Aliona Miller
The wish was a boat. That’s what he told Goku he wanted if he won the Tournament of Power. A luxury cruise liner, for himself, his wife and his three kids. Not power. Not immortality. A holiday.
I love that he said it out loud and I love that nobody thought twice about it, because by that point in Dragon Ball Super Android 17 living a small life on a remote island had stopped being surprising. He was a park ranger. He chased poachers. He’d adopted two children on top of the one he had. A man like that wants a cruise.
Then he won and he didn’t ask for the boat.
The Zenos were testing the winner and nobody told the fighters
This is the part that makes the whole thing land and it only comes out after the fact.
The Grand Priest revealed afterward that the Zenos had a condition running underneath the entire tournament. They expected the last fighter standing to be of pure heart and to use the wish on the Super Dragon Balls to restore the seven universes that had been wiped out along the way. If the winner had asked for something selfish instead, the Zenos would have erased everything, including Universe 7, out of disgust at what mortals turn out to be when you hand them a wish.
Nobody in the arena knew this. Not Goku, not Frieza, not 17.
So the cruise liner wasn’t a joke about a modest guy with modest wants. It was a loaded gun sitting in his pocket for the length of the entire arc. Every time he mentioned the boat, he was one sentence away from ending the multiverse on a technicality he’d never been told about.
He changed his mind at the microphone. Asked why, he said Goku’s compassion had rubbed off on him, which is either the most understated character resolution in the franchise or a writer covering his tracks and I don’t entirely care which. The wish he made was for all of the universes that had been erased to come back. Not the ones erased during the tournament. All of them. Fans have been chewing on that phrasing for years, because it’s broader than it needed to be and Super never came back to explain it.
He only won because two other people threw themselves out
Worth being honest about, since the internet tends to soften it.
Jiren was still standing at the end. Goku and Frieza took themselves over the edge with him, which left 17 alone on the platform as the last fighter from Universe 7. He didn’t defeat Jiren. He outlasted a fight that two other people ended by sacrificing themselves.
Does that cheapen it? Not to me and here’s why. He’d already done the thing that mattered earlier, when he blew himself up to protect Goku and Vegeta from Jiren’s attack and got wished back later. He’d fought Anilaza, the Universe 3 fusion monster, by getting inside it and going after the energy reactor in it’s chest. He’d needled Jiren about his own wish and got under his skin for a moment, which almost nobody managed.
The win is a technicality. The tournament wasn’t.
Bulma bought him the boat anyway
End credits. She gave 17 and his family the cruise he’d wanted.
It’s four seconds of animation and it’s the best joke in the arc, because the entire moral weight of the finale rests on him not asking for the boat and then he gets the boat.
What he actually is, since “android” is wrong
Bulma read his blueprints during the Cell arc and the answer surprised her. He’s human-based. Almost everything about him was enhanced with bio-organic components rather than replaced with machinery. The only genuinely mechanical parts were the emergency deactivation controller and the self-destruct device and Krillin had the bomb removed with a wish after the Cell Games.
Which means the word “android” is a translation of 人造人間, artificial human and “cyborg” is closer than “robot” but still not right. Dr. Gero took two human delinquents and rebuilt them at the cellular level.
The practical consequences of that are what make him dangerous:
| Trait | What it does |
|---|---|
| Perpetual energy reactor | He never tires and never runs out. No stamina clock at all. |
| Human base | He can train and get stronger, which pure machines like 16 cannot |
| Halted aging | Cells deteriorate very slowly, so he barely ages |
| Enhanced hearing | Picked up poachers across his island and located Damom in the Tournament of Power |
That first row is the one people underrate. Every Saiyan fight in the series is a resource management problem. Ki runs down, transformations bleed stamina, Goku collapses. Seventeen has no such meter. In a tournament with a time limit and no rest, the man with an infinite battery is a structurally different opponent and I don’t think the writers fully appreciated what they’d built until Super gave them a reason to use it.
He’s a support character in the mobile game, which is very funny
Bandai Namco’s MOBA, Dragon Ball Gekishin Squadra, has him as a Technical hero, which the game means as support. He shields allies with his barrier. His Rush Attack can interrupt an enemy transformation and he can flip enemy buffs into debuffs. His passive is called Infinite Energy Reactor and it lets him keep using skills during their cooldowns, which is a nice piece of design that translates the canon idea directly into a mechanic.
Community tier lists put him around B, with the usual note attached: situational utility, not much damage.
So the last man standing in a fight for the survival of twelve universes is a mid-tier support pick. That gap between what a character is in the story and what he is in the meta is one of my favorite things about licensed games and it happens constantly. Goku, Vegeta, Piccolo and Frieza sit in S. The guy who won sits below them.
He’s been playable in a lot more than that, going back through Budokai Tenkaichi, Xenoverse 2, FighterZ and the Kakarot DLC, but Squadra is where the design most closely matches what the character is supposed to be.
His name is half of a rock
Before Gero got hold of him he was Lapis. His sister was Lazuli.
Lapis lazuli. The deep blue stone people have been grinding into pigment since antiquity, which is where ultramarine comes from and which was, at points in history, more expensive by weight than gold.
Toriyama didn’t reveal the names until 2014, more than twenty years after the characters debuted in chapter 349 on November 12, 1991. I’ve never worked out whether he had the names from the start and sat on them or made them up when someone asked. Nobody seems to know.
His whole existence is the result of an editor being rude twice
The Cell arc was originally going to be built around Dr. Gero and Android 19. Toriyama’s editor, Kazuhiko Torishima, looked at that and told him he’d made his main villains an old man and a fat guy.
So Toriyama swapped them for the twins. Torishima looked at those and said they were just some kids.
Cell exists because of that second rejection.
There’s a further wrinkle that surfaced recently. Takashi Matsuyama, Toriyama’s second assistant during the Dragon Ball years, said in a Kanzenshuu interview reported out of Manga Barcelona in 2025 that the twins were designed by Nachi Mikami, the pen name of Yoshimi Kato, who married Toriyama in 1982 and is his wife. She’d been a shoujo manga artist before the marriage and had done background work on Dr. Slump.
Fans had guessed at this for years on the basis that 17 and 18 dress better than anyone else Toriyama drew, which is a flimsy argument that turned out to be correct. I’d treat it as one recent statement from one assistant rather than settled record, but it fits the evidence.
Worth separating two claims that get mashed together in the retellings: Toriyama created the characters, Mikami designed how they look. Not the same thing.
In GT, 18 does the work and Goku gets the kill
Super 17 gets talked about as a Goku fight. It isn’t.
Gero and Myuu brainwash 17 from Hell and fuse him with a Machine Mutant copy called Hell Fighter 17. The result absorbs energy attacks, which makes him nearly unbeatable in a series where every problem is solved by firing a bigger beam at it. Super Saiyan 4 Goku threw everything he had and fed the thing.
Android 18, who had watched Super 17 kill Krillin, is the one who cracks it. Goku told her the plan wouldn’t work and her answer was that she had to try anyway. Her barrage forced Super 17 into absorbing and while absorbing he can’t attack. That’s the window. Goku’s Dragon Fist goes through the chest and finishes it.
Afterward 18 said she thought the real 17 had been pushing from inside, deliberately exposing the weak point and Goku said he’d sensed the same thing. Which the show leaves unresolved and should.
The 30 million power level is not real
You’ll see 30,000,000 quoted everywhere as Android 17’s power level. It comes from Dragon Ball Z: The Anime Adventure Game, a licensed tabletop RPG from the nineties. It isn’t from the manga, it isn’t from the anime and Toriyama abandoned numbered power levels during the Frieza arc precisely because they’d stopped meaning anything.
Quote it in a comment section and someone will correct you inside a minute. Fairly.
The thing that keeps me coming back to 17 is that he’s the only major character in the franchise who got better by leaving. Everyone else in Dragon Ball resolves their arc by fighting harder. He resolved his by moving to an island, taking a job counting animals and raising kids that weren’t his and then he walked back in and outlasted gods. Toriyama never explained the middle part and I’ve stopped wanting him to.
