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textfromthelookout · 1 year

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just read ur entire essay about vegeta and like.. goddamn you just gave me a whole new perspective on that funky little man. i love the way it was written and organized

ALSO ALSO i read this bit and am begging u to expand on this concept it sounds so interesting /gen

Oh you would, would you. I am delighted to oblige.

So. Super Saiyan. A transformation available to Saiyans past certain power thresholds that, while more or less freely accessible after first awakening to it, needs a trigger to become accessible in the first place. Over the course of Z in its many adaptations, we see the first awakenings of Goku, Vegeta, Future Trunks, and Gohan onscreen. Goten, Trunks, and Future Gohan are also Super Saiyans, but we don’t know for sure how that came about. Goten and Trunks in particular are why I say that Super Saiyan (more specifically, the first time you access Super Saiyan) can be read as a trauma response, because there’s no real evidence this is the case on their parts. You can make an argument for them, but in general I choose to believe they’re exceptions to this take, so I won’t be discussing them.

Oh and as for Cabba, Caulifla, and Kale…… they’re literally from an alternate universe. Super Saiyan just has different rules there. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Getting back on track. Goku’s the obvious place to start, so let’s look at him first. In the entirety of Dragon Ball (that I’ve seen), not counting the comedic needle bit in that one episode of GT, Goku has only ever been seen crying three times. Once was his reunion with Grandpa Gohan in early Dragon Ball. Once was in the anime’s version of the Tournament of Power, after Roshi’s near-death incident.

Once was at the beginning of King Piccolo, when he finds Krillin dead. King Piccolo saga is a little infamous for the sudden tonal whiplash—yeah, Tien breaks Yamcha’s leg in the tournament just prior, but they make up about it and it’s not as dire as someone dying. What’s really striking to me about it is Goku’s reaction. He’s more upset than we’ve ever seen him. And he loses worse than we ever see him lose because of it. Sure, in the end everything is put right, but.

But, the thing about trauma is that it makes time go weird. Fast forward about ten years. It’s suddenly happening again. His best friend is dead. He couldn’t do anything to stop it. He doesn’t know that Porunga can revive people who have already died once. As far as Goku knows, Krillin’s gone for good this time. And he watched it happen and watched Freeza laugh about it.

And he reacts essentially the same way. Only this time, he’s orders of magnitude stronger than he was when he was 15, and he has the experience and the wherewithal to control himself somewhat better. Emphasis on somewhat, because it’s very clear that he’s worried about going completely off the deep end in the grips of this power. And he’s right to be! I’m willing to bet money that in Gohan’s whole life, Goku has never pulled the ‘I’m your father, don’t talk back to me’ card on him, and that’s one of the smallest ways this power changes him. When he’s fighting Freeza, he’s a lot more like Vegeta, down to the way he smirks. He’s condescending. He’s brutal. I’ve seen comments to the effect of ‘Freeza’s not fighting Goku anymore—now, Freeza’s fighting Kakarot’ and that’s truly what it feels like.

I could go on, but the particulars of the Namek fight aren’t the important part. The important part is that Goku recognizes how badly that whole thing fucked him up and stays on Yardrat for a year explicitly to get a handle on Super Saiyan before returning home. He knows that if he loses control like that again, there’s a very real possibility he’ll end up hurting someone he cares about, or worse, becoming someone he really doesn’t want to be. (Call it a reach, it definitely is one, but I like to believe Goku picked up Instant Transmission while he was there so he’ll never be too late or too far away to help ever again.)

Vegeta’s case is less… visible? So, much of this is going to be purely my extrapolation. If you take him at his word, Vegeta triggered Super Saiyan with the sheer amount of hatred he felt toward himself for his inadequacy and like. Hello. That’s already a giveaway. I don’t believe he’s outright lying, but I also believe he’s simplifying matters a little. Or a lot. Per My Last Long-Winded Essay, he only gets that far because he leaves Earth entirely for areas uninhabited, which is good for him in some respects and bad for him in others.

The sweet irony of it is that it was Vegeta’s own efforts that locked him out of Super Saiyan. He tried to brute-force his way into it singlemindedly, in the belief that he was simply not strong enough, but Super Saiyan’s trigger is raw, overwhelming emotion. It can be one very clear emotion, or several different ones mixed up, but it’s emotion. It doesn’t answer to logic by its very nature, and frankly, neither does trauma. So Vegeta’s removed all the distractions to his training, yes, but in doing so he’s also removed all the distractions from everything else. Without anybody else around, he doesn’t have anything to get himself out of his own head, so now he’s got a whole universe of space for two and a half decades’ worth of repressed shit to come raging out. Funny how the minute he lets himself feel actual emotions other than the ones he wants everyone to see, the transformation explicitly tied to and powered by emotion rears its head, huh.

Vegeta makes several really dumb decisions once he gets back on Earth, in sharp contrast to the way he handles himself on Namek before he’s face-to-face with Freeza. On Namek, he’s careful to fly under the radar whenever he can, which is why I love the fit he launches into when he realizes Gohan played him, because that’s his control slipping. He’s opportunistic and sneaky and it’s clear he’s doing his damnedest to get what he wants without having to fight people who can kill him. He doesn’t hear the Ginyu Force is coming and rush off to challenge them, he’s like ‘oh shit’ and immediately fucks off elsewhere. I can only make sense of the way he acts during the androids/Cell as a symptom of his need to prove himself.

And make no mistake—it is a need, not a want. The power’s meaningless without people to witness and acknowledge it, the same way the authority of royalty is. His chosen course of action, though, is sort of like painting over rotten wood, if that makes any sense. Letting himself get high off the power, pretending that everything went exactly the way it should have gone from the start, refusing to acknowledge all of his Issues more than passingly. Furthermore, his victory must be complete and unquestionable: that’s why he lets Cell take Android 18. He can’t just… not lose, he has to win. Anything less is anathema to him. You see, he hasn’t yet figured out that he can survive without it.

Okay sorry that got a little in the weeds but I hope you get what I was driving at there. Vegeta’s a mess and talking about him makes me Unstable. Let’s move on.

Of the main four Saiyans, I think Future Trunks’ awakening is the simplest to understand: his trigger is that moment of pure, crushing grief when he finds Gohan dead in the rain. And it’s no wonder. Aside from Gohan and his mother, who does Trunks even talk to in that timeline? We never see him with friends, not until Super. Trunks’ ‘You were everything to me’ in the dub version of the special might be only debatably canon but it’s hardly an exaggeration. Friend. Teacher. Comrade. Brother. Perhaps even a father figure, in some ways. Certainly the only other one of his kind—half-human, half-alien from a long-dead warrior race. There was literally nobody else in the world who could come close to understanding him to the degree that Gohan could have. Gohan dies and Trunks is effectively all alone, the terminarch of one species left to shoulder the fate of another.

It’s a staggering loss for anybody, let alone for a boy of 12 or 13.

Speaking of. Gohan. I think Gohan’s a strange case—not powered by grief or anger, but something different. In the moments before he unlocks Super Saiyan, he’s thinking ‘I have to do it’ before flashing abruptly to all the different times where he was ‘too weak or too scared’ to fight. I personally believe that it’s less determination or ‘the power coming in response to a need’, as Goku puts it, that tips him over the edge. Fear, I think—while not being the whole reason, there’s surely some self-directed anger or disappointment involved—is probably the biggest factor. That’s Gohan’s whole thing—he’s scared of fighting, and to some degree of his own power. If I laid out all the specific examples we’d be here for another thousand words, so I’ll just say that he’s been Through It. We all know this.

This sort of has a continuation in the iconic Super Saiyan 2 transformation against Cell. It’s all on him and it’s not until Cell actually kills someone in front of Gohan that it really twigs that it’s do or die for him. And as much as he’s angry at Cell, the realization that Cell means business, that he really will kill them all? It scares him. Fight or flight takes over. The only real difference is that he chooses fight. The change in how Gohan handles Cell is what really convinces me that emotionally he’s going through something similar to Goku and Vegeta—because it’s almost to the letter exactly what happens with Goku against Freeza. The cruelty, the condescension. I’d argue Gohan leans into the mean demeanor, subconsciously or not, to keep from feeling the fear. And it costs him. But the Gohan discussion is a whole other discussion.

As for Future Gohan, I’m putting a disclaimer here now that none of what I’m about to say is really provable—just really really interesting to think about.

Future Gohan’s life is maybe the worst-case scenario. Like the future timeline sucks specifically for Gohan because he doesn’t like to fight and he has to anyway because what other choice does he have? Let everyone on Earth die without at least trying? He couldn’t, not in good conscience. And it’s not like he’ll have a normal life so long as the androids are around anyway. So in the middle of grieving basically everybody he’s ever known and felt affection for (sans his mother and grandfather, it’s more implied that he’s estranged from them, or at least intentionally distancing himself from them to keep them out of harm’s way), he's also making himself channel anger he hates feeling so he has a shot of even surviving these killers that only exist because of something his father did at least ten years ago. This shouldn’t be his fight, and yet.

Here’s my personal theory. Gohan goes into that final fight with the androids fully intending to die. Not just expecting to, but hoping to. He knows that if he was only barely scraping through those fights with both arms, there’s no way in hell he’ll kill them both when he only has one. He’s not an idiot, but you know what he is? Exhausted. Twelve years of this, being the only resistance to this threat and failing each and every time. He knows what will unlock Super Saiyan for Trunks. He knows there’s someone to carry on the torch and lift the burden. And it’s cruel and selfish of him to put all of that on Trunks and throw himself to the wolves, but it was cruel that he had to carry that all by himself for so long.

He’s fucking tired.

Anyways. That’s my TEDtalk on Super Saiyan. If you read it all the way to the end you’re a real one. Thanks for this ask, you two!

#son goku #son gohan #future trunks #mirai trunks #vegeta #goku #trunks #gohan #dragonball z #dragon ball z #dbz #'jojo it's not that deep don't put more thought into it than toriyama did'#Make Me.#text from the mod

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fanfic-lover-girl · 6 months

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Gohan and Future Trunks Deserve Better

I have been getting back into DBZ and my love for Gohan and Future Trunks has been reignited. And I am just craving fics where these two precious gems can be doted on and pampered. Because they deserve it! Unfortunately, DBZ fanfiction is not awashed with soft, tender moments :(.

I just need to rant.

Let's start with Gohan. The best Saiyan hybrid. No one, not even Future Trunks, can compete with Gohan's top hybrid status. I know Gohan is not a fighter like his dad and he fights mainly to protect people...but I wish more fanfic writers would explore this as a trauma response. Think about it. Piccolo kidnapped him and forced him into the Saiyan fight. As much as I gush over the Piccolo & Gohan relationship, Piccolo's crimes can't be forgotten. He forced Gohan into fighting and he was not a nurturing teacher. Gohan's first experience with fighting was severely traumatizing. He endured all those brutal fights as a kid, a baby. He faced Frieza, the emperor of the universe, when he was FIVE YEARS OLD. Then the fate of the world was placed on his shoulders when he was 10 when he fought against Cell. Talk about a messed-up childhood.

Then we have the post Cell saga. I understand Goku wanting to stay dead to protect his family - I will never respect that decision. But he failed Gohan as a dad. Can we talk about the likely parentification Gohan would have experienced?? With Goku dead, Gohan is basically the head of the house. I can see Gohan being Chi Chi's support, especially when Goten came into the picture. So not only was Gohan thrusted into fighting and horrific battles throughout his childhood, but now when he needs his father the most as a young man he has no dad. I hope Krillin acted as a father figure. The Z fighters treat Gohan as one of the boys so much that they often forget he's a freaking child. Please get Gohan some therapy. The curse of being the oldest kid. You never get to be sheltered like the younger kids :(

And you best believe that Gohan had to step up as head of the family AGAIN when Goku decided to go on a training trip with Uub with a TBD timeframe. I know Gohan was a grown man then but still...

And now Future Trunks. Oh poor Future Trunks. After all he has been through, my boy Trunks deserves the world and an eternal vacation. Being the Earth's last hope is a heavy burden. Especially when you are not qualified. It's only fairly recently (maybe last year) that I learned that Trunks is not a good fighter. But you can't blame him. His training was severely limited and he was constantly fighting for his life.

The biggest disappointment of the Cell saga is that Trunks did not have a single mentor. By then, Trunks' epic entrance against Frieza should have worn off and it's disgraceful that no one took the time to train this kid. Vegeta should have taken Trunks under his wing but Vegeta couldn't give a damn. But come on, Goku, Piccolo?? Anyone? Even Popo would be better than nothing! Why didn't Piccolo take Trunks with him into the time chamber?? Someone give this guy some training! How could any of the Z fighters feel comfortable letting Trunks go back to the future with his lack of fighting skill?!!!

And I feel so bad for Trunks when it comes to Vegeta. Bulma sold her son a romanticized version of Vegeta and the man was a massive disappointment. Vegeta did not deserve such a sweet, loyal son like Trunks. Imagine you grow up in this dystopian world and you try to save another timeline even though yours will not be directly benefited. Then your foolish dad, in his quest for power, spits in your face and allows another monster to destroy the timeline you risked your neck to save. With Krillin's lovesick antics, Vegeta's testosterone stupidity and the Z fighters just being an uncoordinated mess, I am surprised Trunks did not tear his hair out in frustration.

Kid Trunks should be happy that Future Trunks was Vegeta's guinea pig for fatherhood. I mean I love Vegeta's character arc but I feel jealous on Trunks' behalf to see Vegeta become such a huge softy with Bra/Bulla.

And then Future Trunks has to go back home where he is the sole defender of Earth. And from what I hear, he loses everything in DBS. Can we just give Trunks a happy ending?! Forget Buu and the other intergalactic crazies! Just let Trunks be a teenager! Let him have awkward dates! Let him be a kid! Let him marry a sweet girl and have a family!! My boy deserves peace!!!

I just want to wrap Gohan and Future Trunks in soft blankets and hide them away.

#so many feelings #son gohan #future trunks #mirai trunks #dbz gohan #future trunks deserves better #gohan deserves better #gohan and future trunks are the only hybrids I acknowledge #dbz #dragonball z #piccolo #piccolo critical #cell saga #dbz vegeta #son goku critical #vegeta critical #parentification #childhood trauma

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perimorp · 8 months

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hope for the future got me on my knees

and oh, i keep a picture of you here in my head

#future trunks #future gohan #dbz #dbz fanart #dragon ball z #mirai trunks #mirai gohan #the history of trunks #son gohan #trunks briefs

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kleenex-tissues · 6 months

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Every Side of Gohan

A Reflection on the Effects of a Child Soldier

In the future, his future, Trunks knew Gohan. Gohan is hardened, with a carefully controlled anger. He’s marred, a missing arm, a scarred face. He’s in pieces, and now he’s gone.

This Gohan is wrong, incorrect in every sense of the word. He has the hidden anger, the unseen scars of his future counterpart, but he’s much more whole. This one carries himself with a childish demeanor, though his knowledge and maturity is far beyond his mere nine years. He’s happy in places the other could never dream of, surrounded by love and arms that should be long lost.

His mother will get to finish raising him, a younger brother to accompany them soon. Piccolo will still hold him in secret when he can do nothing but cry. That’s another thing – this Gohan is granted the comfort of grief. He has the time and space to mourn, to cry, to hurt. Nothing has to be hidden anymore.

Each version of Gohan shared a childhood none other should experience. When Cell finally falls, discolored blood stains those small hands. This is the fourth near-death experience he has suffered. Both Gohans know the trauma of battle and watching every man they have ever looked up to die protecting them. This Gohan’s eyes are equally as haunted. They shine with fear and the horror of having taken another life.

One thing has not changed. Gohan does not like combat. He is a pacifist, more so than his ever-forgiving father. Killing brings a sickening feeling to his stomach, and when the Cell Games have blown over, only Trunks and Chi-Chi know that he has spent every night since emptying the contents of his stomach until morning lights the tile of the bathroom. His Gohan did the same, as much as he tried to hide it.

When Trunks returns to his timeline, he never stops thinking of Gohan – both his mentor and the child he had grown so fond of. As his sword strikes down the Androids who brought civilization to near extinction, he feels peace wash over him for the first time in his life. Their death does not bring Gohan back, but his memory lives on deep within him.

–

Just as he did every night, Gohan lay soundlessly in his bed. Goten has migrated from his own bed to find himself tangled in the sheets of his brother’s. A small foot is pressed to Gohan’s lower back, and it is a small comfort. It’s a reminder to breathe, to know he was safe at home.

His heart had stopped for a moment in the night, an unfortunately common occurrence for him. Nights like these he is haunted by the ghosts of his past. The mucusy blood of Cell coats his small and callused hands, and a broken arm falls to his left.

Trunks had told him about the alternate future version of himself once. Just once, that was all he needed to hear of it. The counterpart who fought androids and lost his left arm. Sometimes this Gohan is the one killing Cell, and he wakes up desperately reaching for the appendage to make sure it’s still there – that it was truly healed.

His variety of nightmares set out to relive the great tragedy of his life.

Some nights, he’s buried in rock, Vegeta’s foot breaking his ribcage. His lungs are going to be punctured any second now, and all he can think of is how they’ll tell his mother. Will they bring back his limp body to Chi-Chi? Will she know where they’ve buried her son, or will she even live long enough to grieve her darling boy? The thought of making his mother cry as she did when his father passed causes a nausea to coil in his stomach. But the thought of seeing his mother dead made the bile begin to rise dangerously close to his mouth.

It’s Vegeta’s final blow, a hard kick to the chest, that makes Gohan’s heart stop beating. That miniscule scare, a few skipped beats, but enough for his adrenalin to pump through his head and his mind to wake him up to a frozen, numb body.

His movement will return in time, like it always does, and then he can sit with his face pressed against a cold ceramic bowl and release the bile still hiding in his throat. He’ll do it quietly, to keep Goten from waking up in the other room. His little brother, who sees Gohan as the hero he never was, cannot know how broken he truly is.

Because those are the dreams that bother him on other nights. He sees the two men he looked up to most in his miniscule life dead on the floor before him. He can’t let Goten see him that same way.

Frieza aims a powerful laser in his direction. He accepts his fate, for just a moment, hoping that maybe this release would bring him a sweet peace, but then the beam is hurtling towards him. He brings up pathetically small arms to shield his face, anticipating the pain. He knows it should only hurt for a moment, so long as Frieza does it right.

But it never hits. Piccolo is in front of him, taking the beam straight through the abdomen, and telling Gohan to, “Run. Anywhere, I don’t care. Just leave and be safe.”

His words echo through Gohan’s head as he processes the scene before him. Piccolo’s body falls backward at his feet. Glossy, white eyes greet him, and the bleeding isn’t stopping anytime soon. For Kami’s sake, there’s a gaping wound in his chest, and for all the things his mother has made him study, he never learned how to keep a man from dying. All he can do is hold back tears because Piccolo always chastised him for crying.

“Don’t grieve me, Gohan. Just fight for me, okay?”

The final words from his master are gentle, and suddenly he’s staring at his dying father.

Piccolo has moved to the other side of the field, and he’s breathing raggedly, power still radiating off of his green skin after putting a powerful beam through the chests of both Raditz and Goku.

Gohan doesn’t even have the time to be horrified by his father’s blood soaking his little cloth shoes before his ki surges through him, and the world has gone black. He’s brought back to life by Goten mumbling something about the biggest fish he had ever seen. The young half-saiyan is still asleep, his face pressed into his brother’s chest.

His favorite nights are when there is no dream, just silence, a simple blink and he’s back to the waking world. It’s as close to peace he’ll ever find, and eventually, after enrolling in high school, the nightmares fade a bit. They are not gone; they will likely always remain, but now he dreams of good things, too.

Videl takes him on dates. She holds him after a tough battle, and soothes his aching wounds. Goten drags him out to meadows in search of a butterfly he’s been chasing all week. Their bright smiles stop the world in its tracks. It is a small thing, but a great comfort he has not seen in years.

He will never be the Gohan he was so long ago, the young child eager to learn yet scared of the world around him. But sometimes, in those good dreams, he is him again. He is held in his father’s warm arms, still so full of youthful vigor. His mother fusses over the dirt on their boots, forbidding them from entering the house until their feet are bare.

The world is filtered in the soft orange of the sunrise. He can see the spatter of freckles across Goku’s face and the loose threads of his worn gi. He feels his chest rise and fall with laughter, his hand rub Gohan’s back soothingly, and the weight of the dragon ball on his hat. Chi-Chi smiles, in that way she only can when her husband is nearby.

Gohan has memorized the scene, playing it through his head on his hard days. This Gohan is gone, but he is just as much him as Trunks’ Gohan was. They are extensions of one person, lives lived under his name. Each of these Gohans lived this moment. They have been held in their father’s embrace, studied under their mother’s steady hand. They were each born and raised under a dead man’s name, but a dead man who meant the world to his father.

And the best dream he has had the chance to live is when those Gohans can all meet. He holds his younger self, laughs with his future counterpart, and carries the large basket Grandpa Gohan once kept. They comfort one another in a way no other can. Because this is an experience only Gohan can have.

This is a dream to tell him: It will all be okay. You have lived. You have learned. You have loved. And you will continue on, for all of them. The sunrise waits for you on the other side.

#dragon ball #son gohan #trunks briefs #future trunks #future gohan #mirai trunks #mirai gohan #character study

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