#trickster arc
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I hope this ask doesn't come off as rude at all-- and I apologize if it does!-- but as an aspiring writer, I'm honestly really confused by some of the early choices in Godfeels, and I'm curious if I'm just not "getting it". I saw some posts about it pop up in the tag (and they WERE very shitty and rude about it :/), but I'd love to hear your explanation/take on June's big character change immediately post-realization, and especially the... "Trickster Arc", I guess it could be called? The former I get to some extent, but I'm really curious about the choice to do all THAT so early in the story with the trickster candy.
Seriously love your work, your narration is honestly a big inspiration to me in terms of how meta it gets and how close it gets to communicating directly with both the main character AND the audience!
no rudeness detected at all! this is a great question, in fact itās one iāve been kinda hoping someone would ask because iāve been thinking about this stuff a lot these last few months. but i get the sense that youāre at least a little new here, so uh, yeah, hello, when people ask me interesting questions i tend to answer at great length. so strap in for that after the break lmao. also as a note, there will be some spoilers for all of godfeels here but please donāt let that scare you away, theyāre all contextless and, if anything, might honestly make the rest of the story *more* enjoyable as a result.
as far as "getting it" goes, i've talked at length about the how & why of the violence in godfeels in multiple places so i'll try to avoid rehashing that too much here. but one thing i want to emphasize right off the bat is that i never intended godfeels to be an ongoing thing. you talk about the trickster arc happening āso early in the storyā but when i wrote godfeels 1 i didnāt plan on writing more. i didnāt even plan on making john trans! my idea of what the sum total of godfeels 2 would be when i started writing it wound up being completely different from the finished work. i didnāt plan to make this thing so long. i didnāt plan for june to accidentally on purpose kill her friends while drunk and then retcon it. i didnāt plan on turning the whole thing into a space opera. it all just happened to me, man. i kept writing because i kept finding more interesting things to say. and itās important to specify that when i started gf1 i hadnāt written fiction in years. i think if you jumped ahead to godfeels 3 part 1 chapter 8, no matter how you feel about the content weād at least be able to agree that in the years since 2019 iāve become a much much better writer. if you want more insight into how my process has evolved, iāve written so so so much about it, too much maybe even, in the #sarahposts tag.
anyway, now i want to talk about june's "big character change." the extent to which her trickster arc makes sense or feels in character seems to vary wildly from person to person. what always bugs me about "ooc" as a criticism is that godfeels starts six years and change after the end of homestuck. let's remember that the protagonists of homestuck were sixteen when the comic ended. now i want you to ask yourself if you as you were at 16 would think that you as you are now was "in character." or vice versa! probably not, right? it doesnāt even have to have been six years. i was STILL sixteen when i started to get embarrassed of who i was at sixteen!
that should be all i need to say, but it isnāt. and it doesn't really get to the core of the issue anyway. i am not nor have i ever been interested in writing "a sequel to homestuck,ā even though it has kind of just become that anyway. godfeels has always been about the meaty existential drama you can tease out through the complicated character dynamics of these fucked up traumatized gods. godfeels has always been my way of analyzing the themes and ideas of homestuck, the existential ramifications of the mechanics of SBURB and the classpects and retcon (letās remember that i wrote godfeels around the same time that i took over hosting duties on the perfectly generic podcast). godfeels has also always been about me and my trauma. i even used to joke that june was my self-insert character, though i've seen that line repeated unironically by enough people who haven't read godfeels that i've stopped saying it. because it's not true! june is very, very different from me... i just happen to see my life reflected in her eyes.
to immediately rehash what i said i wouldn't, june eg8ert arose out of my frustration with most versions of the june egbert headcanon particularly in the summer of 2019. let's call her "hairclips june." hairclips june is always smiling, usually with smiling friends, she's wearing hairclips and has nonzero tit and is A Woman Now. as i said in my video, while i don't begrudge anyone their comfort food, this simply was not my experience with coming out as a trans woman. and of all the characters, iād always identified most with john. also i thought, you know, these kids are SERIOUSLY messed up, every single one of them has died multiple times, they've seen things and done things no one should ever have to. and retcon! god, what a mindfuck retcon is.
those are the primal ingredients of godfeels. what if june came out and everyone wasn't chill about it? some folks say that's out of character and, idk, i guess that's arguably true. but i had friends who were very vocal trans allies whoād been in queer relationships who still stopped talking to me after i came out. let me tell you i spent a lot of time fucked up in the head over how "out of character" that was for them, to the extent that i blamed myself for their reaction because surely they couldn't be so out of character. to which one might respond, well, why do this as a homestuck fic then? why not just do my own original thing instead?
and i guess the answer is that i didn't want to and i still don't, really. it's not just about the characters for me. i like the rules of the homestuck universe. i find it interesting how it mechanically reflects being a fictional narrative. and, you know, maybe it's easier for me to process violent intrusive thoughts through a character who is capable of acting on those thoughts and then immediately undoing them consequence-free. retcon is, in fact, sort of the perfect mechanism for exploring violent intrusive thoughts because it lets us play out the fantasy without lasting diegetic harm, such that we can just focus on the existential and moral questions of the phenomenon itself. and like, yeah, thatās not everyoneās cup of tea. but isnāt it still just as valid a topic to explore in fiction as anything else?
like em or not, people have intrusive thoughts. people have violent impulses. sometimes they even act on them. the unpleasantness of a phenomenon shouldnāt dictate whether it is acceptable to depict in fiction-- if anything, we ought to take our instinctive desire to look away as an urgent invitation to look closer instead. as iāve been wont to say for years and years now, āproblematicā implies a problem to be solved. that which is human is inherently complicated. to pretend itās all good or bad excises humanity from the equation, or at least flattens the range of acceptable humanity. all of which is my extremely soapboxy way of saying (as iāve said a million times by now), yes, godfeels june is problematic. that is in fact what godfeels is about.
there's an extent to which i think this can be blamed on how rooted we are IN june's perspective in gf1 and 2. i don't think people really appreciate the fact that godfeels 1 is john threatening to commit suicide and almost going through with it. that's the context in which her friends react poorly to her coming out; i mean, she's literally sleeping on rose's couch because everyone's so worried about her! i think that, by being completely within june's perspective for all of these events, we don't really get a good sense of the interpersonal dynamics at play (probably because i didn't even really understand them myself until later). instead we just see people who should know better acting like dicks.
i think whether or not juneās trickster arc is canonically palatable to you depends very much on whether or not you've had a dear friend disappoint you so much that you're no longer on speaking terms.
but if we want to reel this back from the abstract philosophical, maybe itās enough to say that we just have different interpretations of these characters? theyāre not monoliths, you know. different people see different things in different characters. some folks get a lot out of hairclips june and thatās okay. maybe i was a bitch about other peopleās headcanons back in 2019 when redditors were calling me and my friends abusive pedophiles for liking vriska, but i gave up that fight when the redditors got what they wanted (to harass a group of queer creators offline and out of their jobs). if someone wants to woobify gamzee, whatever man, go right ahead. that aināt my cup of tea and i personally donāt think thatās very in character either, but thatās why i donāt read it. it aināt for me and thatās fine. i like homestuck BECAUSE these characters can mean so many things to so many people. is this variability not precisely the thing that makes the postcanon era so interesting?
i have my idea of who these characters are based on who they were in the comic and i work very hard to keep them in character, but i also don't want them to be trapped in amber. i want them to grow and change and become different people, because homestuck itself is obsessed with inescapable absolute archetypes (ie the ultimate self, or the captchalogue system) and i enjoy troubling that. i enjoy swimming in a sea of weird problematic dilemmas. thatās whatās fun about fiction for me, you can think about and write about all the most difficult and even fucked up things you like, and it definitionally cannot cause real material nonconsensual harm to another human being. and yet we get so tied up in the question of harm anyway! maybe that makes sense when talking about marvel movies, but this is fanfiction weāre talking about. this is HOMESTUCK fanfiction. if i were to go on twitter right now and post āhomestuck is goodā iād end the day with at least five comments saying ālol no itās not.ā SOME OF THOSE PEOPLE WILL HAVE HOMESTUCK AVATARS. there are few things as cringe as liking homestuck even among people who like homestuck, so who cares? i like homestuck, i like the epilogues, i like hs2, and i think a pretty gargantuan majority of this fandom are subliterate babies. thatās why i donāt engage with them or make much of an attempt to bridge the gap. i think godfeels and its cool little fandom is all the better for how much work it requires of the reader to āget itā as it were. i wish more people would give it a chance, or at the very least not immediately throw me and a lot of my friends under the bus at every possible opportunity, but what can you do? i just write. people will react how they will react. what matters to me is that it stays true to itself as a work, and that it grows with me and my audience and my collaborators. trying to backpedal or soften the edges would just ruin the whole thing, likely alienate my current readers and inevitably invite even more bad faith readings. no thanks!
some folks stop reading godfeels after june's trickster arc, and i can respect that. if you get to that part of the story and don't like it, chances are you're not gonna like the rest of it! and in that sense, i guess you could say i āchoseā to have juneās trickster arc happen so āearly onā as a litmus test for the reader. as annoying as it can be feeling like iām constantly having to address this exact issue, i vastly prefer it to a bunch of people hate-reading something that wasnāt made for them. but again, i didnāt know this was āearly onā when i wrote it, because i didnāt plan it to happen. i didnāt intend for june to go on a killing spree, she just did it and i as writer decided, you know what? this is way more interesting than what i had planned. and then dirk became the antagonist because, oops, june coming out fucked up all the schemes he has that play out in the homestuck epilogues. and i guess in THAT sense, the palatability of godfeels depends on whether or not you liked and/or tolerated the homestuck epilogues and homestuck^2. these, too, are not for everyone. but godfeels is not a replacement for them, as some folks like to claim (god bless them). iām not interested in rewriting homestuck or fixing its sequels. ok well thatās not entirely true, i think the epilogues did jake REAL dirty and thatās become a big focus of mine going forward. but even then, i donāt pretend the epilogues didnāt happen. in fact if youāve read all of 3.1, you know just how cosmically important they end up being.
but this is, i guess, kind of the crux of the issue for me. juneās trickster arc happens very early on in the story, yes, and thatās deliberately challenging on a lot of levels. june spends a great deal of time being challenged by it herself! but folks who stop there (if they even make it that far) often act like the whole story is grimdark wish-fulfillment violence or me airing out my irrational hatred of Boys (????), and that's just not true. i donāt give a shit about that. we get to june's trickster arc at around the 25,000 word mark, out of the current grand total of over 400,000 words. her violence is functionally the prologue, and she spends the entire rest of this story suffering the consequences of those actions. so if i am frustrated with this line of questioning, a lot of it comes down to the fact that if you just read the rest of the story youād see that i have in fact had all of the same thoughts youāve likely had. i know people who think i did dirk dirty in gf2, and i actually kind of agree! which is why dirk comes back and has a difficult, complicated relationship with his past self. people complain about certain characters being ooc, which i can certainly understand because when i started godfeels i really did not have a great grasp on them! but also, if you kept reading godfeels youād know that the tension of whether or not someone is cosmically āin characterā is a huge running theme of this story. juneās friends react poorly to her coming out in part because it seems out of character for her! hell, phenomenologically how *could* june be in character after coming out when she barely even knows who she is yet? her whole thing in gf1 is that she doesnāt know who she is anymore! just realizing that youāre trans changes you, changes how you see the world, how you relate to other people. or it did for me, anyway. risk, dare, X, angel dirk, and silverbark are all sorts of caught up in this question. and if youāve gotten to the end of 3.1 youāll know about the concept of denexustic radiation:
and thatās just the tip of the metaphysical iceberg. all of which is to say that this is a feature, not a bug. so itās always very funny to me when people drop out so early on only to complain about the very same problematics that iāve spent three years and 400,000 words exploring.
BUT. but. yeah godfeels 1 and 2 are messy. the gf3 prologue is very messy. itās a serial narrative that has changed shape multiple times over the years, and barring a bit of polish on gf1 around when i started writing gf3 i generally refuse to go back and rewrite things. thereās a lot i would do differently today, but if i had done it differently then the story as it is today would not exist. and i love this story! i might look back on gf2 and feel like itās rushed and messy, but i know that it was the best i could do at the time. itās a reflection of who i was as a writer then. i live with the ramifications of that for the same reason i donāt delete the old videos on my channel from before i came out/learned what communism was: because i donāt like to pretend that the present was always present. iām a different person now, a different writer. i made mistakes, i learned, and i changed. i will continue this process for the rest of my natural life, as will you.
ultimately i guess my answer here is that godfeels is a flawed work written by a flawed person, and the extent to which readers relate to it seems to have a lot to do with how much their flaws overlap with mine. i get lots of people telling me my characters are in character. i get people telling me theyāre more in character than some canon! and itās not that i weigh those comments as more valuable, i just see it as an indication of who my audience is. iām not writing for people who want more hiveswap, and iām certainly not writing for people who dismissed hs^2 out of hand. iām just writing for myself and my friends, and it just so happens that some people seem to get a lot out of it.
iām gonna close out here by actually finally directly addressing your question with what i think you were ultimately hoping for: some writing advice.
the rules donāt exist. there are things that can make some art better or some art worse but they are not universal. the rules are fake and if you hold every story you touch to those rules, youāre gonna have a bad time. a story is not static and it is never truly yours. you discover it. sometimes you can expand it or alter it in ways but, at least in my experience, doing so more often than not just kills the whole thing-- or at least demands a complete reconceptualization. all of which takes time, and we live in a world where taking time to get in touch with and hone your craft is considered sort of a bad economic decision. but art is what it is and it does what it does and we can either play with it or we can put it in a cage.
what i like about making art is that i am not entirely in control. i have my plans, my schemes, my ideas, but the fun of writing is just putting a bunch of characters in a room together and seeing what they do. quite often they do things i would never expect, that are far truer to their character than i anticipated. my experience has always been that the more you outline a story before you write it, the harder it is to actually write that story. when i know everything thatās gonna happen on a moment to moment level, the whole thing falls dead on the page. but obviously you need to know SOME things! and iāll say that from the inception of gf3 back in december 2019 to now, very very few of the broad strokes of my plans have changed. if youāve read all of 3.1 you know thereās a very specific timeline at play in the backstory of a group of characters weāll be spending a lot of time with in 3.2. there are no questions or mysteries or whatever else iāve introduced to this story that i did not have at least the sense of an explanation for. but these are simply bullet points that dictate the endpoint of a path and suggest something of the moral/philosophical/emotional arc that needs to occur in order to get there. the real meat of it comes out in the act of writing itself, and thatās what iām here for. itās a gamble that doesnāt always pay off, and it does mean that i have almost 80,000 words of material i ended up rewriting or cutting sitting in a doc somewhere, but thatās worth it for me.
if art is to be relevant, it must have the capacity to make an audience uncomfortable. if art is to be essential, it must have the capacity to demand a strong reaction (positive or negative) from everyone who sees it. if art is to be true, it must have the capacity to reflect the disquiet contradictions of simple existence that we desperately wish to ignore in our daily lives. that doesnāt mean everyone has to or should read difficult art, or like it, or make it. but it has always existed and it will always exist, and i think it is essential for writers and critics alike to learn to stop themselves from mistaking a common storytelling method for THE storytelling method. and frankly, most of the art i love most in this world is art that i didnāt particularly like the first time we crossed paths.
and lastly, never forget the inarguable truth that the audience bears quite a lot of responsibility in this equation. you are never, as a writer, inflicting anything on your reader, because your reader can always opt out at any moment they wish. if something doesnāt work, yeah, thatās a problem you can fix. art is a conversation in that way, or at least ought to be. but at the same time, art has no obligation to be perfect, or smooth, or easy to consume. the rules are fake. they exist to be broken. the pursuit of perfection is a dead end. just make shit
okay this one has gone on QUITE long enough lmao i hope thereās something useful in there for you somewhere and uhhhh i hope you enjoy the rest of godfeels if you havenāt already read it!
#sarahposts#godfeels#homestuck#writing advice#problematic art#transgender writing#june egbert#homestuck epilogues#homestuck2#trickster arc
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bonks you with the trickster lollipop
God. Fucking. Damn it.
#badlydrawndirkstrider#dirk strider#dirkstrider#homestuck#homestuck dirk#homestuck fanart#homestuck fandom#homestuckbadlydrawn#hs dirk#badly drawn#trickster dirk#trickster#trickster arc
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trickster gcat (colored)
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was just rereading the trickster arc and had thoughts on the physics ofĀ āpeachinessā
#dirk strider#roxy lalonde#I will not elaborate.#i just think a glowy status-effect thing is cooler#trickster mode#trickster arc
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H3CK Y34H 1 4/\/\ SP4RK|_Y 4$ *#@$
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"THAT SāUNDS LIKE A GāāD IDEA!"
TG: Ok listen up
TG: Everyone, and I mean every1, is invited 2 this party
TG: It's gonna be the best ever
TG: No booze obvsly
TG: But there's gonna be all the Hannukah and Christmas food and the best decorations and presents 4 every1
TT: Mother, the stove.
TG: o shit
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Trickster Dirk for the requests ā”Ģ ??
plus additional shitty gifs
#homestuck#dirk strider#jake english#jane crocker#roxy lalonde#trickster dirk strider#trying to balance 'too much' and 'not enough' not sure if it did it but i still like it#LOVE the trickster arc
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YIPPIE! We Unlocked The Snatcher DLC, LET'S GO!
The best way that I can describe this man in this AU is like.....mostly deadpan, with an occasional snarky quip, he kinda just rolls with the flow at this point. He's very much past his prime, and is now just very calmly sitting in the passenger seat while Hat kid rams her scooter into the nearest cement wall.
He is the only real sane voice of reason in the entire kingdom, Which is why Hat always bothers him with all her problems.
Something I can mention w/o having to be vague is the fact that, - yes, in this universe dad snatcher is a thing. It NEVER comes up in the main story, mostly because I decided I wanted it to be a side thing entirely(backstory for the two kingdoms). Hat kid isn't actually aware of this until post-plot, which is when their relationship really starts to blossom.
In the meantime, he's just her super secret lawyer that nobody really knows about.
#ahit#ahit hat kid#ahit au#ahit snatcher#fanart#shout out to my therapist for telling me to write healthy father relationships#never woulda gotten here without her#this is so stupid lol#sorry to anyone reading the tags#also because I forgot to mention#he is still very much a trickster#and a jokester#but like#his cruelty has been knocked down at least 20 flights of stairs#yknow he's post the revenge arc in his story by this time#the only pranks he's pulling are on his kid#they have a very tic for tac relationship except it's playful#i will shut up now#no wait I just thought of a good comparison#think cat owner and cat- hat is a big girl and doesn't wanna be smothered by the father#but he does it anyway because that's his baby#okay now i'm done
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unbreakable katana, irony as a shield, heroism and masculinity. thats the whole post thank you.
#d talks#unbreakable katana being the only 'legendary weapon' from the trickster arc that isnt any different#hmm i wonder why the symbol of masculine strength is the same under a trickster lense
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"āH, I'M JUST Sā FINE AND DANDY!!! YāU SHāULD TRY IT āUT!!!"
"HAVEN'T YāU HEARD? I'M TRICKSTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
-@badlydrawngcat
GG: Ohhh! GG: This is going to be interesting. GG: Howā s trickster mode been treating you so far? GG: And how exactly does it work with creatures like yourself? I wasnāt aware trickster mode extended to nonhumans :O
#gcat#god cat#godcat#badlydrawngcat#human arc#trickster arc#badlydrawnjane#jane crocker#homestuck#bdhs
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idea/another gd AU (homestuck)
okay so hear me out, this one takes place with the betas as the main focus (depending) in a sci-fi setting.
they all meet on the day they're supposed to begin a search mission, nevertheless, they're fast friends. They're the only people on a small ship, there's John as pilot, Jade as engineer/technician, Rose as navigator, and Dave as Radio technician and they mangae pretty well with such a small group becuase, determined as they are, they don't really expect to recover anything. This trip is more for closure.
but what are they searching for? what do they need closure on?
The alphas (shocker) and their disappearance
ya see the Alphas DID know each other, but lived as far apart as they did in canon so when the opportunity arose for them to finally meet on a research voyage? of course they took it. Strangely though, people started getting sick on the ship. Not intensely enough or often enough to think it was more than a bad round of the flu.
Then Jane got sick. then she got sicker. and sicker. Hallucinations, dysgeusia with any food not high in sugar content, bouts of mania, an orange tinge to her skin, a change in vision and eye appearance, and weirdly a change in hair color. She was able to fight off the sickness for over a month.
Then Jake got infected. Mania, physical changes, biological changes. Three weeks.
there were only a handful of people left, but only Jane and Jake's sickness developed the way it did.
Roxy. A week and a half.
it was just Dirk now.
Dirk. A day.
The betas only know of what was left on the logs, remaining records and footage, and Hal, who they found in the wreckage scraping by on what little power the leftover solar panels could provide. He doesn't give them much, but they do know that for the alphas, the virus wasn't deadly.
#homestuck#dave strider#dirk strider#hal strider#lil hal#john egbert#jane crocker#rose lalonde#roxy lalonde#jade harley#jake english#trickster dirk#trickster roxy#trickster jane#trickster jake#if you couldn't tell it's a tricker arc zombie scifi au#hopin i can actually draw the designs
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"Hey Puzzles can I have the soda you had?"
here the soda template if ya ever want do something with that lol- just no make trickster disappear-
#smg4#smg4 au#aus#trickster au#smg4 mr puzzles#mr puzzles#non-trickster mr puzzles#trickster mr puzzles#non-trickster mr puzzles tumblr arc#ask#ask box#answer
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now do a little dance
#help i dont have any motivation to do anything but shit on a canvas and show it to the fllowers of bdgcat while i pretend like im doing anyt#hing productive#gcat#god cat#homestuck#badlydrawngcat#godcat#human arc#trickster arc
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One of my favorite differences in the DBZ manga that makes Vegebul make More Sense To Me, is that because Vegeta never left Earth, he was living at Capsule Corp for over two years before Bulma got pregnant (assuming Trunks is like 3-6mos old when we see him as a baby), but she said she 'wouldn't live with that jerk' afterward, which implies (to me) that he'd been a chill enough housemate up until the pregnancy, which tracks with his generally private and professional behavior as a Lord in the Freeza Force (in the manga).
I like to think it became a compounding factor in learning that he was slated to be killed in a year, and led to him being uncharacteristically overzealous and performative (and so opposed to Trunks getting close to him) in the android saga as opposed to how strategic and cautious he was with serious threats in the Freeza saga.
I am also always thinking about how Something Happened between him losing to Cell and re-entering the time chamber in the manga, because he was back living at Capsule Corp and staying near Trunks and Bulma when the Cell Games were announced.
#Something was definitely Bulma not getting laid for over a year and Vegeta not getting laid for over 2 because of time chamber shenanigans#You can just taste the Good Shit in the conversation from that first night back š¤ Anyway#Every day I think about how Freeza assumed Vegeta was always going to be his biggest threat -- not just for his power but for his cunning#Every day I think about how that can still be true and how after the Freeza arc Toei traded that cunning for boisterous arrogance#even though that was literally only happening in the android saga and not NEARLY as much as they wrote it#Vegeta being Quiet and Smart is ALSO a reason Vegebul makes a lot more sense if you've read the manga#He's probably the only one in that group who never needs her to translate science talk and the bar is low but boy can he can hop over it#Thinking about how he sat there and explained the science of the Great Ape transformation to Goku and WHY he could create a false moon#Thinking about how Vegeta knows what to do how to do it AND can explain to someone WHY it works#and knowing Bulma would hear a bad boy fighter talk Science and throw her underwear at him at terminal velocity#Every day I think about how Vegeta is constantly flirting with the trickster trope but you'd never know that from watching the anime#He's so sMART and Goku's so DUMB that's why they're great FOILS TOEI#Like Goku's not Stupid but he IS dumb he is a dumb puppy and we love him#I see a lot of Geets fans say they miss how he was in the Freeza arc but he's like that A LOT in Super (just on the good guy team)#His breakdown is over he knows who he is again he's confident he's whole he's fucking Out Here in Super PLEASE read the manga
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