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duhragonball · 4 years

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I absolutely enjoy your DB and DBZ liveblogs (and are kinda sad you won’t be doing GT or Super), so thanks for all the time and work spent on them. What I wanted to ask was your general opinion and/or thoughts on the Vegeta/Bulma relationship.

Thank you. I feel like I’ve written about Vegebul before, but I can’t find it at the moment, so I guess it won’t hurt to go write something fresh.

I brief, I think the main appeal of their relationship is the demonstration of the power of compassion. Goku showed Vegeta mercy, but that gets overshadowed by their rivalry. Bulma took Vegeta in and washed his clothes, and there was never going to be a big fight between them over honor or pride. There’s an undeniable sex appeal going on with those two, but I think that goes hand in hand with the vulnerabilty between them. Vegeta could kill Bulma with his pinky finger, but he also depends upon her for logistical and emotional support, and she knows it.

I’ve been trying to make sense of the Reylo phenomenon ever since the new Star Wars trilogy began. In itself, it may not be that complicated, but the underlying premise intrigues me. I think some fans like the idea of a bad boy getting the girl, and the badder they are, the more they like it. It probably doesn’t hurt if the bad boy is hot, but people wanted to knock boots with the sea monkey in “Shape of Water”, so I have no idea what’s considered attractive anymore. Still, I’m guessing washboard abs have something to do with it. If Adam Driver looked more like Michael Chiklis, the Star Wars fandom would be very different.

The go-to comparison is always Beauty and the Beast, where the girl basically drags a misanthrope through a redemption arc with the power of feminine virtue or feminine wiles or feminine some-other-thing. I read once that the reason girls dig princesses is because princesses get to tell everyone what to do. They’re in charge, and little girls like the idea of being in charge. So it’s not too different from the superhero fantasy, only maybe with more gowns and and tiaras. I guess that’s why fairy tales feature princesses who can transmute frogs into humans with a kiss, or or however Beauty and the Beast ends. I hate all those Disney movies, sorry.

I do think that sometimes these stories can go the other way, or at least tease going the other way. The Batman/Catwoman relatonship often worked like this. You watch the 60′s show, and Adam West would admit that he was into Catwoman, but only if she rehabilitated, but then Julie Newmar would ask him to turn heel, or at least look the other way for her sake.

I think that’s what “The Last Jedi” was playing on with Rey and Kylo Ren’s relationship. They saw each other as potentially kindred spirits, except they were on opposite sides. So he kept asking her “Aren’t you tired of being nice? Don’t you want to go apeshit?” and she was asking him the reverse. Of course, that dynamic doesn’t have to be romantic or sexual, but fandom has a tendency to focus everything through that lens.

This sort of plays into what I was saying about Videl’s haircut the other day. Relationships invariably involve compromise, and the more intimate the relationship, the greater the compromises may be. Is she going to expose my secret identity? Will she make me enter a martial arts tournament? Is he going to make me cut my hair? Do I want to cut my hair for him? Is that weird? Am I weird?

I think that’s the core appeal behind the bad boy romance archetype. It’s this extreme version of a couple that has to negotiate their relationship starting out. She wants to throw out his beer bottle Christmas tree, and he wants her to pick less boring movies to watch on Netflix. But what if one of them was evil? Or formerly evil, or sort of in between moral alignments at the moment. Suddenly it becomes a power fantasy. Can she turn him into a good person through sheer charm? It sounds kind of unlikely, but so is heat vision and people still fantasize about that. But there’s also the reverse, where maybe she’s being charmed into becoming evil, and maybe it’s worth it.

Of course, you can swap out any genders you want for this. I’m just using bad boy/good girl as an example, since it seems to be so popular. But I think that’s the core appeal. People may feel guilty for liking these kinds of relationships in fiction, because they think it informs the kind of romantic partners they like in real life, or because it normalizes bad behavior/abuse etc. But I think that’s like saying fans of detective stories like murder. What they like is conflict and drama in storytelling. Murder just raises the stakes of a mystery, by being such a serious crime.

Something I’d like to do in 2020 is write a Diobahna fic, basically exploring how Giorno Giovanna got made in 1985. The ship appeals to me, for reasons similar to the Vegeta/Bulma dynamic. We don’t really know what happened between the two of them, we just know that some time passed and they had a kid without killing each other. That can be fascinating, because you have a seemingly unlikely Point B and it’s not clear how you connect it to Point A. In this case, Dio’s a vampire, and Ms. Siobahna’s ought to be nothing more to him than food. I can see him horsing around with her for a while, but not letting her live to bear his offspring. And yet, he did let her live. Why? Did he forget to kill her? Was he planning something for later? Was she too hawt to kill? Likewise, why did she stick around long enough to get pregnant by him? You’d think the pointy teeth would be a red flag, but maybe he was too hawt for her to care.

I think that’s part of the human condition. It’s not just a sex thing, although it often ties into it. We like to think we each have all these principles and values and things that we stand for, but deep down inside, we wonder if we wouldn’t throw all that away for a little companionship, a little physical pleasure, a little romance. I have a 2020 Vegebul calendar on the wall of my kitchen, and it’s pretty dang steamy, and I’m pretty sure that’s why. It’s not just the sexy cartoon bodies that makes Vegebul work, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. It makes you wonder if Bulma only puts up with him because he’s good in bed, or if there’s something more to it than that. And that makes us wonder about ourselves, and our own relationships and desires for relationships.

#ask duhragonball #dragon ball #vegeta #bulma #vegebul #Anonymous

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