Dragon Ball Forum

Goku. He's the shows protagonist and the one who everyone always relies on. He's the hero of the story, the most selfless and Cell aside the one who always ends up saving the day. Speaking as someone who normally doesn't like the main character he has a lot of qualities like his selflessness, humility and at times stupidity which make it difficult not to root for him. He is in my view the most universally likeable main character in any series I've seen and my favourite by far in DBZ.

Gohan by contrast is not one of my favourites. He comes across as a bit of a wimp with no real battle sense, the random gargling noises kid Gohan tends to hit out with every 10 seconds were a particularly annoying reminder of this. He is lazy, doesn't train and gets most of his significant power increases handed to him on a plate. In spite of this he still has a tendency to become arrogant when he has th upper hand in battle and this pretty much always costs him. That kind of things fine if alongside it the character has an edge like Vegeta but Gohan's arrogance alongside his goofy attitude is a strange fit and a major reason why i'm not a big fan.

Gohan

Neither. Vegeta and Future Trunks make for far more interesting characters. :P

As discussed, Goku's mentality seemed to change surprisingly between DB and DBZ with his earlier reluctance to kill evil doers when necessary which lacked any buildup or reasoning as he clearly kills Piccolo Daimao and other major foes he encountered as a kid. Not to mention as a character, he's rather bland being the typical dense hero completely devoted to training as a martial artist and known to make some not-so-smart decisions at points in the series (sparing Frieza, going to battle against the androids despite being warned of his heart virus, giving Cell a Senzu Bean to replenish his strength, letting Buu slaughter the human populace while training his sons).

Gohan had the potential to be a better protagonist than Goku since he had more common sense in making decisions than his father and the Cell saga portrayed him as being his father's successor. But his commitment to school studies and everyday life led his abilities as a fighter to weaken and moments of his timid personality getting in the way of battles can get grating at many points in the series.

Future Trunks and Vegeta are the more better characters of the series since both are far better developed and are shown to have a nice balance of battle smarts and knowing how to live normally. Vegeta has the most major developments of characters in the series as he slowly learned to let go of his pride as a former prince of his race to enjoy life with his new family on Earth and become a more willing ally to Goku and the other Z Fighters, while Future Trunks has his mother's smarts with operating technology and his father's battle smarts (with his special offering nice exploration of his past). It's kind of regrettable the version of him that grew up into Dragonball GT winded up not being so interesting.