance of descendants, and Daima could have just dropped a big reference to these forgotten children.

King Piccolo was a self-proclaimed “Demon King”, although he never appears to have actually been the King of the Demon Realm, as Piccolo had no knowledge of that land. Now it is known thanks to Daima that all Namekians are actually natives of the Demon Realm, so despite this fact, King Piccolo still has a connection to the Demon Realm, even if he wasn’t fully aware of it. Before he was “reincarnated” as Piccolo fans know and love, though, King Piccolo had some other children who did his dirty work for him, and these other children bear a suspicious resemblance to the demons of Daima.

Daima may finally explain the ancient mystery of King Piccolo’s children

King Piccolo’s children were demons

Until now, King Piccolo’s children, such as Tambourine, Cymbal, and Drum, were considered “mutant” Namekians, with strange (to Namekian) appearances as a result of their father’s extreme evil. Although King Piccolo and Piccolo Jr. resemble common Namekian biology, these other children have many features that Namekians don’t have, such as wings, horns, and spot patterns, and other than being green and having pointy ears, they really don’t. I don’t look much like the Namekians.

In episode #3 of DaimaGoku, Supreme Kai and Glorio go to a bar, which is inhabited by several natives of the Demon Realm of varying appearances. Several of these demons have wings, horns, and/or spot patterns that make them resemble King Piccolo’s children and appear to be quite typical of the inhabitants of the Demon Realm. Perhaps, Instead of mutated Namekians, King Piccolo’s children were modeled after other demon species, giving them abilities and appearances very different from their Namekian father..

Alternatively, it is possible that the Namekians and these other inhabitants of the Demon Realm share a common ancestor and have evolved differently over time until they became distinct species. King Piccolo, being half of the Nameless Namekian of Dragon Ball very distant past, it may be from a time when they were more closely related, allowing him to resort to recessive traits like wings and horns that would become defining features of the Demon Realm race. He can even be considered to be of the “Demon Clan” because of his ability to bestow these demonic characteristics on his descendants, further making them mutants.

King Piccolo’s children look more like demons than Namekians

The “mutant” Namekians raised many questions

King Piccolo’s children have been a big question mark in the Dragon Ball tradition since the Namekian race made its proper debut in Dragon Ball Zon his former home world of Namek. It wouldn’t have been difficult to make some Namekians on Namek have characteristics similar to Tambourine or Cymbal, just to help explain their appearances, but this was decidedly not the case when the characters started arriving there; instead, they all looked like Piccolo and Kami, with none of them having wings or horns.

By showing that the demons native to the Demon Realm share many characteristics with King Piccolo’s children, it helps solidify their “Demon Clan” status, as well as offering some potential explanations as to why their children looked so different from other Namekians. The resemblance certainly appears to be more than a coincidence, although not all of the demons seen in the bar share it. After all, there were other demons seen everywhere Dragon Ballnotably Dabura, who one would think would be more typical of how a demon from the Demon Realm might appear.

By bonding with the first “Demon King” in Dragon Ball, Daima is in conversation with the series’ continuity and may even take the opportunity to answer a question that has been hanging over King Piccolo’s children for years. There appears to be a great deal of variety in the appearance of demons in the Demon Realm, and there are still other “worlds” in the Demon Realm that have not yet been shown, possibly including even more variety, with those demons resembling Tambourine and others only constituting a small portion of the kingdom’s population.

Although fans may balk at the idea that Daima would connect to something so deep in the franchise’s past that it wouldn’t be the first time the new anime resolved a potential problem in a previous series. Daima fixed one Dragon Ball Z plot hole in confirming that Buu is the key to reversing the Potara fusions and the series also made references to both Super and GT. Dragon Ball Daima hasn’t been afraid to make some deep references to the franchise’s lore thus far, so it would be perfectly appropriate to reference some of the first “demons” seen in the series through the denizens of the Demon Realm.