#Vegeta meta

[dragomer]

Thank you. And if you don't mind, can you roast review this discourse about redemption arcs?

https://www.tumblr.com/dushman-e-jaan/694120765277306880/why-do-you-dislike-zuko-and-kurapika-when-the?source=share

Oh god, if it's anything like the previous one, I don't think I'm mentally prepared for it.

Okay, I skimmed through it and I don't have much more to say than about the previous post, except that in addition to being an immature redditor who can't be concise and is desperately trying to sound smart and grown up, they are also clearly trying way too hard to be edgy.

I've rarely seen someone managed to be that comically stupid while still being beyond uninteresting to the point that just trying to read their post make my eyes roll back so hard, I see my brain. It has a lot of volume but it's so empty and artificially pumped there's nothing to take apart.

The only response to that entire thing is 'Yes, it's a kids show, no, it doesn't become bad just because you grew up and no, acknowledging old stuff is good is not nostalgia, you are not more grown up for deluding yourself like that', there is literally nothing more to say or address.

The fact that they whine about 'not addressing the harsh realities of Imperialism' (yes, it does, you're just mad they do it with nuance instead of indulging your edgy murderboner, they even acknowledge the fact that it would create a 'mixed race' class between the colonized and the 'colonizer' and thus mean you literally can't do anything about it without denying an entire innocent demographic their right to exist, which is infinitely harsher than any surface level edgy nonsense you can fathom) while also whining that every 'revolutionary' (IE terrorists, because the Gaang, Hakoda's crew and the White Lotus are all revolutionaries, just not terrorists) is treated as insane is quite funny, they literally can't handle the harsh truth that slaughtering powerless civilians make you an insane murderer, no matter what 'greater good' you're ranting about.

Just say you simp for Hama and her Jason Voorhees LARP and Jet's delusional plan to drown an innocent town Ozai couldn't give less of a shit about and would have probably burned down anyway and go instead of whining like that.

Also the bit about Vegeta being a 'softy' for his 'waifu' show he clearly has no clue about any of the shows he's talking about. Vegeta had no qualms about killing Bulma or letting her die UNTIL he had his redemption, even in the Buu saga he came close to killing her without giving a shit once he went Majin. Dude unironically did not watch the show.

Gotta love the 'It's the death of creativity!' from someone who's clearly a pretend artist who didn't even have enough balls to try and become a frustrated failed artist. You couldn't make a character anyone give a shit about to save your life, dude, sit down.

Thanks for the ask ^^

[upwards-descent]

Please reblog to enhance sample size!

[himbocorgi]

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[celestial-alignment]

Saw this DBS clip and a lot of the comments were people saying that Piccolo has no right to judge Vegeta, that everyone is forgetting that Piccolo was also a villain once, too. I was going to respond in the comments, but then I realized I don't want to deal with the argumentative dude bro fans of Dragon Ball, so I'm just gonna vent my opinions here... Okay, rant incoming because I'm stuck at home sick and feeling some cabin fever. Honestly, I don't blame Piccolo for having his doubts. He was there almost every time Vegeta did something with possibly world-ending consequences. Vegeta being the one to threaten the planet in the Saiyan Saga. Vegeta letting Cell go to his perfect form. Vegeta going Majin. All for selfish reasons. Yeah, at the end of the Buu Saga he came around, but... it's hard to ignore the years and years of Veggie's A-hole behavior lol. Also, Piccolo DOES have the right to judge. He started off as a villain, but he never really followed through with the evil things he intended to do. He destroyed the island during the 23rd World Tournament AFTER everyone already evacuated. He saved that rando kid and his mom from a falling sign. He caused Goku a lot of damage in the tournament, but not nearly as much damage (physically and psychologically tbh) as Goku caused him, and the way he raised/trained Gohan was to the extent of how he grew up. I would also argue that he was showing signs of being softer long before he ever even fused with Kami or Nail just because he was caring for Gohan (and how could you not, Gohan is the purest cutest thing). Also, Chi-Chi is definitely projecting here, but that's a rant for another day.

[not-souleaterpost]

People on here who think even anime Crona didn't deserve redemption or needed to be severaly punished after watching DBZ:

[evilkitten3]

@blueper-saiyan

#Not sure if I’m allowed to pull out these tags as a separate reblog#but that is an interesting and fucked up theory I like it#and absolutely want to hear the long version#vegeta

you absolutely are as far as i'm concerned but since op's post was getting a bit long i'll respond here

dbz always reblog i have a theory that there's actually a reason for this it stems from my theory that vegeta's mom doesn't exist bc he's a clone of his dad basically it eventually become obvious that frieza was going to take whichever kid was heir to the throne so king vegeta (kv i guess) went ''aight we need a Super Baby (no tuffles allowed) and i'm the coolest guy on the planet. need a baby me'' so he gets a bunch of the buffest nerds imaginable (be real saiyan scientists like the job bc they get to fight physics) and start working kv: i need this kid to last as long as possible we're gonna need to buy some time scientists: got it boss *proceed to make the universe's most ridiculously hard to kill infant* how's this kv: excellent. frieza catch! frieza: oh this is adorable! i'm going to traumatize it =) <-an extremely brief summary of my hc

(^the tags in question)

ok so first there are a couple of things i need to get out of the way ahead of time– namely, i'm not the first person to come up with the vegeta-is-a-clone idea; the first person i saw with that idea was someone who wrote a fic i read a while back that i'm blanking on the name of at the moment, and while their version is massively different from mine, the core concept of clone!veggie is more or less the same

the second thing is that i get way too into world building sometimes and so a lot of pieces of my hcs get mixed up with one another and often don't fit in with established canon (which isn't like abnormal or anything but i want to clarify that i already know some of this doesn't perfectly slot up. in my defense the db timeline doesn't even match up with itself half the time)

the final thing is that while i've seen bits of the anime and the first handful of super episodes, i'm mostly a manga fan, so i view any non-manga parts of dragon ball as free real estate

buckle up, i was not kidding about the length (*immature snickering*)

SO.

first and foremost the relationship between the tuffles and the saiyans: the tuffles are described as being a peaceful yet technologically advanced race, but in my hc, they're a bit more complicated than that. for starters, i don't see how a supposedly peaceful race is going to have high-tech blasters, and while it's possible that they're for defensive purposes, it... really doesn't give off that vibe. also they were super into some fairly questionable science, some of which objectively involved human experimentation (or... humanoid experimentation, i guess)

jumping back to the future for a sec: gohan. gohan is a half-human, half-saiyan male hybrid, and while two separate species somehow producing a hybrid child isn't unheard of, male hybrids are almost always completely infertile. and yet, gohan grows up and has a kid (another explanation is gohan and videl are t4t, which i also love, but it doesn't really fit into this). so how are saiyans and humans not only capable of reproducing together, but capable of having children that can also reproduce? my theory here is that saiyans are genetically modified (early) humans– tuffles arrived on earth sometime prior to homo erectus finishing the jump to homo sapiens, grabbed a handful of various lab rats, and got to work.

this would also explain why saiyan tails look the way they do. to elaborate, here's a spider monkey skeleton:

notice how the tail is made up of more vertebrae that continue along the same curve as the rest of the spine. meanwhile, goku's tail looks like this:

it juts straight out, almost perpendicular to his spinal cord. to me, that does not look like how tails work– it looks grafted on. in the video game kakarot, bulma even makes goku a fake tail for him to fish with that he can just... stick right on there. i know dragon ball science is already broken af (someone please explain to me how dr briefs isn't basically a deity for inventing capsules), but if the tail is a genetic trait that didn't evolve naturally, it makes some sense (in the way anything in dragon ball makes sense, that is)

so– saiyans are a highly adaptable species that seem to be able to eat basically whatever, can both endure and dish out catastrophic amounts of damage, are biologically driven to fight to the point where it's hard to imagine how a society full of them could function at all, get stronger whenever they recover from being seriously injured, can transform into giant apes, and yet have a glaringly obvious weakness that can pretty much completely incapacitate them if you know about it? they seem designed for war, and not in the natural evolution-is-just-funny-like-that-sometimes way.

what we know about the tuffles sort of differs from source to source, but the most negative opinions come from the saiyans– according to vegeta, the tuffles basically treated them as slaves. which... yeah, that adds up, given everything.

anyway, here's where i divorce from canon entirely bc according to gt, king vegeta iii is the one who led the saiyans in the war against the tuffles, which raises... honestly so many questions. so i'm ignoring that; it was vegeta i and he was never officially king, but more on that later. i also need to note that the whole "saiyans lived on planet sadala, fucked it up, and moved to planet plant which later became planet vegeta" to my knowledge is not manga canon but since i like the general idea, i sorta moved it a bit.

in my version, the saiyans and the tuffles both lived on planet sadala, but the war between the two species got a little out of hand and the planet was kaputski (to be fair, if you suddenly got to turn into a giant ape and wreak havoc on the people who were possibly enslaving you, you might go a bit overboard too), so the saiyans stole all the tuffles' ships and gtfo'd (this is why everyone was so sure the tuffles were gone. bc typically blowing up someone's planet is a good way to get rid of all of them. at least in theory– i'm sure frieza can tell you all about how well it works in practice)

back to vegeta i– he wasn't a king, technically, but he was the saiyan who started, led, and according to all saiyan sources (which are biased but w/e) finished the revolt, and chose to die on the planet in an act of heroic sacrifice and/or symbolism and/or his daughter twisted a fact or two bc propaganda is a game we all can play, and the new planet they landed on was named after him. said daughter took the same name, declared the planet and the king to be one and the same, and set about conquering the shit out of it. so vegeta ii was technically the first king but if you asked her she was the second and also disrespecting her father and probably also about to be killed via spear (oh btw king vegeta ii is famed for her giant war spear which was very cool and intimidating and probably didn't see much use outside of ritual combat bc it's honestly more efficient to just blast people but all the statues and art and whatnot have her with it)

i'm going to take a minute to gloat about vegeta ii bc honestly she's one of my alltime favorite ocs that i've made, despite the fact that i don't intend to ever have her show up in anything (yass gurl haunt that narrative!!!) but basically she's a deeply respected figure in saiyan culture, although she died way before any of the saiyans still alive in dbz were born (except nappa), bc she... basically built saiyan culture from scratch. pretty much all the core beliefs the saiyans as a people had were from her very deliberately and surprisingly sneakily forcing them to be developed bc she was fully aware that the saiyans needed more than a love of battle to actually survive as a society independent of the tuffles. she basically had the whole thing set up and ready to last and become a proper empire but unfortunately the one kid that lived long enough to succeed her (by killing her in combat, obviously, and yes the others all tried and died– she's an important figure, not a nice one) ran face first into frieza and we all know how that went down

anyhow, vegeta ii's reign (which lasted a crazy long time bc she lived way longer than she should've and almost certainly used some kind of not-so-great method of living that long, but in her defense she needed to make sure at least one of her kids was cool enough to be in charge, so what's a few war crimes between monarchs) pretty much cemented all the saiyan pride and identity that vegeta iv is so fond of, and not just bc she was his grandma either.

the reason i have to get through all of that to explain my clone!vegeta theory is bc i need to explain why king vegeta iii became king in the first place– under vegeta ii's system, anyone could challenge for the throne at any time, regardless of who they were. her own children were expected - but not required - to do so, and if she died before an heir could kill her in glorious combat, the princes would become stewards and have the duty of finding the next king (who couldn't be one of them. fight and die for that shit like a real saiyan or no throne for you). however, there was actively incentive not to do that bc A) whoever's in charge has to actually be in charge and therefore gets to fight way less, and B) in order to become king you had to be ritually stripped of your identity as a person with the understanding that if you died during your challenge your name would be stricken from all records, none of your family or friends would ever acknowledge that you had ever existed, and you would simply cease to be (the afterlife doesn't follow these rules but most of the saiyans who are there still do, including the ones who by saiyan law no longer exist. say what you will about saiyans; they're a dedicated lot)

so anyway vegeta iii (before becoming vegeta iii – he had a different name bc names are super important in my version of saiyan culture but if i get into that here we will literally be here for the rest of the week - but i'll call him that for the sake of my sanity) is somewhat reluctant to challenge for the throne bc none of his siblings have managed it (not that they exist anymore whoops), but one of his colleagues/presumed ruling partner (not gonna get into saiyan relationships here either sorry) has been pushing him to do so for a while now

i think i've gone through a few names for vegeta's not-mom, but the most recent one is touga (from tougarashi, or capsicum annuum, and yes i was thinking of neon orange glimmer song by the mountain goats when i named her), so i'll call her that. touga is a pretty saiyan-y saiyan– she's violent, temperamental, proud, strong, and so forth, but another thing she is is deeply, deeply loyal to her people. she's also very aware of vegeta iii's weaknesses (such as "will probably care a little too much about kids if he has any" and "may make decisions based off of feelings instead of cold hard practical logic" and "seems likely to develop emotional attachments to family members"; you know, normal kingly failings) and has the lady macbeth-esque stainless steel go-fuck-yourself coldness to make up for her future husband's pathetic little morals or whatever

anyway, touga pushes vegeta iii to go for the throne bc holy shit his mom has been alive for way too long but also she has faith in hi or something and duty and whatever and dude do it if you ever want this saiyan tail, and eventually he caves and goes for it. he fights his mom, wins, gets a shiny new king name and is all set to run his kingdom. and then king cold shows up.

now in between killing his mom and our favorite chilly boys coming to town, vegeta iii and touga have had a kid, prince escallion (who is a girl ftr but i can't get into saiyan thoughts on sex/gender or the language or even escallion herself in this post bc we will never ever leave). escallion is pretty neat, just the strongest baby in history or whatever, but then post-cold arriving and politely yoinking the saiyans into his empire, rumors start spreading that frieza miiiiight be wanting a saiyan under his personal command. no prizes for guessing whose palace he's looking at for pickings. obviously the only prince they've got is not someone they can afford to lose, but they need a sure bet on super-infants and can't afford hoping for a genetic bingo, so vegeta iii assembles the universe's swole-est scientists and has them get started on making the Coolest Baby Ever (by cloning him, the king, bc he's the strongest but also bc frieza is an asshole and likes playing mind games with people so let's be real he's taking one of the king's kids no matter how tough they are)

so vegeta iv gets made (and named inappropriately but that's frieza's fault and a story for another time so ignore it for now) and eventually tarble is born and almost immediately sent off just in case frieza decides to be a bigger dick than usual (spoilers: frieza is going to decide to be an even bigger dick than that), and vegeta gets to spend the first few years of his life with his dad, big sis, and not-mom until he gets shipped off to go be a child soldier/slave/distraction, at which point frieza goes ahead and blows up the planet. there's more to it than just that, but i may actually want to write it out some day, so i'll keep the rest to myself for now.

[starlooove]

Oh also In my mind WFA and vivs shit exist in the same sphere as people thinking it’s groundbreaking work bc it’s fanfic tropes someplace “official” but it’s these same people who hem and haw for DECADES on why fandoms conveniently ignore queer women and BIPOC and think reading fanfic is the same as reading books

[hiero-green]

Mhgnnhh smth smth about vegeta struggling with being a father for years bc saiyans aren't naturally nurturing as a species and don't really Parent™️ their kids all that much but he knows that parental relationships are important to humans and also his son is half human and maybe he doesn't want to completely fuck up by not living up to the care that his human half needs but he just doesn't Get It sometimes and he sees how naturally parenting comes to Bulma while it can feel so alien to him and he feels useless sometimes and the only thing he feels like he can do to bond with Trunks is to train with him but that’s clearly not enough and

[mechaking789]

Goku Kills Meta-Cooler ( I found this on YouTube)

[solid-bambino]

Daily Drawing 288 - misc late night doodles

[saiyan-edame]

The moral universe of DBZ (the Dragon Ball franchise in general, really, but you know what I mean) is so fascinating because in a lot of ways it's barbarically simple and binary -- Good and Evil exist as measurable forces within a person, and people who are Evil want to destroy and do harm seemingly for its own sake. (This is most apparent in the Boo Saga.) But at the same time, there’s a surprising amount of flexibility and grace afforded to people. King Piccolo is fully Evil, and Piccolo Jr. starts out that way as well, but having his life spared by Goku and later training Gohan changes him so thoroughly that by the time he’s sacrificing himself for Gohan, he’s just NOT. He’s fully one of the Good Guys. And VEGETA, HE spends most of the series either flirting with Evil or fully sucking Evil’s dick, but he still possesses the capacity for Good. In the Boo arc, we get one of the most selfish and Evil things Vegeta ever does (allowing Bobbidi to possess him so he can fight Goku) back to back with one of his most selfless and Good acts (sacrificing himself to destroy Boo). Good and Evil are elemental forces, but people decide whether or not to let themselves be controlled by them.

[cupcraft]

I love the scene in super where vegeta teaches cabba about saiyan pride and like culture and like the super saiyan stuff.

Like it's a big move for vegeta from moving from being forced to be in frieza's force and living every day as survival planning for any out he could no matter who or what he hurt in the process. And then we have him learning growing healing and changing (esp bc of his friendship to goku, and his relationship to bulma, and his kids, and etc) sort of processing that he and goku are really all that's left. And then he meets another and instead of anger at the fact their history is different (the planet still being there) he decides to teach. He decides to tell cabbo to "aim higher". He decides that he won't be alone and suffer alone. He decides to teach him about pride because it's all vegeta has left for his universe's people that are gone. It's such a beautiful scene and mementorship.

[adjoint-law]

a dozen Queer Studies doctoral theses could be written on this post alone

FEMINISM: sorry, but you can't be a feminist. You cum out of the wrong hole and that makes it toxic masculinity if anything has ever made you angry in your life. We're looking for that "white cis woman blogger on her 3rd box of franzia since 5 pm radiating elephant's foot level toxicity on twitter about her inoffensive cis boyfriend for losing one of her $30 Sockdreams socks in the dryer" type beat. You can go hang out with the queer theory people QUEER THEORY: whoa there buddy. The dick is... sorry, it wouldn't be a dealbreaker if you weren't on estrogen, but as it stands, well. Call us if you die in a way that helps us yell about the Nordic Model. In the meanwhile, go hang out with the trans activists TRANS ACTIVISM: As a poor above 21 you mean nothing to us. We're strictly for closers. Go hang out with the t4t crowd T4T CROWD: Fat and over 30? Gross. Go back to Fetlife, loser FETLIFE: You can't post mpreg vegeta here. Mpreg vegeta is strictly forbidden by the Fetlife terms of service,

[himbocorgi]

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[celestial-alignment]

I need to sleep but I'm thinking about how in the original Bardock movie, when little Vegeta found out his world was destroyed, they believed he was the only survivor at the time. Who knows how long it was before he was reunited with Nappa and Raditz, but for what probably felt like a lifetime, that little guy believed he was completely alone.

Fast forward to when he meets his son from a future where HE is the only survivor (aside from his mom), because the world was decimated by the androids.

Just wondering if those two dots ever connected for Vegeta or if that was a big part of why he was so god damned mean to Trunks. It's a lot of trauma and toxic indoctrination to work through.

[evilkitten3]

THAT INTERVIEW THOUGH my brothers and i like to play the "who would win x vs y" game a lot and sometimes goku gets shuffled in and i always have to add the caveat that, if the other character is mostly a good guy, this isn't a fight to the death fight it's a friendly comparison fight.

like if the question is "who could win" the answer is usually goku. but i can't imagine him going all out the way he would if it was a fight to the death but if it wasn't, goku wouldn't be going all out bc he just. doesn't like hurting people. for him, that's an unfortunate but necessary part of life, but it isn't something he actively seeks out.

vegeta, though... well, i imagine that a large part of that is just his life having been pretty much a continuous stream of traumatic events, but regardless of why, it's pretty clear from the get-go that hurting people for him is a bonus, at least at the beginning. it makes sense that he's like that, both given the general attitudes of most of the saiyans we've met and vegeta's own upbringing, but either way, vegeta when we first meet him enjoys hurting people

i think vegeta is someone who has always had someone he needed to be better than– initially, that was frieza. vegeta's goal has always been another person and he doesn't easily swap between targets, so once goku beat frieza his target switched to goku. before goku did that, vegeta just seemed to see him as someone he'd need to kill after he'd dealt with frieza himself, but frieza was still his true goal. once goku had won, though, goku took frieza's place as "person i need to be stronger than" for vegeta, and that didn't change even when vegeta learned that goku hadn't killed frieza and future trunks did it instead. f!trunks actually ended up taking goku's original place of "i'll kick his ass later" (but he got out of it by vegeta going "wait i'm his dad?" and then much later going "wait hang on i actually care about this kid wtf")

anyway, that's why - to me, at least - it was such a big deal that vegeta accepted goku being stronger than him at the end of the manga. it wasn't just him going "oh well guess i'll give up forever" like his post-cell sulking, it was him finally accepting that he didn't need to defeat goku, that it was possible for both of them to exist together

that's something goku never needed to learn– for goku, it's always been an option to coexist with people, it's always been acceptable that other people could change. it hasn't always been easy, but most of goku's friends were his enemies at some point.

that's part of what makes goku and vegeta's relationship so fascinating for me– they have so much in common, but their worldviews are so fundamentally different that it's almost impossible for them to properly understand each other. i talked about this a bit on my dbz shitpost blog, that goku and vegeta didn't understand each other until literally being the same person, but i focused more on vegeta bc i'm me. on goku's end, i think it's in large part that he chooses to see the best in everyone. or, i guess, it's more that he chooses to see the best that everyone could be. goku believes in second chances, and third, and fourth, and so on. to goku, it never seems to be too late to become a good person. or at least to stop being a bad one.

a lot of people dismiss goku's kindness as idiocy - which makes sense to some degree; one of his character traits is being "stupid" - but as i've gotten older, i've begun to appreciate it more and more. people can't change if you don't let them– and goku is someone who is always willing to let people change. no matter how awful someone is, goku will always believe they can become a better person. there's something beautiful in that, i think.