Tumgik
#Make Me.
textfromthelookout · 1 year
Note
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
Tumblr media Tumblr media
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!
222 notes · View notes
keiranzstuff · 8 months
Text
"dude Please stop talking so much in the tags"
3 notes · View notes
ravenkings · 28 days
Text
Tumblr media
114K notes · View notes
sirompp · 4 months
Text
hi. i made some images.
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
feel free to take them and use for whatever you may need them for. no credit required
114K notes · View notes
butchfalin · 5 months
Text
the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again
#yeehaw#1k#5k#10k#posts that got cursed. blasted. im making these tag updates after... 19 hours?#also i have been told it should say speech loss bc nonverbal specifically refers to the permanent state. did not know that!#unfortunately i fear it is so far past containment that even if i edited it now it would do very little. but noted for future reference#edit 2: nvm enough ppl have come to rb it from me directly that i changed the wording a bit. hopefully this makes sense#also. in case anyone is curious. though i doubt anyone who is commenting these things will check the original tags#1) my friend did not do this on purpose in any way. it was not intended to distract me or to hit on me. im a lesbian hes a gay man. cmon now#he felt very bad about it afterwards. i thought it was hilarious but it was very embarrassed and apologetic#2) “why didn't he use 🫵🏼?” didn't exist yet. “why didn't he use 🆗?” dunno! we'd been using a lot of hand emojis. 👌🏼 is an ok sign#like it makes sense. it was just a silly mixup. also No i did not invent 👉🏼👌🏼 as a gesture meaning sex. do you live under a rock#3) nonspeaking episodes are a recurring thing in my life and have been since i was born. this is not a quirky one-time thing#it is a pervasive issue that is very frustrating to both myself and the people i am trying to communicate with. in which trying to speak is#extremely distressing and causes very genuine anguish. this post is not me making light of it it's just a funny thing that happened once#it's no different than if i post about a funny thing that happened in conjunction w a physical disability. it's just me talking abt my life#i don't mind character tags tho. those can be entertaining. i don't know what any of you are talking about#Except the ppl who have said this is pego/ryu or wang/xian. those people i understand and respect#if you use it as a writing prompt that's fine but send it to me. i want to see it#aaaand i think that's it. everyday im tempted to turn off rbs on it. it hasn't even been a week
144K notes · View notes
winged-fool · 29 days
Text
Tumblr media
🫡🫡🫡
42K notes · View notes
slavicafire · 4 months
Text
sobbing into my plate after overhearing a conversation between a mom and her tiny daughter in this shopping centre food court
64K notes · View notes
ilona-mushroom · 5 months
Text
Not socialist in a “I won’t have to work” type of way but socialist in a “I’ll still be working but I won’t be worried I won’t make the rent” type of way. In a “billions won’t be hoarded by one person” type of way. In a “janitors, fast-food workers, child care workers, preschool teachers, hotel clerks, personal care and home health aides, and grocery store cashiers, will live comfortably” type of way. In a “the sick and elderly will be cared for” type of way. In a “no child should work” type of way.
87K notes · View notes
mxmollusca · 3 months
Text
Tumblr media
fear me
57K notes · View notes
so-many-ocs · 5 months
Text
[on the verge of having a complete breakdown] i need to make some kind of list or perhaps sort things into categories
81K notes · View notes
riacte · 5 months
Text
not romantic not platonic but a secret third thing [what would happen between earth and the moon if the earth stopped spinning as illustrated by xkcd randall munroe]
Tumblr media
62K notes · View notes
imperatoralicia · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
I get a lot of entertainment thinking about how containers are used in video games sometimes.
43K notes · View notes
yourtongzhihazel · 3 months
Text
France: hundreds of years with baguette -- DID NOT INVENT BANH MI
Vietnam: less than 100 years with baguette -- INVENTED BANH MI
ANOTHER WIN FOR VIETNAM‼️‼️‼️‼️
🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳
38K notes · View notes
throwupgirl · 9 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
AUTISM RULES.
143K notes · View notes
dendrochronologies · 3 months
Text
Tumblr media
maya angelou saying the funniest thing anyone has ever said about editing, which i can never let myself forget EVER AGAIN [x]
43K notes · View notes
chilpilled · 3 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
his smile and optimism…….gone………
43K notes · View notes