#I constantly think about Toriyama saying that Vegeta got his “bargain sale” line from watching tv and I choose to believe

[shannonsketches]

Hello, I love reading your DB analyses and headcanons on Vegebul... Was wondering how you imagine Vegeta realized and dealt with his growing deeper feelings of love towards Bulma after the Cell Games? Would he have confessed it outright to her or been more subtle about it?

Hello!! I love yelling about Vegebul, thanks (to you and everyone!) for sending me asks!

I like to think it's been all but unspoken for almost their entire relationship. Bulma's a big romo goober on the surface but she has a lot of trust issues like Vegeta does, and I think for as smart as they both are they both struggle sometimes to put their more fragile feelings into words.

As much as I talk about Goku and Vegeta and their relationships with their wives being foils, I think something they have in common is that their actions have always been much louder and much more meaningful to each other than words.

While I think that Bulma and Vegeta do both appreciate verbal affirmations, I also hc that genuine vulnerable emotion is an easy way to throw them both off their game, and I've always imagined their confessions to be very quiet, if not completely non-verbal.

tldr I think after the Cell Games Vegeta's confession was just Being There for his family and putting in the work to learn what his role is and what his life looks like now and how he can be what his family needs him to be with the options he has. (Saiyans are masters of adaptation, as we know)

In the same vein, one of my favorite things about Bulma's growth as a character is that as a teenager/younger woman she thought the ultimate love was a man who was performative arm candy that she could cart around in public to show off how loved and adored she is, and being with Vegeta seems to have changed that expectation.

My hc is that her needs became more grounded in what was solid and stable and real and her confidence was rebuilt in the shape of someone who didn't really need anything from her, but continued to choose her anyway, and Vegeta's was too. They're both used to positions of strategic leadership and resource acquisition, and expect their value to be limited to how much those positions are required by their peers.

While they both clearly enjoy certain kinds of attention, outside of the occasional performance, Bulma and Vegeta are both very solitary operators. They would do just fine without each other. They're not emotionally dependent on each other. They're not resource-dependent on each other. They could both easily find other physical outlets. They don't need each other at all.

They want to be together. They chose to be together. They keep choosing to be together. They seek each other out, they miss each other, they like each other, as full and complex and weird and annoying and recovering people.

I think that matters a lot more to both of them than anything else, and I think that's been their way of confessing how they feel for a long, long time.