Lord Beerus, you can't really blame a toddler for pulling anything that grabs their attention

another art dump for my fans on here . hey guyssss

Those wikiHow pages are wonderful

You def gotta do some bits with King Vegeta for your koth au

I’ll get to emm

(Z) Retribution...(Part 2) 

Didn't make it to actual Father's Day but it's in spirit.

Part 3 is still a (maybe)

okay but this scene from dragon ball goes HARD

I love how Raditz uses him and Goku’s familial relationship to trick him into letting go of his tail so he can start whaling on him again, all the while having Gohan hostage in his pod. And then later on, Vegeta’s transformation into a great ape causes Goku to realize that he killed his own Grandpa Gohan all those years ago, accidentally or otherwise. It’s like this one biological side effect of his Saiyan heritage both robbed him of a relationship and prevented him from properly mourning once he realized what had happened, with his empathy and willingness to forgive being leveraged against him by those same Saiyans to destroy other familial bonds. It’s such a brutal introduction to a previously unknown part of your identity.

But then on Namek, Vegeta applies him & his father’s own situation to Gohan and Goku when he’s explaining the danger that the Frieza Force represent, saying how “they don’t have to be stronger than you to beat you, they could take your son hostage.” Obviously he’s referencing his childhood removal from King Vegeta’s “care,” but a side effect of that arrangement is that the King himself isn’t a tangible presence in his son’s life, certainly not by the time he’s on Namek. Vegeta does have something vaguely resembling a father figure when he makes that comparison, but it’s not him, it’s Frieza.

Frieza & Vegeta’s relationship is certainly not parental on an emotional level, but the mechanisms of keeping people as indentured servants naturally tend towards paternalism, and it’s obvious that Frieza has a weird little fixation on him besides. The entire Namek saga lowkey constructs this wildly uncomfortable parallel between Goku’s care for & devotion to Gohan, (putting himself in harms way and crossing between entire worlds to keep him safe over and over again,) and Frieza’s similarly relentless but antithetically possessive & degrading relationship with Vegeta, (repeatedly demanding that he be brought back to him alive no matter how much of a nuisance he becomes, to the point of having him nursed back to health after Zarbon claps his ass just so he can torture him himself.)

It’s Gohan who first notices that Captain Ginyu stole his dad’s body, and Gohan who keeps fighting through exhaustion and extreme violence before Goku gets to Namek. Later on in the Buu Saga, Goku realizes the projection of Gohan inside Majin Buu isn’t really his son quicker than anyone else does - their emotional bond is sturdy enough to transcend the physical, even after it’s repeatedly acknowledged that a young child shouldn’t be involved in situations as gruesome as these.

Compare that to Vegeta, who’s only visible relationship with his father comes from sharing violence as a form of giddy self-aggrandizement, until he sells him to a more powerful stranger - which he can’t even say was especially wrong by their own standards, the transaction as much a moral injury as an emotional one. As Frieza pointed out during his fight with Goku, he literally just beat the Saiyans at their own game, picking up where King Vegeta left off by using his son for the benefit of himself & the empire instead of for the benefit of his father & homeworld.

The fact alone that his relationship with his biological dad can begin to amalgamate with his relationship to a person who calls him a pet speaks volumes about how emotionally warped Vegeta was from the beginning. It’s a small wonder he clings to the dynastic propaganda of the Saiyans so hard, using the title he gets from the King in spite of the fact that his reaction to the man himself’s demise is so muted & repressed that it’s depicted using the imagery of a child encased in a mountain of corpses. It's the only thing that can potentially delineate what happened to him as unjust & undeserved - if it’s the violence itself that’s wrong, then what does that make him, his values, his scattered family, their entire culture. What does that make everything he’s been told since the moment of his birth.

And even in that scene where Vegeta is shrugging off his dad’s death and the planet’s destruction, the messenger mentions how Frieza offers his sympathies: as if Frieza isn’t the same person who killed him, this sickly pretense of warmth intended only to cover it up. You might recall how Goku is always mussing Gohan’s hair, and everyone knows that infamous scene where Vegeta strokes his hair before knocking the wind out of him - which can be read as a precursor to that horribly intimate beatdown Frieza lays on Vegeta and the others later, the one he had been planning to give Vegeta this whole time which is only compounded in brutality since Vegeta thwarted him, the one where he licks blood from Vegeta’s mouth off his face as he holds him up by his neck like a dog with it’s pup. It re-contextualizes the head stroke/brutal attack combo Vegeta pulled on Gohan as him acting out the sadistic objectification Frieza raised him on using another Saiyan child.

And in the end it comes full circle, with Vegeta using his last moments to pass the vendetta of himself and his own father on to Goku and his line. And this happens willingly, as a productive challenge to the Saiyan’s culture of domination, unlike the grotesque re-appropriation of that same culture that we’re presented with when Frieza takes Vegeta from home: Goku assumes this mantle after Vegeta is dead and fully incapable of forcing him. He also contradicts the callous disregard Vegeta displayed during the aforementioned scene with the Saibamen by treating his corpse with so much care. He holds him, he buries him. And you could argue that it’s better than he deserves at that point, but like. I think the fact that the gesture is unwarranted is a part of the point.

Gonna start posting wips so I won't be inactive on this account, lol. I don't draw splatoon anymore unless it's a gift. ^_^

I'll work on ship requests later,,, mental health is deteriorating drastically. I'll rant about my headcanons in a seperate post.

Happy Halloween!! 🎃🎃🎃

Saiyan Saga au: Old Days - Guardian

👀

It's so symbolic, I love it.