Character · Dragon Ball
Tien Shinhan
Three eyes, four arms when he wants them, and a name taken from a plate of crab omelette on rice.
In Otakana the clue reads: Fighter with a third eye on his forehead
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Dragon Ball
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Tien starts as an assassin. His teacher, the Crane Hermit, is Master Roshi's old rival and sends his best student to the world tournament with instructions to kill. Tien takes the job, gets most of the way through it, and then does something rare in a shonen villain: he changes his mind mid-fight, in public, because he has worked out that his teacher is using him. He spends the rest of the series on the other side.
His arsenal is the strangest in the cast. The Four Witches Technique grows him a second pair of arms. The Solar Flare blinds everyone watching, a move so useful that every other fighter steals it. The Tri-Beam fires a square of energy and takes the difference out of his own lifespan, which is why he uses it only when the situation is already lost, and he uses it more than once.
Tenshinhan is a dish, a Japanese take on Chinese cooking, crab omelette over rice. His tiny companion Chiaotzu is named after gyoza dumplings. Between them, Tien and Chiaotzu are the only fighters in the group who train alone in the mountains and turn up anyway whenever the world is ending.
Spelling TIEN
TIEN is four letters, and the I in it does not exist in Japanese. The name is Tenshinhan, ten-shin-han, and English releases split it into Tien Shinhan while adding a vowel to the first part. So the sound is TEN and the spelling is TIEN. Otakana wants the short first half only, not the full name.