#also if you've read through this and started wondering ''hey if gine is an outlier isn't vegeta iv also an outlier''

[evilkitten3]

#Vegeta#king vegeta#clone vegeta theory#i have actually seen the clone Vegeta idea before as well#and I did sort of think about intentionally engineering him for durability#But I was thinking about it from the angle that if I knew my species got stronger from almost dying and I wanted the strongest kid#id want to make a kid who was extremely good at almost dying#which means being very good at not actually dying#Not as a way to have him last longer with Freeza rip#anyway they should slap a GMO sticker on Vegeta for this

^also very good and YES omg give that boy a sticker

i am pretty impressed that you read my whole infodump and more than happy to respond!!!!

the idea behind the steward(s) finding a new successor was that, as children of the previous king, they would of course want to be sure that whoever succeeded their parent was strong enough that they would have been able to beat them if they'd been born sooner, but a lot of it is pretty shaky bc like many empires there was a certain "we can't possibly fail!" vibe going on (*cough*rome*cough*), so it's relying on an assumption instead of a fact. vegeta ii had her strengths and weaknesses and her self-confidence was both of those.

vegeta iv is aware of most of this. some he learned prior to getting shipped off to frieza, and some he bullied out of nappa after raditz made a comment about how both he and vegeta had been named against tradition (gine did not give a single flying fuck about tradition, to the point where if saiyans had lasted long enough for her to be considered an older historical figure, she would've driven historians absolutely bonkers trying to figure out What This Lady's Deal Was). however, he mostly chooses to believe that his dad totally thought he'd be strong enough to beat frieza, which is something he seems to have decided was his job after the planet blew up - all vegeta iii explicitly told him to do was survive (oops did someone get attached to their clone son? for shame)

an absolutely massive part of saiyan culture, manufactured or not, involved pride, and while actual family connections as we understand them on earth weren't much of a thing (to be fair, it's hard to have a loving family when your whole species is biologically designed to feel mostly Fight), there was some semblance of familial honor– hence why vegeta feels that trunks defeating goten is an acceptable stand-in for beating the then-dead kakarot himself, but also why raditz reacted so violently to... basically everything about goku. bc of that, the idea of stewards (what the king's children become if the king dies before anyone kills them) was that the ex-princes wouldn't want to disrespect their own lineage by implying that their parent could've been beaten by someone unfit to be king

escallion is someone i would genuinely love to talk more about but i actually do plan to write something with her in it at some point, so i want to keep some things to myself. however, there are a few things i don't mind sharing:

escallion was a natural birth, which was rare bc most female saiyans would rather be fighting that carrying a baby, and while you definitely can do both, it's a bit inconvenient. bc of this, natural births became associated with feats of strength (they aren't– gine gave birth to most of her kids the natural way; saiyan women have a much lower obstetric death rate than human women for... a lot of reasons) and touga felt that as the partner to the new king she needed to prove herself. escallion's birth actually added to that superstition bc of her unusually high power level at birth. escallion and vegeta iv didn't hate each other, but they had a very difficult time getting along bc circumstances sort of put them as rivals for future king-ness, and also bc vegeta iv was the saiyan equivalent of a massive nerd (read: kept breaking into the archive to read books and learn things). more on her eventually.

ok so i'm gonna need to make an entirely separate post for my hc of saiyan names, but to sum it up: saiyans aren't given names when they're born. they're given numeric placeholder names, as saiyan infants have a very high mortality rate, once they've lived at least a year (usually two or three) they get a child name, and once they pass what's basically a "does this kid have any chance at all of reaching adulthood" test, they get a "true" name. as mentioned earlier, gine gave all her kids their true names right out the gate, so that's why kakarot has an actual name instead of a number name.

in vegeta's case, frieza basically just said "well he's gonna be vegeta eventually so skip the process bc i don't care about your culture", which resulted in vegeta being almost exclusively addressed as "your highness" or "the second prince" by pretty much everyone but his dad (touga mostly just said "boy", which doesn't have the exact same implications as it does on earth, but is still kinda odd). he actually doesn't really remember this bc the planet blew up when he was like five and both nappa and raditz got used to calling him vegeta pretty quickly. he only knows this now bc of the aforementioned bullying-nappa-into-answering-his-questions. he's less insecure about it than he otherwise might be bc at that point nappa was the only (known) living saiyan who'd gone through proper naming traditions, but it still annoys him that he never killed his father like he should've (to be clear, there was never a point where vegeta wanted his father dead, and this irritation is almost certainly stemming from denying that he's sad his dad is dead)

saiyans are pretty much entirely fight-oriented to an almost comedic degree. the saiyan language has words separating things by gender/sex, but the vast majority of them are pretty much exclusively medical terms, so it'd be very weird to use them in every day conversation unless you happen to be a doctor. the only real exception are the words for an individual's parents and even those are flexible unless one parent actually gave birth naturally. bc of this, there's no separation in the saiyan language between words like "prince" and "princess"; it's just the same word. bc many earth cultures view women as weaker, a female saiyan raised in a saiyan society who showed up on earth would probably refer to herself with mainly masculine terms (not necessarily with pronouns, but with basically everything else– i.e., "prince", "king", "lord", "mister", etc.; a female saiyan would be very unlikely to use a word that her translator told her implied weakness in any way. the exception, as always, being gine, who is generally considered by most saiyans to be kind of a weirdo at best anyhow)

saiyan relationships are sorta like. the opposite of how it works on earth, in a sense. "romance" isn't really a thing. not that they don't experience what humans would understand as romantic feelings, but more that they don't really differentiate between that and other ways of having strong attachments to people. if two people are attracted to each other and want to bang, they can just. go do that. a saiyan wanting to be in an exclusive one-on-one relationship with another saiyan is seen as very strange unless it's royals, which is really more of a political partnership than anything else (and even then it's generally assumed they'll sleep with other people if they feel like it). there are exceptions- the word for this translates basically to "exclusives". an exclusive can either be a saiyan that actively wants to be in a one-on-one relationship, or a saiyan that doesn't necessarily desire that but chooses it anyway bc they like a certain exclusive enough to drop everyone else for them. having said that, people in exclusive relationships don't typically refer to the latter of those two definitions as exclusives; they're usually called "others" (example– bardock and gine would both be considered exclusives by society at large, but between the two of them only gine would be referred to as such, while bardock would be "Gine'Bahl" (gine's other) or just "Bahl" (only by gine herself; it literally means "my other")

@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.